20 Under 40 / Chris Adrian

Illustration by Grafilu

20 Under 40: Q. & A.
Chris Adrian

By Jennifer L. Knox

June 77, 2010

Chris Adrian was featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction Issue. His story will appear later in the summer.

When were you born?

November 7, 1970.

Where?

Washington, D.C.

Where do you live now?

In Boston and San Francisco.

What was the first piece of fiction you read that had an impact on you?

Probably Richard Scarry’s “Busy, Busy World.” It was the first time I can remember being so taken by a fictional representation of the world that I wanted to live there instead of in the real world. And I identified very closely with Lowly Worm. I had this idea that Lowly and I and Huckle Cat could all live together in one of those timber-framed houses that Scarry drew so exactingly. I didn’t think of it that way back then, but now I think I wanted us all to be boyfriends.

How long did it take you to write your first book?

About ten years, through almost as many drafts.

Did you ever consider not becoming a writer?

Yes. I still consider it every few months or so.

What, in your opinion, makes a piece of fiction work?

I think that there needs to be something at stake that the writer, the characters, and the reader can all agree is interesting and important.

What was the inspiration for the piece included in the “20 Under 40” series?

When I was five, my aunt gave me a Christian record album for Christmas that was a sort of singing narrative of the battle between the Warm Fuzzies and the Cold Pricklies. She was (and still is) a wonderful person, and her family was considerably more ethically advanced than mine, and I loved her, but I was bitterly disappointed in the present. Though I was too polite (or too afraid of what my mother would do to me if she caught me being rude) to say it directly, I tried to indicate what a lame gift I thought she had given me by dragging her to the new television my parents had given me and extolling its virtues to her, trying to make plain that this was the sort of thing that one got for Christmas, and that Jesus-themed gifts were really not appropriate at this time of year. My brother and I listened to the album once, pronounced it irredeemably gay, and I lost it shortly thereafter, but it’s always stuck in my memory, and I remember the melodies of the songs, if not the words. When one of the characters in my novel suddenly appeared to have grown up in a very musical Christian household, the gift of the album combined with some not very well remembered episodes of “The Partridge Family” to shape this part of the story.

What are you working on now?

I’m finishing up a novel that’s a retelling of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” set in Buena Vista Park, in San Francisco, and a novel for young adults about a girl who makes a deal with the Devil to try to get her mother out of a supernatural jail.

Who are your favorite writers over forty?

Ursula K. Le Guin and Marilynne Robinson, John Crowley and Padgett Powell.

Published in the print edition of the June 14 & 21, 2010, issue.

THE NEW YORKER

20 Under 40 / Karen Russell

20 Under 40: Q. & A.

June 14 & 21, 2010 Issue

Karen Russell

Jennifer L. Knox

June 7, 2010

Karen Russell was featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction Issue. Her story will appear later in the summer.

When were you born?

July 10, 1981.

Where?

Miami, Florida.

Where do you live now?

Washington Heights, New York.

What was the first piece of fiction you read that had an impact on you?

Well, I really want to lie and say “The Count of Monte Cristo.” But it was probably “The Day of the Triffids,” a 1951 British sci-fi book, by John Wyndham. My sixth-grade class was reading this happy, snoozy tale about a girl and her horse, and my friend Michelle sneaked me the Wyndham book, which chronicles the end of the civilized world. A meteor shower blinds ninety-nine point nine per cent of the world’s population, and that’s only Chapter 1—things go way south after that. Carnivorous plants called the Triffids decide to take advantage of the whole global Mister Magoo situation and overthrow their human masters. It turns out that the Triffids are tired of being cultivated for vegetable oil and are eager to teach us a lesson in a rain of fronds and blood. I loved the apocalyptic stakes of the book. I loved the way that Wyndham took an impossible premise and blew it up into a world that felt frightening and strange and indisputably real.

How long did it take you to write your first book?

Two years, and then another six months or so of neurotic revisions.

Did you ever consider not becoming a writer?

I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway. I also love animals, and I worked at a veterinary clinic for a while, but it turns out that loving animals and removing deflated basketballs from the intestinal tracts of animals are two very different skill sets. But I was also one of those embarrassing cases who prayed to be a writer from an early age—or, failing that, to find or invent some job for which I got to read books in air-conditioning.

What, in your opinion, makes a piece of fiction work?

I think that different pleasures work for different readers—a friend of mine won’t read anything that’s not a cardiovascular sort of page-turner. I tend to care less about plot, but I’m a sucker for humor and strangeness. I love weird or funny or beautiful sentences; Joy Williams could write a microwave-oven manual and I’m sure I’d love it, because the sentences would be tuned up like music. And I do think that great fiction, even when it’s comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

What was the inspiration for the piece included in the “20 Under 40” series?

I was working on a novel draft for what felt like the thousandth year, doing some pretty heavy research into Florida history and the Army Corps Dredge and Fill campaign, and this little story within the story opened up. I wanted to try a sort of fantastical-historical story—Hitchcock meets the swamp.

What are you working on now?

New stories and a novel about a whacked-out imaginary town during the Dust Bowl drought.

Who are your favorite writers over forty?

Just a very few on a long list would be George Saunders, Kelly Link, Joy Williams, Ben Marcus, Jim Shepard, and whole cemeteries of the well-over-forty deceased ones.

Published in the print edition of the June 14 & 21, 2010, issue.

THE NEW YORKER

20 Under 40 / Téa Obreht

Téa Obreht
Illustration by Grafilu

20 Under 40: Q. & A.

Téa Obreht


By Jennifer L. Knox
June 7, 2010

Téa Obreht was featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction Issue. Her story will appear later in the summer.

When were you born?

September 30, 1985.

Where?

Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

Where do you live now?

Ithaca, New York.

What was the first piece of fiction you read that had an impact on you?

Sheila Burnford’s “The Incredible Journey,” which I borrowed from my elementary-school library one summer and never returned. I still have it.

How long did it take you to write your first book?

Three years—although, looking back through my notes, I realize that some characters and events are much, much older.

Did you ever consider not becoming a writer?

When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother’s hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word “goat” looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.

What, in your opinion, makes a piece of fiction work?

When something inexplicable happens in the transfer from writer to reader, and the piece, despite its imperfections, rattles and moves the reader. The best fiction stays with you and changes you.

What was the inspiration for the piece included in the “20 Under 40” series?

My family lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1996. Our last year there, before we moved to the States, my mother and I spent a month at the Red Sea. I wasn’t a brave child, but the underwater world was so incredible to me that I was somehow able to overcome my terror of it. I doubt I’d be able to do so again, as an adult, but its magic stayed with me for years, until I finally wrote “Blue Water Djinn.”

What are you working on now?

I am currently researching my second novel.

Who are your favorite writers over forty?

T. Coraghessan Boyle, Toni Morrison, and Gabriel García Márquez.

THE NEW YORKER