Category Archives: …Author Interview/Profile
Author Interview: Anjali Banerjee
With her past seven published novels – written for audiences that range from middle-grade readers on up – Anjali Banerjee didn’t particularly mention male body parts in any great detail. Maybe a twinkling eye here, capable hands there, but she certainly didn’t dwell. But as the saying goes, there’s a first time for everything.
Indeed, welcome to Haunting Jasmine, Banerjee’s eighth novel, her third for adults: Page one opens with an avid discussion on the fidelity factor of male genitalia based on ethnicity, complete with images of… well, shall we say… gold-embroidered formalwear for the faithful Bengali member. Five pages later, our betrayed heroine is not above asking the elephant god Ganesh to put a curse – à la Lorena Bobbit – on her heartbreaking spouse’s non-Bengali, all-American private parts. Oh, ouch.
Painful initial details aside, Banerjee’s latest is actually another easy-breezy, deftly entertaining love story, this time with spine-tingling twists. Searching for respite from her cheating soon-to-be-ex, the eponymous Jasmine heads home to remote Shelter Island in the Pacific Northwest where she’s agreed to watch Auntie Ruma’s bookstore for a month. Auntie Ruma needs the time to have her “heart fixed in India,” and only Jasmine can be entrusted to take care of the historic Victorian and the treasures – literary and otherwise – that reside within.
Books and writing – and certainly some multi-culti magic – have always been a part of Banerjee’s life. Born in India, and raised in small-town Canada and later big-city California, Banerjee found special inspiration in her literary maternal grandmother, herself an English writer who called India home.
From the moment Banerjee “could pick up a crayon and scribble,” she started writing. She wrote her first story at age seven, and in spite of “preposterous premises and impossible plots,” she never stopped. While she’s “not sure of a specific moment when I decided to become a writer” – she did have a few career detours as a veterinary assistant, an office manager, a law student, to name a few – Banerjee readily acknowledges that “writing has always been part of who I am.”
Since publishing her first title in 2005 – her lauded kiddie novel Maya Running, about an awkward young Indian American girl who goes through a 13 Going on 30-sort of transformation (sans the timely fast-forward) and becomes an assertive, multilingual beauty overnight – Banerjee has managed to publish more than a book a year. Even with five books for middle grade readers and three more for us oldsters, all out in just six years, Banerjee insists, “I’m not that prolific!”
In case you’re about to set off for the library or local bookstore, you’ll need the rest of Banerjee’s titles: In addition to Maya, her other younger-reader novels are Rani and the Fashion Divas, The Silver Spell, Looking for Bapu, and most recently Seaglass Summer; her adult titles before Haunting Jasmine are Imaginary Men and Invisible Lives (with nary a mention in either about certain appendages. Ahem).
So Haunting Jasmine starts with quite a saucy departure from your previous novels. What prompted the impulse?
The departure seemed right for my character, a jilted divorcée whose husband cheated on her. He dashed her dreams for a perfect life and a happy marriage – her thoughts seemed appropriate for the situation! [... click here for more]
Author interview: Feature: “An Interview with Anjali Banerjee,” Bookslut.com, February 2011
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Author Interview: Audrey Niffenegger
Sometimes jet lag has its advantages. Amazingly enough, I caught Audrey Niffenegger soon after her London arrival, when she wasn’t sleeping – “I am very bad at jet lag,” she confesses. She’s currently on her book tour for her first full-length graphic novel, the chilling literary delight The Night Bookmobile, which appeared as a serial graphic series for London’s The Guardian newspaper from May to December 2008, and was introduced this September as a single stunning bound volume.
That Niffenegger is an official tour guide at London’s Highgate Cemetery (a skill she just happened to pick up while researching and writing her second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry), makes her visits over the pond a homecoming of sorts … and eventually, she will certainly sleep. But not before she offered some memorable answers about writing, printing, reading, travels, fans, and even death.
Probably because I was hiding under some rock of denial, I first knew of Niffenegger as a creator of magnificently illustrated books before realizing she is also that internationally renowned, mega-bestselling novelist. If you’re rolling your eyes at me right about now, then perhaps you have not seen her spectacular titles, The Three Incestuous Sisters, with its rich burgundy leather-like spine, and The Adventuress, with its begging-to-be touched forest green velvet binding. These are unique artistic creations to be surprised and delighted about, to be haunted and shocked by, to linger over.
Before she was a novelist, Niffenegger was trained as a visual artist; she began making prints in 1978 and her artist life continues as both practitioner and teacher. She’s made her very own books, which she printed and bound by hand in editions of 10; two of them became the (thankfully) commercially available The Three Incestuous Sisters and The Adventuress.
