HORROR STORIES

failure of leadership, and I was interested in how this affects what happens when a country starts unraveling, and what happens to its most vulnerable citizens. I have to mention that engaging like this means I’m also desperately interested in how we can move forward of course, as most are. I write because I care.

You said you first intended to attend law school. What changed your mind? Do you see anything that you hoped to do as a lawyer seeping into your writing? Or do you see those two things as totally separate?

I did intend to study law, yes, but that was mostly a result of coming from a background where you’re expected to pursue sensible and practical things, and if you told people, at least at the time I came of age, that you were studying “law,” “engineering,” “medicine,” et cetera, then you were a person-person you know, whereas “writer” or “artist” would be a waste of time. Of course it’s perfectly understandable for families to push their kids toward “real,” “tangible” careers, but that unfortunately always means traditional fields; the arts can just be another distant country for those who cannot afford the luxury. I sometimes see the same dynamic play out with the many young people who come through my classes, the agonizing over what to do, what they love versus what is practical and what not, what the parents expect, and of course I just wish them the courage to sort it all out. It’s not always easy, like most life decisions.

Anyway, I suppose what changed my mind, or should I say, what opened my eyes, was finding myself on the page after taking classes at Kalamazoo Valley Community College in Michigan (I can’t speak highly enough of that school) and understanding that writing was what I was meant to be doing, which then shaped the 12 or so years between taking my first creative writing class, and the publication of my debut novel. My law aspirations at 18, 19 were vague, I was still in the process of figuring myself out, but as an artist I’m interested in literature as a social project that allows for imagining ethics-driven representations and interrogations of the world, that allows us to talk about and around rights, wrongs, problems, issues of justice, et cetera. I imagine this is where my powerless and marginalized characters, normally children and women, as well as my socially engaged themes, come from.

There are some notable moments in your novel where you note the naïveté of Western aid workers. You do not doubt their good intentions, it seems, but still you see a gap in understanding. Was your novel at least in part motivated by a desire to correct some notions people in the West have about Africa? What kinds of misconceptions do you feel it’s most important to address?

The misconceptions about Africa are numerous, but I believe a better way to think about the issue is to perhaps consider why they exist in the first place — from cultural arrogance to problematic media representations to lack of information et cetera. And quickly, I’ll note that as an educator I’m quite surprised by how much Africa seems to be missing from the formative Western Curriculum, so that it’s possible for a student to get to college and complete it without encountering Africa in any meaningful and balanced way. And as we all know, uninformed young people

make for a dangerous society, because these are future leaders and players who will, among other things, have to deal with Africa in one way or the other. Let’s prepare young people who are able to adequately engage with the world, period, not just Africa by the way. It is 2015 after all, and globalization is here.

The NGO section in the novel is concerned about the culture of dependency, where the adults are in fact not inspired to take any initiative, but to simply wait for handouts, being disappointed when these don’t come on time. Where aid is concerned, people in the receiving end are better served by the type of intervention that also leads to self-empowerment, otherwise the aid itself can easily cease to be a solution and become a part of the problem. Even as I cast a light on it, the gap in understanding seems to me like it would need more than literature — I’m writing about characters of course, but they come from systems that are in many ways responsible for shaping who they are. It reminds me of how I sometimes watch America’s racial madness, count the black boys and black men that are still being murdered by white policemen, and it’s business as usual, and I think how mind-blowing that the prophetic James Baldwin spoke about these issues decades ago, and his literature did not, and is not, saving anybody, not counting the numerous contemporary writers who are writing around the issues everyday. Literature has its value of course, but systems need to have active participants, after all. Not everybody is reading.

I read the novel as both a call to political action, but also a very realistic understanding of capacity and effectiveness. Has anything changed in terms of your optimism or pessimism about how positive change might come in Zimbabwe?

As long as we are under the same leadership that failed the country, and that arrogantly believes that liberating the nation gave it the right to choke its dreams, and not be accountable, then I’m still disappointed, even as I’m grateful for the quiet. I mean, it is no longer the Zim of 200809, when I wrote the novel, and the crisis was at its height. I’ll say that to hope is human, so I do and still hope for the kind of leadership that is able to carry the country forward.

HORROR STORIES ARE LOVE STORIES

KELLY LINK

INTERVIEWED BY HELEN OYEYEMI

I’m still not sure exactly who I should thank for alerting me to Kelly Link’s story collection Stranger Things Happen, but I do remember when it came my way. I was at university, a time when books and references to those books seem to circulate mysteriously between local and international bookshops, libraries, your room, and those of your friends’. It was just the right time to begin reading Link, who immediately became one of the first to come to mind when I think of writers who are most excitingly and alarmingly contemporary. In her work there is often more than a hint of sympathy for the ways in which technology and modernity complicate all the old predicaments connected to being human.

