Poured Over: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah on Chain-Gang All-Stars

Jenna Seery

“… A big part of the journey with this book is realizing that people’s humanity shouldn’t be negotiable.”

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut novel Chain-Gang All-Stars tells an explosive, unrelenting and ultimately compassionate story about a not so unbelievable future in which incarcerated people become gladiators fighting their way to freedom at any cost. Adjei-Brenyah joins us to talk about the underlying love in his dystopian setting, creating his characters through voice, the realities that led him to his plot and more with Poured Over host, Miwa Messer. We end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Madyson. 

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.    

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app. 

Featured Books (Episode):
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Solitary by Alfred Woodfox

Featured Books (TBR Topoff):
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Oh lordy, do I love your books. And I want to start actually with love because Black Friday, everyone knows, New York Times bestseller. You were a 5 under 35 named by Colson Whitehead and the National Book Foundation, he has such good taste. But also Chain-Gang All-Stars is your first novel. And there’s a lot of stuff here that’s going to remind folks of Black Friday. I mean, obviously, you’ve been working on this book for a while. But I want to start with the love in this book. There is so much love radiating through this. But I felt so good and sad, I felt all of the things. But really, by the end of this book, you had me completely wrapped around the story, and the characters and everything else. And can we just talk about how you found the love for the characters in the story behind Chain-Gang All-Stars?

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
First of all, thank you so much, I really appreciate you allowing me in the space today. The love in the book is, it’s really important because, in some ways, so the book is about imagine a future in which convicted wards of state opt out of a sentence of at least 25 years to participate in these deathmatches if they choose to. And it largely thinks about the carceral system, which to me is a largely loveless system, as are many of our institutions. And so for me, the idea of love and compassion, and if that could be sort of a guiding principle for people as opposed to sort of force and power, which I think force, power and death is sort of the American, sort of the rule right now. And if compassion, love and connection could be the sort of rule, what would that look like? And so it made sense for there to be a lot of love in this book, it took a lot of different forms, but maybe, particularly the love between them, or Thurwar, Staxxx and then them and the rest of their sort of team or chain is really sort of one of the fundamental energies in the book, I think.

MM
There’s so much fantastic world building, in Chain-Gang All-Stars. It’s a combination of language and character and action. I mean, certainly anyone who’s watched professional sports or even reality TV, I mean, there are elements that sort of ground you in the here and now and then there are things that happen in your life. Well, that’s not actually possible and yet, it is all so plausible. And there’s a lot of violence, and there’s a purpose to the violence and we will come back to that. But I want to talk about world building for a second because I mean, this is, anyone who’s read your short stories knows you’re very good at building worlds very, very quickly. And I was invested from the opening pages of Chain-Gang, because of the way you set up the story. But you as the creator of this world. How did it start?

NA
So I always had the idea, the image of like a woman in the eye of the Colosseum had like sort of this person who was speaking to like an announcer, in a really strange context. I thought this was gonna be a short story at first for Friday Black, for my first book, okay, it kind of obviously grew, it’s something else. And what happened was, I started doing research, I started thinking, okay, you know what, I’m interested in prison. And I’m interested in the idea of abolition. And in many ways, I think, I wrote this book, hoping I was abolitionist and by the time I was done, I realized I actually definitely was, and that came through like, okay, thinking about the history of a prison. I was like, okay, I learned about the Auburn system, which is, you know, 19th century in New York, and prisoners are forced to be in silence all the time. And that’s like, wow, that’s horrific. And then you learn about the nature of the death penalty in America right now and how we’re mostly an outlier, concerning quote, unquote, the best democracies in terms of still having a death penalty. And you start thinking about all these just facts that are like blatant, but also sort of hidden, because we often don’t think about prisoners, or we also don’t think about those who are incarcerated. And also the fact that I think, has been made famous by the documentary The 13^th, slavery is explicitly protected by our Constitution in the case of the so-called criminals, all these like real life facts has created so much material for me. And so I’m really, I think what I often do is look at what’s in front of us and extrapolate against what feels like the trend. And so once you have the idea that okay, people are allowed to make profit off of prisoners, once we know for sure that prisoners are legally and explicitly slaves, corporations right now are literally, actively benefiting from that slave labor. Once you have those things together, really anything’s on the table. And so I kind of could have those sort of fundamental truths, be like the guideposts and then build up from there and what I ended up with was this sort of deathmatch space, where humans are fighting each other for their lives. And even just very recently, I saw that they were like, I can’t remember where this was they were floating the idea of prisoners being able to sell off organs to lessen their sentences. So that’s real. So it’s always right there.