Niffenegger’s writing life began in 1997, with an idea for a story that didn’t work as a graphic novel, but would become her phenomenal 2003 debut, The Time Traveler’s Wife. The premise of Time is rather like a Möbius strip which, at first glance, appears to be two parts, but is intricately connected to make a neverending surface. That is the essence of the relationship between Clare, the eponymous wife, and Henry, the chrono-challenged love of her life. Clare is 6when they meet; Henry has traveled back from when he is 36 which means he holds the future. In Henry’s ‘real’ time, they will not meet until Clare is 20 and Henry is 28, which means only Clare knows their past. Their love story, of course, proves timelessly everlasting.
Six years later, Niffenegger followed with Her Fearful Symmetry, another novel driven by otherworldly love. Elspeth Noblin is one half of a pair of identical twins. She dies in a London hospital, having been separated for the past 20 years from twin Edie, whose life now is contained in an overdecorated suburban faux Tudor home outside Chicago. Inseparable until their transatlantic cleaving, Elspeth and Edie never stop longing for one another and yet truculently remain parted, until death. Enter the next generation of twins, Julia and Valentina, belonging to Edie and raised across the pond. Elspeth’s final will lures the twins to London as sole benefactors of her spacious Highgate flat and the rest of her generous estate, with stipulations. Julia and Valentina must live in the flat for one year, during which time their parents Edie and Jack must never set foot within. Death may have taken Elspeth’s expired body, but her story – and that of the entangled twins – is just beginning.
Settling back into her own familiar London, Niffenegger was headed to Highgate Cemetery for the weekend. She’ll be leading eager visitors through narrow paths, revealing spooky tales, sharing impossible stories. For those of us unable to join her in lifetime at death’s door, we’ve thankfully got five uniquely Niffenegger titles to keep us deftly entertained and memorably haunted.
As a Luddite, I loved reading your comments about e-books, and how you championed the physicality of holding, having beautiful books. I see from Amazon that The Time Traveler’s Wife remains unelectrified, but Her Fearful Symmetry can be whispernet-ed instantly. So what changed? How did Fearful become Kindle-able, and how did you keep Wife off the wires?
The e-rights to The Time Traveler’s Wife belong to me (just as the e-rights of most books published before 2004 or so belong to their authors, if the books are still in copyright) and so I can do as I see fit with them. Someday I will probably authorize an e-version; I am waiting for the technology and the design issues to firm up a bit. There’s no rush. Lots of people have decided to pirate it.
The e-rights to Her Fearful Symmetry were part of the original contract with Scribner. I don’t actually know how that is going; it does seem to calm the people who thought I was vehemently opposed to all e-books, which I’m not. Though I haven’t figured out yet how the bookstores are going to participate in the e-book thing, and I do love bookstores, so that worries me.
I hope and believe that the current e-readers are just the beginning; they are pretending to be books because new technologies often try to look like the thing they are replacing. But they aren’t books. They can’t do many bookish things. But they have other talents, and I hope that the e-readers will evolve into something more interesting that can support art forms we haven’t yet invented. [... click here for more]
Author interview: Feature: “An Interview with Audrey Niffenegger,” Bookslut.com, November 2010
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Author Interview: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Sharing Humanity: A Talk with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni about Her Latest Novel, One Amazing Thing
Over the last decades, tragedies – both human-made and those wrought by an ever-angry Mother Nature – seem to be coming at humankind with fast and furious regularity. The latest oil spill devastating the Gulf of Mexico promises to be the worst disaster of its kind in history. This short year alone, horrific earthquakes, erupting volcanic plumes, and tumbling mud slides have not stopped their violent paths.
And yet, somehow, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni manages to craft some of the worst tragedies into memorable, haunting stories of human connection. The last long conversation I shared with Divakaruni became a featured cover article for the November/December 2004 issue of TBR. Her just-published novel at the time was Queen of Dreams, which she wrote as a direct personal response to 9/11, haunted not only by the vivid images of what happened, but also by the repercussions felt throughout the country, especially in the South Asian American community.
In February of this year, bookstores across the country lined their bookshelves with One Amazing Thing, the latest from Divakaruni, an award-winning, multi-platform writer of short stories (Arranged Marriage, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives), poetry (Black Candle, Leaving Yuba City), middle grade/young adult titles (Neela: Victory Song and the three-volume Brotherhood of the Conch trilogy), and adult novels (including The Mistress of Spices, The Vine of Desire, Sister of My Heart). At the core of Divakaruni’s new novel is a violent earthquake in an unnamed U.S. city, its aftereffects almost a character itself. Incredibly, the book was written long before the too-recent tragic earthquake disasters in Haiti, then Japan, Chile, and China. Divakaruni’s timing proved presciently shocking.
