Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Books, apps, and tools
book / likes
“I love Pale Fire. For my birthday this year, one of my friends, Rodrigo, got me this special edition that has the cantos printed on index cards, so you can go through the index cards as you’re reading the narrative proper or the notes on the poem.”
Claim ledger
16 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I really resist these broad generalizations of national literatures because you always find a lot more diversity within a genre, within a national literature, than you do differences between two national literatures, I think.”
02 / recommendation
“I love Pale Fire. For my birthday this year, one of my friends, Rodrigo, got me this special edition that has the cantos printed on index cards, so you can go through the index cards as you’re reading the narrative proper or the notes on the poem.”
03 / belief
“I just turned in an essay to British Vogue about all the things I hate about going on book tour, which is the indignities of travel and worrying about making my flights and worrying about showering and composing myself before I come downstairs and say hi to booksellers. I think the thing that makes it all worth it is interactions with readers.”
04 / belief
“I think another complicating factor is that the internet is so distracting, and it doesn’t encourage us to think in nuance or to slow down or consider multiple sides of a problem.”
05 / belief
“If you go in thinking that it’s going to be like Jonathan Strange and map precisely onto some historical metaphor, or even have that much of a linear plot, then you may be disappointed. But if you read to be transported, I think, into a different frame of mind, then you come away delighted and enchanted.”
06 / belief
“I think that translates into writing compelling fiction because you know when you’re boring the audience.”
07 / belief
“To split this psychological burden across two people would mean that not only do we have to clarify our relationships to the text, but we’d also have to clarify our relationships to each other. So yes, we would end up killing each other or getting married, I think, and I’m already getting married, so that’s not interesting to me.”
08 / belief
“I think Ken’s done a very good job with this simple prose and rendering it elegant without significantly distorting the voice or adding a kind of lyricism that wasn’t there to begin with.”
09 / evaluation
“When I was drafting Babel and doing some research into what technologies existed, what my characters’ lives would have been like, I was at first disappointed to find that I couldn’t rely on shows like Penny Dreadful, things set in the late 19th century because a lot of that stuff had not been invented yet.”
10 / evaluation
“I say this because, based on conversations with friends who are either part of the HarperCollins Union or folks who are trying to enter the publishing industry and become one of those gatekeepers — one of those people who can decide which manuscripts are valuable, worthy of getting a platform, worthy of being put in front of readers — everyone circles back to the same problem: that it’s nearly an impossible industry to enter unless you have previous connections, and more importantly, inherited family wealth — some situation that lets you live in London or New York without worrying too much about your income because entry-level wages are really so atrocious.”
11 / commitment
“This is actually something I need to figure out because I am scaling back significantly from all social media and following people whose opinions I respect.”
12 / preference
“Jeanne was very good at explaining to you where structurally things had fallen apart and then stepping back and letting you figure out how to fix it, because you can’t fix it in the voice of somebody who thinks they know their story better than you.”
13 / preference
“I think I have a slight preference for Ken’s literary style. It might be because he’s also quite an accomplished writer of his original fiction.”
14 / evaluation
“I think a lot of this Chinese-language science fiction comes to us mediated by what Ken has decided is interesting, and it occupies that platform and gains an audience — rightfully deserved — because Ken has decided to introduce it to that audience.”
15 / evaluation
“It gets back to a paradigm called world literature, which means a lot of different things. But broadly, when we think about literature is produced in different languages and the movements within those literatures, and we compare them on a global stage and look at what’s gaining a readership, what isn’t, what is moving through translation, what isn’t, and which languages we associate with literary prestige, this is clearly influenced by history, geopolitical movements.”
16 / evaluation
“I was very surprised to see that it has gotten such a mixed reception, though. I think Jonathan Strange is more palatable on a genre front.”