The Dizziness Of The Natural Sublime: An Interview With Claire Vaye Watkins, Author Of Gold Fame…

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The Sierra Nevada snowpack — a critical source of water for the state of California — is at its lowest point in 500 years. California gets most of its precipitation in winter. Come spring, snow stored in the mountains melts and runs as river, supplying the state with water. So in this, the fourth year of drought, many in the region hope that in winter, the El Niño will bring moisture to replenish the mountain reserves of snow. But even precipitation may not bring relief.

In the meantime, California continues to implement water-saving measures. The detail of regulation is sobering. Homeowners may be fined for applying water to hard surfaces like driveways and sidewalks, and at restaurants, servers may only bring water to those diners who ask for it.

Claire Vaye Watkins’ first novel, Gold Fame Citrus (Riverhead Books 2015), imagines an American future in which drought, horrifically severe, grips the west. Most citizens are confined to camps, and those who live free struggle to find water and fresh food. As a massive sand dune encroaches upon the land, Luz and Ray flee with their adopted — abducted? — daughter. They encounter a charismatic cult leader, Levi, who is — thrillingly — not as he appears. In contending with the menace of a natural world gone dry, Luz, Ray, and Levi grapple, too, with the private threats of desire and heartbreak.

Drought interests Watkins, she says, because it is “a collision of geologic time with human time.” The human mind struggles to imagine the scale of earthly machination which brings about environmental change — engaging in this imaginative work, Watkins says, lets her test the limits of what her mind can conjure.

For her short-story collection Battleborn, Watkins has been a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and winner of the Story Prize and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, among other awards. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and a faculty member at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. With her husband, Derek Palacio, she founded and directs the Mojave School, a free writing workshop for rural Nevada teens.

Over the phone, Watkins and I chatted about wilderness and pioneers, what it is like to teach writing at Princeton and at the Mojave School, and how, growing up in the desert, she believed torrential rain was, purely, a metaphor.

Megha Majumdar: The book takes great pleasure in being inventive. Reading it, I felt its joy in the wealth of what you can have if you are inventive. This becomes true both in the form of writing (so you create a catalog of animals living in a dune sea) and in the lives of the characters (so they make shoes for a toddler from tape and corkboard). What were your goals for these layers of inventiveness?

Claire Vaye Watkins: Wow, that’s a great question. As I was approaching the idea of writing a novel, I felt intimidated by the thought that I’d have to commit, with a capital C, to a certain style and certain characters. It was a bummer. I felt like a schoolmarm in my head: No, no! You’re writing a novel now. Playtime is over. I didn’t want playtime to be over.

At first the book was about a young couple who were trying to figure out their feelings for each other. They lived near a park in Ohio. I think the subject matter had to do with my claustrophobia, stylistically speaking.

Once I went into wilder territory, I knew the book would rely on a showy imagination. The speculative aspect made room for me to be more experimental. Then I thought, Why not write a field guide to animals? Why not write a chapter as notes from a psychiatry appointment? Once I gave in to that experiment and play, that’s when the book really got cooking.

MM: The story frequently references Sacajawea and John Muir. Is there a tradition of exploration and wilderness writing in which you see this book participating?

CVW: Your question touches on how the book, while pretending to be about the future, is actually about the past. Its gaze is over the shoulder, particularly as it applies to the identity of people living in the American West.

You know, if I could only write the equivalent of Ken Burns documentaries or Planet Earth shows about the West, I’d be happy. But those research interests of mine don’t exactly jibe with what fiction does best, which is people.

So I’m interested in grand movements of history, but I’m also curious about its mysterious, popular figures like Muir or Sacajawea. In the process of research, you realise that when John Wesley Powell was travelling down the Colorado River, he had one arm. Or, Sacajawea had a newborn baby when she was on the Oregon Trail. I want to capture those human glimmers.

MM: Can you tell me more about how this book is not looking forward so much as looking back?

CVW: Though it is set in a misty future time, the book’s real interest is in the stories that have been told about the American West that have brought us to this period of crisis.

Drought is fascinating to me because it’s a collision of human time with geologic time.

Drought is fascinating to me because it’s a collision of human time with geologic time. We’re saying, There’s always been water here! But geologic time knows: not so. Or we’re saying, This aquifer will sustain us for fifteen years, and geologic time tells us, That’s nothing. I think a reason why I’m preoccupied with those two modes is that we can’t actually think in geologic time. That’s probably why we’re not very good at doing something about global warming — we can’t conceive of that scale. If you think about how nuclear fuel rods will be dangerous for longer than we’ve had language, that’s hard to wrap our heads around. I like that feeling of struggling to imagine something. I like to have my imagination tested, pushed to its limits, and to wallow in that limit.

And I find the failings of imagination interesting. We can see those failings in hindsight. We know now that it was a very bad idea to encourage farmers to grow cotton in the American West. And that all the rainwater in Los Angeles goes right out into the ocean — hello? Horrible idea, in retrospect. But that was impossible to imagine at the time when we were making aqueduct systems or when the Mormons were irrigating the fields. So I like those paradigm shifts of the imagination.

MM: In this grappling with scale, did your work begin by looking at these environmental crises and working downwards, landing them in the characters’ lives? Or are these people you’ve had in mind for a while who you thought would be fully realized in the scenario of drought?

CVW: The motion in my mind looks a little bit like a zig-zag between the macro and the micro. I get very excited by attention to scale — that’s why I love nature documentaries. You see this camel walking along a dune, then you zoom out and realize the shadow is fifty feet long and the dunes are hundreds of miles wide. The shorthand we have for that feeling is, I think, the dizziness of the natural sublime.

I love that feeling, and I want to create that in my readers. Then I also zoom in on the person who is getting all sandy — what would that feel like? What’d it be like to have sex or go to the bathroom, or try to raise a kid, when you’re living by this sand dune?

When I spend a bit of time in that, I’ll come zooming back out, eager to discuss the history of the region, or the formation of a rock which influenced the natural history of a place.

The thing I’m interested in is movement. Wallace Stegner, I think, said that movement is the central motif of the American West. This is not a new characterization. There’ve been robust civilizations in the West for thousands of years before Europeans arrived — being ever on the move, though, what do such shallow roots do to your identity?

MM: Can you tell me about your relationship to wilderness, whether mediated through art or not?

