Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Neill Lochery, author of Cashing Out: The Flight of Nazi Treasure, 1945-1948, about the flight of Nazi treasure through “neutral” countries after the Second World War.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

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Professor Neill Lochery Ph.D., is the Catherine Lewis Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Mediterranean Studies at University College London. He has served as an adviser to political and economic leaders from both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is the author of nine books including The View from the Fence: The Arab-Israeli Conflict from the Present to its Roots (Continuum) and Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light 1939-1945.

Writer and editor Zeke Caligiuri joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion, a new collection of essays on class he co-edited along with eleven other incarcerated writers. The volume’s contributors include Eula Biss, Kao Kalia Yang, Lacy M. Johnson, Valeria Luisielli, Kiese Laymon, and many others. Caligiuri, who worked on the book while in Minnesota correctional facilities and is now free, discusses the challenges of creativity and the literary life in prison settings, as well as how the book came to be. He also reflects on the idea that “the history of class hasn’t always been written by the powerful, but they have always been its editors,” as he writes in a foreword, which he reads from during the episode.

Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: I want to rewind a little bit so our listeners can hear about the long road to this book. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got your start as a writer via the Stillwater Writers Collective and later with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop?

Zeke Caligiuri: I really just got my start as an incarcerated reader. A big thing is that my relationship to books and language has always made me want to be able to write the books that impacted my life in the same way. I sort of began writing my own stories and trying to put together my own life, and I ended up running into a cohort of people when I was incarcerated in Stillwater that were also writers or artists. And a big draw that I always tell folks is that when you’re in those sorts of places, the artists tend to find each other. There can be 1000 people, but the artists tend to find each other. And that was really what the case was. Anytime I was anywhere, I always ended up finding other people who were working on things—creatives. As a result, we also realized that there wasn’t going to be support coming from outside of the facilities. We had sort of all gotten together under the idea that we needed each other as a community for whatever that meant, so that it could grow. 

One really good friend of mine, C. Fausto Cabrera, and I always had a real kind of complicated artist relationship. He was phenomenal with all sorts of different mediums like paint and pastels, and he was also a phenomenal writer. I had this project that I wanted to write—I was writing my memoir at the time—and I was really afraid that they would do something to stop it, they would do something to prevent it from getting out there. So we had these sorts of ideas, like, how are we going to build sort of some collective power? There’s really only so much you can do in there, but it was about trying to create a collective of artists and creatives that would be able to somehow help each other. 

Regardless of what it was, we just knew that we didn’t have outside support, and so we built what we call the Stillwater Writers Collective, which was just the collective of us. We ran it. We did everything it took to take care of each other. Fortunately, what ended up inevitably happening was Jen Bowen coming into the facility. Jen had decided she wanted to teach some writing classes, and she did at one of the other facilities. 

When Jen started teaching at Stillwater, bringing other folks, it was sort of a natural relationship that just took over. Essentially, they came to us and said, “What do you guys as a writing community want and need?” And these are all people that had been doing other things in that same realm for many years, just not within carceral institutions. It became kind of this idea of, well, we would love some writing classes, we would love a mentorship program, and we would love to be able to post readings and do things like that. We’ve been able to do those things and they brought all of the right people. That was essentially what a lot of the core was—Jen going out  and finding wonderful people who were also wonderful writers and very talented and understood. 

I guess the landscape of it and what it kind of became was these two communities—one outside of the prison and then the prison communities itself, growing up alongside each other on these two different tracks. And that’s really what brings us to how the project becomes and how… How we have a community in which to be able to create something like this.

WT: You wrote a foreword to this collection, and you talked about the lack of infrastructure for writing or creating art inside these prisons. And you talked about computer labs that have been proposed and set up by members of your community. It made me think, just in a practical sense, what did your writing day look like when you were incarcerated? Where did you work? What did you work on? What hours? Did you have to work? What was your physical environment like?

ZC: That’s a good question. Well, I was locked up for 22 years, so I had a lot of changes. It was really about adaptation. I worked as a higher ed clerk, I worked as an editor of one of the newspapers at one of the facilities, I worked on the yard crew for a long time. Most of my practice would start very early. So I would get up prior to breakfast, prior to counts, prior to any of those early things that you have to get out and switch up. And I spent time with the word. Sometimes that’s really just reading, sometimes it’s writing. So most of my days, and even as a free person—or mostly free person—my practice starts in the morning. If I can start with some blocks of language, I can get something in my mind without any outside interference. You’re not hearing the voices or things that are barking out of a screen. 

If I was fortunate enough, I would get some computer time. I think the last job I worked was in the health service unit at Faribault. That meant you dealt with a lot of people with either long-term health care issues that were not going to leave, or were just recovering from different surgery. So I would spend my day usually reading and writing and then when I could get a chunk of time—an hour to three hours—on a computer, I would go and transcribe as much as I could. In the early days, I took jobs intentionally so that I could go type in a computer lab. You also had to build relationships. Early on, it was really difficult because they didn’t support the prison writing workshop. They didn’t really care that you were in these classes. You had to be in higher ed to be able to use the computer lab. 