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Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Home, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 85 x 95 x 1 3/4 inches (215.9 x 241.3 x 4.4 centimeters). © Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo.

In Link’s latest collection, Get in Trouble, stories like “The New Boyfriend,” “Valley of the Girls,” and “The Summer People” are laced with humorous resignation to the frequency of mind-body disconnects. Shifts in tone and atmosphere click together so artfully that you almost feel as if the words are changing you as you read them. How on earth does she do this?

In the conversation that follows, Kelly Link generously gives thinking time to questions in which I unsuccessfully attempt to uncover her methods. (Well, I had to try.) We corresponded by e-mail, and here’s what we wrote:

Helen Oyeyemi: Your new collection

is called Get in Trouble. Are there ways

in which you see fiction as getting its readers into trouble? Or do stories have a greater tendency to get us out of trouble? Or both? Is there something else to keep in mind about the statement/invitation/command of this book’s title?

Kelly Link: The title has a lot to do with a realization I had about the underlying mechanics of narrative. Which is that trouble drives story. Certainly it drives these stories. What did I think, previously, that stories were about? I have no idea. I spend so much time in my own life considering consequences and imagining outcomes, that it’s a kind of joy to inhabit characters who don’t overthink. Or who, perhaps, think but act anyway.

You’ve mentioned that you feel a sense of fullness upon completing stories, and I remember feeling quite mystified and delighted by that. Mystified because my own experience of writing is feeling drained afterwards, but delighted by the possibility of stories actually nourishing their teller. To me it also sounds as if stories occur to you as external chains of ideas and it’s then necessary to take them in and make them presentable. Is that it, or not at all?

And now I’m trying to figure out what a workable metaphor for writing would be, when I think of how I do it, and what it feels like to be done with it. I did have the sense of pushing back from the table, I suppose. And of satiation. But I think what I meant was more that I had too much in my head, all the finished stories jostling around, that I couldn’t find a way to clear the cupboard for more. This last year was one in which I got a great deal of writing done, at least for me. I’d finished one story, “I Can See Right Through You,” which took almost two years, and then I got three other stories done as well.

What was it that kept “I Can See Right Through You” in development for two years? Could it have been finding the right beginning? (I’m thinking of that anecdote Italo Calvino tells about the artist who required ten years, a country house, and 12 servants before he was in exactly the right frame of mind to draw a perfect image of a crab with a single brushstroke.)

“I Can See Right Through You” took such a long time because I knew the kind of relationship that I wanted the two central figures to have, but not much about them individually. For a while they were two women. I gave them a failed marriage. Some children. I saved something like a dozen different openings (I’d get about three to four thousand words in, and then be stymied again) so that later on, I could go back and see if it were possible to figure

out a better way to proceed in the future. But it’s still a mystery to me, how to make yourself find the right way forward at a smarter pace. The slower I work, the more I stumble.

As for my requirements, it did take renting a friend’s house in Polperro, Cornwall and the company of other writers, for the rest of the story to come clear. Stories usually arrive as fragments that attach to questions. Sometimes the question is from an editor: Would you like to write a story in honor of Ray Bradbury [“Two Houses” Or, I’m thinking about two ghost stories told to me by two friends, plus a desire to write about a murder-house-asrepulsive-art-object. The bits that go into the story are things that have been stuck to me for a while. Sticky things. So less external chains than a Katamari-style ball of the like and the unlike. And once I have the question and the material, it’s a matter of establishing a tonal quality that will suit. This often takes the longest to figure out.

There’s a shift that happens when I’m writing, in which the internal voice moves from, “What about this? Maybe? Or maybe this?” to a more definitive series of yes/no. Eventually there are more “yes” responses than “no”. But I can still look at stories and see a line of dialogue or description that never quite got to “yes”. They’re placeholders for whatever I wanted to do that I couldn’t get done. I’m always lending bits of stories to other stories, and then having to come up with new bits.

It makes sense that “Two Houses” has a Bradbury connection. There’s a quiet expansiveness to it that reminded me of

my favorite Bradbury book, Something Wicked This Way Comes: a sort of circu-

lar wave silently and rapidly expanding at the heart of a lake, the source of the commotion not (yet) visible. Trouble! I also like the leaving in of dialogue and descriptions that don’t necessarily smooth the reader’s path — yes, they’re placeholders, but for a reader they can also be seen as elements that build a story’s logic. Lending bits of stories to other stories and having to make up new bits (something I find myself doing, too) makes me think that once the trouble in a story revs up it doesn’t ever really wind down.

Now I’d like to know what, in your opinion, is the difference between a love story and a horror story?