CVW: Now that I’m an adult, living in a small city in Michigan, I have a much more conventional relationship with wilderness. On the weekend, I go on a hike. But when I was growing up — in Pahrump, Nevada — I lived it. I didn’t know there was such a thing as wilderness. I thought that was the world. It was a very particular wilderness, the Mojave desert. I remember thinking that leaves changing color in autumn — turning orange and yellow and red — was figurative. I did not think it actually happened in certain regions of the country. When I read about torrential rain, I thought that was a metaphor.

It was important for me to see the desert through the eyes of people for whom leaves changed colors.

As I got older and moved away, the freshness and mystery of the desert, which had been naturalized for me, got defamiliarized and explained to me by culture. People said, The desert is scary or mystical or mysterious and I thought, I guess it is! If I had never left the desert, I never would have started writing about it. It was important for me to see the desert through the eyes of people for whom leaves changed colors.

I was born in the Owens Valley. Owens Lake was the lake which was drained to fill the Los Angeles aqueduct system. In the movie Chinatown, when the farmers were bombing the aqueducts, that was the Owens Valley. The California Water Wars of the early 20th century were a bedtime story in my family. So later when I read Cadillac Desert, I thought, Oh, that was real! I thought it was a fairy tale or something.

That’s another example of how this book looks to the past. This book is more about the Water Wars in California and the internment of Japanese people than it is about futuristic Mojaves or any of that other silly stuff that I made up.

MM: Many of your readers will be familiar with the water crisis in the West, at least from the news. What were the constraints and possibilities of writing in a space exceeding fact but alarmingly close to it?

CVW: That was one of the more destabilizing parts of writing this book. Believe it or not, when I started writing this book five years ago, on the rare instance when I would summon up the courage to admit that I was writing a book on drought in the American Southwest, most people were puzzled. There was no flash of recognition. No remark that it was topical or timely. They would reply, Yeah, it is kind of hot there.

I would try to invent something… Then I’d come across the fact that a version of this had actually happened, or that there was a plan for it.

I noticed a strange pattern in my research. I would try to invent something — some coping mechanism that our culture might have to deal with drought, or some strategy the government might employ to relocate people. I would go very big — grandiose, high sci-fi, wacky, almost satirical proportions. So I’d think: What if big funnels were put up to the sky to catch rain? What if a piece of glacier in Alaska was broken off, put in a boat and brought down? Then I’d come across the fact that a version of this had actually happened, or that there was a plan for it.

I was being presented with the limits of my imagination every day. Everything crazy and berserk that I could imagine had already happened. There was a piece of legislation that said, Yes, it’d be all right if we took glaciers down from Alaska. I was ping-ponging back and forth between imagination, play, and bureaucratic information.

So the book started out in the aesthetic mode of fantasy or sci-fi, and got tugged into a more realistic vein. There’s nothing more sci-fi than the story of the relocation of the Japanese to internment camps. I can think of few things more bizarre than that we did that to humans.

MM: When did you learn about that? How did it stay with you?

CVW: While I was writing this book, for years I struggled to have a model in my head of what the relocation process looked like for all these people who were living in the southwest. I was calling it a refugee crisis. I read about refugee camps all over the world, and about migration patterns, and nothing resonated with me. I finally gave up on it. I thought, Well, I hope no one notices that that part of the book sucks!

Then, to finish the book, my husband and I went to Lone Pine for a month. We would hike up in the mountains early in the morning, and come back to write in the afternoon, into the evening. One day I got blisters and couldn’t go hiking. So we went to Manzanar, one of the camps where Japanese Americans were confined. It’s now a national park and a museum. I’m a historical site interpretation junkie, you know, and Manzanar was one of the most powerful museum experiences I’ve ever had. In the gift shop, I bought Julie Otsuka’s book, Buddha in the Attic, and that turned on a light for me. I began thinking about how to capture the bizarre, other-worldly aspect of the relocation.

MM: It sounds like you did a massive amount of research. What is one striking thing you’ve read that didn’t find itself reflected in the book?

CVW: I read a lot about how water works in the Middle East, and water rights in the West. There were also a ton of conspiracy theories — this is one of my favorite genres of storytelling. I would love it if the whole book had this feeling of listening to a conspiracy theory, where you’re going back and forth between I believe this and No, that’s crazy! But… the fact that it is crazy is evidence that it is really happening. So conspiracy theory has this wonderful, cyclical quality that I’ve always wanted to replicate.

MM: I think I see that in the creation of the community moving ahead of the dune sea, particularly the character of Levi. Levi is an interesting figure — he finds water and fruit in the drought, enabling a community to stay one step ahead of disaster. In a way, he is a pioneer. In Levi and in the references to Sacajawea, the book shows an interest in pioneer figures. Where does that interest come from?

CVW: I said that one of the book’s secret topics is the past. The other one is faith. Me, I don’t have a disposition that has much room for magical thinking or faith, but I’ve always been envious of believers. I’ve been chasing a feeling of surrender that happens, I imagine, when you find a belief system.

I don’t think Luz has felt that surrender, either. I think she’d be very envious of Levi, who is the absolute personification of intuition and faith. He encourages her to think that she is good at a certain kind of living, and I think that would be very intoxicating.

In my research, I found very little about what Sacajawea thought of Lewis and Clark’s crazy expedition. Well, she didn’t have the choice of thinking about it. She was purchased for the occasion. I imagine her watching them and wanting to feel that fervor of belief.

In John Muir we see this faith. He strikes me as someone who had a voracious capacity for faith in the restorative powers of the natural world. And when I walk in the woods, that’s what I’m looking for. Most of the time, I don’t find it. So I go to my computer and try to create it.

MM: I want to ask you about making the beautiful sentences that fill the book. Here’s one: “Levi walked slowly, his hands clasped together at his navel, the tips of his index fingers pressed together in a steeple.” Tell me about the work of making that image.

CVW: I read a book about dowsing, and I was practicing it in my yard. There are a few different ways in which you can hold your hand while dowsing. So, I had to decide, what would Levi do with his hands? Then I went out in the yard and did that. I went back to the desk and did that. And I recalled the children’s rhyme, “Here’s the church, here’s the steeple,” for which you do a similar shape with your hands.

I tried a few other words, like “obelisk,” but when I came across “steeple” via that old rhyme, I thought, There’s the faith, the religious context. So there was the concern with, first, making the reader see what I was seeing, and then, the thematic resonance.

But probably, the very first thing that happened was that I liked the sound of it. There’s a sensory, tactile aspect to it. I do a lot of reading out loud, and when I find the right line, there’s a little zing!