You’re writing fiction in a really strange moment in our society, in our world, and you do satire very well and always have, and you just have been able to pull these details that like I mentioned earlier, you ground us enough. And then you kind of poke us a little bit and you realize how you’re being poked, and where you’re being poked. And it’s very sort of Kurt Vonnegut. It’s very George Saunders, who you’ve studied with. I mean, I think folks know that about you. How do you keep from going to extremes when you’re creating these worlds? Because it would be really easy because we live sort of on 11 now, right? So even to turn up the volume a tiny bit, suddenly, like we’re in the stratosphere, and that takes the power away from the work.

It’s really interesting, like the sort of like delicate dance between like hyperbole and understatement, or like slapstick, or like a more subtle satire, it’s really a feeling process. For me, though, in Chain-Gang if a character dies, they’re dead, you know, and they’re gone. And the response to that death is not, haha, it’s serious. There’s a real loss, the book kind of takes it seriously, even in the footnotes. So that’s a sort of grounding element that pushes us more towards the, I don’t want to say serious but away from a more like jokey satire. Other aspects of like, in my mind, I keep it from going like too far is just by taking the moments where anything happens and having the characters respond to them, more or less how I think we would if we were in that situation, and again, trying to have analog that is conceivable to the reader that that exists right now, for most things. There’s not like anything is like so so so out of left field that we can’t even have imagined it, a lot of the things, that technology, at least theoretically will probably exist at some time, at some point in the future. Some of those things are kind of like how I tried to keep it reined in. But it’s really more of a kind of, it’s not unknowable, I think if I if we went like line by line on like any particular page, I could talk about how to keep it from going a little bit too far. But it’s really that keeping that tone, all the way through is it’s really about understanding how this chapter is gonna sound next to this chapter, knowing that some people are going to be more inflected than others, and that Thurwar was kind of my tuning fork, she’s sort of like my middle, my middle C. And the book, if more of the chapter took place, from the perspective of Simon Craft, or Hendrix Singer Young it would feel very different, would feel more surreal, a little bit less grounded, because of the just the nature of their psyche. And so having Thurwar as the sort of anchor, load bearing beam also helps make it feel a little bit more all together and grounded.

I love her voice. I love her perspective. I love what she knows about herself in the world. I just I think she’s wonderful. And the way she brings the entire, all of the links together, you call them links on the chain, all of the people on her team, how she brings them together and says, this is how we’re going to do it because we are not just cogs in a machine. And it’s such a powerful statement. Hurricane Staxxx and Loretta Thurwar are really the big beating heart of this book. There are some, I mean, certainly no disrespect to the men, but it really is about these two women, which I found really interesting after reading, going back and rereading Friday Black, because so many of the stories are told from a male perspective, which was also incredibly refreshing. And, you know, fun to read, even when it was really tough stuff. What was that shift like for you? Because I mean, you do have to sort of step outside part of what you’ve been thinking.

Well, you know, in some ways, it was like a continuation, the very last book story in my first book was also the last story I wrote for that book, was called Through the Flash and had another very strong physically, kind of murderous woman as the star, I think in terms of thinking about Thurwar and Staxxx for some reason I just always kind of had Thurwar as a woman in this very particular situation. But I think as I continued thinking about what prison is, and also thinking about how sports and entertainment works, I felt like only a woman could be it could be both, like hating loved sexualized and degraded in that exact type of way, a woman of color, particularly, it felt like I had to be Thurwar, and then I needed her to have a partner that could kind of completely understand. And I just don’t think a man would fully understand that perspective.

No offense, no.

10:10

Like the analog I would say is Lebron James understands, like Serena more than most people, but it’s something that, there’s a different thing that she has to deal with. So I wanted Staxxx to, like have a really complete understanding of Thurwar’s perspective, and vice versa. And that felt like just really important to their relationship being what it is. And so when in terms of actually rendering them Thurwar, I appreciate that you like her, she’s pretty reasonable. You know, she’s sort of closest to like, a normal person, even though she obviously has can tap into like, a great rage. And I think we’re kind of meeting her a little bit calmer than she probably maybe has been in the past, she’s seen a lot. But in a lot of her decision making and our approach to life, she’s not normal, because she hasn’t set this particular situation, but she’s maybe the normalist of anyone else in the book, and, and by that, I mean, like she, I feel connected to her. It’s like, who’s, if I if I did a personality test, mine would be closest to Thurwar, once I had that, I just kind of, I know that she’s a woman, I know that there’s I tried to imagine some of the things that she would have to deal with that a man wouldn’t have to deal with. But then mostly, I just, I know that she’s kind of smart, capable person of conviction. And I just kind of think about how smart people with personal conviction would respond in several situations.