So how it works is that I immediately begin to think of the similarities, rather than the differences. The idea of falling, that vertiginous feeling, the idea of being seen and known; a kind of attention to the body — attentiveness to the being, the presence, the whole of oneself or of the other; being seen and known, absolutely; absorption. The extension of oneself into the unknown. I think of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

I suppose that was a bit of a trick question because I, too, see more similarities than differences there and it’s a perspective I’ve recognized reading your stories. The Haunting of Hill House is full of scares, but one of the biggest for me was the realization that it’s a love story. Though maybe the love story bit falls under conceptual shock. I do believe there must be a difference between love stories and horror stories though, that it’s more than just labeling; the difference may be subtle and may often dissolve, but it’s a pet project of mine to find or tell a story or two that knows what this difference is . . .

“Shock” seems like the right word for that place where we aren’t quite sure what emotion we’re experiencing: intensity in the moment that swamps meaning. Let’s posit that a love story can be sustained longer than a horror story. (“Love bears all things.”) Perhaps a love story is also a more capable container? Horror and love are also maybe modes of interpretation/ reading.

One of my favorite things about your writing is the gentle but implacable escalation of strangeness. The shift always takes me surprise, and then once the first blast has receded I marvel at the way it was done. Reading your ghost stories is a bit like walking on moving platforms, with the sound or vision that’s to be feared always just ahead or long past, having gone by in a flash. I was thinking about other writers who also work with atmosphere in idiosyncratic ways: Shirley Jackson, who warns you quite clearly that all is far from well but somehow amplifies the moment of crisis beyond expectation, and Robert Aickman, whose narrative preference seems to be the equivalent of keeping you in the gloom with a blindfold on and then shaking things up by allowing an occasional peep through the fabric.

Hidden somewhere in this rambling comment is a question about technique and how important it is to you as a reader and writer. Do you reread your favorite stories and novels, for instance? Is there anything in particular you look for in a story (or poem, or essay) while you’re reading it, or any structural requirements that you have when it comes to your own?

Thank you! Coming from you, this gives me the most perfect kind of happiness. I’ve been rereading Robert Aickman recently. I keep going back to “The Cicerones” and “Rosamund’s Bower.” Although “Ringing the Changes” may always be my favorite. When I write I spend a great deal of time putting cloths over all the mirrors, so to speak. There are always the things that you want to be clear to the reader. There are the things that you want them to make up their own minds about. There are the things that you wish them to be surprised by. And then there are the things that you want to leave lying there unanswered. One of my favorite books when I was a kid was a Reader’s Digest book called Strange Stories, Amazing Facts. Faces that appeared as stains on tiles, the Russian countess who dreams that her father appears and says, “Your happiness is at an end.” Kaspar Hauser: I think I memorized most of it.

That countess in the Reader’s Digest book — do you remember if it transpired that her dream father was right??

Her father says to her, “Your happiness is at an end. He has fallen. He has fallen at Borodino.” She has this dream three times, and she and her husband, a Russian general, search on a map for Borodino and cannot find it. But then her husband goes off to fight a battle against Napoleon’s army, and he dies in a place called Borodino — and as in the dream, her father comes into the room where she is staying, and says the words from her dream.

I do reread books and stories, all the time. Often children’s books and ghost stories, especially anthologies of ghost stories. Stephen King’s novels or collections. I reread things that I loved, or that

had a particular effect on me. I once asked a bunch of horror writers why it was still pleasurable to reread scary stories when their power to scare us has diminished. The writer Nick Mamatas said, “I read to feel a sense of dread.”

Are you writing something about Angela Carter?

I was asked if I would write an introduction to Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber last summer and agreed, and then spent far too much time not only rereading her short stories, but also reading various introductions. I felt I needed a crash course in how to write that kind of thing.

At the same time I was also reading Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s fairy tale anthologies. Reading other people’s reworkings of fairy tales was a way of reading fairy tales, of course. Seeing how other people read them. What mattered to me with Angela Carter was her voice, the way the register switched from high to low — from an arch, almost nails-on-blackboard surface doodling to something that was almost sodden with meaning. (“Now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation.” I love “The Lady of the House of Love” best, the way you are moved from the horror of the gothic to the horror of World War I, on a bicycle, of all things!) Her fairy tale stories had a kind of show-your-work scribbliness to them. (I read Tristram Shandy a bit later.) I liked that quality.

The part of writing that is most pleasurable to me is problem-solving. Story math. How do I achieve a certain kind of mood? What can I leave out? What are the different ways to read the fantastic bits of the story? (The introduction of the fantastic means that there are going to be metaphorical meanings, and this gets messy very quickly, especially with horror. What are we afraid of? Who is the other? Who is being punished and why? What is precious or a marker of beauty/ value/worthiness of love? Why?) Angela Carter, working her way through a fairy tale, takes it apart at the same time so that you can see the seams that she sees.