In One Amazing Thing, nine men and women are trapped in the basement visa office of an Indian consulate, and must gather their strength, both physically and mentally, in order to survive the devastating earthquake that wipes out all contact with the outside world. Two characters emerge as the group’s leaders: Cameron, an African American Vietnam veteran still fighting demons, is the most qualified to deal with the group’s physical safely, while Uma, an Indian American graduate literature student inspired by the heavy copy of The Canterbury Tales she carries in her backpack, turns to storytelling to distract the group’s growing anxiety. “‘We can take our stress out on one another,’” Uma admonishes after a desperate incident, “‘… or we can focus our minds on something compelling … we can each tell an important story from our lives.’” Uma assures her audience, “‘I don’t believe anyone can go through life without encountering at least one amazing thing.’”
And so the stories unfold: Grandmother Jiang’s first love in the Chinese quarter of Calcutta, Mr. Pritchett’s beloved kitten that shuts down his little-boy heart, Malathi’s gleefully brave revenge on an abusive wealthy woman, Tariq’s firsthand experience of post-9/11 injustice against his innocent family, Lily’s discovery of her prodigious musical talent, Mangalam’s emotional destruction, Mrs. Pritchett’s longing to escape her overprivileged life … and finally Cameron’s desperate search for a lost child and Uma’s own need to understand true, lasting love.
As the waters rise, the gas leaks, and disappointments prove almost crippling, nine strangers who once expected to change their lives in faraway India, share a life-altering experience right here at home. [... click here for more]
Author interview: “Sharing Humanity: A Talk with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni about Her Latest Novel, One Amazing Thing,” The Bloomsbury Review, Summer 2010
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Author Interview: Grace Lin
I really should have taken a picture: my too-fast growing tween son, cuddled in bed reading to his little cousin (my not-quite-5-year-old nephew with the most amazing eyes you’ll ever gaze into), hearing the very familiar words of Grace Lin’s delicious Dim Sum for Everyone.
“Do you want to hear it again,” my son asks. “SURE!” comes the resounding reply.
Although Grace Lin has never met my kids (or nephews, although they’re practically neighbors), she’s long been a part of their lives – on their shelves, lying across the couch, now cuddling with younger cousins. As our kids have aged, so have Lin’s books, as she’s moved from the fantastic picture book fun of The Ugly Vegetables, Fortune Cookie Fortunes, Bringing in the New Year, to middle-grade reads that began with The Year of the Dog, continued with The Year of the Rat, and most recently with the just-awarded Newbery Honor title Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.
Having grown up with the rare but cringe-inducing, exoticized titles like The Five Chinese Brothers (Lin actually illustrated the much-needed girl-power antidote, The Seven Chinese Sisters, by Kathy Tucker), my kids have little idea how lucky they are to be surrounded with so many great books in which their Asian Pacific American, multicultural faces and experiences are thoughtfully, accurately reflected. Ironically, while Lin’s literary stardom is firmly grounded in her Chinese American heritage, she spent her childhood in upstate New York as part of the only minority family in town, mired in cultural denial. Today, she refers to her then-self as “a perfect poster image of the ‘Twinkie’ stereotype” – that is, yellow on the outside, white on the inside.
The one thing Lin did know early on is that she wanted to “make books.” Sparked by the thrill of a fourth-place win in a 6th grade book contest (that thrill of victory keenly captured in Lin’s autobiographical The Year of the Dog), Lin’s future was sealed. Not until art school in Italy, however, did Lin find her true calling. Maybe it was eating all that pasta (which is originally Chinese, after all), but Lin realized that she knew more about Italian art and history than she did her own family culture and traditions: “I knew more about the Renaissance than why my parents immigrated from Taiwan!”
At art school, she found inspiration in Chinese folk art with all its magnificent colors and patterns; at home, she found comfort in her mother’s recipes. Lin took her first literary bow with The Ugly Vegetables, published in 1999, which remains one of her most popular books. Fast forward to 2010, and Lin has more than a dozen titles she’s written or illustrated, and more often than not, written and illustrated. Her penultimate, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, was chosen for Al Roker’s Today Show Kid’s Book Club, then got the very-much-coveted 2010 Newbery Honor, placing it high on the New York Times bestseller list (every author’s dream come true!).