I was at a reading in Oregon about a month ago, and I read a description, from the first chapter, of a coyote carcass drying in the ravine. The phrase I use for it is, “going wicker.” Another writer at the reading said that the phrase made the whole image worth it, and I was so glad.

…you have that flash of recognition, that pleasure, when you read a satisfying sentence.

I remember driving down the highway, being stuck in traffic, and seeing a deer carcass in a stage of decay I’d never seen before. It wasn’t bloody or pulpy, nor was it bones. It was shaggy, almost like wood. I looked at it for a couple minutes. I thought, What is the word for it? It’s like wicker furniture. So, for a while, the line was, “the carcass, which was like a piece of wicker” or something. Eventually, I grew to trust that there is an intuitive quality to this image, so that you can say, this carcass is “going wicker.” And you have that flash of recognition, that pleasure, when you read a satisfying sentence.

MM: Let me switch gears and ask you about teaching writing. You have been teaching full-time for four years, and you are about to start a new job in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. You also — with your husband — founded the Mojave School, a writing workshop for teens in rural Nevada, where you teach every year. How do you find that teaching at these universities, and at the Mojave School, is different?

CVW: It’s good for my teaching to go back to Pahrump. I realise that as a college professor, so much of my pedagogy relies on my students giving a shit about what I think of them, which my Mojave School students do not. They’re sweet, but they do their own thing. They don’t care if I like them. It’s not like, Will you write me a letter of recommendation?

As a professor, my rhetorical stance would be, I have something in my pocket, can you guess what it is? I have a reading for this story, can you guess what it is? And my Mojave School students are like, I don’t care what’s in your pocket. While my Princeton students are like, I want you to think I’m smart, so I’ll engage with this. I’ll play the game.

I had the idea for the Mojave School for a while, but I didn’t do it for a long time, because I felt the politics of it were dicey. I was this educated outsider, and I was going to come back for a week and tell them how to write. It made me equivocate with the parents and teachers. I’d say, Just so you know, I’m not trying to be micro-imperialist. And they would look at me, puzzled, like, I don’t give a shit about that. I have to worry about how I’m going to get a ride tomorrow, so that’s what I’d like you to focus on, rather than the socio-political implications of giving me a ride. So it’s a grounding experience.

MM: When I taught a workshop in rural Uganda I had similar questions, and like you, I realized that the students and other teachers were thinking about whether we had enough pencils, and whether we could get everyone from the surrounding villages to come to the schoolhouse on time. Very practical questions.

CVW: Right, and I think it’s good for someone like me. I make my living in academia, and it’s wonderful to be in that area of pragmatism.

I’ve also been reminded how frank people from this community are. I might say, “This community is underserved.” And they’d say, “What do you mean — poor?”

MM: How do you think writing intervenes in the lives of the young people you teach at the Mojave School?

CVW: I hope it does. I hope it does.

For a long while I had an impression that we only care about certain types of stories — affluent white men stories.

I was fairly far along in my education before I saw any people who looked like me in fiction — people who were from a place like Pahrump, who were poor. For a long while I had an impression that we only care about certain types of stories — affluent white men stories. Kids get those messages that our culture sends, so I hope my students get a corrective from being with us for a week. But really, I do that workshop for me. I want to be in my home again, participating in this community. I don’t want to leave that place behind, in no small part because it’s very artistically fruitful for me. It’s the place where stories come from.

And then — I’m talking to you from the porch of my large home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have survivor’s guilt from moving from one class into another. So I wanted to do something about the guilt and helplessness I felt about the fact that I was teaching at places where kids like me would never set foot. I’ve taught at Princeton, and other well-regarded workshops for high school students that cost a couple thousand dollars to attend, and I’ve always had this voice in my head that says: People like you aren’t allowed here.

MM: We do hear so much about how it’s discouraging for kids to not see people like them reflected in writing. I grew up in India, where I read American and British books about people nothing like me. The paraphernalia of their lives was so unfamiliar. And it seems to me that there’s something beautiful, too, about confronting difference so early, about having to imagine a world bigger than you. How would you reconcile those two functions in writing?

You’re hitting upon an uncomfortable truth — to be marginalized is probably good for your fiction.

CVW: You’re hitting upon an uncomfortable truth — to be marginalized is probably good for your fiction. So you’re a kid growing up in India, and you’re being asked to inhabit the mind of George Orwell. And that’s good for the artist. That’s our bread and butter — imagining the complex and inscrutable inner lives of other people. But if you’re a young British schoolboy and you’re inhabiting Orwell, you’re not traveling as far. You’re not getting as much practice.

This kind of explains the connection between pain and art, which is that pain makes you vulnerable and forces you to think uncomfortable thoughts, and that’s good for you as an artist. It doesn’t change the fact that it really fucking hurts.

Some of my writer friends say that women are better at writing across gender and ethnicity. While I don’t know if that’s true, I can imagine that it might be, because women who live in a patriarchy are asked every day to think in the perspective of men.

My husband and I were watching the NCAA basketball tournament. (I love college basketball.) So we were watching ESPN and this Old Spice commercial comes on. In it, a woman is a robot who is programmed to say yes to the man. My husband turned to me and he said, “What is it like for you to watch these sporting events and then watch a commercial that is really clearly not for you, that is offensive and hurtful?” And I laughed and said, “That’s all commercials. Even the ones that are meant for me are offensive.”

MM: What imprint has your own MFA experience left in your life?

CVW: In discussing MFAs, abstract ideas are tossed around — community; diversity, ideally; inclusivity. But those ideas have very much not been abstractions for me.

I’ve married a person I met in my MFA. My best friends, I found in my MFA.

You know, I barely got through undergrad. I had no money, and if it had not been for the funding structure of my MFA, I never would have gone to grad school. So the program lets into these rooms people who are otherwise excluded.

These days, wanting to make art can be a dirty secret. It can be shameful. A graduate program legitimizes it. I tell my students, Tell your parents that getting into a top-fifteen MFA program is harder than getting into Harvard Medical School. At Thanksgiving, when they’re wondering what you’re doing with your life, tell them that.

So the money and the academic context carves out a space for making art in our culture.

The idea of MFAs encouraging homogenization in writing is silly. Look back at Best American Short Stories 1965 — it’s not exactly a cornucopia of diverse voices. What are we trying to protect here?