WT: You’re writing by hand then and taking it to a computer lab and typing it?

ZC: Or on an actual typewriter. We actually would keep a typewriter, it’s just much more difficult and harder to keep a file.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: For an incarcerated writer to be transferred from one facility to another, what ability to keep files is there? How does a writer keep track of their own work under these circumstances? Is that possible?

ZC: Now it is a little more possible. But you do not get nearly as much computer time as you would like, so that’s the thing. Sometimes you might get a couple hours a week, sometimes you might get more. Each facility has different access. So when I left initially—I had left Stillwater in 2013—I had written my book and had most of this manuscript done. I was working through the process of editing it, and we didn’t have any sort of network file system. They have since changed it. Now if you do leave, your stuff is still saved on your file. So if you go to another facility, it’ll still be there. When I left it, it was not that way yet. 

We went through a really grueling process. I would make edits and send it to a woman who was a close personal friend—shout out to Myrna—and she would transcribe from an actual hard copy, send the digital copy to my editor at U of M Press. They would print that out, do a whole bunch of markups—just like the olden days—and send it to me. And we went through that process. I would circle things, maybe mark small things on the page, but then also maybe have a secondary page. So we had to go through that process several times, just because we couldn’t save the manuscript digitally on my end. So we had to do it through other folks and different channels.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Mikayla Vo.

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Zeke Caligiuri

American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (ed.) • This is Where I Am • Prison Noir (ed. Joyce Carol Oates) • The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison (ed. Caits Meissner) • How a Collective of Incarcerated Writers Published an Anthology From Prison – Electric Literature • “Before I Was Anything” (poem) Literary Hub

Others:

Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop • What Incarcerated Writers Want the Literary Community to Understand: Caits Meissner on Why “Prison Writer” Is a Limiting Label (featuring Zeke Caligiuri, Literary Hub, Sept. 11, 2019) • C. Fausto Cabrera • Kiese Laymon • Valeria Luiselli • Steve Almond • Jen Bowen • Kristin Collier  • Sarith Peou • Toni Morrison • Eula Biss

This week on The Maris Review, Ed Park joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Same Bed Different Dreams, out now from Random House.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts.

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from the episode:

Maris Kreizman: I love that we are told explicitly, throughout the novel, that writing from different viewpoints at different times in history is helpful in understanding how the world works.

Ed Park: Yeah, once I broke out of the idea that it would all just backtrack… Most of the original version was just a straight first person, Soon Sheen, with some flashbacks, and some stuff that I didn’t use. It was fine, but it just didn’t feel agile enough or capacious enough to get at what I kind of gradually understood were the themes of the book. Not to sound pretentious, but, you know, books like Ulysses and Pale Fire, kind of the usual suspects, but also there’s a novel called The White Hotel by a writer named D.M. Thomas, a British writer who passed away this year. Night Film by Marisha Pessl. Just books with a lot of parts. I think there’s a pulse if the writer is passionate. Like, I feel like he or she can just tell it in all these different modes and you kind of get a more panoramic view of the story.

And it’s not for everyone. It’s definitely not for every book and I’m not saying like, oh, my next book will be that way. But, even Personal Days, which is a relatively short book, it’s like a third or a quarter of the size of this one. The first part of that book is in the first person plural, but at around page 60, I was like, that’s enough, you know, I get it, the reader’s going to get it, and so I was like, let’s do something radical. And the next part is kind of written as a report, and then as I neared the 40-page mark, I was like, okay, enough of that. The story had developed enough that I thought this kind of long unpunctuated piece of prose poetry would emerge in the last third. So I guess at this point it’s part of my style, but it’s something I like to read anyway as well, in other books that is.

MK: And I love that you trust the reader to be okay with not knowing a bunch of different things.

EP: Yeah.

MK: But you also give the reader breadcrumbs. Towards the end, one of the characters says, this all wraps up in the final book. Tell me about establishing that trust though, because you had me the whole time.

EP: Oh, great. Yeah, that’s quite a trick. Breadcrumbs is a good way of putting it. Every time you start a section that is different in structure or voice than the previous one, as a writer, there is this burst of freedom and energy. And I think that’s a good thing. It’s like, okay, now here’s a fresh canvas.

Like, this is a triptych. I’m putting new marks on the page, on the canvas. But I think once you get enough into that, whatever this new section is, then you have to really think, how does it relate? Like, in my head, maybe I know it relates, but the reader’s gotta know after a couple pages. Why am I reading this part? Who are these people?

When a lot of the book was done, but still not completely finished, I realized in some of these, especially in the notorious third strand that I’ve been alluding to which goes under the title 2333, I realized that some of these minor characters could actually be characters from the other sections of the book. And so it was like, a bit like Easter eggs or cameos or walk-on roles. But it’s there if readers want it. I think it also works if you don’t catch on to it. But upon revising and editing it, it always made me smile to see like, oh, this is that character when she was a teenager.