I mean, part of it for me, too, is her voice and her voice separate from the narrative voice because I want to come back to the overall narrative voice of Chain-Gang. Her voice is just so clear, and so real. And she’s a great substitute for me as the reader walking me through because I’m like, what? Yeah, I mean, granted, it’s you. So of course, I’m gonna give myself over as the reader and just be like, well, it’s Nana of course, I trust him. It’s fine. I’m gonna follow him wherever we go.

Well, you’re generous reader. Because everyone doesn’t do that. That’s nice.

I like to be surprised. I like to be challenged. I like to be knocked off my socks, like, have my socks knocked off a little bit when I’m reading because there’s so much out there where it’s like, well, we only have so many stories, right? Yeah, guy walks into a bar, woman loses her family, someone dies, someone’s born, some of you know, not to dismiss, obviously, the written word. I’m very fond of books in the written word. But you do have to find a new way to tell a story and to engage readers. And I think if a reader isn’t walking into something with an open mind, then kind of what’s the point.

Yeah, I agree. I absolutely agree.

Why? I just I think it’s so important, especially when you’re talking about, you know, justice and punishment, and certainly the carceral system and whatnot, we have to find new ways of having these conversations, because the old ways are not working, like we can’t hear each other. Like we just can’t hear each other. So why not, dehumanization is a huge piece of a lot of the problems we’re seeing right now, around the world and certainly in America, but around the world. So to humanize these sort of big ideas, and give them over to Loretta Thurwar, and Hurricane Staxxx, I needed that, I needed that.

Me too. Me too, I appreciate it. Because it, I feel like that same thing, you’re just that you’re talking about, I think I was looking for the same thing in writing the book. Its theoretical, it feels theoretical until you are right in the middle of dealing with someone’s actual life and remembering as a person. And then it gets really, really egregious as you start moving down the line of what we’ve allowed and also it’s insidiousness is like sort of not only two fold, but like multiple, because it also tailors the way we think about the world. Even if we’re not involved in prison in any way or we think we’re not involved, we are all involved. We’re all trained to think that sometimes just kill’em. Sometimes someone does something, it’s okay for the government to get a cocktail of poisons, that costs thousands and thousands of dollars and inject them into their blood and kill them before an audience. It’s archaic, but it’s crazy and just sort of, but it’s also normal.

There’s sort of this timeless feeling to the way you write in this book. And you know, it could be 20 years in the future. It could be next Tuesday. It could be, but there’s a sense, when I was reading it for the first time, there was a sense for me that this book is going to age incredibly well, which part of me is thrilled by that. And part of me is really upset by that because I would like us to be able to evolve as a society.

I know, I hope that they, I hope in the future that like what was he been talking about?

Yeah, right. Like I would very much like that too. But can we talk about how you got to sort of the overall narrative what because you’re juggling a lot of characters. you’re juggling a lot of set pieces, you’re moving your characters physically, not just on sort of the game do I call it a game field? I mean that feels weird, but I guess it’s a field.

Right, the map like, the game of the world, America but the map.

But they’re also like physically going from point to point and yet they’re always cameras and yet there’s always things on their wrists because it’s not handcuffs but they are, the links are handcuffed.

Magnetic like implants, mag cuffs.

But it also sort of determines how they can move and how they can interact with each other. And you know, the guy who’s driving them around. He has a self-driving van, which tiny things, those little details? When did you figure out what the narrative voice needed to be because I will say having read the stories, I feel like you’re really comfortable in this particular territory where it’s like, I need sort of an arch voice, with a bit of humor. I need to be able to take a step back from story at any point, but like, how did you know when you had the voice of the novel?

I’m a pretty like, voicey writer I guess. Meaning like some of the voices are pretty inflected compared to what we are by expect from like normal language. And they sound like strange or otherworldly sometimes. I mean, I could get pretty like into, like in depth about it, I guess there’s many different voices, but Thurwar and Staxxx are told from, the two main protagonists if you want to call them that, are told from like a close third. So it’s not it’s not a “I” it’s a “she” but it’s, it’s a very close, meaning it’s super infected with their own thoughts and their desires and their perspective. So it’s like you kind of get your cake and eat it too. Again, I think if you want to think about the close third, like George Saunders is really, really good at it, because it’s like, his thirds are so close, it seems like an I but it’s not often. So that’s a cool device, because you get to have your cake and eat it too. Again, without giving anything away. I needed to be very close to both Thurwar and Staxxx but also have the reader not know exactly what’s in their head, you know, and if I had the I perspective for them, it would be hard for me to like meaningfully withhold what I want to withhold. And I went back and forth about this many times, I almost moved into the I for them. And I almost tried to have one chapter with Thurwar as I and I did not, meaning first person is what I mean by that. So you have these two like totem poles and it’s very close third, Thurwar was a little bit more, I say standard, but it’s very still precise. It’s very matter of fact, it’s very direct. Whereas Staxxx is a little bit more whimsical or like floaty or her mind drifts differently. She’ll get to things indirectly rather than like fight straight to them, even though sometimes the indirect way is the way to get right to the hardest stuff.