Solitude Is Nasty Business: Three Poems by Matthew Lippman

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Three by Matthew Lippman

Cheap Trick

My kids will be home in ten minutes
so I listen to Cheap Trick
and falling over the couch
like Bun E Carlos before

he stopped smoking
it’s a tattle tale kind of world
and that’s why I tell on myself
I ate the cookies

beat the dog
burned down the basement
had sex
three times in front of an open fridge

it’s that kind of day
and the school bus will stop
in front of the front door
of my mind

and then I’ll have to welcome them
with Rice Krispie Treats
and tables for homework
and house work

and Bun E Carlos will disappear
into the ether
but he’ll always be right under the rug
and my fingertips

I don’t know what to say anymore
except that solitude
is a nasty business
but the best business

and that is why I fail at everything
I do
except running around the house naked
slamming into walls

the way those monkeys
slam face first
into their glass cages
at The National Zoo

when they want to go home
I want to go home
out there somewhere
into the middle of nowhere

where where is as obtuse as here
and no one in their right mind
would ever want you
to want me,

the way monkeys do.

•

Angel of the Electricity

The Eversource guy is outside
in his neon yellow vest
so the cars don’t hit him
and he goes flying

all over South Street
into a million parts
he’s got one positive wire hooked up
to a manhole cover

and the negative wire
attached to the fender
of his truck
I have no idea about

what he’s writing
on his clipboard
but the power has not gone out all winter
so he’s an angel

of the electricity
I want to run outside
and rub my balloons on his neon yellow
then stick them to my head

to heat up the 30 degree day
the truth is most times
when guys are outside in white trucks
you have no idea what they are doing

maybe wasting time
that’s the creepy side of me
the other side of me
is standing up right now

at my dining room table
with the wandering Jew
and it’s so warm in my heart
I can feel all my wires

sizzling and crackling
like they want to burn down the whole damn house.

•

The Mediterranean Sea

My publisher wrote to me, Dean Young just bought your book.
I felt important.
Then my kid spilled a glass of water across the floor and it was
The Mediterranean Sea
so I picked up my sponge and could have gone one of two ways with it:
thrown it at her head or jumped on the purple vessel with my paddles
knowing I had to row pretty damn fast,
the vessel taking on water.
I jumped on.
It’s important to teach your children how to be good people.
My problem is that I don’t know how to do that.
Either way I’m not the greatest father
because there is always the third option,
get a paper towel and clean up the mess that I never seem to get to.
I always turn everything into the Mediterranean Sea.
The phone bill. The cooking of asparagus and avocados.
Changing the windshield wiper fluid in my car
so the windows get clean in winter
when I drive behind semis and cry my eyes out for no reason.
Better to turn things into waves and salt water
and feel good about Dean Young washing his hands in my ocean
that spills out the front door
dancing with angel fish
and blue fish
and octopi so incandescent they turn pink in the night.

Hauntings: Terra Firma Triptych by J.M. Ledgard

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“We are now at a low tide in the powers of travel writing,” Grame Wood lamented in Foreign Affairs in 2010 in an essay morosely titled, “Travel Writing Is Dead.” “Where travelers once brought back invaluable stolen glances at places that the rest of us could only guess about, the new breed combines the worst of the traveler and the worst of the homebody,” Wood writes. “The writer goes overseas but brings back news about a tedious inner crisis, leaving undisturbed any insights about the places visited.”

2015 might be, finally, the turning of the tides, if it will allow itself to be led by the gravity of J. M. Ledgard’s Terra Firma Triptych, a three-part essay cycle penned and published as part of FSG’s Digital Originals series. Altogether, the book is a mere 40 pages long — the length of a few long commutes, if you’re casually reading on your phone, or on a lazy afternoon, but Ledgard is no homebody, no casual observer, no armchair traveler: A Scot from the Shetland Islands, Ledgard served as a longtime foreign correspondent for The Economist, with much of his time dedicated to Africa. As the author of 2011’s masterful novel Submergence, and 2006’s award-winning Giraffe, Ledgard makes his first foray into essay collections, but by no means his first stab at nonfiction, with Terra Firma Triptych.

The three panels comprising Triptych are “Terra Firma,” “The Connectome,” and “Red Liners.” While the essays are seemingly unconnected other than sharing the continent of Africa as a backdrop, the first of the collection, “Terra Firma,” is a gut-punch account of a trip through South Sudan, where the language spoken is violence and the earth seems to crumble to dust beneath Ledgard’s feet:

I had a feeling of being in a still point in a storm, the building sites and tunnels only increasing, perforating the earth, and unseen data blooming and going faster and faster until pooling and coagulating upon a device. At some point even the spot on which I stood would be tagged, but at that moment it was very quiet. The sound of my boots scuffing on the dirt was enormous. I coughed and it was like an interruption. I saw the curvature of the earth with the exactness of an etching by Hollar and I had a feeling of belonging to something massive and drifting. I think I saw my own transience more plainly there than at any of the treacherous moments in my life. How should I stand on the orb? How should I tread it? How many breaths should I take upon it before I stopped, and when I was expired and decomposed, what small shape of me would be left in the air? I thought it would have been a tender place, but it was harsh and it was gone in an instant. I saw an ostrich in the distance, moving away at great speed, its neck and head still and legs pumping, just as you imagine yourself sprinting in dreams.

In the second essay, “The Connectome,” Ledgard visits Rwanda, where he has the “queer feeling” of “being haunted by the future” while visiting a stretch of valley set to be transformed into a massive airport.

It was not good, neither was it awful. It was like a motor that turns over and catches and noise and fumes come and there is something lost for something gained. It was perhaps always meant to be, it was simple mathematics, this many humans need this many things, one connection begets another, and we move, we move, we are like sharks in this respect, we can no more stop ourselves than can a thresher shark or a mako shark lay its head down on the sea bottom and sleep, if we stop moving we asphyxiate, and so it was inevitable and right that Rwanda would want to make those connections, and that its citizens would want to board airplanes and receive and send goods. Rwanda was late, Africa was late, that was all.

The final panel, “Red Liners,” then, is the odd duck of the collection. While Ledgard’s first two essays could perhaps be united in their lyrical environmentalist or humanitarian concerns, “Red Liners” reads almost like a literary sales pitch for Ledgard’s Red Line cargo drone initiative, which he directs out of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Illustrated with futuristic renderings of droneports and droneways (if you will), Ledgard lays out a vision of Africa serviced by drones that go, “uncomplaining and methodically like a pack animal along paths that wind up through wooded hills, cresting at a remote village, and then winding down the other side.” It’s a jarring, technical contrast to Ledgard’s mastery over depictions of landscape and the people and animals of Africa, who he describes with such lyricism and poetry that it’s hard to challenge comparisons to other geniuses of the prose form: Calvino, Coetzee. “Red Liner” is, rather, almost an act of journalism, studded with the occasional footnote, sprinkled with statistics; a return to an essay in its more rigid form.