What was the last thing you read or saw (art exhibitions, films, TV) that took you aback in a good way?

So, three things quickly. An exhibit of Sol LeWitt at MASS MoCa, and a short film about the 65 people who drafted and painted the wall drawing installation according to his recipe. Tanya Tagaq, a singer. The Vampire Diaries, which has all my favorite things in it: recursive patterns, including doppelgangers; unreliable narrators interacting with each other; lots of surprise kissing and also surprise impaling; oh, and a reading that the poet Mary Ruefle gave at the Tin House Workshop.

ART TK

Roula Nassar, untitled, 2019, ink on paper, 10 x 18 inches.

Tanya Agathocleous is a professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research interests include 19th and 20th century British and Anglophone literature and empire and postcolonial studies. She is the author of Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (Cambridge, 2011) and Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere (Cornell, 2021); has edited Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent for Broadview Press and Great Expectations and Sultana's Dream for Penguin; and is co-editor (with Ann Dean) of Teaching Literature: A Companion (Palgrave, 2002). Along with a number of academic reviews and articles, she has also written for Public Books and LARB.

Steph Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award, and the Juniper Song crime trilogy. She’s a critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she served as noir editor, and is the current series editor of the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology. A native of the San Fernando Valley, she lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Sarah Chihaya is an assistant professor of English at Princeton University, and senior editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is one of four authors of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Columbia University Press, 2020).

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), which won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry, Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), and The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010). She has received a Whiting Award, Lannan Literary Fellowship, Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, International Griffin Poetry Prize (Translation), DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship, and Guggenheim Fellowship.

Sophie Duvernoy is a PhD student in German literature at Yale University, where she focuses on literature and aesthetic theory of the Weimar period. Her translation of Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier Takes Berlin was published by New York Review Books in 2019, and she is the recipient of the 2015 Gutekunst Prize for Young Translators. She is now working on a translation of Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers and Emmy Hennings’s Das Brandmal (The Stigma). Her writing and translations have appeared in the Paris Review Online, Los Angeles Review of Books, No Man’s Land, and The Offing.

Kaya Genç, the Istanbul correspondent of the Los Angeles Review of Books, is the author of four books: The Lion and the Nightingale (Bloomsbury/I.B. Tauris, 2019), Under the Shadow (Bloomsbury/I.B. Tauris, 2016), An Istanbul Anthology (Bloomsbury/AUC Press, 2015), and Macera (Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, 2008). The Economist called Under the Shadow a “refreshingly balanced” book whose author “has announced himself as a voice to be listened to.” The Times Literary Supplement praised the way The Lion and the Nightingale “grounds Turkish current affairs in the context of the past couple of decades and explains the attraction of extreme politics to the country’s youth.” He contributed to the world’s leading journals and newspapers, including two frontpage stories in The New York Times, cover stories in The New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Jenny George is the author of The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). She is also a winner of the Boston Review’s Discovery Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships

from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Narrative, Granta, Iowa Review, FIELD, and elsewhere. Jenny lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.

Amanda Gorman is the youngest inaugural poet in US history, as well as an awardwinning writer and cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she studied sociology. She has written for The New York Times and has three books forthcoming with Penguin Random House.

Jorie Graham is the author, most recently, of Fast and From The New World (Poems 1976–2014). She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, photographer, and novelist. Her recent hybrid collection of poetry and photography, Seeing the Body (W.W. Norton, 2020), was selected as the winner of the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize and nominated for a 2021 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a 2020 NAACP Image Award. Griffiths's visual and literary work has appeared widely, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, The New York Review of Books, and many others. She has received fellowships including Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Cave Canem Foundation, Kimbilio, and Yaddo. Griffiths's debut novel, Promise, is forthcoming from Random House. She lives in New York City.

Sheri-Marie Harrison is an associate professor of English at the University of Missouri, where she researches and teaches contemporary literature and mass culture of the African Diaspora. She is the author of Difficult Subjects: Negotiating Sovereignty in Postcolonial Jamaican Literature, and among her ongoing projects is an author study of Marlon James and a monograph on genre in contemporary Black fiction. She is also one of three co-editors of the Routledge Companion to the Novel (Routledge, forthcoming 2023).

Richie Hofmann’s new book of poems, A Hundred Lovers, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2022. He is the author of Second Empire (Alice James Books, 2015), and his poetry appears recently in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. A former Stegner Fellow, he teaches at Stanford University.

E. Alex Jung is a features writer at New York Magazine.

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, three books of art and cultural criticism, and After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography. A former Guggenheim fellow, she is a co-editor of the independent press Semiotext(e), alongside Hedi El Kholti and Sylvère Lotringer. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at ArtCenter.