And it almost changes the sensation of time because you’re reading something later that actually happened decades earlier, and it just gives it a much more complex, and I hope satisfying, feel.

MK: Yeah, let’s keep talking about time, because I love that  in various parts of the book there’s the idea that, okay, if you have VCR,  you can suddenly tape television shows and your entire world opens up in a way that suddenly you have so much time. And then, and then there’s something similar with, with the idea of how many movies you can see in a lifetime.

EP: Yeah.

MK: And then, of course, there’s the idea that war throws it completely off balance.

EP: Part of what I’m finding interesting about this book… I was conscious of certain things as I was writing it, but then other things kind of sink in later. I mean, as much as it is about Korean things and Korean American things and how Korean history and American history interlock, the character Soon Sheen is roughly my age, comes from Buffalo like I did, whose father was a psychiatrist like mine. But it’s also kind of a snapshot or a memory of the 1980s, not to get too Stranger Things, but that’s when I came of age and I feel like I remember the first VCR and just being like, wow, what does this mean? Like, at the time it could seem like just a new machine, a new gadget, but it was actually quite profound, especially kind of as we get into Dream 5, the last section of the book. I feel very emotional actually talking about it now. The book is quite fictional in most respects, but you know, a lot of those memories and impressions are almost like me trying to preserve that moment in time and that moment in my life. I hope other people, future generations, find it interesting, but it felt important as I went on and time and history became such a big part of the book.

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Recommended Reading:

Generations by Lucille Clifton • A Writer Prepares by Lawrence Block

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Ed Park is the author of the novels Personal Days and Same Bed, Different Dreams. He is a founding editor of The Believer, and has worked in newspapers, book publishing, and academia. His writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Born in Buffalo, he lives in Manhattan with his family.

Montréal is a city of parallel universes, often most at ease ignoring each other. Across linguistic, cultural, and generational orbits, it’s also a city that’s shown tremendous appetite for German author Jenny Erpenbeck’s work, in great part due to De Stiil, an anglophone bookstore in the heart of francophone neighborhood Le Plateau. Owner Aude Le Dubé’s carefully curated shop features literary fiction and books translated into English—and it serves as a kind of headquarters for what Le Dubé affectionately calls “the cult” of Erpenbeck fans.

Erpenbeck’s six books—five of fiction, and a memoir in essays—are as interdisciplinary as reality itself: economy, archeology, architecture, political history, musicology, psychology, sociology, mythology. Or a more contemporary articulation of academic inquiry: Trauma Studies. From the immeasurable devastation of the Third Reich to the enduring reverberations of Red Army soldiers’ desecration, from the upheaval that awaits within a numbered Stasi file to a modern Berlin accounting of what’s untaxed and undeclared in an inheritance, Erpenbeck’s writing defies appraisal. Her work resists summary, just as her most injured characters, with intractable agency, resist straightforward victimhood. Is her most recent novel, Kairos, about an increasingly destructive affair between married 58-year-old Hans and 19-year-old Katharina, or is it a reimagining of the control, betrayal, and collapse of a state? Both, of course, and then some.

A few weeks before my conversation with the Berlin-based author, I sit down with Le Dubé beside one of De Stiil’s huge windows to get a better sense of this Erpenbeck cult.

Originally from Brittany’s Lorient, a seaport town once occupied by the Germans, Le Dubé situates Montrealers’ fervor for Erpenbeck, an East Berliner who was twenty-two when the wall came down, within the Quebec context: “She speaks to our beliefs: socialist principles, sharing, and that building a better society includes immigrants and refugees.” The pre- and post-Wall Germany of Erpenbeck’s work offers helpful analogues for the complexities and clashes of Montreal’s adjacent universes, each building from distinct cultural-political models, yet supposedly the same people.

Beyond historical and metaphorical walls, though, Le Dubé, who prefers to read in English, emphasizes the moral urgency of the Erpenbeck oeuvre. At the time of reunification of Germany, Le Dubé describes, “All of a sudden the future was dead. Everything they’d been taught to fight for was gone. When everything is collapsing, how do you build a fair society?” Climate catastrophes, xenophobia, pandemics, occupations, wars, not to mention the proto-fascist policies of Quebec’s current premier—the concerns are unyielding, for any person who enters De Stiil. “I think it’s important for people to read her. While we don’t sell her to everybody, we always mention her work.” For the uninitiated, she first recommends Go, Went, Gone. “They buy that book, but they always come back for the rest.”

When New Directions published the English translation of Kairos earlier this year, Le Dubé contacted their Canada publicist to see if Erpenbeck, who some say is on her way to a Nobel Prize, might have travel plans to North America. Once on the continent, Montreal’s not that far, right? An agent got looped in, then Montreal’s Goethe Institute, then the Consulate General, then the Ottawa Embassy. At each stage of escalating bureaucracy, though, was a champion of Erpenbeck’s work. In the early evening of October 26, the outside of De Stiil resembles a night club more than a literary writer meet-and-greet. Dozens and dozens of readers, lined around the block, await their entry. In advance of the event, I sit down in a quieter corner of the bookstore to speak with Erpenbeck.

