This fall is starting to feel like a tornado. But not a gnarly apocalyptic Midwestern tornado of doom; more like a tornado of positive vibes that glisten like dew drops on blades of grass in the morning in the spring. So I figured what better time to fire up the Radio Waves blog communication machine and roundup all the latest happenings with our authors. Cause there's a lot going on that we don't want you to miss. So imagine it's a vibrant spring morning, you've got a fresh cup of coffee, and you've wandered into the yard barefoot and you can feel the dew and the soft earth underfoot. Those vibes. Behold:
- The film adaptation of Amy Koppelman's novel, A Mouthful of Air, drops in theaters TODAY. Amy adapted and directed the film, which stars Amanda Seyfried and Finn Wittrock, and it's getting reviews everywhere, from Variety to the New York Times. Watch the trailer below. Listen to an interview with Amy Koppelman at KMUW's "Marginalia."
- Jana Benova, author of Seeing People Off and Away! Away!, will be the guest on Trafika Europe Radio this Sunday. Benova won the European Union Prize for Literature for her novel, Seeing People Off.
- The paperback release of Melanie Finn's third novel, The Underneath, is just around the corner (November 16!), and the book has been named one of Nylon Magazine's "Best New Books."
- Kalani Pickhart's debut novel I Will Die in a Foreign Land continues to slay. The book was just named one of "5 Hot New Books" by The National Book Review, who called the book "dazzling," and one of Cosmopolitan's "Best Historical Fiction of 2021."
- "Rhythm and rhyme is maybe the most important thing to me when I'm writing. It’s part of hip hop culture, part of that music. I am a rapper myself, so when I'm writing, especially when I was writing 808s, I made the decision to take rhythm very seriously. I was counting syllables, even the essays and thinking about how many syllables are in a sentence in my essays. I definitely read everything out loud, multiple times. Again, being a rapper, coming from slam and spoken word was like my first real entry point into poetry. I've always felt what I write is meant to be heard, if not by me, at least, meant to be read out loud. I think once I started to understand that, I needed to write in a way that other people could read it, and still hear the rhythm without hearing my voice. I started to become much more selective with my word choice and what rhymes I made. There are certain rhymes that don't sound like it rhymes until you read it out loud, or unless you say it a certain way or put a stress a certain way. I spent a lot of time thinking about syllables, just syllables, masculine, feminine, slant, double rhyme, all those things, because it's important to me. It's fun, too, just fun." —Sean Avery Medlin, author of 808s and Otherworlds: Memories, Remixes, and Mythologies, interviewed by Joshua Bohnsack at Triquarterly
- Sean Avery Medlin has several events coming up, including the below at Grand Ave Records in Phoenix. Check the calendar on their website for the full schedule.
- And while we're talking about books and spoken word, how about you listen to one of the first audiobooks we've released at Two Dollar Radio: Sean Avery Medlin reading 808s and Otherworlds. It's available wherever you listen to audiobooks, but we recommend Libro.fm, where your purchase/stream can also support independent booksellers.
Here's what else is filling our brain-pan, non-Two Dollar Radio-related, this week.
What we're reading: Pity the Beast, a novel by Robin McLean, from And Other Stories, for bookclub at HQ (which you should join if you're around).
What we're listening to: "Friends," by Broncho. If there was one thing we needed after living through the past 18ish months, it's a song about friends. I made the kids blast this song twice through on the drive to the grocery.
What we're watching: Wu-Tang: An American Saga, on Hulu.
In the fall of 2016, we were also fortunate enough to bring Masande to the U.S., for events at the Brooklyn Book Festival and City Lights Bookstore, as well as many points in between. For the Midwest leg of the tour, we drove with Masande to events throughout Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, on a trip that proved to be exceptionally fun and surprising. In Davenport, Iowa, he read in an old town hall on the banks of the Mississippi River before two folksy American bands played. In Columbus, he spoke to the radio station WOSU about South Africa's strife and where his work fit within its history. And in Fairfield, we ate Ethiopian food at a YMCA dining hall with the author of Found Audio, N.J. Campbell. The experience of hosting Masande was one of the more memorable and enjoyable experiences of my 14-year publishing experience.
Masande Ntshanga: It’s strange. I didn’t leave anything out, which is rare. Technically, I began with the coming-of-age story, but to be honest, how it really started was that, after my first novel, I became preoccupied with the idea of the three-act narrative. Obsessed, almost. That’s where the motif of the triangle came from. In my first book, as well as in stories I’d published before, I’d always viewed both its nature and predominance with suspicion. It sounds naïve, now, but I favoured narrative voice over what I felt was a contrived and limited narrative structure. That’s what mattered to me at the time: looser structure, ambiguity, a more accurate simulation of reality, etc. But fiction can never be reality in the end. Not the reality of the senses, anyway. It can only be fiction, and that’s a strength, not a weakness, I came to realize. Once I’d made peace with that—that the three-act narrative was a valuable literary device in its own right, with enough great stories in its repertoire—I began to wonder what it would look like if I tried to befriend it. Most of the novel’s structure and drive is derived from this preoccupation, including its use of mystery, science fiction, and coming-of-age. I wanted to explore the three-act narrative using three genres, and to see what emerged on the other side. These are the book’s formal preoccupations. In terms of content, once I got going, my preoccupation with narrative structure naturally grew into a preoccupation with memory and recollection—and with time; and this idea that the imagination could be a memory of the future. Mystery, then, became a choice because of its strong adherence to the element of discovery, and science-fiction because of its adherence to speculation. The former was provident in picking apart and exploring the past, and the latter was provident in imagining the future.
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