Summer Kim Lee is an assistant professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the best selling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, among others. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, The Believer, Guernica, and elsewhere. She lives in Philadelphia and is the Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.

MariNaomi is the award-winning author and illustrator of the graphic books Kiss & Tell: A

Romantic Resume, Ages 0 to 22, Dragon's Breath and Other True Stories, Turning Japanese, I Thought YOU Hated ME, the Life on Earth YA trilogy, and Dirty Produce. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, the Smithsonian, the Cartoon Art Museum, the Asian Art Museum, and the Japanese American Museum. She’s the founder and administrator of the Cartoonists of Color, Queer Cartoonists, and Disabled Cartoonists databases. She lives in Los Angeles with a menagerie of rescue critters and her partner, Gary.

D. A. Miller was for many years the John F. Hotchkis Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent books include Second Time Around: From Art House to DVD (Columbia, 2021) and Hidden Hitchcock (University of Chicago, 2016).

Yxta Maya Murray is a novelist, art critic, playwright, and law professor. The author of nine books, her most recent are the story collection The World Doesn’t Work That Way, but It Could (University of Nevada Press, 2020), and the novel, Art Is Everything (TriQuarterly Press, 2021). She has won a Whiting Award and an Art Writer's Grant. In 2022, she will be a fellow at the Huntington Library and a Walter E. Dakin fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference.

Mukoma Wa Ngugi is an associate professor of literatures in English at Cornell University and the author of Unbury Our Dead With Song (a novel about competing Tizita musicians), The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity and Ownership, the novels Mrs. Shaw, Black Star Nairobi, Nairobi Heat, and two books of poetry, Logotherapy and Hurling Words at Consciousness.

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn, 2018) and recipient of a 2021 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to winning the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A Kundiman fellow, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Helen Oyeyemi is a British novelist and writer of short stories. Since 2014 her home has been in Prague.

David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and professor of comparative literature at Stanford University. His latest book is Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back, forthcoming.

Michael Robbins is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Walkman (Penguin Books, 2021). He is an associate professor of English at Montclair State University.

Mary Ruefle’s latest book is Dunce (Wave Books, 2019) and her poem here published is in it. Mary lives in Vermont.

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is the author of Lima :: Limón (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) and The Verging Cities (Colorado State University, 2015). Winner of a Windham Campbell Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and a Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, she currently is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of South Florida.

Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University, and a Fulbright grant to Morocco, among other

awards and recognitions. He is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA programs.

Prageeta Sharma’s recent poetry collection is Grief Sequence, out from Wave Books. She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence, an interdisciplinary conference on race, creative writing, and artistic and aesthetic practices. A recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Award and a finalist for the 2020 Four Quartets Prize, she taught at the University of Montana and now teaches at Pomona College.

Min Hyoung Song is a professor of English at Boston College, where he is also the director of the Asian American Studies Program and a member of the steering committee for the Environmental Studies Program. He is the author of several books, including Climate Lyricism (Duke, 2022), and the co-editor of several volumes, including The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature. His words have also appeared in numerous academic journals and edited volumes, and in venues like The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Chicago Review of Books, and Public Books, in addition to LARB.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an American academic, writer, and activist. She is a professor of African American studies at Princeton University. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.

Clifford Thompson is the author of Signifying Nothing: A Novel (iUniverse, 2009), Love for Sale and Other Essays (Autumn House Press, 2013), Twin of Blackness: A Memoir (Autumn House Press, 2015), and What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues (Other Press, 2019). He is the author and illustrator of the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men, due out from Other Press in the fall of 2022. His personal essays and writings on books, film, jazz, and visual art have appeared in publications including Best American Essays 2018, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Commonweal, and The Threepenny Review.

Ben Wurgaft is a writer, historian, and critic. His books include Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt (Penn, 2016) and Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (California, 2019).

FEATURED ARTISTS

Amita Bhatt received her BFA from the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, India and her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, USA. Bhatt’s work steadfastly explores conflict, and ideology in the war-torn world we inhabit. Armed with humor, paradox, symbolism and mythology, Bhatt creates complex worlds that implode and explode as she encourages her audience to reflect on the endless cycles of conception and annihilation, highlighting the impermanence of all things, animate and inanimate. Her protagonists negotiate abundant, primordial and potent spaces. They oscillate precariously between the ambivalent edges of insatiable desire and aversion; knowledge and catastrophe; monumentality and sacrifice, passion and destruction. They experience and exist within suspense filled spaces and are armed with the indefatigable resilience of the human spirit. Amita Bhatt’s art has been exhibited at prestigious venues and her works are included in noteworthy collections globally. Amita Bhatt is represented by Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston.