I think she’s a little looser.

She’s much looser.

Her thinking is looser than thorough thrower is sort of much more. For one of a better word. She’s kind of more of the grown up. And it’s not just because she’s the Colossus like, it’s not just because of her role on the chain. Yeah, she would have been a grown up when she was six.

Yeah. Staxxx is like playful even as she’s like contemplating like really intense harshness. She was like a playfulness about her person and leaks into her point of view, her perspective, in this close third I’m talking about. Those are like to the two like main voices. And so I imagine like, if they’re like, these two, like main beams, then branching off of them, these two like, main trunk of a tree or like these, like other voices that are often if not always told from the I, so there’s less of them, but they are told from a first person point of view. And so now with those voices, because it’s the full I meaning, that they speak from the first person. I can affect them pretty intensely not only because it’s the odd but because like they’re pretty intense people, specifically, Simon Craft and Hendrix Singer Young, there’s more characters than just that. But just thinking about those four, I have these two close third person perspectives with these two first person perspectives that are like secondary, but explosive, if you will, that are very inflected like and I, I kind of had a chance to like almost like, flex a little bit. Because sometimes, when you write in anything really types of conceit, people kind of forget the line level stuff that you’re doing. And that’s not why I did it. But I had opportunity to do it that I sort of like did not back down from at all.

One of the things I really appreciate about the close third, and you sort of hinted this without saying it is the intimacy that comes with a close third, intimacy between the reader and the story, whether it’s a character moment or like an action moment or whatever. It’s the intimacy that comes from the close third that you can’t actually do with the first person. And the first person is so much more aggressive. And for those characters, it really works so that that shift in point of view, and I think too, it keeps the ground shifting because none of us should be particularly comfortable. There was more than one moment where, you know, you zigged and I thought you were gonna zag. And I would just scream with glee, even though I wasn’t necessarily reading something, if it was something that I was seeing in real life, it would be incredibly disturbing, but because it serves a purpose as art on the page, yeah, I can relate to it differently. So it’s not like we’re reading the New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander or like Solitary by Alfred Woodfox, you know, or even How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith. It’s because you have a freedom on the page. And your characters have a freedom. We get in there and we’re with them at any given moment. And there are a couple of characters that I would really like to punch in the face. But that’s since we’re spoiler free, I am not going to tell people who I’d like to punch.

Yeah, we’ll leave that out because there’s a couple who are not the best, but I absolutely love those books you just mentioned I’ve read as well and read them while I was doing. This book in particular, Solitary by Alfred Woodfox, I think about like LSP, Louisiana State Prison and Angola, like that’s still a prison.

Angola has a rodeo in which prisoners compete, and they have a gift shop like what do you really want a coffee mug from Angola?

So what I’m trying to say like sometimes, like I’m not, it’s not crazy, but if you if people want to read a book that will tell you about this prison system. They should, I really recommend that book. And Albert Woodfox like, I hope that people remember his name as a national hero.

Solitary confinement is a form of torture and you use a lot of footnotes in this book, and I wasn’t expecting that. And I thought, oh, are we doing this thing? Or we are going to do this thing with the footnotes? I will follow you anywhere. But I had a moment with the footnotes. Except the footnotes are great. Yeah, they never took me out of the story. And I really, sort of they felt a little snide and a little and by snide, in a good way. Like, can you believe this? Can you believe this actual piece of fact, that’s supporting this wild thing that you just read? And they were just they were really good. And they never took me out of the story. Cuz sometimes, no offense, sometimes footnotes will pull you out of the story and these did not.

No, I was very, very wary about using footnotes in this book. I’m one of the people who do not like footnotes in my fiction. But that said, I did like, there are examples I have in mind where I did like, but I think what I liked least about footnotes is that they were not dynamic and how they arrived in most other things. So my footnotes are working a little bit differently. And I managed to say that but they’re not always the same type of thing, I guess, standardly. But those will be like, more information about something that might be slightly expository, something that’s more information about a subject. This sometimes does that. But sometimes it comes out of the world of the story. Sometimes it comes from our world, sometimes it’s they weren’t, they weren’t, they weren’t dynamically which I was interested in. But yeah, for me, along I was super important tenet of mine was from the I remember reading the John Gardner and be like, never break the fictive dream and a few footnotes as inherently breaking that dream. And so I was very scared. But I also knew that this book was going to be like entertaining, in quotes. And I didn’t want to ever have like the subject be lost and there was just a lot of facts just like that. Just now we were talking about Angola, and you told me there was a rodeo about it, they’re like, that matters to me, because that’s significant to the world, I think. And so footnotes give me a chance to really so in so real life application of like, why this matters to why this or should matter to us, in our real lives, as well as the characters in the book, why this thing might be significant for them as well.