Mountain’s spunky and independent heroine, Minli, can’t bear to see her parents leading such harsh lives, especially her mother who is so discontented with the family’s poverty that she can’t even enjoy the glorious stories Minli’s father regularly tells her. Minli is determined to change her family’s fortune, and with the help of a talking goldfish, she sets out in search of the Old Man of the Moon high atop Never-Ending Mountain. Along the way, she meets a dragon who can’t fly but knows how to be a true friend. Back at home, her parents wait for her return with ever-growing worry … but only with Minli’s disappearance does her mother finally recognize that the vastness of their true wealth has nothing to with gold. In the end, true fortune has to do with true thankfulness … a perfect reminder lesson for us all.
That Mountain’s message celebrates gratitude came at one of the most difficult periods in Lin’s life. In the advance galley of the book, Alvina Ling – Lin’s childhood best friend who also happens to be her editor, whose early years are already immortalized as the best friend of Lin’s stand-in Pacy in The Year of the Dog and The Year of the Rat – offers an incredibly touching note about how Mountain came to be: “This book was born from the tragedy of [Grace's] husband Robert‘s illness, and after his untimely death, it has become Grace’s testament to his life. It is absolutely Grace’s best work to date …”
At just 35, Lin’s husband, Robert Mercer, lovingly remembered in the mouse story that is Robert’s Snow, passed away in 2007 from a rare bone cancer. When she could cry no more, Lin traveled to China, to both calm and feed her depleted soul. There she overcame her own mountains of grief, filled with stories of wonder and strength that would become that “best work to date.”
During the special luncheon Lin’s publisher, Little, Brown, threw for her the day before the July 1, 2010 Newbery banquet, Lin gave a tearful thank-you, which she later posted on her website blog:
As many of you already know, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is my personal tribute to my late husband Robert. While the fantasy genre interested me, I only began to write it in earnest when he asked me to, so, while he was going through chemotherapy, I could read it to him and he could imagine himself elsewhere.
At the beginning of Robert’s illness, there were many times I thought we were cursed with ill-fortune and I would wonder why our fate was so poor. But as he began to lose his fight for life, I realized how lucky and how truly fortunate I really was. And when Robert’s battle ended, his final gift to me was the soul of the book.
No dry eyes in sight!
With such gratitude, the saddest endings sometimes can beget happy beginnings. Lin has recently remarried, to Alex – they’re practically newlyweds! – whom she refers to as Squatchie (yes, as in Sasquatch!) with giddy humor. The best of new beginnings are indeed possible.
Ever prolific, Lin’s latest, Ling & Ting: Not Exactly the Same! hit bookstores last month. This literary Ling, by the way, is not Lin’s Alvina Ling, Lin insists [HA! Say that 10 time fast!]. By the way, any maverick PBS or television producers listening out there? Here’s a perfect programming tip coming your way … Ling & Ting could have an amazing future as a children’s TV show. Move over Arthur! Mice are so 20th century … it’s high time for Chinese American twin adventures already!
Since the big Newbery announcement, I’ve so been enjoying seeing your name regularly pop up (complete with polka-dotted dress pictures) in my various listservs, literary announcements, etc. in the last few months. So are you having the time of your life?
Yes, when I think about it! But I am knee-deep in a rough draft for the new novel so I shut off the Internet and hole up a lot of the time these days. But it’s fun when I get to come out and do things, like book parties.
Could you share some of the highlights of your “Cinderella night”?
It was rather a blur, but it was also great fun. Anytime I have a legitimate excuse to get dressed up in a fancy outfit is always fun. I know I should say the best part was listening to the inspirational speeches or meeting so many nice people and being with friends, but really the best part for me was receiving the award! It only felt real once I had it in my hot hands, I guess there was a small part of me before that which thought maybe it was a mistake and they could take it back. Hmm, I guess they could still do that, but now they’d have to pry my fingers off it. [... click here for more]
Author interview: Feature: “An Interview with Grace Lin,” Bookslut.com, August 2010
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Author Interview: Karen Tei Yamashita
For the last two months or so, Karen Tei Yamashita will not get out of my life. And I say that with a goofy-grinned “wahhh” of delighted surprise. While I’ve been an ardent admirer of Yamashita’s books for some 20 years (yup, I have all her titles: Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, and I Hotel just out in May), only in the last two months have our paths continued to criss-cross over and over again, literally and in livetime.
Let me count the ways. During one of my busiest weeks this spring, Yamashita’s latest, I Hotel, arrived on my doorstep from my Library Journal editor with about six days to file a review. At 640 pages, I gasped at what lay ahead of me, but had to smile at the irony that I would be meeting Yamashita that very weekend – she was headed to Washington, DC, for a literary double-header.