Born in Seattle, Washington, Noah Davis (1983–2015) studied painting at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York before moving to Los Angeles, where, in 2012, he

founded the Underground Museum in the city’s Arlington Heights neighbourhood with his wife and fellow artist, Karon Davis. Davis’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California (2008, 2010, and 2013); Tilton Gallery, New York (2009 and 2011); PAPILLION, Los Angeles (2014); and the Rebuild Foundation, Chicago (2016), among others. Noah Davis: Imitation of Wealth, which had previously been presented at the Underground Museum in 2013, opened at LA MOCA in 2015 on the same day as the artist’s untimely death at age thirty-two, due to complications from a rare cancer. In 2016, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, presented the twoperson exhibition Young Blood: Noah Davis, Kahlil Joseph, The Underground Museum— the first large-scale museum show to explore Davis’s work alongside that of his brother’s. In 2020, an acclaimed solo presentation of Davis’s work was on view at David Zwirner, New York, a select portion of which will travel to the Underground Museum in December 2021.

The artist’s work is featured in the landmark exhibition 30 Americans, which was organised by the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, and has been travelling extensively throughout the United States from 2008 to the present (the exhibition is currently on view at the Arlington Museum of Art, Texas, through 5 September 2021, and subsequently travels to the Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina, in October 2021). Davis’s work has been included in other notable group exhibitions, including ones held at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California (2010 and 2020); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012 and 2015); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2017); and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams (2018). Davis was the recipient of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 2013 Art Here and Now (AHAN): Studio Forum award. Works by the artist are included in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Rubell Museum, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

Born in 1978 in Saudi Arabia, Roula Nassar lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Asuka Anastacia Ogawa (b. 1988, Tokyo, Japan) creates large figurative paintings that depict androgynous children in chimerical dreamscapes, otherworldly scenes formed from solid fields of color and flat picture planes. Her subjects have wide thin eyes that gaze forward, piercing the fourth wall. Ogawa conjures these compositions through an exercise that embraces unmediated impulse and channels the sense of curiosity, wonder and play paramount to childhood. Ogawa was born in Tokyo where she spent much of her childhood. When she was three years old, Ogawa moved from this vertical urban backdrop to rural Brazil, where she passed a handful of formative early years amongst wandering farm animals and rushing waterfalls. The artist later relocated to Sweden when she was a teen, where she attended high school, and soon thereafter she moved to London to pursue her BFA from Central Saint Martins. After having her first solo show at Henry Taylor’s studio in Los Angeles in 2017, she had a solo show at Blum & Poe Tokyo in 2020 and at Blum & Poe Los Angeles in 2021. Her work is in the collection of X Museum, Beijing, China. She is currently based in New York and Los Angeles

Cambridge University Press congratulates the Los Angeles Review of Books on their 10th Anniversary Issue

NEW from Cambridge

‘Chris Funk’s Drought, Flood, Fire uses a compelling mix of storytelling and fact-finding to communicate the very real impacts we are now feeling from climate change-fueled weather extremes. Read this book to understand the problem and learn how we can solve it.’ Michael Mann, author of The New Climate War and The Madhouse Effect

‘What a nifty book! We have a beautiful planet--and we’re not taking care of it. This book shows in compelling detail how we’ve begun to shake our home apart, and it reminds us of the very human consequences. Climate change is not going to happen someday. It’s happening today!’ Bill McKibben, author of Falter and The End of Nature

“Drawing on his own research in a narrative that’s both engaging and sobering, Chris Funk shows us the havoc that human-caused climate change is wreaking on the disparate landscapes and peoples of Africa and the United States — and how we can avert still-worse calamities that otherwise lie ahead.”

Robert Henson, author of The Thinking Person’s Guide to Climate Change FUNK

‘a compelling mix of storytelling and fact-finding to communicate the very real impacts ... from climate change’ - Michael Mann

HOW CLIMATE CHANGE

CONTRIBUTES TO CATASTROPHES

CHRIS FUNK

Every year, droughts, floods, and fires impact hundreds of millions of people and cause massive economic losses. Climate change is making these catastrophes more dangerous. Now. Not in the future: NOW. This book describes how and why climate change is already fomenting dire consequences, and will certainly make climate disasters worse in the near future. Chris Funk combines the latest science with compelling stories, providing a timely, accessible, and beautifully written synopsis of this critical topic. The book describes our unique and fragile Earth system, and the negative impacts humans are having on our support systems. It then examines recent disasters, including heat waves, extreme precipitation, hurricanes, fires, El Niños and La Niñas, and their human consequences. By clearly describing the dangerous impacts that are already occurring, Funk provides a clarion call for social change, yet also conveys the beauty and wonder of our planet, and hope for our collective future.

