A very happy International Women’s Day! I’ve basically spoiled this entire blog post, but we’re BEYOND thrilled and honored to announce that our own authors—Violet Kupersmith (Build Your House Around My Body) and Ruth Ozeki (The Book of Form and Emptiness)—are both longlisted for the Women’s Fiction Prize (formerly known as the Orange Prize), the UK’s most prestigious annual book award celebrating and honoring fiction written by women!
The shortlist gets announced at the end of April, with the winner in mid-June. All of us here at TFA will be nervously biting our nails come April 27! These books couldn’t be more different, but are each magnificent and unique—and clearly the judges agree!
If you haven’t heard of either title, I’m excited to share two podcast episodes that will definitely pique your interest!
First, a conversation between Ruth and Ezra Klein on “The Ezra Klein Show”, where they discuss what it means to hear voices in our heads and whether it’s really so rare. And next, an interview by Ari Shapiro for NPR’s “All Things Considered”, where he discusses with Violet what it means to be haunted, the legacies of the Vietnam War and colonialism, and how writing BYHAMB was a form of exorcism for Violet.
A boy who hears the voices of objects all around him; a mother drowning in her possessions; and a Book that might hold the secret to saving them both--the brilliantly inventive new novel from the Booker Prize-finalist Ruth Ozeki
EZRA KLEIN: So in the book, there’s Benny who hears the voices of objects, and there’s his mother Annabelle who — I don’t want to say she doesn’t hear them. They’re not in the way intelligibly the way Benny does, but she’s a hoarder. She loves her objects. She does not want to get rid of them. It causes all kinds of very, very dangerous problems for her in her life.
And you’re very sympathetic to her throughout the book. There’s a beautiful line where she said, this isn’t just stuff. It’s an archive. It’s my life. And I wanted to know how you would describe Annabelle’s relationship with objects.
RUTH OZEKI: I love Annabelle. And I know she’s a difficult woman. I get that. And she is a bit of a hoarder, maybe more than a bit of a hoarder.
But what I love about her is her creativity. It’s that she sees the potential in everything, and she’s just wildly optimistic about things. And one of the things that she loves to do is go to Michael’s, the arts and crafts superstore, and just walk up and down the aisles with an empty shopping cart, just looking at things and imagining what they could become, seeing all of their potential to become something else.
And there’s something so kind of hopeful about the way that she can intuit or perceive or feel the vibrancy, the aliveness of matter and its ability to transform. So in that sense, she’s not that unlike her son, who has a similar ability to perceive this vibrancy in the world around him.
Part puzzle, part revenge tale, part ghost story, this ingenious novel spins half a century of Vietnamese history and folklore into "a thrilling read, acrobatic and filled with verve" (The New York Times).
SHAPIRO: This is your first novel. And before this, you wrote a collection of short stories that was also populated by ghosts, as this book is. As a writer, what appeals to you about the supernatural?
KUPERSMITH: Well, when I wrote "The Frangipani Hotel," the short story collection, I was very interested in the metaphor of the ghost as sort of a stand-in for the immigrant. Because I thought, oh, it's such a perfect figure, the ghost who's sort of trapped between worlds and doesn't really belong anywhere. But with the novel, I was more attracted to the ghost as a way of getting revenge...
SHAPIRO: Huh.
KUPERSMITH: ... And as a figure who has this agency that was denied to them in life.
Massive congratulations to both Violet and Ruth! And now, we wait for the shortlist!
xx Marin