Lan Samantha Chang: The Family Chao (A Novel)

The Family Chao – Lan Samantha Chang – W.W. Norton – 9780393868074 – 320 pages – Hardcover – $29.00 – February 1, 2022. eBook versions available at lower prices.

This is a beautifully written and thoughtfully composed novel about three brothers in a Chinese American family living somewhat awkwardly in a small town in Wisconsin. It has elements of the picaresque, the humorous and a great deal of sadness and pain that suffuses all.

At the heart of the novel are the three sons of the family patriarch, Leo Chao, who with his wife established and operated the Fine Chao restaurant in this small heartland community for over thirty years. The mother and father are almost mythological characters, he being the large appetite materialist and she being the spiritual – almost mystical – counterpoint to his outsized public persona.

When he dies, he is presumed to have been a murder victim by the residents of Haven, Wisconsin, and consequently unwanted attention is turned toward the brothers, each of whom has attempted to carve out an individual identity separate from their parents. Each of them is suspect in their formerly quiet community – Dagou, now the restaurant’s boisterous chef; Ming, financially successful but emotionally stunted; and James, the youngest, who is a dreamy college student not at all suited to the family tradition.

The book is a wonderful homage, well crafted by this very talented writer to The Brothers Karamazov. Each of the sons must struggle to understand and cope with what happened to his father, and one becomes the public scapegoat in the story. Chang is never heavy handed in her approach, and you don’t have to remember your Dostoyevsky to appreciate The Family Chao completely.

This is a complex and compelling story of what it is like to be an immigrant family in the heart of the heartland. It is also an American story, and very much a universal one at that. I  enjoyed Chang’s writing and her storytelling, the many intriguing characters so finely portrayed, and the mystery in the novel that is unveiled unexpectedly that quite deftly ties together the entirety of the family Chao. Lan Samantha Chang is a terrific novelist and we had an equally terrific conversation about this book, her writing and her sense of the world at large.

Lan Samantha Chang is the Director of the Iowa Writers Workshop and Elizabeth M. Stanley Professor in the Arts at the University of Iowa. She is the author of a collection of short fiction and two novels and one book of nonfiction, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. She has received creative writing fellowships from Stanford University, Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Author website is here.

Buy the book here.

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Anne Enright: Actress – A Novel

Actress: A Novel – Anne Enright – 978-1-324-00562-9 – W.W. Norton – Hardcover – 272 pages – March 3, 2020 – $26.95 – eBook version available at lower prices

I think it is pretty safe to say that Anne Enright is one of the best writers of our time. Her writing is so well done that you don’t notice her deft ability to portray characters and tell their stories as if you were present at the time.

In some ways, Actress is an unusual novel, structured more like a memoir, albeit a fictional one. The story meanders the way a person might when telling a story about their parents and themselves. Ostensibly Actress is the story of Katherine O’Dell, the narrator’s mother. Norah, the daughter, is herself a writer in mid-career. But as I read the book, it became clear that this book is really about Norah, and while the daughter-mother relationship is central to her story, there are more layers than initially meet the eye here. It’s not so much a fictional portrait of an actress, but a fictional portrait of a writer.

Norah, the writer, has spent her life avoiding writing about her mother. Being the daughter of a famous, even notorious actress, is something she has tried not to deal with, even though it is the grounding of her own life story. That her mother ends up in decline is also defining for her. Katherine was a difficult, mercurial, highly private and complicated person. Her daughter, our narrator, is ultimately more like her mother than she wants to believe or accept. In Enright’s telling, the writer tells the story she must tell, even if it is not always the story she wants to tell.

Aside from being a terrific writer, Anne Enright is an outstanding conversationalist, making her a great subject for an interview. It’s pretty obvious how much I like speaking with writers about their books, and a conversation with Anne Enright is a joy. I am sure that you will enjoy listening to this interview and you will find this book well worth spending some time with. I had the pleasure to speak with her in 2015 about her last novel, The Green Road, another terrific book. Here’s a link, in case you want to listen to that conversation as well.

Anne Enright was born in Dublin in 1962, studied English and Philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, and studied for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

She has written short stories that have appeared in magazines including The New Yorker and The Paris Review. In 2004 she received the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award for her short story, ‘Honey’. She has published three collections of short stories.