I had to remain impartial to be able to review her book – I alerted my editor as to the imminent meeting and she was fine – and the six days dropped to four. For all its density, I Hotel was a stunning read. Comprised of 10 novellas that took 10 years to craft, I Hotel is Yamashita’s magnum opus. Each novella marks the most tumultuous years of Asian Pacific American history, from 1968, when ethnic studies was painfully birthed in San Francisco, to 1977, when San Francisco’s International Hotel – long a pivotal symbol of APA activism – fell to demolition crews.
I filed my starred review, and gleefully went to meet Yamashita with a clear (and giddy) conscience. That weekend in March, I got my first-ever Yamashita livetime dose, initially as part of the lucky audience during a symposium featuring eight notable Asian Pacific American writers in celebration of the literary debut of The Asian American Literary Review (AALR). Then on Sunday, I joined the limelight (albeit from a distance) as I moderated a panel of seven of the eight writers (one ran off to continue his book tour) during the inaugural Amnesty International Human Rights Art Festival.
Here’s what was so mind-boggling and phenomenal about that panel: every one of Yamashita’s cohorts were somehow contained in Yamashita’s I Hotel:
- Poet Srikanth Reddy read “Fundamentals of Esperanto,” a poem from his collection, Facts for Visitors – Vasily Eroshenko, a proponent of Esperanto, takes a bow in I Hotel.
- April Kyoko Heck read “The Bells,” a poem from her as-yet unpublished collection, A Shelter of Leaves, about her mother who was in utero – “in utero, did my mother stir?” – and miraculously survived the Hiroshima atom bomb. In I Hotel, a young Japanese American artist travels through Hiroshima and returns with devastating illegal footage of bomb survivors.
- Novelist Peter Bacho’s literary obsessions – boxing, 1968, anti-war movements – are all scattered throughout I Hotel.
- Memoirist/novelist Kyoko Mori chose to share a passage from Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior – the legendary Hong Kingston appears right next to her archnemesis Frank Chin in a series of hilarious cartoons smack in the middle of I Hotel.
- Sonya Chung’s photographer protagonist, who captures images of death and destruction in her debut novel Long for This World, is echoed in one of Yamashita’s characters, an artist who recorded the devastation of the Japanese American prison camps in charcoal and watercolor.
- And Ru Freeman, debut novelist of A Disobedient Girl, the newest Asian American in the group, asked when buying I Hotel, “Will I understand it without knowing all the Asian American history?” to which the answer would be a resounding YES. I Hotel is now her history as well.
Indeed, the breadth of I Hotel is a historical achievement. Mere words, but such truth. No matter who you are, you cannot read this book without recognizing its contents, both small and large.
So since that fateful weekend, I seem to be constantly revisiting Yamashita’s book. I’ve also had lots of excuses to be in regular touch with Yamashita. During our last conversation, she was getting ready to head over the hill on Highway 17 to join the Asian American Curriculum Project’s APA Heritage Month celebration. Yes, the AACP and its founder Florence Hongo, in case you had any doubt, appear in I Hotel.
If I had a brick for every time I said to myself, “oh, that’s in Karen’s book,” I’d have built an APA museum on the National Mall by now! But that’s another story… [... click here for more]
Author interview: Feature: “An Interview with Karen Tei Yamashita,” Bookslut.com, July 2010
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Author Interview: Ruthanne Lum McCunn
Through the decades, Ruthanne Lum McCunn has built a lauded career giving voice to spirited, groundbreaking heroes of Asian descent. Growing up in a large, extended family in Hong Kong, McCunn, who is half Chinese and half Scottish American, was surrounded by strong, independent women to inspire her. Her titles include Sole Survivor (1985), about a Chinese sailor who miraculously survived 133 days adrift in the Atlantic Ocean after his ship was sunk during World War II; Wooden Fish Songs (1995), in which three very different women present the life of a Chinese American immigrant to whom they are somehow related; The Moon Pearl (2000), about a group of brave young women in 1830s China who refused to accept arranged marriages and vowed to live independent lives as spinsters; and her latest God of Luck (2007), which tells the story of one Chinese man among thousands who were kidnapped and sold into slavery in the mid-19th century to work in the deadly guano mines in faraway Peru.
More than merely appreciating McCunn’s many titles, I also owe her an unrepayable debt of literary gratitude. Decades ago, her children’s classic, Pie-Biter, was the book that sparked my initial interest in Asian American literature. I can’t emphasize enough just how important finding Pie-Biter was to my literary development. As the first bona fide children’s picture book by an Asian American author that celebrates the Asian American experience, Pie-Biter is based on a real-life Chinese immigrant boy who arrives in the American West in the late 1800s to work on the transcontinental railroads and, as tall tales go, gets his strength from eating pies.