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Ellen Adams: In re-reading your work, I was struck by how often infidelity comes up. Across your books, what new discoveries have you made about betrayal, whether in intimacy, or infidelity of values or the state?

Jenny Erpenbeck: When I first started to write, I didn’t know what my subject would as a long-term author. But, as it turned out, you are right. Betrayal and lying are at the center of my work, as are the layers of truth: how the same thing can be revealed again and again, or looked at from other perspectives, without being a lie, but rather a different kind of truth. If you look at Book of Words, her childhood is made up to be a good, easygoing childhood, then all of the sudden you can see that there’s something underground, not told to her, and eventually her father’s true profession is revealed. Even in The Old Child, my first main character, she’s lying to her classmates, to everyone, about her age. There’s a lot of hiding in my books. It’s always interested me. Hiding gives a certain kind of freedom because you can try something on without telling anyone, an experiment you undertake. And there’s always the question of what is the truth? In The Old Child, the truth is not revealed at all, not even in the end, so you don’t know where this lie comes from. And of course in Kairos, lying in the very middle of everything, as is the question: Who’s lying to whom, and in which way? Sometimes it’s shocking, with how little we can be content because we expect a certain truth. And if this is given to us, we are content. If someone believes a lie, it’s also sad, because it tells us that he or she is lacking the instruments to even doubt. But perhaps if you are young, it’s a blessed state of mind, to be so trusting.

EA: It makes me think of that initial rendezvous with Hans in Kairos, where Katharina thinks, “How can he ever refuse her anything, if she doesn’t demand anything?” The self-deception, the self-erasure that allows for their connection to exist.

JE: I think almost everyone has had this experience once in life, that of betrayal. If we were to see all the complexity all the time, it would drive us mad. And there’s always the question behind it: How could I take a half-life for a whole life? Was I content with so little that I couldn’t even see there was something missing, there was something hidden from me? In Kairos, all the things that are hidden, earlier or later, are revealed in the course of the book, earlier or later. What also interests me about hiding and revealing secrets is—in The End of Days, for instance—is if someone dies, a different kind of talk can happen, real, serious talks when someone perhaps reveals what’s been kept secret. Or in sorting the household of someone who’s died, a character might run into a secret by chance. This is also interesting to me, that there are some moments when you can speak about what has been hidden, after years in which it was not the right moment to speak about the secret.

In Kairos, you also have to—well, you don’t have to, and you don’t need to, but it’s nice if you manage to enable someone to tell the truth without being punished. And of course, we are cowards.

(Erpenbeck cracks up.)

If you ask your lover to tell the truth, but in the very moment when he or she does, you start arguing or punishing or playing some bad games with him or her, he or she will learn the lesson that if “I tell the truth, I get punished.” Kairos is a slow process of how something meant as a kind of truth actually transforms into a relationship with lying at its center. As it was in the political history of the GDR. Ideas were received enthusiastically in the beginning, a new start after fascist times. Slowly, a certain vocabulary was forbidden, a certain exchange of opinions not allowed. People started to deliver ready-made sentences—how to bring it into good English?

EA: Catch phrases, party lines?

JE: Yes. Perhaps I shouldn’t say so, but sometimes I have the feeling that we are coming to a similar time now, because there are certain sentences that you are supposed to deliver and others sentences that you are not supposed to deliver anymore. It’s a core question to art, because we are also responsible for the ugly children among the sentences. We should love all sentences, the ugly ones as well as the beautiful ones.

EA: And to let them be heard.

JE: Yes. Because if you want to describe reality, you cannot make a detour. Reality is reality is reality, and that’s it. So if you want to describe a bad experience, perhaps you need to use bad words to bring it to life, to let the readers feel something about it. If it’s not ugly enough, it doesn’t work. If Richard III is a nice character, you might as well throw the play away.

EA: (pointing to Go, Went, Gone) Or Richard the—

JE: Or Hans the Third!

EA: The first time I read Kairos, I found myself shouting on my couch, “What an asshole!” “Piece of shit!”

(Jenny laughs.)

I wrote it sometimes, too, in the margins: How awful!!! And yet, it was very liberating to see—in such amazing sentences—experiences that many of us have had behind closed doors.

JE: The women were much less shocked than the men. The women somehow experienced similar things. Some had periods in life when they were obsessed with such a Hans character. The men were really shocked! The nice readers, you know, the nice men. “Does such a person exist? I got so angry about him!” They hadn’t faced such a thing before, as it seemed.

EA: And yet there’s so much complicity between some of the male colleagues in your books, whether it’s a Richard’s colleague who’s dating a 20-year-old—

JE: This is not what I’m judging. The age difference is not the point. The point is the character. Even if Katharina could have met a version of Hans when he was 20 years younger, he would have been the same character. The character is what matters—if someone is manipulating, or hiding a big part of his life. An older man looks at a young woman with a certain kind of pleasure? This is normal. You admire beauty. You are happy to look at some young person, man or woman, it doesn’t matter. It’s not a crime. Only if you use your experience to manipulate someone, like Hans does with Katharina.