You know, part of what you had me thinking about as I was reading Chain-Gang All-Stars too, is whether or not we need to redefine what freedom means, right? And this is an idea that you play with too in the stores in Friday Black. It’s like, what does freedom actually mean? Like we have this sort of definition, right? And everyone seems to have varying ideas of what freedom means. And yet we have characters here who can find freedom in some ways when they are stuck in this impossible situation, because they’re like, Oh, actually, you can’t have all of me. Yeah, yeah, can’t have all of me, or you can’t have this piece of my relationship with another person. It’s kind of exhilarating to see people hold on to themselves and a couple of them, you know, maybe not the nicest people in the world, but they still get to hold on to themselves. Like you’re not not human, if you are in this wild, like people make bad decisions all the time. And no matter what the consequences are, you know, but like, people make horrible decisions, split second decisions, like circumstances can be wild or people can just, you know, make bad decisions. And it’s so easy to lose sight of that when you think you’re not hugging about people.

Exactly, for me like a big part of the journey with this book is like, realizing that people’s humanity shouldn’t be like negotiable. And so that idea of freedom is a hugely important one for the book. It’s a goal, it’s a state of being, it’s a status, high freedom, low freedom, it’s kind of everything. But also in our culture, we use it as, as this carrot on a stick. And also as like a, if not the whipping posts that because we understand very clearly that if we do not follow the rules of our sometimes oppressors, our freedom can be stripped from us. And that is like really important to the people who have the power because we know that’s what we value most. And so in their modes of existence in which they sort of withhold some parts of themselves or find joy or find freedom. I think the links are really doing this radical work. And I think they’ve been aware of that. They do this radical work of saying kind of like a F You to the viewers of this program. Because there’s this back and forth relationship they have, obviously, but yeah, that the question of what it means to be free and how, how elusive it is, because in a in a consumer capitalist world that has this the military and carceral systems that we do, is it even possible to be free? I think the book is really interested in that question.

I think, too, it’s easy to forget that, you know, code switching can roll up into freedom, and respectability politics can roll up into freedom as well. And it’s like, well, what do you choose? And are you actually in a position to choose? Like, there’s so many questions that we don’t always ask because they’re uncomfortable, or we think we already know the answer, and that that’s the piece of our blank, we think we already know the answer. That’s why I would really like as many people as possible to come to Chain Gang All-Stars, because I think their heads are gonna explode in the best possible way because of the setup that you use, and the fact that you never lose empathy, that you never lose compassion. And those are not synonyms,vempathy and compassion are not synonyms. And love can actually be a really radical idea. And not in like the squishy teddy bear hearts kind of way, but like actually loving someone that you look at and say, I have nothing in common with you. That’s a radical act.

You’ve harmed someone before, but I still love you. But for me, it gets easier when you start realizing that like, wait, we have a larger system that harms everyone. And many of us have the privilege of being protected from some of that harm, and many of us don’t. And so that that system perpetuates its harm, it perpetuates its harm, it perpetuates it over and over again. And so when we make the radical choice to love, despite, or in spite, or because we kind of push back against this sort of mechanical loveless automatic way of thinking, and that is really radical. And so that’s why bringing it back to love to me love, it is radical, it’s the most radical.

And it’s hard.

It’s not the rule. It’s not the standard. It’s something you have to choose. And it’s different and sometimes difficult choice because we’re taught not to, we could teach ourselves something different.

People constantly ask you why you write political fiction. And I always counter that with, you know, Jane Smiley, has said more than once like writing a novel as a political act. Like, just writing a novel, writing fiction, and explaining the world is a political and you know, we have that response, as a culture of late where everyone’s like, well, I just don’t want to be political, it’s messy, or, you know, your politics don’t match mine, and everyone can just go away. And yet, you have to ground your point of view in something right? Like, even if it’s a close third person, even if it’s a novel that, you know, is a classic three act structure. And every chapter has a title, which, I’m curious how that happened too but can we just talk about that piece of it for a second?