Even though I’m not Chinese American (although the Hong side of my family originated in China 46 generations ago), and even though I don’t have direct ancestors who built the transcontinental railroad, Pie-Biter offers a collective historical past with which I can identify as an Asian American today. Stories like Pie-Biter allowed me to voice my discomfort about growing up without books that spoke to my own experience. Contrast McCunn’s book – her very many books, actually! – to something like the still-popular The Five Chinese Brothers which is all about the exotic and foreign. Instead, Pie-Biter is a piece of genuine history with none of the cloying made-up exoticism seen through someone else’s eyes.
Of all of McCunn’s many books, her debut novel Thousand Pieces of Gold (1981) remains her signature work. Based on the life of a 19th-century Chinese American pioneer woman, Thousand Pieces of Gold is almost three decades old, has had countless printings, has never been out of print, is available in eight languages, is ubiquitous on high school and college reading lists, and has even been made into a PBS film of the same name.
So when a galley arrived late last year which seemed to be about Polly Bemis, said Chinese American pioneer woman, I immediately thought of McCunn’s now-classic. I ended up reviewing Christopher Corbett’s The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West for a major newspaper, and will admit reading it to be a frustrating experience. And so I contacted McCunn, and we started chatting about history, authenticity, writing, and so much more…
You’re hapa, Scottish on one side, Chinese on the other; why the focus only on your Chinese side in your writing?
I grew up in Hong Kong in my mother’s Chinese family and didn’t come to America until I started college. Even now, after decades in the U.S.A., I feel like an immigrant. Maybe I always will. As a little blond girl growing up in Hong Kong, though, I was very much an outsider, including within my family. Not just because of color, but interests – my love of books, to name just one. Similarly, the people I’ve written about – whether Chinese, White, Black, or Latino – have been outsiders because of characteristics beyond color and ethnicity. Just as the people I’m closest to in my life are outsiders. … [click here for more]
Author interview: Feature: “An interview with Ruthanne Lum McCunn,” Bookslut.com, March 2010
Tidbits: Ruthanne Lum McCunn was a delightful guest, together with Jeannie Pfaelzer and Jack Tchen, for the Smithsonian APA Program’s literary event, “The Chinese American Experience – and Those Who Survived and Thrived to Tell the Tales,” on October 12, 2007.
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Publisher Profile: Madras Press
A Quartet of Unsalable Gems: Madras Press Debuts Series One
A modern eco-fable about an almost-royal swan and just-a-common-bluebird couple whose lives intersect with a miner and a logger who turn away from their destructive careers… a contemporary fairy tale about a witch with one heck of a sweet tooth, her vampire boyfriend whom she turns into a chocolate housecat, and her ultimate date with Death who has a shoe fetish worth dying for… a bitingly clever story about a Manhattan dinner party populated by a pregnant couple, a cheating couple, childhood best friends, an editor waiting for the latest Salman Rushdie manuscript, an adventure author – and the nonpresent presence of the impossibly gorgeous mistress Lakshmi (coincidentally – or not – Rushdie’s real-life ex-wife is the impossibly gorgeous Padma Lakshmi) … an eavesdropping session that cryptically reveals a conversation between lovers on opposite sides of the earth with one half eating more than his fair share of the toothsome bread pudding while the other half attempts to tell him of her faraway adventures which has somehow landed her in a hospital bed all because of a hidden, biting caterpillar…
Admit it: Aren’t you intrigued? Wouldn’t you want to read more, more, more?
Who would have thought such enticing tales – not quite short stories, not quite long enough to be novels – would be considered unpublishable? But that’s exactly what Sumanth Prabhaker, the 26-year-old, creative writing degreed publisher of brand-new Madras Press, who moonlights by day as a book production manager at Pearson, realized when he thought about submitting his own pieces for publication. And being energetic, talented, and not-so-ready-to-take no for an answer, Prabhaker began his own press, right out of his Boston living room. Released in sets of four, Prabhaker’s 5”x5” pocket-sized little gems make for perfect reading on the go. Series One, which includes Aimee Bender’s eco-fable The Third Elevator, Trinie Dalton’s witchy Sweet Home, Rebecca Lee’s dining Bobcat, and Prabhaker’s own eavesdropping A Mere Pittance, starts shipping December 1.