But this from a man who told the New Yorker that, “While great journalism speaks essentially to the moment, literature has the long reach.” Even “Red Liners” is not without its more cosmic moments:

Cargo drones will fly routes that are geofenced in the sky at about the height of the Eiffel Tower. I choose this monument deliberately because it escapes gravity in a more breathtaking fashion than I think any other building on earth. It is arched on the ground and touches the sky at its narrowest point. It is the supreme surviving example of Victorian steampunk, and it is possible to imagine Red Liners passing over the top of it, silent in their sun power and sometimes hidden and emerging through the mist and in ribs here and there. The tonnage of the tower in any case is not weighed only in iron but in swagger that we are duty-bound within the limits of our science and technology now to imitate.

Ledgard’s is quite the dream — one he rather unconvincingly argues isn’t techno-utopianism, but this may be excused as a moment of allowed personal enthusiasm, for Ledgard’s travels aren’t a metaphor for his own transformation. Unlike authors of personal crisis who Wood blames for killing the travelogue, that most ancient of literary forms, Ledgard has returned to form as an observer, a set of eyes watching, retaining, reporting. “Life there was harsh, like a fairy tale,” Ledgard says, without judgment, without grief, but thoughtfully, intentionally. Taken as a whole, Terra Firma Triptych is a hybrid of journalism of the moment and something new, something transformative, something sui generis, even — travel writing not looking at the self, but out, at the long reach of a future haunting us all.

To purchase Terra Firma Triptych, visit the FSG Originals website.

The Broadcaster & The Writer in America

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Stephen Colbert returned to the airwaves on September 8th. Stephen Colbert is a broadcaster. David Letterman was a broadcaster. There are great journalists who have also learned what it means to be a broadcaster and be a host. (Think about Jorge Ramos interviewing Carlos Salinas de Gortari or Edward R. Murrow’s dispatches from London, let alone Hemingway’s or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s respective careers in journalism. (Hemingway’s take on Mussolini remains a favorite.))

But Colbert and Letterman aren’t “writers,” per se, and it’s slightly surreal that this ends up being the obvious point that needs to be reemphasized. (When Salman Rushdie was recently describing how he ended up getting to the point of writing a song for U2 to Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Fallon said, “That’s so deep, man.” Thanks, Jimmy.)
But in lieu of the (perhaps particularly American? (Despite publishing statistics?) Partially Italian? A little bit Brazilian?) anxiety that looks at the world and comes to the conclusion that — as Lee Siegel did — the news has overtaken literature (which I’ve written about previously) or that Joyce would be working at Google were he alive today (let alone the now years-old, multi-tentacled fretting that’s marked Tim Parks’s writing about writing (though my inner editor is tempted to dismiss this as being my version of something like this), it’s worth considering two things — what it means to be a “broadcaster,” and what writers have done in considering what it means to be a broadcaster, and how — in articulating what it means to be a broadcaster today (think of this twinned with this) — we can appreciate what it means to be a writer today (and vice versa.)
In “Host,” David Foster Wallace described a man whose eyes off-air “are usually flat and unhappy” and “alight … with passionate conviction” once they return to broadcast, and how — once on air — we’re dealing with an emotional landscape that trades in “anger, outrage, indignation, fear, despair, disgust, contempt, and a certain kind of apocalyptic glee” created by a man who “has one on-air job, and that is to be stimulating.”

In “E Unibus Pluram,” he writes about how “the result is that a majority of fiction writers, born watchers, tend to dislike being objects of people’s attention”; that — “if we want to know what American normality is, we can watch television”; and that — unfortunately — “we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant quality of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.”

In “My Appearance,” David Letterman is invoked as a force of nature, whereas — per the narrator in the story — “The man has freckles. He used to be a local weatherman. He’s witty. So am I.”

Now what do those three pieces tell us? (That we should read more Barthelme, for one? Or take a tour through David Carr’s archives? (And why did he have to go?)) And what has changed since DFW articulated some of what he articulated? Well — for one — Tahrir Square arrived like the imagistic inverse of a monk burning outside the Pentagon during the Vietnam War and spread hope with quick, quick dispatch across the globe. American satire moved to punch a hole in the political class and the political class tried to re-appropriate satire’s voice (which means that the next logical step is probably something like this.) Roxane Gay arrived. Ta-Nehisi Coates arrived. Twitter went from being a curiosity to a way to be a little bit faster than traditional news wires to a way to organize protests and demonstrations (Occupy Wall Street, Gezi, Hong Kong, Black Lives Matter, Bring Back Our Girls, Je Suis Charlie, et al.) to a way for others to become famous in those contexts to a way to relentlessly harass women for years to a way to humiliate lives because of a single bad joke to ways to transmit and care for refugees fleeing across multiple countries, fleeing fast and far from Bashar al-Assad, Daesch, and others burning a whole country to the ground. (Small wonder that the NSA sees the potential of such power in aspiring to have a handle on such an excess of digital information.)

The capacity and breadth of broadcasting has expanded, but broadcasting itself — as an idea — still feels remarkably capable of being shrunk to size and dismissed. Everyone may talk about Mr. Robot, The Wire, Downton Abbey or whatever with cyclic regularity, but the fact remains that the United States publishes a lot of new books every year — I’ve seen numbers that put it anywhere between 300,000 and a million. And now that cord cutters are the dominant norm, I’d argue that there’s a window of opportunity for people to define television to themselves in a way that you wouldn’t expect — beyond the kind of articulations made at the MacTaggart Lectures — given that television’s continual presence is so good at keeping someone on the judgmental back foot. (Look at this interview between Jon Stewart and Craig Ferguson in 2005, for instance. They could have been saying the same thing today, but the process of ‘feeding the beast’ keeps our understanding of being a broadcaster fluid.)

And writers are still writing, one going so far as to spend a month ensconced at The Seattle Public Library. “Within the first hour,” Gabriella Denise Frank wrote over at The Rumpus, “I realized that I would have to push myself in order to work under the eyes of the same strangers I hoped to inspire. I would have to endure people reading my unformed thoughts before I deleted and rewrote them again, sensing the cast of their unspoken scrutiny.”