For me, it just, it just gets hard to imagine what people mean when they like a sort of a political novel, but, you know, to be generous to them. Now that I’ve written this book, you know, there’s a sense I guess, maybe there is like if they want to make a distinction, I don’t know of a novel that is aware of his particular and specific cultural conversation it is a part of and I will or not will of the author does arrive at sort of push towards something. And I do think that just writing fiction is political. I think that we all arrive at a particular space and time and, and putting your name on a book is political and understanding like what type of characters you write in the time frame and blah, blah, blah. I don’t want to claim some of these terms, because I feel like it’s for other people to say, but I know this book is interested in abolition, you know, again, in a way that is not like, hidden, or that it’s actually like, it’s right there. And I mean, like, it’d be very hard for you to read this book and not think about that.

There’s so much to think about in Chain-Gang in all the best possible ways. I mean, there were moments where I got really mad at you, because stuff happened, and it had to happen. I’m just saying inevitable things had to happen. But, you know, I had become so attached to what was happening on the page in front of me that, you know, I got a little mad at you, but I mean, not personally, but…

I’ve been getting that a lot from people who have read it.

I totally understand and, you know, intellectually, I absolutely understand why the story does some of what it does, right? Without a doubt. I just, I was so attached. Yeah, I was even attached to the people I didn’t like, because obviously, you need the people you don’t like to sort of push things forward. And I keep coming back to the end, you said it at the top of the show, but this started as a short story. And I’m just, I’m so glad you let it go. I mean, I love your stories, because you get all of the emotions, really big emotions in this tiny, tight compressed space. But I’m really glad you gave yourself room to roam with this one.

Yeah, there’s so many points of view, like in the short story, we would have had, like 16 pages of Thurwar, reflecting on what she’d done. And I mean, I won’t say what, what happened in it, but maybe I’ll tell you after. I went back and saw it contained a lot of what happened in the book here, I got to have not comprehensiv but as much because there’s too much insidiousness, but a much more thorough interrogation of what it means to be in a society where sometimes human beings are put in cages and murdered by the government. It was like I got to like, write about, I got to really meet, really know characters, like Thurwar and Staxxx, they became like, my favorite characters I’ve ever written.

I can see that, it feels like you’re I mean, I know I just described Staxxx as being looser than Thurwar, but I feel like you gave yourself space to roam in this novel in a way that you can’t with short stories. I mean, it’s a different art form. It’s a, it’s just a much more compressed tighter, slicker art form, in some ways. It’s wild to me that more people don’t love short stories than I do. Because I’m like, you can get so much in a very short amount of time. Like, you know, not every story has to be 1000 pages. Sometimes you can do a lot in 15.

A lot of these people need to, people need to embrace short stories more and I totally had, like, in my heart of hearts, I do think I’m a short story writer. And I think that impulse impacted how this book came to be and so the chapters individually have their own little arc, can have their own little satisfaction. They have their own titles, as you said. So every chapter feels like a little, almost episodic tidbit and you continue along that way. And so, to me, my short story background, but even thinking about poetry, like there’s, there’s energy on a micro micro micro scale, there’s the big macro threads, too. And I really like to think of myself as a writer who is thinking about, to the syllable level of energy and even to like the chapter-to-chapter level energy to so short story stuff was huge. And think I want that same immediacy, that same feeling and compression, that same feeling of nothing is extra that I hope is there in my short stories to exist in this novel as well.

Yeah, you pulled it off. I mean, without a doubt, it’s absolutely, this book flies. And I wasn’t necessarily expecting. I mean, I was very pleasantly surprised. But sometimes when someone’s shifting, or you know, a novelist, goes to stories, and you’re like, okay, I mean, I trust you, I’ll follow you. And then you know, you get a thing and sometimes it’s really fantastic and sometimes you’re like, oh, I totally get what you’re doing. And I love you anyway.

Doesn’t always land. I mean, that took a long time for like, yeah, there’s a much worse version of this book. And so I’m grateful to my editor Naomi Gibbs. Yeah, she’s my agent Meredith Capella Simonoff some of my other readers, because it’s a much worse version. But we worked on it for a very long time. It took me about seven years to get this done. And so we got it to a place where I felt like, you know what, I think this is, it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.

What’s that collaboration like? Because I mean, that’s the same team that helped bring Friday Black into the world to so they’re working with you on two separate levels, but also, seven, you were very young. When Friday Black came out. I mean, you were in your late 20s, not like you were Doogie Howser of short stories, but I mean, you were young.

I was 27, now I’m 32

Okay, you’re still young but you’re still older than you were.

I’m older now. I was definitely gonna, I’ve been thinking about how like when that book first came out the fact I was 27 was like a part of the story. And I used to be like, everyone’s always saying, I’m young, like, I don’t know how much I like that, now that they don’t say anymore. I’m like, I guess I did like that. I guess I did.