Besides offering such an enjoyably portable new reading experience, Prabhaker is also a socially-conscious 21st-century literary renegade: Madras Press distributes all its net proceeds to a growing list of charitable organizations chosen by its authors. It’s all about the love of literature, nothing about making a fast buck, or even a penny, for that matter. Bender gives to InsideOUT Writers, which offers writing classes to students in Los Angeles’s Juvenile Hall System; Dalton chose the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants, a California native plant nursery; Lee chose Riverkeeper, an environmental neighborhood watch program that defends our waterways; and Prabhaker chose Helping Hands: Monkey Hands for the Disabled, which trains capuchin monkeys to help people with quadriplegia and other severe spinal cord injuries with daily activities. Bookslut interviewed author and publisher Sumanth Prabhaker about the genesis, and future, of Madras Press.
Hey, wait: If I’m remembering my Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts correctly, doesn’t Prabhaker mean “light”? Could you be more aptly named?
I just looked it up in an online baby name website, and it said it means “one that gives light.” But then I looked up my brother’s name and it said it means “lamp,” and my mom’s name apparently connotes a light shade of yellow, so maybe it’s just a recurring theme in Indian names.
Or maybe your family is just more enlightened! And since we’re talking names, why Madras Press?
My dad grew up in Madras [now Chennai, India], and my mom’s parents live there for part of the year, so the few times I’ve traveled to India have mostly been there. I’ve only been there five or six times, but I really love it — the economy is so much simpler, and someone can support a family selling fruit on the street or making limeade or something. Near my grandmother’s house is a little shack on the street where you take any clothes that need alteration, and there’s an old lady in the shack who sews them up for you; on the other side of the street there used to be a little lending library, where you give them an empty bottle as a deposit. My first memories of reading are of walking barefoot across the dirt street and exchanging a Coke bottle for a stack of Tintin comics. Despite the transformation of the city into an IT hub, and despite the immense poverty, the Indian economy rewards one’s attention to detail more than anywhere else I’ve ever been. Everything is a little smaller there, and a little more focused, and so it seemed like a fitting name for this project – tiny books of shorter stories at low prices to help little organizations. …[click here for more]
Tidbit: Growing up oh so strictly Catholic (still recovering in my old age) makes me even more delighted to announce that I have now officially made my very liberating Bookslut debut with the brand-new December issue! Whoo wheee!
Publisher Profile: Feature: “A Quartet of Unsalable Gems: Madras Press Debuts Series One,” Bookslut.com, December 2009
Readers: Adult
Published: 2009 Continue reading
Leaving Yesler by Peter Bacho + Author Interview
On Old-Timers, Boxing, and Lots of Sex (mostly off the page …)
Next April, if you happen to be in the DC area, you might be lucky enough to meet Peter Bacho at the Smithsonian as he presents Leaving Yesler, his first foray into the young adult readers market which debuts late March 2010 from Pleasure Boat Studio out of New York. “I’ll read for food,” Bacho promises.
Bacho’s been here at the Smithsonian before, back in December 2006, as a panelist for “Filipino American Literary Writers,” together with M. Evelina Galang, Marianne Villanueva, and Luis Francia. Truth be told, he and Villanueva had the audience giggling and occasionally wide-eyed with shocked surprise. Model minorities don’t say those things.
In spite of his immigrant roots (Bacho’s parents are both from Cebu, Philippines, although his Wikipedia entry erroneously claims him to be half-Filipino and half-Yakima Indian), his summa cum laude undergraduate degree from Seattle University, his JD and LLD from the University of Washington, his experience in Seattle’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and his various professor-ships in Washington universities and colleges, Bacho is anything but model minority, truth be told … nor are his characters, thank goodness!
His first book, Cebu (1991), about a Filipino American priest who arrives in the Philippines to bury his mother in her homeland, won him an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He won both a Washington Governor’s Writers Award (renamed the Washington State Book Award) and The Murray Morgan Prize for his collection of short stories, A Dark Blue Suit (1997). Then he did a children’s title, Boxing in Black and White (1999), which got him on the Center for Children’s Books Best Books List. Next came Nelson’s Run (2002), about an oversexed young man who travels to the Philippines after the accidental death of his father, followed by my personal favorite, Entrys (2005), about a teenaged Filipino Native American hapa Vietnam War veteran’s challenging attempts to re-enter civilian life.