EA: I’m curious about the idea of using sensuality or romance to lure someone as an agent of the state—for example, the “John” essay in Bits and Pieces. Or Richard looking up his own Stasi file to find that his state-declared “areas of weakness include habitual arrogance and documented marital infidelity.” And of course, Hans uses his sexual influence to surveille.

JE: To spy for the Stasi—that’s bad!

EA: Mixing spying and romance and the state—which returns us to the idea of infidelity.

JE: It seems this kind of surveillance spying is a specialty of dictatorship systems! After partition, people worked for the Stasi for a variety of reasons, and not all of them were bad. Especially in the first years of the GDR, people entered the Stasi in order to find fascists who were hiding under false identities. Or people freed from the concentration camps entered to find those who had treated them so badly.  Later on, it became more complex, to put it briefly. People were trying to gain power over others by stepping out of the system and looking in on it. This is the core of spying: you position yourself outside to look in. You look at your community, a group of friends, your family, or your colleagues, all from outside, from the very moment when you start reporting on them. (Even in Western structures where there is no Stasi, there are still people who would like to surveil. The bad characters still exist. They just aren’t given the chance to do so!) Again, it’s a question of character, as is lying. You know, Katharina is also lying. Perhaps not that badly, but she’s lying, too.

EA: And her diaries become this archive of lying—or not.

JE: We all lie to ourselves. We manipulate with what phrases we leave behind. If I make a diary entry, I might write one thing on one day, and the next day I might describe the same scenery in a different way. Is this a lie? Or if you are afraid that someone will find your diary, so you leave some things out. So it’s not all about the bad Other. It’s also about us. And of course, Katharina is not true to herself. This is the main mistake she’s making. Otherwise, she would just go away with this young guy and be happy, you know? Why is this obsession with Hans is so much stronger? And I have no answer! If any reader does, give me an answer, please!

EA: Yet there is a logic to it! In Kairos, as in other works, the logic and inner worlds of your characters feel full, flush with associations and fleshed-out subconscious. In your process of developing a book, does that ecosystem of meaning arrive to you from the onset, or do you write your way into it and then trim back?

JE: Normally, I start from the beginning, and I just write my way to the end. I have a center for every scene or chapter. I put all the material that I collected, all the thoughts that I had on it, and then I try to put it in connection to the chapter’s center. Some things about your characters will just happen in the writing process. When I had already written half of Kairos, for example, I did some research on the guy on whom Hans is based. I got this Stasi file. It became a major problem for the structure of the book, one I didn’t expect! When I studied opera directing, a famous director—one of the most famous opera directors in Germany at this time—she always said, “If you are facing a problem, don’t make a detour. Go right through the middle of it.” I think this is a basic law for all art. Even if something is destroying your initial idea or plan, you have to deal with it.

EA: Which reminds me of what you mentioned at the beginning, of not making a detour around the truth. Instead, really looking at it—while also exploring characters who are lying to themselves, or having to shed lies that they’ve told themselves.

JE: I think we are all trying to produce ourselves as like—Wait.

 (Jenny goes to the back of her bookstore to fetch her smartphone, then searches the word Heil.)

We want to produce a sound picture of ourselves, a picture that makes sense. A whole that works well with our idea of what we want to be. We want to have not only smooth outsides, but also smooth insides. And this doesn’t work, of course. We have dark corners.

EA: Speaking of which—I’m curious about Eros in your writing. Obviously in Kairos, it’s a powerful force, but it’s present in many of your books. Eros and violence, or Eros and control. Eros and compliance. What draws you to look at sensuality through those lenses?

JE: You might be right. The erotic scenes in my books are not the happy ones. I don’t know where it comes from. Of course, it has a lot to do with power. When I think of the Red Army soldier in Visitation, I thought it would be interesting to put it differently than how it is normally put, so that you cannot clearly see who is the one with the power and who is the victim. It switches many times during this erotic scene. You cannot say this is a Red Army soldier raping a German woman. It could also be a German woman raping a very young Red Army soldier. It’s not clear. The erotic in Kairos is also a deeply disturbed. When Hans is first tying Katharina to the bed, she’s thinking about how she forgot to buy onions. This is not erotic. I would say it’s the opposite of erotic. Perhaps only women can see that. A man would perhaps rather say that Katharina’s obsessed with him and she cannot leave him because she’s so obsessed with his sexual potency. But a woman reader, I think, can clearly see that Katharina’s not interested in him sexually. There’s one passage where he asks her, “Are you looking for a father?” She says, “No.” But in the end, she herself says she would have liked to have someone without all this sex, just as a good companion. If Hans had offered her friendship, perhaps she could have accepted to leave him. But he didn’t offer friendship, because he wanted to use her, abuse her. Ahh, I don’t know where it comes from. I’m not an American author. I don’t have a psychotherapist! I would say I had a lucky youth, and everything was okay. But in a way, it took me a long time to find men in my life who are not—freaks. I don’t know why.