I mean, there was, it was fun going back, though, and looking up all of the coverage from 2018. Because, you know, that doesn’t often happen for story collections. It doesn’t always happen for young writers although sometimes that is still the hook. I remember when Tea Obrecht’s first novel, The Tiger’s Wife came out and everyone’s like, oh, look, you know, the 24 year old or however old she was, I mean, people got really excited.

Publishing is weirdly entwined like that. I think it’s because you can, like be in your prime in your 60s or 70s that it’s rare for someone to even published earlier on. But in terms of the team, I’ve been supremely blessed with the people who have worked around with me for the first book, it was some of the same team, but I had a different publicist Taryn Roeder who was huge.

I know her. Yes, she’s great.

She’s amazing. You can’t think about Friday Black’s sort of success in that in terms of like people’s reach or whatever without Taryn. This time around I had the same agent, Meredith, same editor, Naomi, but we have a new publicist, because I changed publishers, Josefine Kals and Josie is like, totally keeping that baton like in a beautiful way, she’s done incredible stuff. And I’m just so grateful I’ve been I you know, my job is to write the book, but then I really can’t overstate how grateful I am for people like Taryn and people like Meredith, people like Josie, people like my marketing director both times around like it’s just, I’ve been very lucky.

Yeah, you also do the work. So let’s just say all of the pieces came together and the way that the pieces are supposed to come together. I mean, it’s nice when it really works that way, especially when, you know, you do this thing where there are people who are just like, well, he writes genre, and there are other people who are like, no, no, he writes literary, I just think of you as writing like Nana, and you know, Colson Whitehead has done this too, you know, he’s done the zombies and but I know I like I see your work. And I’m like, Oh, I know, I mean, something weirds gonna happen, and I’m totally down for it. And I think that’s really important to be able to bounce back and forth between, you know, realism can be overrated, sometimes you need that sort of domestic drama, and that, you know, whatever. But then there are other times where you’re like, the world is so weird. I may as well just have a weird thing.

You’re speaking my language. So you know, you know, I’m very grateful to hear that because I think and you sort of just named like, what exactly I kind of, like the real thing behind my genre, not genre, like, whatever. Because I struggled with that for a long time I write realism, I write whatever else speculative sci fi, genre, whatever people want to call it. But really, I don’t think about those things. As, as I’m writing, I think about this sentence, and how do I make it as complete as possible, but I also know that I have a style, I think it’s recognizable. And I always want to have a style that’s like that, to me that feels that’s why it really means a lot to me that you would say that because if this if you read something, and feel like this is Nana, that feels really good to me, because that’s kind of like I think most artists want that, George is a stylist for sure people know his style off rip, but he’s also somebody who writes a lot of weird stuff. But he also has stories that are just about a guy writing letter to his kids, or just about a guy who’s trying to buy a house. Life is full of strangeness anyways, yeah, if you have any, if not, I don’t have to get a neurodivergences, I don’t have to go to the nature of dreams, but like, we’re full of this life was full of wonder already. And so this distinction that people have created, it’s mostly, for me very elementary and very, like it’s for selling, which is fine. You know what I mean? It’s great. But don’t let that like hinder your own conception because I think it limits how some people even can hold things in their own mind’s eye, that’s what gets dangerous.

Yeah. And I just, I think the more we can read and the wider we can, I mean, my reading is sort of wildly Catholic, and that’s partially because I’m a bookseller, but it’s also partially because that’s how I interact with books. I mean, I’ve read I’ve gone down weird rabbit holes, just like I’m actually reading this writer I never in a million years would have read who was banned in Ireland in the 60s because Colm Toibin was like, oh, yeah, he’s absolutely seminal for me. I’m just like, hmm read a little, glad I did. Am I going to do his whole catalog no, no, but now I have a pretty good idea of how he fits into Toibin’s worldview, and you know, I love being able to do that and just stretch a little bit and not always sit in my comfort zone. I find you very funny. I find you very nimble and like, I just when I think of you, I know I’m gonna get something great and there’s going to be a serious “wow” payoff for me.

It means a lot because and I think that is like a hallmark of mine. There will be some humor even in like the serious, it’s hard to tell if I’ve read this the way I’m talking about it. But there is going to be humor in my work like that. Just because I moved to the world there’s going to be there’s going to be harshness, there’s going to be institutional cruelty probably. There’s going to be people trying despite, it is going to be dynamic, how characters, I care a lot about, like sentence level like considerations.

Oh, yeah, you do know it shows it shows without a doubt.

