It’s one thing to read Ellmann’s 1,030-page novel; it’s another to read it aloud. When tiny press Galley Beggar signed Ducks, Newburyport, they didn’t give much thought to an audiobook, says co-founder Sam Jordison. It still didn’t have an audio publisher when it was nominated for the 2019 Booker prize – but as the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) makes all shortlisted titles available to members of its library, it commissioned US actor Stephanie Ellyne to tackle the challenge.
Ellyne spent almost two months recording the book, and it left a strong impression. As the housewife contemplates violence – historic, domestic, political – she started feeling “more emotional and upset about news coming out of America, the hideous political situation there,” she says. “One thing that was helpful was that I share a lot of those ideas – there’s really troubled times in the States at the moment.”
I quickly learned that my culture’s definition of luxury is not based on brand names, but rather owning something that has a lot of heart put into it. Pieces are valued for their spirit, and not their monetary value. Heirlooms are passed down through the generations, and pieces are considered special because of the hands or stories behind them. In my own family, I think of a beaded medallion necklace my sister made me in the shape of a turtle, to represent Turtle Island (among other tribes, the Ojibwe teachings refer to the Earth as this). I also think of a star-shaped quilt blanket my mother made me. These items are meant to be decorative, but they hold greater meaning—they represent an upholding of cultural practices and traditions.
For the current moment, in which whitewashing still extinguishes opportunity and supports the status quo — despite gains both on the screen and in writers’ rooms — Yu’s novel may seem topical. But it is so much more than that. “Interior Chinatown” represents yet another stellar destination in the journey of a sui generis author of seemingly limitless skill and ambition.
Dusapin’s terse sentences are at times staggeringly beautiful, their immediacy sharply and precisely rendered from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins: “the rain hammered down, the sea rising beneath it in spikes like the spines of a sea urchin”. Oiled with a brooding tension that never dissipates or resolves, Winter in Sokcho is a noirish cold sweat of a book.
Situating the poems of her new collection amidst voices of postcolonial love from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to Rihanna—and saturating her lines with allusions to writers as varied as Homer, Jorge Luis Borges, and John Ashbery—Natalie Diaz makes no pretense that Postcolonial Love Poem is anything but a major work of American literature. “I am your Native,” writes Diaz, “and this is my American labyrinth.”