Her novels are The Wig My Father Wore (1995), shortlisted for the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Irish Literature Prize; What Are You Like? which was the winner of the 2001 Encore Award; The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002); The Gathering (2007) which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction; and The Forgotten Waltz (2011). Her most recent novel, The Green Road (2015) won the Irish Novel of the Year.

Enright is also the author of a book of humorous essays, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004). She lives in Ireland.

You can buy Actress online from RJ Julia Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut where it is a current Staff Pick.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk interviews writer and entrepreneur Rachel Lehmann-Haupt

Publishing Talks began as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, mostly talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. As every media business continues to experience disruption and change, I’ve been talking with some of the people involved in our industry about how publishing might evolve as it is affected by technology and the larger context of culture and economics.

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt is best known for being an expert on the future of family life, career timing, and the influence of science and technology on fertility, pregnancy and family.

She is the author of In Her Own Sweet Time: Egg Freezing and the New Frontiers of Family. Her articles have been featured in a wide range of magazines and websites.

Rachel graduated with a degree in English literature from Kenyon College, and has a Masters in Journalism from the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. At UC Berkeley, she apprenticed under Clay Felker, the founder of New York Magazine. She has spoken on numerous panels at bookstores, hospitals and corporate events, and has delivered keynotes at universities.

Rachel’s newest venture, StoryMade Studios, a content development and editorial production studio was what introduced me to her work and caused me to want to talk to her for this Publishing Talks podcast series.

Much like my own work with content creators, and similar to the way movie studios work, Rachel builds teams that include writers, designers, developers, and video producers, and then manages the creation and editing of all the elements of a digital media story. StoryMade Studios focuses on health, parenting, advanced reproductive technology, neuroscience, women, sustainability, and food.

In recent years, Rachel has been a senior content strategist and strategic advisor for a number of technology start-ups, media properties, and non-profits including TED Books, The Dwell Store, Wired Magazine, BabyCenter.com, The Women 2.0 Conference, Code for America, Bridge Housing, Shebooks, and Dr. Dean Ornish/Healthways.

It was a pleasure to spend some time with her for a lengthy and wide ranging conversation when she was recently in New York City for a visit. I wanted to talk to her about her work as a writer and as a facilitator of book and other content projects, but in particular, I thought it would be really interesting to talk to Rachel about what it was like to have grown up as the child of two writers in the hothouse environment of New York City literary culture and how it influenced her own professional and personal life.

Thank you Rachel for a great conversation!

You can buy her book from RJ Julia here.

Visit Rachel’s own website here. Read about her book,In Her Own Sweet Time. 

And about Story Made Studio here.

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Claire Messud: The Burning Girl (A Novel)

The Burning Girl – Claire Messud – W.W. Norton – Hardcover – 9780393635027 – 256 pages – $25.95 – ebook versions available at lower prices – August 20, 2017 (paperback forthcoming June 5, 2018)

The Burning Girl is an extraordinary novel. Messud, whose work and reputation I knew of, but had never read before discovering this, her newest book, is an exceptional novelist. Her writing is luminous and almost magical; she is able to inhabit characters and tell stories from within them in an assured and sympathetic voice. This is a beautiful, sometimes disturbing, and very powerful work, a book that has stayed with me since reading it.

The story is about two young girls, Julia, and her best childhood friend Cassie. The book is initially about their friendship and their adventures together, and the way the closeness of two girl friends can be so important to the very young. But then it turns to the changes that occur as the two girls get older and find themselves taking different directions in their young lives. Julia is a golden girl and Cassie is not. Cassie’s life is a struggle simply to be who she is in an impossible circumstance, where Julia’s feels centered – as much as any adolescent life can actually be centered in the modern world.

But this is not just an interior novel of psychology and being. Messud tells a good story with grace and sureness. Julia and Cassie ultimately do come back together in a dramatic way, and what happens to the girls is complicated and emotionally draining both for the characters and for the reader.