And the fact that this balance between our expectation of writers and broadcasters fluctuates so — think of the historical dimension, too, where audiences grew silent because of the expectations partly put upon them by Haydn, Rossini, Beethoven, and others — means that this is not necessarily a particularly intransigent problem. It’s not even an intransigent problem now, globally, as — if you want to look past the experiential level in Paris — you can look at this paper from Gisèle Sapiro, which argues fairly well against the notion of the ‘death’ of French literature as seen from an American perspective. (French literature is alive and well and out there. We’re just not translating it well enough. Or even look to Héctor Hoyos’s Beyond Bolaño to get a sense of how the ‘global Latin American Novel’ is moving in a global context.)
But I think that all this talk partly comes down to the way in which we define our space to ourselves in this country — from notions of rewilding to urban studies to the developmental impacts of technology on children, Michel De Certeau, and beyond. When I first flew up from London to Glasgow in February of this year, I couldn’t get over the fact that it only took about an hour. It’s the length of a flight from Boston to New York, or — if the pilot’s pushing it a little bit — DC. And I was going over an entire country, filled with cities I already knew a fair amount about. And yet — for all the ways in which we choose how to engage in our space — think of post-sex selfies, midnight shift photos sent Instagram’s way, radios left on at the beach, the hovering question as to whether or not Arcade Fire or St. Vincent sufficiently described a certain shade of technological anxiety the way Neil Portman described ‘Amusing Ourselves To Death’ — Montana still remains Montana. You can drive through New Hampshire in pursuit of Presidential candidates and still be stunned at the landscape you see. You can log off the internet for a day, come back on at the end of it, and be absolutely bewildered at the turn everything seems to have taken.

All this activity may leave writers feeling like their work lacks sufficient dexterity, or that they somehow aren’t adapting well enough to the technology of the moment, that they have to pull off big circus-sized ‘tricks,’ or that — like Wallace — the natural appreciation of a certain lack of attention puts them at a storytelling disadvantage of sorts — a disadvantage that people like Colbert and others can capitalize upon — but it shouldn’t. Just because what you write in a notebook isn’t the literal size of the space around you — be it the Grand Canyon, the Mississippi River, the streets of San Francisco or the tattooed greenery of the Pacific Northwest — just because writing isn’t an actual car stereo blaring down a highway, a Mardi Gras parade filling the French Quarter, or the Chicago River turning green as can be come St. Patrick’s Day doesn’t mean that what you write isn’t capable of filling that space, of meeting that space in its own particular method, its own particular way, and its own particular time.

Anatomy of a Discovery: How a Literary Magazine Editor Finds New Writers

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I sometimes hear publishing new writers talked about as if it were an occult art. Tea leaves consulted. Sand art made. A voice in the dark. But it’s not that hard to find very good new writers. You just have to listen to people. There are agents who seem to constantly have good new voices, magazines which have a record of publishing them, cities where they seem to develop and read in public, and, of course, teachers and writing programs around which they seem to cluster. Just as tornadoes hit the plains and avalanches happen in winter, spend enough time in these spaces and soon enough something miraculous will walk into view.

Spend enough time in these spaces and soon enough something miraculous will walk into view.

The exciting thing about these stakeouts is you never know exactly what shape the writer will come in. It might be someone like Claire Vaye Watkins, who walked up to the Granta booth in the basement of the Chicago Hilton during AWP in 2008, looking like a goth girl with a hangover, standing next to Christopher Coake, saying nothing, while Chris is saying, trust me, man, just trust me, ask her to do something. And then a week later she unreels the most gorgeous essay about growing up in the west and having to dream up her family, much as the west is dreamed up, because her father had died before she was born and all she had left of him was the media coverage that had burst into view when he renounced The Family, of which he was a member. Claire’s first novel is coming out next week, Gold Fame Citrus, and every bit of its terrifying genius, its lyrically specific grasp of the West — how it is a place built on a mirage of water — can be found in that tiny little 600 word piece she wrote for Granta on a whim because a guy standing on the other side of a table said have a whack at it.

That’s all editors do sometimes. Read the slush. Tell the ones we meet to try. Listen to a writer’s supporters. So when Nathan Englander says, I have this student named Phil Klay, he’s the real deal, I listen, and when Lan Samantha Chang nudged me after a visit to Iowa and mentioned the writer who’d just given me stories — Chinelo Okparanta — I made sure to read them on the flight back to New York. Somewhere over Pennsylvania my hands started to sweat: here was a real talent. Someone who knew how often the press of love had to find small spaces. Her stories were patient and wise, as if they were written by a woman in her 80s who had condensed all her experience into 12 key narratives. Chinelo’s first novel is also out right now, and it’s the kind of book that should have come with a cold compress kit. It’s sad and sensual and full of heat.

Somewhere over Pennsylvania my hands started to sweat: here was a real talent.

But if there were one source of high pressure in the past decade, a real Tornado alley, it would have to be Hunter College, which Peter Carey and Colum McCann have taken from a school people worked hard to get into and did well with, to one of the most important weather systems in the country. The list of exciting writers who have come out of that program since they took over is comically long, from Maria Venegas to Vanessa Manko and Samantha Kristia Smith, Alex Gilvarry and Bill Cheng, Jason Porter, the aforementioned Phil Klay, Tennessee Jones, Scott Cheshire, Lauren Holmes, Jeffrey Rotter. On and on it goes. When I worked at Granta and came back to the city I’d go to an event and there they’d all be, like some sort of strange motorcycle gang, moving as a pack, listening keenly to whomever it was reading, and then wondering where to go to next on their choppers.

Great storytellers. That’s what seems to unite the writers who emerged from that program, and I can see why. Peter and Colum have huge, forceful, sometimes overwhelming personalities, but also the spooky ability to disappear in their own books, to narrate with observational intelligence rather than the self. McCann runs a clinic in this erasure in his new story collection, “Thirteen Ways of Looking.” It seems to be the ethos of that school. So when Colum started mentioning a writer to me in 2008 or 2009 named Fatin Abbas, speaking with his body he was so excited — that’s the tell — saying she was going to be big, but she’d take time, I set a timer in my head and kept asking. Every six, nine months, I’d talk to Colum and then, eventually, Fatin herself, who showed up at a few Granta events, but would disappear for months if not years to work on her novel.