EA: There’s an element of chance, and also an element of tolerance.

JE: Yes, and sometimes you are drawn to the freaks without knowing it. When you’re young, things happen. Now it’s been a long time that I’ve been very happy, you know?

EA: I certainly related to the onions moment. Been there! Which leads me to humor in your work. Humor appears in such subtle ways, or more head-on, like the Go, Went, Gone scene with the barrister, that owl-man lawyer. I was just cracking up. So theatrical, almost like it could have been a cartoon. Yet he’s the person who’s invested in reviewing these folks’ asylum files. Does humor come to you on intuition, or do you find yourself going back to the heart of a chapter and saying, “Maybe I should add some in?”

JE: I really have so much fun, actually, but very rarely do people see the humor. Perhaps it’s not so obvious. Of course my books are about serious issues, so it’s not much fun in general. But I do think I have a kind of humor, and I enjoy it. Sometimes it just takes me away!

EA: In Go, Went Gone, women are really on the periphery. I know that writing this book included experiential research, not to mention years-long friendships, with many men arriving initially through Italy as refugees. In the novel itself, we see and hear children. In the hellish waiting room of asylum claims, however, the women are spatially and narratively on the outskirts. One is up a tree at Oranienplatz, and the others appear via a second-hand account of sex work along a rural Italian road. What was your intention in writing these women only at the periphery?

JE: The journey from an African home country to Europe is really hard. Not so many women make it to Europe. Of course, some women do, and during my research, I met several, but then I thought: the absence of women is a screaming one. This is a story I want to tell. A connecting bond between Richard and the refugees is that all these men are missing women. It’s not just about sex, of course. It’s also about family, children, to have someone you feel close to, in a different way than a friend. This is what Richard is missing, after his wife passed away, and it’s also what these young men are missing. So the finale of the book is the men speaking about the women who they knew, who they are missing. The loneliness. It’s a major aspect of the problem. They are missing children so desperately! Many of them told me they had never slept in a room all alone. Many of them are used to sleeping in a room with their family, children, grown-ups, sisters, brothers, cousins, etc. They adore children. And then you put them into such isolating houses where they cannot meet women and they cannot have children. You forbid them to work, so you don’t let them learn the language. What would come out of it? This is a desperate situation, and it can only end badly. And if it doesn’t end badly, they are heroes for withstanding all this. These young men should be given a chance to move forward, to move, to get out, to find his own life, to find his family, to get a job. The absence of women means much more than just having sex. For most of these men, it means that life is starting. And their lives are not starting.

EA: That line—“It means that life is starting”—interests me in the context of Go, Went, Gone, given the abortion revealed at the end, from a time when young couple Richard and Christel’s life would be starting. The couple’s life comes to a halt thereafter.

JE: I am absolutely for the right for abortion. But in this case, Richard made a mistake, and it couldn’t be taken back. I thought for Christel, it would have been the right moment. For Richard, because of his career, he says no. For their marriage, that proves sad and irreversible. To come back to your earlier question, how I make the characters. In the beginning of Go, Went, Gone, I mentioned that Christel drank too much. After I wrote the whole book, I thought, “Hmm, there is one question waiting for me. Why did she drink?” Only in the very end, I had to answer that for myself. It’s a strange thing, because, of course, I’m the one inventing the story. On the other hand, my subconscious put something in the beginning that I didn’t want to go back to for a long time. I could see that she was physically and mentally wounded by the whole thing, in part due to abortion being illegal at this time. I know women who almost died—put on some kitchen table in a private apartment of someone who may or may not have even been capable of performing the medical procedure. As a friend of mine says, if you don’t allow abortions, it doesn’t mean that abortions don’t take place. It only means that abortions are made illegally and put the woman in danger.

EA: Pregnancy, abortion, and paternity are weaponized elsewhere in your writing. In Kairos, Katharina wonders which patriarchal affiliation allowed her access to the West. Her grandfather, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War? Her older male employer, who takes a bit too much pleasure in sitting next to her? Her father’s status as a professor? Paternity, and paternalism, is the go-to rubric to vouch for Katharina’s mobility. Yet in other gorgeous pages, we learn about matrilineal Tuareg traditions where kids “belong” to the mom. I’m curious to hear your thoughts: Who does a child, who does a life belong to?

JE: Hmm. It’s an interesting question. I think I will write another novel about it.

EA: Let me know if you need a reader. I’ll start studying German ASAP!

JE: You are a tough questioner! Of course I already told everything, but nobody sees it so clearly! It’s always interested me, how much you inherit by your genes versus how you’re brought up socially. In The Book of Words, the young woman ends up on the wrong side, if you look at her true parents. She’s on the enemy’s side, the one who killed them. Often, you define yourself by feeling either like a natural part of, or in opposition to, your family. You always feel you have power over who you are and why you are that way. If there’s a sudden revelation, like the sad truth about the young woman in The Book of Words, it’s like that power is taken from you. You become a victim, perhaps of your parents’ mistakes, or all the things they went through so that they couldn’t bring you up themselves. Likewise, I’ve always been interested in people who are looking for their biological parents—what exactly they are they looking for.

