I recently had the chance to sit down with Abdellah Taïa and Chiké Frankie Edozien at the CUNY Graduate Center for an evening of discussion put together by Words Without Borders, Belladonna* Series, and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. It was an absolute honor––Taïa and Edozien are talented, fiercely passionate writers whose work challenges political and social boundaries. Video of the event is now available and you should also check out their work!
Author Archives: mythiligrao
In Secret, a North Korean Writer Protests the Regime
This week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, I interviewed Heinz Insu Fenkl. Fenkl is in the process of translating the poems included in that mysterious manuscript said to have been smuggled out of North Korea. He talked about the unusual, propaganda-inspired poetic devices at work in “The Red Years,” and explained what the poems reveal about the North Korean dream of reunification.
Reading North Korean Poems During the South Korean Olympics
I wrote about the poems of the “The Red Years,” by Bandi, which are being translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl for US publication, for The New Yorker.
Varieties of Matrimony
My review of The Heart is a Shifting Sea by Elizabeth Flock ran in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review– the Pleasure Reading issue. A snippet:
The journalist Elizabeth Flock was in her early 20s when she moved to Mumbai. Though she was wary of overromanticizing India, she was immediately taken with what appeared to be an Indian attitude toward romance itself. “In Mumbai, people seemed to practice a showy, imaginative kind of love,” she writes in “The Heart Is a Shifting Sea.” She wondered if there was wisdom to this brand of passion: “When I arrived in Mumbai after my dad’s third divorce, the city seemed to hold some answers.”
“The Accusation: Dissident Fiction from North Korea” at NYPL
Earlier this week, I interviewed South Korean human rights activist Do Hee-yun– the person said to be responsible for helping the manuscript of “The Accusation” escape North Korea– at the New York Public Library. He told me that he hoped to make contact with the author, Bandi again this spring, and– incredibly– that he believed the stories in “The Accusation” may actually have been the work of not just one writer, but a group of writers (!). That conversation was part of an extraordinary evening, with readings from Min Jin Lee and Heinz Insu Fenkl, and a performance from the opera-in-progress based on one of Bandi’s stories. (UPDATE: Audio and video of the event are now online.) Here’s my original piece on “The Accusation” for The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-collection-of-north-korean-stories-and-the-mystery-of-their-origins
Walton Ford and Emma Cline at The Greene Space
I really enjoyed talking about lions, bears, griffins, communes, murder, “the duality of glamour and catastrophe,” and other California specialities with writer Emma Cline and artist Walton Ford last week at the inaugural Gagosian Quarterly talk at The Greene Space. If you missed it, video of the event is now available: http://www.thegreenespace.org/story/gagosian-quarterly-talks-walton-ford-and-emma-cline/
The Complicated Backstory to a New Children’s Book by Mark Twain
I wrote about the racial politics of a new Mark Twain’s children’s book for The New Yorker:
When Mark Twain died, in 1910, his literary output slowed but did not cease. In the decades since, Twain’s posthumously published works have included a novel, two short-story collections, four essay collections, a book of letters, a book of notes, a translation of a German children’s story, and a three-volume, twenty-three-hundred-page autobiography. This month, Doubleday will add one more work to the list: “The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine,” a children’s book.
A Collection of North Korean Short Stories and the Mystery of Their Origin
I wrote about The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea for The New Yorker. The book and its backstory are pretty fascinating:
The story goes something like this: nearly thirty years ago, a talented North Korean propagandist secretly began writing fiction critical of the North Korean regime. When a catastrophic famine beset North Korea in the mid-nineties, the propagandist’s misgivings about his country’s leadership deepened. Over the next several years, he chronicled the deprivation and disillusionment of his countrymen in a series of stories that he shared with no one. Roughly two decades later, a close relative defected to South Korea, and the writer saw an opportunity to get his work across the border. In 2014, a book of his stories was published in South Korea under the pen name Bandi, which means “firefly.” It is believed to be the first work of dissident fiction by a living North Korean writer ever smuggled out of that country.
‘The Teeth of the Comb’
I profiled Syrian writer Osama Alomar for The New Yorker:
In 2014, Osama Alomar was working as a cab driver in Chicago when he learned that the suburb of Zamalka, just outside the heart of Syria’s capital, Damascus, had been destroyed by the fighting that continues to ravage his country. The apartment house that Alomar had lived in for five years before leaving for the United States, and everything in it—his furniture, clothing, guitar, and, most painfully, his library of old and rare books, including volumes he’d inherited from his father and grandfather—had been reduced to rubble. “I’m homesick, but I cannot go back,” he told me recently. “I would be homeless.”
Before he left Syria, in 2008, Alomar’s fiction and poetry had been published in four collections; he’d won literary prizes and had his work broadcast on the BBC. Now his entire personal archive was lost. “All my published poems, stories, interviews I had done in journals and magazines. Everything. I was completely shocked to learn that it was all gone,” he said. Also lost were the manuscripts of several writing projects in progress, including a completed autobiographical novel, called “The Jagged Years.”
Spoiler alert: Alomar is brilliant and indefatigable. The piece, which centers around the publication of his second collection of translated stories, The Teeth of the Comb, ran on the site’s Page-Turner blog.
UPDATE: I’ll be discussing The Teeth of the Comb with Alomar on Tuesday, June 13th at McNally Jackson Bookstore. Come by! http://www.mcnallyjackson.com/event/teeth-comb-osama-alomar-and-mythili-rao
Boyhoods: Hirsh Sawhney and Akhil Sharma
I recently got to spend an evening at Columbia University’s j-school moderating a conversation between novelists Hirsh Sawhney (author of South Haven) and Akhil Sharma (author, most recently, of Family Life) for the South Asian Journalists Association. They’ve both written intensely dark books about death/loss and dysfunctional families, so I’m not sure why we’re all grinning ear to ear, but it was very nice to talk with them.
Mythili G. Rao 