9781108839877 $24.95 | August 2021

“This superb book reminds us of one enduring insight. Economists like Smith, Hirschman, List, Keynes, Schumpeter, and Polyani understood what modern economics has forgotten. Capitalism does not flourish when markets are fully free. It thrives when they are socially embedded and politically well governed. A turbulent twentieth century has made this pandemic moment ripe for this timeless reminder.” Peter J. Katzenstein, Cornell University

“Inspired by the insights of six key economists, Campbell and Hall offer a masterful interpretation of the global political economy from the early twentieth century until today. What political and economic conditions enabled the golden era of prosperity after the trauma of the Second World War? Why did this period end as economic inequality combined with slower growth, greater instability, and resurgent intolerance? And what lies ahead, as China assumes a leading role in the world’s economy? In a compelling and carefully researched analysis, the authors identify the critical conditions upon which the viability of global capitalism depends and map out ways to meet the challenges of the future.” Bruce G. Carruthers, Northwestern University

“A capitalist economy is never pure capitalism. Its operation is, as John Campbell and John Hall show us so clearly and effectively, both supported and impeded by an array of institutions and government policies, and it produces consequences that themselves affect the economy’s functioning.” Lane Kenworthy, University of California, San Diego and Hall Campbell

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Award-winning historian Ronald G. Musto has taught at three universities and served at ACLS Humanities E-Book (co-director), the Medieval Academy of America (coexecutive director, co-editor of Speculum), and Italica Press (co-publisher). He is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. He is coJohn L. Campbell and John A. Hall Forgotten Lessons of Great Economists author, with Eileen Gardiner, of The Digital Humanities. Designed by Phil Treble Printed in the United Kingdom9781108471923 Musto – The Attack on Higher Education – Jacket

From unemployment to Brexit to climate Employing ample historical knowledge, a fine eye for current trends, change, capitalism is in trouble and and a razor-sharp analytical prose, Ronald Musto has offered a bracing and necessary examination of the current plight of higher ill‑prepared to cope with the challenges education. Though his focus is U.S. higher education, the book has global implications. As a history, a landscape analysis, and a font of the coming decades. How did we get of suggestions for a way forward, Musto’s book will be essential reading for all those who care about the future of higher education. here? While contemporary economists Christopher Celenza, James B. Knapp Dean, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins University and policymakers tend to ignore the When Ronald Musto was writing this wise, well-informed, and political and social dimensions of alarming book, even he could not have known how trenchant his analyses would appear by the date of publication or how quickly capitalism, some of the great economists his prophecies would begin to come true. As institutions of higher of the past – Adam Smith, Friedrich List, education struggle to find a “new normal” in the midst of pandemic and authoritarian uproar, they risk failing to see how powerful are John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, the forces arrayed against them. Musto can tell them. James O’Donnell, University Librarian, Arizona State University

Karl Polanyi, and Albert Hirschman – did Ron Musto’s Attack on Higher Education is a profoundly timely not make the same mistake. Leveraging their and transformative work – a must read for anyone who cares about higher education – where we are now and how we got here. insights, sociologists John L. Campbell and Shakespearean in scope and depth, this book tells an extraordinarily powerful and complex story, at times exhilarating and painful, that John A. Hall trace the historical development impacts each of us today. Indeed, it is one of the most moving, important, engaging, and significant books I have read in a long of capitalism as a social, political, and time. I simply could not put it down. economic system throughout the twentieth Suzanne P. Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University and early twenty‑first centuries. They draw Of the many books out there about the crisis of American higher comparisons across eras and around the education, read Musto’s first. Even readers who disagree with his point of view will learn from his nuanced portrait of the university’s globe to show that there is no inevitable uncomfortable multiple allegiances – to knowledge, democratic education, and elitism – that have left it so vulnerable to the changes logic of capitalism; rather, capitalism’s wrought by new media and technology. Musto’s existential questions and suggested strategies should be required reading for chairs and performance depends on the strength of deans. Joy Connolly, President, American Council of Learned Societies nation‑states, the social cohesion of capitalist societies, and the stability of the international system – three things that are in short supply today.

9781108487825 $24.95 | September 2021

EARTH DETOX

Barbara Kellerman was founding Executive Director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership and a member of the Kennedy School faculty for over twenty years. She is author, coauthor, and editor of How and Why We Must many books on leadership and followership, JULIAN CRIBB Clean Up Our Planet ‘Starkly engaging, beautifully written, and deeply unnerving’ – Geoffrey Holland including Leaders Who Lust, Followership, Bad Leadership, The End of Leadership, and Professionalizing Leadership. Cover design: Andrew Ward9781108838320: Kellerman: Jacket:

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“Barbara Kellerman knows great leadership when she sees it, and when she doesn’t. The Enablers is a brilliant, yet bluntly candid, analysis of how and why otherwise accomplished people follow (and enable) flawed leaders to failure. A must-read cautionary tale.”