Writing from and about children creates complications and challenges for any writer. In my opinion, Messud has met that challenge, and has given us a vivid portrait of the tragedies that lurk beneath the surface of modern digitally enabled culture. Her story makes us wonder about what is going on in the families all around us, the complicated circumstances and emotional challenges that face so many today, a world of hidden pain and sorrow for far too many.

Claire Messud really impressed me with this book. And while it was a painful book to read at times, the emotional and intellectual reward was worth the journey. It was a pleasure for me to have the opportunity to talk with her about writing and the story she told in The Burning Girl.

Claire studied at Yale and Cambridge and has taught literature and writing at a number of colleges and universities and is on the editorial board of The Common, a literary magazine at Amherst College. She  is a recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Burning Girl is her seventh novel; The Emperor’s Children was a New York Times best seller. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.

Visit Claire Messud’s website here to find out more about her work. And there is a good interview with Claire in the Guardian from 2013 that is worth a read as well.

I am still surprised that I had not read this author’s work before – and am now a dedicated Messud reader, looking forward to reading the rest of her earlier novels, and looking forward to her next. I think you will enjoy our conversation about this book.

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Blume Lempel: Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories

Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel – Translated by Ellen Cassedy & Yermiyahu Ahron Taub – Mandel Vilar Press & Dryad Press – paperback – 9781942134213 – 240 pages – $16.95 (ebook versions available at lower prices)

This book was the winner of the 2012 Translation Prize awarded by the Yiddish Book Center.

Blume Lempel wrote in Yiddish, her native language. She was a wonderful storyteller with a strange and far reaching imagination. Hear writing slips beautifully between realistic and dreamlike states, lyrical and penetrating in style, completely compelling to the modern reader. What a surprise to discover this writer whose poetic language style is masterful.

As the publisher describes her stories: “A Holocaust survivor speaks to the shadows in her garden, a pious old woman imagines romance, a New York subway commuter forges a bond with a homeless woman, and in the title story a mother is drawn into a transgressive relationship with her blind son.”

Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub (the translators) on encountering Blume Lempel’s stories wrote: “When we began reading and translating, we didn’t know we were going to find a mother drawn into an incestuous relationship with her blind son. We didn’t know we’d meet a young woman lying on the table at an abortion clinic. We didn’t know we’d meet a middle-aged woman full of erotic imaginings as she readies herself for a blind date. Buried in this forgotten Yiddish-language material, we found modernist stories and modernist story-telling techniques – imagine reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez with the conversational touch of Grace Paley.”

Lempel (1907–1999) was one of a very few writers in the United States who wrote in Yiddish into the 1990s. She immigrated to New York during the time that Hitler rose to power, and began publishing short stories in 1945. By the 1970s her work had become known throughout the Yiddish literary world. When she died in 1999, the Yiddish paper Forverts wrote: “Yiddish literature has lost one of its most remarkable women writers.”

Blume Lempel (1907-1999) was born in Khorostkiv (now Ukraine). She immigrated to Paris in 1929 and fled to New York on the eve of World War II. This book is the first English-language collection of Lempel’s stories and is based on a manuscript that won the 2012 National Yiddish Book Center Translation Prize.

Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub received the 2012 translation prize from the Yiddish Book Center for their translation of short stories by Blume Lempel.  In 2016, Ellen Cassedy received a PEN/Heim translation grant for her work on the Yiddish writer Yenta Mash, the first time the prize has been awarded for a Yiddish book.  Ellen is the author of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust published by University of Nebraska Press.

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is the author of four books of poetry, Prayers of a Heretic/Tfiles fun an apikoyres, Uncle Feygele, What Stillness Illuminated/Vos shtilkayt hot baloykhtn, and The Insatiable Psalm.  Tsugreytndik zikh tsu tantsn: naye Yidishe lider/Preparing to Dance: New Yiddish songs, a CD of nine of his Yiddish poems set to music, was released in 2014.  He was honored by the Museum of Jewish Heritage as one of New York’s best emerging Jewish artists and has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and twice for a Best of the Net award.  His short stories have appeared in Jewish Fiction .net, The Jewish Literary Journal, and Jewrotica.  Taub’s website is www.yataub.net.

This is the first interview I have done with two writers simultaneously; I think it worked well, thanks to the interviewees handling this conversation so deftly.

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