One of the strange things one experiences as an editor is the stop-gap impression of books being written. How a face or email address or thought of a person will bloom into view and then disappear, all while this immense amount of effort and lifting is being done in the dark, alone. I thought in fact with Fatin the trail had actually gone cold, but suddenly she wrote back quickly last fall, sent some pages. Two chapters in fact. Those first few moments of reading a writer’s work you’ve been chasing are so electrifying. You don’t read slowly, or at least I don’t: I read paragraphs at a time after the first one starts off well. There’s a kind of dilation of the pupil. With this big eye I read very quickly and as more and more pitfalls are avoided, and the prose takes on that forceful inevitable quality, I read even faster, I’m racing to the end. Only to begin again, read slowly, find out if in fact I was just tricked.

Those first few moments of reading a writer’s work you’ve been chasing are so electrifying.

With Fatin, there was no trick, just an extraordinary stillness and poise. There was a scene: we were in a small village town in Sudan that had been raided by rebels on and off over the previous weeks. There was a house boy, a documentary filmmaker, and several other people, all of whom are brought together by the appearance of a dead body one day, so charred and burned it is hard to ascertain its identity and more keenly, as a result, where it should be buried. Fatin, who had seemed so shy in person and on email, was not at all shy on the page. She moves swiftly in and out of four or five different characters points of view like it was nothing, like it was what she was for. It reminded me instantly of the narrative poise of Chimamanda Adichie in “Half of a Yellow Sun,” the way her steady hand with interior lives allows her to take a big wide angle shot of her country with the whole tale.

There is around 18,000 words of Fatin Abbas’ manuscript in the first issue of Freeman’s. The only longer piece is Lydia Davis’ 24,000 word essay about learning Norwegian without a dictionary by reading Dag Solstad’s notoriously difficult Telemark novel. It is one of the first issue’s main pillars. It’s there because it’s great, but it’s also there because I feel like literary journals exist for these discoveries. It’s what keeps them alive and more importantly, it’s what unites them with their readers, who come to our pages looking for something. Even if it’s not the writer being introduced that a reader finds, the vibration of discovery — and here I will sound oeiji board-ish — rubs off on everything around it. It’s the sound any good editor is listening for when they’re sitting there in the dark, watching for movement in the bushes.

Talking to NBA Legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar About His Sherlock Holmes Novel

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Though it seems we’ve had a storm of Sherlock Holmes pastiches in the post-Cumberbatch world, the fact is that the literary tradition of writing your own novel or short story set in the universe of 221B Baker Street has been happening for decades, if not nearly a century. From Neil Gaiman to Lyndsay Faye to Michael Chabon to Anthony Horowitz to Star Trek II director, Nicholas Meyer, plenty of people you’ve heard of and love have adventured into this rich fictional universe.

And now, add a NBA Hall-of-Famer onto that list, because Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has also busted into the world of Holmes. But wait! His book is not about the Holmes you might be thinking of! Sherlock’s older brother Mycroft Holmes is the title and the subject of Abdul-Jabbar’s novel, and the story is something of a prequel to the canonical Doyle tales loved by so many. I got the chance recently to correspond with this legend about his new novel. Here, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar describes his collaborative process with co-writer Anna Waterhouse, his passion for history, and how this Holmes might have a connection to…Marlon Brando?

Ryan Britt: I’ve read you’ve always been a huge fan of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories. It’s even in your bio for this book that you incorporated a kind of Holmesian method of deduction into your early strategies for playing in the NBA. How did all that enthusiasm for these stories lead you to this novel? What’s the leap between fan of these stories and novelist?

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: My manager, Deborah Morales, has been hearing about Mycroft Holmes for so long that she finally said “You have to do it.” Anna Waterhouse, my co-writer, worked with me on my award-winning documentary, “On the Shoulders of Giants,” and I knew we could work well together. Her background is screenwriting, so I knew both the dialogue and the setting would be right. I had a story in mind: we fleshed it out, and that was that. The leap between fan and novelist is a whole lot more work.

My manager, Deborah Morales, has been hearing about Mycroft Holmes for so long that she finally said “You have to do it.”

Britt: The historical detail in this book is extraordinary. Short of time-travel, can you describe your research process?

Abdul-Jabbar: I’m passionate about history. I’m particularly fond of the Victorian era, because it was a time when one superpower (Britannia) ruled the waves — and therefore the world. We wanted to be sure that readers felt, heard and even smelled what it was like to live back then. But we also wanted to make sure those descriptions never interfered with plot. That was a tightrope walk, frankly. We left more out than we put in. So I’d say we had a good two months of intense research before we even began the prologue. Most was just hitting the books, but more than some was serendipity. One fact would lead to another that was just as necessary, only later on in the novel. Thankfully, we stayed organized.

Britt: Now, as the title clearly gives away, this novel centers on Mycroft Holmes — the brother of Sherlock — as a young man. But Mycroft is in or mentioned in four of the original stories. We know he’s supposed to be just as smart as Sherlock, if not smarter, but other details are scarce. Did you feel as though you were inventing your own character here?

Abdul-Jabbar: We don’t feel we invented him, no. Because of my respect for ACD, we made a conscious effort to make him plausibly Doyle’s Mycroft Holmes as a very young man. In other words, we took all the written characteristics (or what little there is) into consideration, and we posited the rest. It’s been interesting to hear the results from those who’ve read the book. A few (thankfully, very few so far) think he is “nothing like” Mycroft would have been at that age, while most readers, including devotees of ACD, have been quite kind and even complimentary about what we’ve done with “their” Mycroft Holmes.

Because of my respect for ACD, we made a conscious effort to make him plausibly Doyle’s Mycroft Holmes as a very young man.

Britt: Right for the start Mycroft’s athleticism and physical prowess are on display. Did you feel like you got to write a sort of buffer, more badass Sherlock Holmes?

Abdul-Jabbar: No, I think Robert Downey Jr. has cornered the market on that. More seriously, though, Mycroft is not “Detective Number Two.” He’s not “the game’s afoot!” Junior. He’s an entirely different character with different motivations. While Sherlock has to wait until a crime happens, and then go after the bad guy(s), Mycroft is much more interested in preventing larger-scale crimes before they happen. He’s already more of a Machiavelli, and will become even more so, if we’re given the chance to keep writing about him.

As for buff and badass: because Doyle depicts Mycroft, in his mid-forties, as overweight and sedentary, we wanted to see if we could get to him before life (tragedies and gravity) had their way. In other words, there’s young Marlon Brando and there’s old Marlon Brando. We thought to write about young Marlon Brando.

Britt: The character of Cyrus Douglas seems to be of your own creation. Did you consciously create him as a kind of Watson-analog?