Leaving Yesler definitely treads on familiar Bacho territory: religion, boxing, immigration, and – of course – lots of sex (“mostly off the page,” Bacho insists in this case for the sake of younger readers, ahem!). Bobby Vicente is five months shy of turning 18. His family has just shrunk by half, after losing his mother to cancer and his older brother to Vietnam. His father, Antonio, an old-timer Filipino American immigrant who once had a glorious boxing past, is determined that his only family will not only avoid war, but somehow make it out their Yesler housing project in Seattle. Antonio doesn’t have a whole lot of time left to both educate and train sweet, kind-hearted Bobby. What happens in that fast-forward week before Bobby takes his GED – from falling in love, to having conversations with a dead brother not to mention a martyred saint, to witnessing murder – will literally determine the rest of Bobby’s life.
“The kid survives,” Bacho quips. “Gotta give the little kiddies hope and all!”
I have to ask … now that you’re moving into the young adult market … do you have kids yourself?
Yes, one daughter [now 27 years old] from a former marriage. I like to say I’ve been married 35 years – if I put them all together, that is.
Why write for young adults now?
Why not? It’s getting increasingly edgier and, I think, more interesting. I mean, Yesler is a Filipino American novel without a Filipino protagonist.
Oh, no … you can’t give TOO much away … besides, culturally, that protagonist is all Filipino American!
True. For some Filipinos, especially those arriving after 1968, there’s almost a racial and linguistic purity – stuff we never bothered with.
Purity … that’s ironic, given the tragic history of Filipino colonialism, no?
It is that, but it’s expected because colonized people imitate the colonizer. …[click here for more]
Readers: Young Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
The Last Communist Virgin by Wang Ping + Author Interview
Through loosely connected short stories, Wang’s second collection straddles both worlds of her native China with her adopted America – and the undefinable spaces in between. From the young Chinese girl who sees too much in “Where the Poppies Blow,” to the naive immigrant struggling to understand her new world in the title story, to the bewildered older immigrant who returns to his an unrecognizable Beijing in “The Homecoming of an Old Beijing Man,” Wang explores the new fluidity of the modern immigrant experience where borders are anything but static.
Building Bridges: The Dual Life of Wang Ping: An Interview
The one thing the admirably prolific Wang Ping hasn’t yet written is her memoir. Not that a few details here and there of her astonishing life story haven’t made their way into her eight published books, but I’m certain her readers would appreciate hearing much more than the glimpse I can offer here.
Born in Shanghai to a naval officer father and a music teacher mother, Wang grew up on a small island in the East China Sea. When the disastrous Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Wang was in the second grade. Life as she had known it ended then, when her parents were imprisoned and tortured, leaving Wang and her younger siblings to be brought up by their grandmother. Her formal education, too, was over, as Chairman Mao’s government tried to purge the country of literature and art – anything that smacked of what was considered representative of the liberal West. … [click here for more]
Author interview: The Bloomsbury Review, May/June 2008
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2007 Continue reading
Forgery by Sabina Murray + Author Interview
Ruffling Feathers: An Interview with Novelist Sabina Murray
Sabina Murray’s published output over the past five years has been substantial by anyone’s standards: three books, five screenplays, umpteen short stories, and winning the prestigious 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award. [Click here to see earlier article in The Bloomsbury Review, January/February 2004.] All that on top of teaching graduate students how to write well (including directing some eight theses every year, although this year it was 12), balanced with raising two small kids with her poet husband, John Hennessy (who just debuted with his collection Bridge and Tunnel, from Turning Point Books).
Murray swears she doesn’t get writer’s block. She’s got time management down so well that she can work minor miracles in scattered 20-minute snippets during her day. “There’s no other choice,” she says matter-of-factly. “You just keep going and you get things done. I’m not a procrastinator. I pack everything in.”
That is, until you get Murray to Greece and suddenly everything changes. Absolutely nothing gets done. Something just shuts off, she confesses, and she’s able to achieve an enviable state of do-nothingness. She’s been there six times already. “Mostly, I wade into that shimmering blue water, about knee high. My jaw goes slack. I think about nothing. As my body is digesting the too-big lunch I ate with the two glasses of wine I downed, I wait for the fishes to jump and just watch the horizon,” she laughs.
In this blissful state, Murray somehow managed to formulate her latest book, an enticing, slyly entertaining novel called Forgery. Rupert Brigg, an overprivileged New Yorker who knows a little something about art, mourns silently. As an antidote to his sadness, his uncle William insists he go to Greece to find more treasures that will further enhance William’s art collection. It’s the summer of 1963; the islands are gorgeous, the wine flowing, the water warm and beckoning. Lost and searching souls gather, hoping someone else will be interested enough to share their secrets and offer a few new ones in trade. …[click here for more]
Author interview: The Bloomsbury Review, September/October 2007
Readers: Adult
Published: 2007 Continue reading
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