Backlisted - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer

Episode Date: July 9, 2018

John and Andy are joined by writer and editor Nikesh Shukla to discuss Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, ZZ Packer's groundbreaking collection of stories, first published in 2003. Andy also talks about Lissa Evans's new novel Old Baggage, while John has been reading Problems by Jade Sharma.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)7'36 - Old Baggage by Lissa Evans14'07 - Problems by Jade Sharma21'35 - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in South Atlanta, getting ready to testify at the Greater Christ Emanuel Pentecostal Church of the Fire Baptised. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously,

and I am speaking to you on a cocktail of three different painkillers. But I'm not going to specify for what, because I said I wouldn't, but man. Everything's swimming away. Joining us today is Nikesh Shukla, writer, editor, journalist. He's the author of three novels. The latest, The One Who Wrote Destiny, was recently published by Atlantic Books, and his first book for teenagers, Run Riot, has just been released by Hodder. Nikesh edited the best-selling and game-changing anthology The Good Immigrant,

is the editor of the literary journal The Good Journal, and co-founder with Julia Kingsford of The Good Literary Agency, an agency which aims to increase opportunities for representations for all writers underrepresented in mainstream publishing. And also Nh is uh of all the hardest working men in showbiz we've had on this podcast amongst the most hard-working you were saying that you you're trying to fence off weekends at the moment which as a writer is quite challenging your first child this year as well second child this year sorry yes yes oh god so last year when we were at the apex of good immigrant massive things happening um we we we were just about to have our kid and she i think it was a couple of couple of weeks late and so you guys were all off at the

the nibbies and i was like dealing with nappies waiting for the venue that has no reception to tell me whether we'd won an award or not I try I try to try to keep weekends clean clean clear I try to keep weekends clean as well but you know it has been pretty amazing a couple of years isn't it professionally it's two novels it's uh well yeah yeah i seem more productive than i am just uh so my uh i finished my second novel meat space in 2030 like at the end of 2013 so you know i've been working constantly since and when i sent uh rachel kerr who's the editor at large uh unbound uh like a back of the a fag packet pitch for the good immigrant in like the summer of uh 2015 when i was really pissed off you've been drinking up in newcastle i seem to

remember yeah yeah we got really drunk together and she told me all about unbound i thought that sounds wicked and then a couple of things happened in like the month after that i sent her an email that basically said i want to do a book of essays with 21 writers of color and i think i will ask these people and she was like yeah let's do it and i don't think when she said yep let's do it either of us thought it would become the book that it has become and i can really remember when i thought wow we're on to something and it wasn't when jk rowling gave us some money it wasn't it wasn't when the guardian wrote about the crowdfunding it was when i'd we'd hit 100 i still wasn't quite sure what was going to happen we'd hit 100 and i came into unbound for a drink and um we were all having a drink and then someone went oh another page and it was for the good

immigrant because at the unbound offices you guys have this like live feed of all the pledges coming in which is kind of exciting it's like being on tv it's like being on a telephone or something and we i saw one come in and it was from like somewhere really random i was like and i don't know anywhere one there it is mad we we discovered the other day that we'd had pledges from 191 countries. Oh, wow. There's 187 countries. That is literally everywhere in the world. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, making them up now. No, it's great. Well, listen, Nikesh has found some time in his incredibly busy schedule to come and talk to us today on that list about drinking coffee elsewhere uh which was the first story collection by uh the american writer zizi packer originally published by canongate in the uk in 2009 no well it was originally published by riverhead in 2003 and canongate in 2004 uh because... I'll talk about this a bit more as we go on,

because I was working for Canongate when we published this book in the UK. Cool. And also, Nikesh and I were saying before we started, we were both kind of taken aback. When Nikesh suggested this, I was really pleased. I thought, great, I love this book, despite forgetting that I'd only actually read half of it,

not the whole thing. But I read half of it 15 years ago actually read half of it not the whole thing but i read half of it 15 years ago now i've read the whole thing but it's not in print in the uk it's in print in the states it's not in print in the uk yeah uh which strikes me as fairly baffling because i would have thought his audience is an ongoing one such a great book yeah well we talk about it because it's it seems pretty extraordinary to me that it's not incredible i mean i'm always amazed my guess would be and i'm basically parroting what andy said like 10 minutes before we started but i'm going to say it like it's my opinion isn't that what podcasts are um she's been promising a novel for years and years

so maybe when the novel comes. It'll all be a bit of, yeah, that's probably true. That sounds like publishing logic to me. But it's a book that whenever I see it in charity shops, I will always buy a copy because it is the book that I gift to people that I like. Great. And by doing this podcast, I've gifted it to you. I could not be more pleased to have read it.