Abdul-Jabbar: Anna and I knew that Mycroft would need a confidante. But we didn’t want him to be just a guy who asks the questions so that the plot can be explained to the audience. We wanted someone who was fully his own man. So we made him older than Mycroft (Douglas is 40, Holmes is 23) and black, specifically because Mycroft Holmes has been rather sheltered and has never lived anywhere but England. We wanted to match him up with someone worldly, and with a whole different set of experiences. We also wanted a character who could be the moral center. Cyrus Douglas fit the bill.

Britt: Mycroft being in love is central to this novel. This seems like a tricky move in writing about the traditionally cold and intellectual Holmes boys. Without ruining anything for those who haven’t read it; how does Mycroft being in love with Georgiana impact this calculating, logical, reasoning machine?

Abdul-Jabbar: It impacts him in the way that it would impact anyone experiencing his first big love. It messes with the synapses. The brain takes a back seat to the emotions. Otherwise known as a blind spot.

It impacts him in the way that it would impact anyone experiencing his first big love…The brain takes a back seat to the emotions.

Britt: There’s been countless film and television versions of these adventures, but not a lot where the ethnicity of Sherlock Holmes or his friends has been changed from the source material. (Lucy Liu’s Watson on Elementary is an obvious exception.) However, there are of course, black versions of Holmes and Watson in other media; the graphic novel Watson & Holmes by Karl Bollers and Rick Leonardi is a good example. If something like Watson & Holmes were adapted to film or TV would you want to play someone? Maybe Mycroft?

Abdul-Jabbar: I would never turn down a part that sounds like fun, and of course that sounds like fun. But I’m a purist, in that I do think the middle-aged Mycroft Holmes should bear at least a passing resemblance to the way Arthur Conan-Doyle described him. And that wouldn’t be me.

Mycroft Holmes is out now from Titan Books.

TED WILSON REVIEWS THE WORLD: POPE FRANCIS

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★★★★☆

I wonder who would win in an arm wrestling match between the Pope and the Dali Lama. At first I thought the Pope, because the Dali Lama would not desire to win. But the Dali Lama is always showing off his biceps and they look pretty good for a reincarnated guy. The Pope always has a big, flowing robe on. What’s he hiding under there? You never see him in bike shorts and a tank top. Without seeing the Pope’s physique, I guess it’s a mystery who would win, just like the mystery of which one of their Gods is the real one.

Frankly, the Pope’s outfit seems outdated. It’s never the wrong time to rebrand yourself and the Pope could look at least a little more trendy. Maybe a new hat with a logo on it done in a graffiti artist style. Not Banksy though, because he just traces photographs and that’s not very creative.

At the very least the Pope should grow a beard. Those are very fashionable right now. A lot of religions encourage hair growth, and I saw a priest with a mustache once so I don’t think there are any rules specifically prohibiting it.

The Pope with the casual stubble, and unbuttoned robe of Ryan Reynolds.

The Pope with the casual stubble, and unbuttoned robe of Ryan Gosling.

What I like most about the Pope is how nice he is. I think of myself as a pretty nice guy and the Pope is even nicer than me. Everyone has their breaking point though. For me it’s when someone talks during a movie. I’ll really sush that person. I wonder what it is for the Pope. Maybe if someone dog-ears a bible.

One day the Pope will get replaced, most likely when he dies. That’s usually what does it. People will want a new Pope though, just like when a pet dies and you’re sad but then eventually you get a replacement pet. I expect the Pope will be liked even ore posthumously, also much like a pet.

If I was the Pope I would move out of the Vatican because I don’t like people knowing where I live. That’s why I switched the letters around on my mailbox to read “Wilsno.” That’s also probably why I haven’t gotten any mail in several weeks. (If you’ve written to me and I didn’t reply, please call me at (617) 379–2576.)

If you manage to see the Pope while he’s here, try to get a selfie with him. He has a beautiful smile and seems quite agreeable.

BEST FEATURE: Limitless compassion.
WORST FEATURE: Those hats.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing hogwash.

McDonalds UK to give away Roald Dahl booklets with Happy Meals

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Every McDonald’s in the UK will be giving away booklets featuring excerpts from Roald Dahl’s books with their Happy Meals. 14 million books have been produced for the six week event, which begins on Wednesday, September 23.

In 2013, The UK’s National Literacy Trust and McDonald’s partnered up to create the project “Happy Readers,” meant to provide young diners with reading tips. Earlier Happy Meal offers include vouchers for free downloads of e-books, as a part of a collaboration with Kobo, in the spring of 2014.

Back in 2013, Lisa Rootes, who is the head of partnerships at the National Literacy Trust, said: “We are delighted to be working with McDonald’s to give families access to quality, affordable books and spread the joy of reading. Reading for enjoyment can enrich children and young people’s lives beyond the classroom and give them vital skills for the rest of their lives.”

The Roald Dahl giveaway project is their latest idea, also in collaboration with Penguin Random House and the Roald Dahl Literary Estate. The booklets have titles such as “Roald Dahl’s Extraordinary Friends,” “Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Families,” and “Roald Dahl’s Beastly Creatures,” among others.

Over the next six weeks, many young readers visiting McDonald’s might get a chance to own their very first book, and for those who get the taste for more, McDonald’s will be giving away vouchers to buy two additional booklets for £1.

Steve Hill, head of marketing at McDonald’s UK, said: “Dads like me grew up on the magic of Roald Dahl and his extraordinary characters. Finding time for families to have fun together is all part of a trip to McDonald’s, so I’m thrilled we’re able to introduce the likes of Matilda, James and his Giant Peach and the wonderfully ludicrous Twits to a new generation of readers.”

Comedian Amy Schumer Lands Whopping $8–10 Million Book Deal

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by Melissa Ragsdale

Fresh off her Emmy win, Amy Schumer has reportedly signed a book deal with Gallery Books worth nearly 10 million dollars. This advance is astounding even when compared to similar titles. In 2012, the world was shocked when Lena Dunham’s hit book, Not That Kind of Girl, sold for $3.7 million dollars. Aziz Ansari’s recent book Modern Romance sold for $3.5 million. Tina Fey comes relatively close to Schumer’s level, having sold Bossypants for $6 million.

In addition to the book deal, Schumer’s Inside Amy Schumer won both an Emmy and a Peabody this year, her movie Trainwreck was a box-office success and she’s about to be the first female comedian to headline Madison Square Garden. Schumer is known for her fun and fearless personality, and her ability to tell it how it is.

The book’s working title is The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo. It will feature personal and observational stories about Schumer’s childhood and will be published in late 2016.

Photo via 92YTribeca