EA: One last question. I love that Richard has to come up with a slogan to get the protest permit.

JE: Ahh, yes! That’s one of my funny scenes!

EA: If you had to come up with a slogan for your work, what would it be?

JE: Oh God!

(She laughs.)

A slogan is a difficult thing.

EA: Maybe even the opposite of what you’re doing. Your work seems like an anti-slogan.

JE: The shorter the text that someone wants from you, the more difficult it is to write. Whenever I’m asked for a blurb for a book, I work two weeks on it! I keep looking for how to get to the very essence. Hmm. The essence.

 (She taps the table, then looks up.)

Keep being curious. Everything depends on the point of view. And the truth is never just one thing. It is a complex, living entity, moving, growing, shifting around. But these are not good mottos, because a motto should be clear about what truth is, and I am not.

EA: Maybe that is the truth, that it’s not clear?

JE: Clearly. Okay, one more slogan: Everybody should be given the chance to live.

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Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated from the German by Michael Hofmann) is available from New Directions.

Tune into the latest episode of the Read Smart podcast, which is dedicated to Jennifer Homans and her #BGPrize2023 shortlisted work, Mr B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century. Recognized as the first major biography of the legendary choreographer and based on more than one hundred interviews, Jennifer’s work takes readers through the tumultuous life of the man who has been hailed by The New York Times as being the “Shakespeare of dancing.”

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The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.

For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another. Four thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and a great flourishing of human achievement began. We know it today as literature, a term broad enough to encompass everything from ancient epic poetry to contemporary novels. How did literature develop? What forms has it taken? And what can we learn from engaging with these works today?

Hosted by Jacke Wilson, an amateur scholar with a lifelong passion for literature, The History of Literature takes a fresh look at some of the most compelling examples of creative genius the world has ever known.

Jacke talks to scholar and biographer Lara Vetter (H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)) about the life and works of modernist poet and avant-garde woman Hilda Doolittle, better known by her nom de plume H.D.

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Subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to:

Jesse David Fox (Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work)

Lexi Freiman (The Book of Ayn)

 Lindsay Hunter (Hot Springs Drive)

 E. J. Koh (The Liberators)

 Ed Park (Same Bed Different Dreams)

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Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?

Lindsay Hunter: Murder. Sex. Dieting. Young love. Jail. Codependent relationships. Neighbors. The banality of horniness. Remembering you have a body. Bodies. A body. Ghosts.

Jesse David Fox: Can I say “comedy”? It is about comedy, the art form. Not like the jokes you make with your friends and family. Actually, it’s kinda about that too.

E. J. Koh: The willingness to be broken for that which one was not to blame.

Ed Park: The Korean Provisional Government, apocryphal role-playing games, the Buffalo Sabres, secret societies, the ‘80s, the ‘90s, the ‘00s (2000s and 1900s), war, utopia, pillow talk, the movies.

Lexi Freiman: Selfishness, altruism and objectivism as applied to sex with much younger men.

Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book?

Lexi Freiman: I was influenced by the ideas of Ayn Rand but also her sex life and, let’s be honest, my own sex life. But I also made a lot of stuff up!

Ed Park: The Korean War and the 1999 Stanley Cup Finals.

Lindsay Hunter: Keith Morrison. That ‘90s shade of brown that was everywhere in suburbia. Tiled rooms. Motherhood. Gen X and boomer dieting culture. The way the mind floats outside the body, the sonic boom when they finally unite.

Jesse David Fox: The Matrix, The Matrix: Reloaded, The Matrix: Revolutions, the musical Passing Strange, remixes to indie rock songs from the late ‘00s and early ‘10s, this series the photographer Alec Soth did at a Laughing Yoga school in India, those specials in the ‘90s where that masked guy revealed how magic tricks were done, resentment towards one sentence in a review of a comedian by a writer I respect who doesn’t normally write about comedy, the episode of The Simpsons where Dustin Hoffman plays Lisa’s substitute teacher, blogs and blogging.

E. J. Koh: The fragility of the human condition. Tendering the spirit—freeing myself of what cannot be mine.

Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book?

 Ed Park: Fatherhood, new job, stories but no novel, another job, Instagram, moving, pandemic, friends dying, moving again, K-dramas, Peloton, new desk, remembering, remembering, remembering.

Lindsay Hunter: A global pandemic. My pit bull’s illness. Terror. So much love. A lot of idling the car in parking lots. A lot of folding inward. Nature.

Jesse David Fox: Pandemic, baby.

E. J. Koh: The world shattering in slow motion like a windowpane.

Lexi Freiman: Moved to LA, got depressed, found meditation, pandemic hit, moved to Australia, got depressed, repeat.

What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers?

Jesse David Fox: I despise all versions of “you’re cutting up a dead frog” so much that I essentially built a career in spite of it. Also, I don’t like when people misspell my name as “Jessie.”

