Interviews – Mythili G. Rao

British Podcast Awards

Screen Shot 2020-07-17 at 11.19.51 PM Last weekend, Today in Focus took the gold award for Best Current Affairs Podcast at the British Podcast Awards. Our team couldn’t be more delighted; it’s been a journey! The show also took silver awards in the categories of Best Interview and Best Daily.

Last year Hacks/Hackers invited me to talked about some of the things that go into launching a new daily podcast at one of their monthly meet-ups at Twitter’s London headquarters. They wrote about my presentation here. I’m not used to seeing myself quoted but I do stand by this: “In all creative processes, you don’t really know what you are doing until you dive in.”

What to Read This Summer

Screen Shot 2018-06-12 at 10.50.41 PM I was on The Takeaway today sharing my summer reading recommendations with host Tanzina Vega. My picks: Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, There There by Tommy Orange, Pretty Things by Virginie Despentes, Banthology, edited by Sarah Cleave, Air Traffic by Gregory Pardlo, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. Listen here for more about what makes these books so great.

In Secret, a North Korean Writer Protests the Regime

Screen Shot 2018-03-12 at 8.37.02 PM 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.

“The Accusation: Dissident Fiction from North Korea” at NYPL

DTs4mNZWsAA9Ftr 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

Screen Shot 2017-12-07 at 7.48.56 AM (1).png 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

9780553523225 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.

‘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.

The Crazy Human Heart

I interviewed Daniel Mendelsohn for Virginia Magazine. It was a treat to sit down with a critic whose work I’ve admired for a long time and talk about how he approaches his work. The headline comes from his take on Love Actually. I’ve always loathed that movie, but on his urging, I’m going to try to let my guard down next Christmas when it’s on TV.

Do you believe in “guilty pleasures” of cultural consumption?

I really do believe that the high-low distinction is more invidious than not. The aesthetic components of “guilt”-inducing pleasures are usually melodrama and sentimentality. I have a great aversion to the aversion to sentimentality. To me, what made Mad Men unbearable was its own incredible overweening need to be cool. And because it was so cool and so cynical about everything, I just didn’t care about it, whereas in the first five minutes of watching Friday Night Lights, I thought I was going to die if I didn’t know those people were going to be okay.

Why not love something like Love Actually? What’s so terrible about just caving into your crazy human heart every now and then? You don’t always have to be armored.

Mapping the Pungent History of ‘Brooklyn’s Curious Canal’

Licensed NYC tour guide Joseph Alexiou walked me along the symphonically stinky Gowanus Canal and discussed his new book, Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal. Hear my WNYC story here.