It's been a real highlight. We'll talk more about it. But first, here's a message from our sponsor. We're delighted to welcome back Spoke, ladies and gentlemen, a sharp and intelligent online menswear company. Spoke design men's trousers with a difference. They fit you. It's true.

With their online fit finder, you just put in a few details online. In under a minute, you'll have the perfect fit. You can choose from almost 200 size combinations. They obsess over every detail, the fabric, the lining, the fastness. Ordering from Spoke is a bit like going to your own tailor, without the hassle or expense or without patronising comments from men with tape measures around their neck. You get sharp, personalised design delivered to your door in two working days.

And as a backlisted listener, if you go to www.spoke-london.com and place an order, you get £20 off your first order. Just use the code backlisted20. Terms and conditions obviously apply. Once again, sitting here happily in my spoke trousers. I practically wear nothing else these days.

That's true. I love them. So, Andy, from Pats to Bats. Oh! No, sorry. What have you been reading? What have you been reading this week? What have I been reading this week? What have I been reading this week? The novelist Lisa Evans...

Who we love. ..has got a new novel out called Old Baggage. This is one of my favourite books I've read this year. I read it about three months ago. And it manages to do a really complex and socially resonant story in language which is so clear as to be almost invisible. It's such good writing that you can't tell it's good writing. It's set in the 1920s, and it is a prequel to Litter's last novel for adults, Crooked Heart.

And it is about the character Nettie, who in Crooked Heart we meet when she's in her 80s and slightly losing her marbles. We meet her in her 60s, 10 years after she has been a militant suffragette. And the novel is about what happens to you, to you and your friends after you change the world? What did you do next? And contrary to what people are saying about the dearth of comic novels in the UK at the moment, it is really funny. But it was also, I kept reading it thinking, wow, this is great. Of course, the suffragettes 10 years after they get the vote. Wow, this is such a rich period. It's always being written about. Now I was thinking, but wait a minute, I can't think of any other novels that are set in this period. And it makes the point that many of the women who were involved with the suffrage movement

and the suffragettes went on to, having had a moment of unity, go on to disperse widely across the political and social spectrums. You know, the coming together of that movement, it happens, and then they disperse in different and quite controversial directions. So it's a great book. It has the resonance of the moment of being published 100 years since some women gained the vote. 100 years since some women gained the vote.

And it's the sort of novel that I feel might, and I hope doesn't, be overlooked because it might be perceived as being lightweight. Just because it has the appearance of that Orwellian prose as clear as a glass window. So I'm just going to read a bit from the beginning of the book just to set the scene. So part one, 1928. Mattie always carried a club in her handbag, just a small one, of polished ash. That was the most infuriating aspect of the whole episode. She'd actually been armed when it happened.

The New Year's Day fair had been audible from the moment she'd left the house, a formless roar that receded as soon as she turned off the track and took the path through the woods. The quickest route to the underground station was along the narrow lane to Hampstead, but there was, as she'd pointed out to the flea only this morning, apropos of their neighbour's new motor car, very little point in living with the heath absolutely on one's doorstep if one didn't take every opportunity to tramp across it. Besides the exercise, it was a rare walk that didn't provide one with at least a nugget or two

of brain food, as evinced by Mattie's December column in the Hampstead and Highgate Express, in which she compared a dead duck frozen into the pond with the Prime Minister's current position. compared a dead duck frozen into the pond with the Prime Minister's current position. She'd been bucked by the news that the paper had already received 13 letters in reply, several of them furious. The handbag was whisked from her grasp before she'd even registered the footsteps behind her and she was left standing open mouth as a young man ran down the slope towards the fair, stuffing her bag under his plum-coloured jacket as he went, glancing back at her and then slowing, actually slowing, to a casual stroll as he neared the striped shooting booth at the perimeter.