Lexi Freiman: A reviewer once asked if my book was “helpful” to a social cause, which helped clarify the suspicion I feel toward any book that is helpful to a social cause.

Ed Park: “Clever.” (I don’t actually know that it’s been used, but consider this fair warning.)

Lindsay Hunter: “Too dark.” “I don’t know why I had to read this.” “Gross.” “Not dark enough.” “Hateful.”

E. J. Koh: “I wouldn’t have left you all alone.”

If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be?

E. J. Koh: Architecture of threshold spaces—interstitial hallways, stairs, entryways.

Lindsay Hunter: Dog psychic. Britney Spears’s assistant. Britney Spears’s dog psychic.

Ed Park: Hockey player.

Jesse David Fox: Cofounder of a start-up that operates a fleet of rotisserie trucks that pop up at farmers markets around New York City. We’d sell chicken and potatoes at first, but overtime we might do roast beef and like a porchetta or something.

Lexi Freiman: Spiritual guru or hip hop dancer.

What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?

Lexi Freiman: Writing about poop; writing about plants and flowers.

Lindsay Hunter: I think I’m very good at imagery. I think I’m very good at the sentence level. I am good at character and dialogue and relationships. I would like to be better at place, at subtlety, and at allowing more grace and joy into the narrative.

Ed Park: Jokes, twists, clues that pay off on a second read, the use of nonliterary forms (emails, transcripts, etc.). On the flip side, it might be fun to write a slim, traditional-looking book that only has one font.

Jesse David Fox: In so much as being easy to read is a good thing, I’m pretty good at making complicated ideas go down easy. I write a lot in the book about the subjectivity of funniness, so I’d NEVER say I’m funny, but I have “voice.” After reading the audiobook, I vowed to never write a long sentence again. Also, I would love to be able to describe the appearance of something and have people think it was beautiful, but I have aphasia and I literally cannot picture anything in my mind. And basic grammar skills.

E. J. Koh: I can fold the blankets like hospital sheets. The holy word—light.

How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?

Jesse David Fox: 15 years ago I wasn’t a writer. I was working for a major talent agency and I was very bad at it. My friend Dawson said I should start a blog, so I did. Well, I thought, I wasn’t being self indulgent, I was being Dawson-indulgent. That’s what I kept on doing: Just focused on writing for the specific individual/s who requested I write the thing and tried not to think about the hypothetical other people who would or wouldn’t be interested. My agent, Adam Eaglin, is brilliant and caring, so I tried to write the proposal for him. Then I met my editor, Jackson Howard, and thought he was so smart and cool and powerful, so I worked really hard to impress him. Adam and Jackson seemed to like the book, so that makes me think people might be interested.

Lexi Freiman: No one should really be interested in anything but the silent emptiness of the mind. So I don’t worry about it.

Lindsay Hunter: That’s a tough one! It’s something I have to fight through all the time. What I usually do is get very micro. I focus on the actual making of the thing. I remember what I love about it, what is fun to me about it, what I love reading in other people’s work. I remember that I am a voracious reader and can’t imagine a life without books. I remember who I am, and I write from there.

E. J. Koh: My gaze opens and bandages of doubt fall from my face.

Ed Park: I only do this every fifteen years, so everything I say is important.

Tune into this special shortlist edition of the Read Smart podcast, where Toby Mundy speaks to #BGPrize2023 shortlisted author Tania Branigan about her book, Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution. Branigan’s book explores and uncovers forty years of rarely heard stories surrounding the Cultural Revolution, begging the question: what happens to the present when the past is repressed and buried?

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The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

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Writer and comedian Ziwe has made a career out of conducting charged and satirical interviews. She joins us this week to discuss her debut essay collection, Black Friend, the backstory behind her essay WikiFeet, her early affinity for broadcast news, the influence of satirists Jonathan Swift and Stephen Colbert, and her early, formative experiences working in comedy.

On the back-half, Ziwe reflects on the making of her YouTube series Baited, a memorable episode with Aparna Nancherla, her pandemic pivot to IG Live, and the Showtime variety show that followed. To close, a philosophy on art-making from Ira Glass and what Ziwe hopes for in her next chapter.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

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Ziwe is a comedian, writer, and actor. She was the executive producer and star of the eponymous late-night variety show ZIWE on Showtime. She has also written for Desus & Mero, Dickinson, and Our Cartoon President. She lives in New York City.

Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, activists, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting seminal interviews with icons like Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he independently founded Talk Easy in 2016.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Rob Copeland, author of The Fund, about Ray Dalio, the billionaire Big Brother of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund on the planet.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

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Rob Copeland is a finance reporter for the New York Times. He was previously the longtime hedge-fund beat reporter at the Wall Street Journal, and has also covered Silicon Valley and the hidden worlds of the wealthy and powerful. His front-page investigations into Bridgewater Associates won a New York Press Club award; he was also awarded an honorable mention twice by the Society of American Business Writers (SABEW) and was named a News Media Alliance “Rising Star” (formerly Top 30 Under 30). He has appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” NPR and other major news networks.