And in those things is a million different things, but those are some of like, the bigger macro pieces that you throw into the pot that creates like the Nana thing and I could do that same thing with a story that’s 100% realism, and 100% surreal, whatever. I wrote a story called Everything is Lava, it’s one of my first times ever writing a story. It’s like a prompt. They asked me to take a headline just like we were in mid pandemic time, like in the thick of pandemic and it’s a story about a person who is dating someone with a child and he’s with the child watching YouTube video about an astrophysicist explaining gravity on five different levels of I don’t fish these YouTube videos. And at the at the final level, what is the astrophysicist talking to the astrophysicist? Gravity and time become the same thing. This is real.

Okay, my brain broke a little bit. But I also ditched out of math and science sort of as soon as I could, because I was like, that’s more space for language and

my brain broke too, but to me, it’s magic, to that astrophysicist, that’s just how it goes. Eventually, gravity, it’s a fact tha, t it’s at least a scientifically effective gravity and time are related. That’s the whole interstellar thing. There’s a thing about gravity and time. But I just say that to say, I watched that in real life that was 100% real. But to me, from my purview that feels like magic that feels like sci fi, it feels like whatever to that guy. And that’s chair, it’s, it’s just his job to me five years ago, this sitting here and has dinner. And it’s super fancy. And so bunch of rich people, blah, blah, blah. This is surreal to me, five years ago. Now it’s not because I’m here. So it’s all about your perspective, there’s so many ways of living that so many people have no idea about. So it’s about making it real to the reader in the moment on that sentence on the page. And then everything else is sort of just like accoutrements to help people understand in advance of buying, which sometimes predetermine their appreciation of any ways, which can be problematic, but also can be beautiful, because it can also make, you know, I don’t think John was bad. I love like the magic of it. But what I don’t like is that hierarchical ideas that emerged sort of naturally not naturally, but like, they come. And because I love sci fi, I love cool action things. I love detective stuff. I like quote unquote, literary, whatever that even means.

That’s a whole different conversation. To me, at this point, it has, and I’ve been doing this a really long time. I have many, many, many issues with the way we throw that word around, and I aspire to it. But what does even mean? It doesn’t at the moment have a whole lot of meaning. That’s part of the problem.

You’re a veteran bookseller, you’re a real bookseller. And so if it doesn’t mean anything to you that means doesn’t mean anything to them, either.

It’s a tricky moment to be in. And you know, I respect people who want like straight up entertainment, I just want people reading and I honestly am not going to judge. Like, I read Flowers in the Attic when I was 12. Like, I cannot cast stones and but I do know that for me as a reader, like, I need language, I need character, but I don’t necessarily need characters I like Yeah, I think is a really good there are some people who are like, if I don’t like the people, I can’t do. Okay. But that’s not me. And I do like I am actually one of those people who believes that there is a book for every reader. And if you don’t love to read, you haven’t found your book you it exists. I don’t know how to get you there in every case, but in a lot of cases I can get. That’s why I do what I do.

I think about it the same way. And I have like a little library in my room. And I’m always like tailoring my book like gifts, like loaning out to people based on who they are. Yeah, he’s different. Everyone has different style, but like, they don’t think about where the literary thing breaks down is there’s some people who think like genre stuff are not quote unquote, literary well. What they’re doing is over privileging the imagination that takes into me, that takes people to make like strange conceits or ideas. Yeah. And they’re sort of stereotyping that unwillingness to focus on sentences. But that breaks down super quickly if you think about any, I could name a million, but the person comes to mind because he’s one of the best writers, period, is Ted Chiang.

Yeah, oh, my God. Yes, absolutely.

And so what? He’s not literary? He is, as far as I’m concerned. If he’s not literary then I don’t want to be, you know, but he definitely is, but I’m just saying like, it breaks down so quickly, and I wish that book world would just grow up.

Yeah, I get that. I see itm trust me. I’ve been doing this a really long time, I get it.

Anyway, sorry. That’s why that all I started out doing everybody’s doing good stuff. Stop trying to find out how it’s like people are so thirsty to be like better than somebody else based on nothing. Just read the actual book and judge it on itself.

You and I could keep going for forever but you know what happened the time went and I knew this was going to happen but I did also I did promise Josie that I would not keep you all afternoon and you and I could keep going for like hours and hours and hours more. But appreciate it. You know you were so much fun and I really love your work and I do love Chang-Gang All-Stars and I’m really hoping that people come to it with an open heart and an open mind and I think it is going to pleasantly surprise a lot of folks I think it’s going to have other people laughing and crying and doing all sorts of stuff but I read so I can make my world bigger and I get to do that when I read you so thank you Nana. I really appreciate it. Chang-Gang All-Stars is out now. And if you haven’t read Friday Black, which I don’t know what to do, if you haven’t, but just go get that one.

If you haven’t, it’s okay. But I appreciate that so much. It’s really kind it’s really great questions. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Poured Over