Stan McChrystal, @StanMcChrystal, author of Team of Teams, co-founder of the McChrystal Group, and retired US Army General

“Barbara Kellerman’s scholarly eminence in the academic field of leadership studies is undisputed. Her canonical examination on the relationship between leadership and followership provides fresh insights into conventional accounts of leadership. Focusing on six pivotal months in the Trump administration, The Enablers lays bare President Trump and his team’s disastrous handling of the response to the COVID-19 virus.”

Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Associate Dean and Senior Adjunct Professor of Law and Global Leadership, University of Pennsylvania Law School

“Barbara Kellerman has produced an important work that furthers our collective understanding of the interactional nature of leadership. It is a work of scholarly intensity that should be read by scholars and practitioners trying to make sense of the nature of leadership and followership in our post-modern times.”

Rakesh Khurana, Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development and Dean of Harvard College, Harvard University

9781108931083 $14.95 | September 2021

KELLERMAN THE ENABLERS

THE ENABLERS

HOW TEAM TRUMP FLUNKED THE PANDEMIC AND FAILED AMERICA BARBARA KELLERMAN

The COVID-19 pandemic will forever be remembered as a pivotal event in American history. Written by one of the world’s foremost experts on leadership and followership, this book centers on the first six months of the pandemic and the crises that ran rampant. The chapters focus less on the former president, Donald Trump, than on his followers: on people complicit in his miserable mismanagement of the crisis in public health. Barbara Kellerman provides clear and compelling evidence that Trump was not entirely to blame for everything that went wrong. Many others were responsible including his base, party, administration, inner circle, Republican elites, members of the media, and even medical experts. Far too many surrendered to the president’s demands, despite it being obvious his leadership was fatally flawed. The book testifies to the importance of speaking truth to power, and a willingness to take risks properly to serve the public interest.

9781108838320 $24.95 | August 2021

Musto

The Attack

Education on Higher

“... a timely and transformative work ...

a must read ...” Suzanne P. Blier

The Attack

Higher on Education

The Dissolution of the American University

Ronald G. Musto

American higher education is under attack today as never before. A growing right-wing narrative portrays academia as corrupt, irrelevant, costly, and dangerous to both students and the nation. Budget cuts, attacks on liberal arts and humanities disciplines, faculty layoffs and retrenchments, technology displacements, corporatization, and campus closings have accelerated over the past decade. In this timely volume, Ronald G. Musto draws on historical precedent – Henry VIII’s dissolution of British monasteries in the 1530s – for his study of the current threats to American higher education. He shows how a triad of forces – authority, separateness, and innovation – enabled monasteries to succeed, and then suddenly and unexpectedly to fail. Musto applies this analogy to contemporary academia. Despite higher education’s vital centrality to American culture and economy, a powerful, anti-liberal narrative is severely damaging its reputation among parents, voters, and politicians. Musto offers a comprehensive account of this narrative from the mid twentieth century to the present, as well as a new set of arguments to counter criticisms and rebuild the image of higher education.

9781108471923 $24.99 | November 2021

9781108843539 $24.95 | September 2021

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‘A critically important assessment of the current state of governance of healthcare and the economy in the UK – uniquely placed in historical context. The disastrous mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic provides an ideal launch-pad for this critique, which also demonstrates a clear path to a better future. It should be in the hands of everyone in the country who cares about and has responsibility for our future.’ Sir David King, former UK Chief Scientific Adviser and Climate Envoy, Chair of Independent SAGE

‘What lessons does the past hold for shaping a better post-pandemic future? This book, with its powerful account of the intolerable inequalities of the present, argues for a revival of the moral foundations of the successful social contracts of earlier periods of British history.’ Diane Coyle, author of Markets, State and People: Economics for Public Policy

‘It is quite a feat to trace the vagaries of English social history from the Elizabethan Poor Law, through mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, to the seven pillars of what a good society should look like. But these wonderfully accessible authors have done it. Bravo.’ Sir Michael Marmot, author of Build Back Fairer: The COVID-19 Marmot Review

‘Impressive analysis of how 40 years of neoliberalism severely increased inequalities and the impact of the pandemic, and how a secure, mutually supportive society with a strong economy can be restored. Let’s hope our government finds it inspiring and acts accordingly.’ Pat Thane, author of Divided Kingdom. A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present

Cover design: Andrew Ward Cooper and Szreter

AFTER THE VIRUS

‘should be in the hands of everyone in the country’

Sir David King

Hilary Cooper Simon Szreter

AFTER THE VIRUS

Lessons from the Past for a Better Future

9781108492423 $24.95 | September 2021

9781009005203 $16.95 | November 2021

9781108845946 $27.95 | October 2021