Thief! she shouted, starting forward. Thief! Her foot touched an object that rolled, and she looked down to see the miniature of whiskey that had fallen from the bag as he tugged it away she snatched it up it was full a decent weight heavy enough to startle too light to maim and then she straightened took aim and flung its side arm as if skimming a stone the slope was in her favor the missile maintained its height kept its trajectory and she was able to feel a split second of wandering pride in an unlost skill The slope was in her favour. The missile maintained its height, kept its trajectory, and she was able to feel a split second of wandering pride and an unlost skill before a red-headed girl ran laughing from behind the booth, dodged round the thief,

and received the bottle full in the mouth. I am really most dreadfully, dreadfully sorry, called Matty, hurrying down the path. The redhead had been joined by a boy, and the pair of them were kneeling, staring up at her in round-eyed disbelief, the boy pressing a handkerchief to his companion's mouth. You're a bloody lunatic, said the boy. Who for are I? said the girl. That was accidental. I was aiming at a man who had stolen my bag and I would awfully like

to... She stepped to one side and looked round the booth at the shifting crowd. I really must try and catch him. As I say, I am enormously sorry. May I see? She reached towards the handkerchief and the girl jerked away. Don't touch her, ordered the boy. I have myself been the recipient of a large number of superficial injuries, many of them deliberately inflicted. In the case of a blow to the mouth, the only worry is whether the teeth are broken or the outline of the lips transected. Momentarily, the girl lifted the cloth.

And Mattie glimpsed an upper lip the size of a frankfurter and a row of undamaged teeth. Cold compress, she said, exiting around the tent no other treatment needed awfully sorry for half an hour she hunted the fairground it appeared that plum colored jackets were commonplace this season she accosted four or five self-declared innocents before accepting that the thief was certainly long gone there really was nothing further she could do thief was certainly long gone there really was nothing further she could do you know i mean she's great it's doing everything isn't it makes you laugh bit of action setting the character letting you know the type of person you're dealing with well you know and the other thing about this

book which is i can see why the publisher had done it it's very clearly being sold as a book for female readers. But as I said on Twitter yesterday, I'm sure there are many other human beings who aren't female who would thoroughly enjoy this book. So Father's Day would have gone. But if your dad isn't a prat, buy Father's Day. Sean, what have you been reading this week?

I've had fun this week with Problems by Jade Sharma, published by Tramp Press. It's about as cracklingly contemporary as you're going to get this is her first book she's new yorker it's first person narrative a woman called maya who is uh married to peter it's about a descent into it sounds fairly kind of hoary sort of plot you know descent into drugs hell it is i mean she's uh unfaithful to her husband she's sleeping with her professor uh she's taking heroin he's working as a barman she's working in a bookstore and the addiction gets worse the kind of the scene the book turns

on is when she goes and spends a visit with his parents who are born again Christians and I'll read a little bit of that but the thing about it is it's really really funny there were three things that made me want to read it one was that Phil in the office Phil Connor said it's brilliant you'll love it I always trust him one was it came with a it came with a encomium from David Gates who is an American writer who I've loved for a long time, the author of Jernigan, really, and Preston Falls. In fact, I published both of those books back in the day. And also this, I just like this line, behind every crazy woman is a man sitting very quietly saying, what, I'm not doing anything.

And the thing about it is, a book you know my drugs hell is not it's not but it's incredibly it's strong it's an amazingly strong voice very very funny and weirdly you're on her side all the way through it and she kind of comes without giving away too much she kind of comes through it she's staying with the parents and she's having to take xanax to take to cope with the fact that she's on um she's on three and andy's cock i can vouch for it two xanaxes and a glass of wine later i felt amazing xanax was like a shortcut out of the woods of addiction into the clearing of sobriety. Fucking Xanax. I could do this every month or so.

Get clean, let my dope tolerance drop so I wouldn't need to use as much to get high, save money, stay clean for long stretches, but still have dope when I needed it. I could use until Peter and I had babies and then slide right back into society, blend into Facebook with baby pictures, my hair in a baseball cap, complain about how tired I was in my status updates. Life would take over. And like a mountain climber, I would keep going. A stupid, idiotic mountain climber moving up very slowly up a big, dumb mountain, weighed down by a bag of shit, finding one foothold at a time just to turn around and do it all over again

backwards. All this until you wake up one day and you're old. Your kid has taken over and you become part of the shit they have to carry with them. Just like my mother haunting me. If only she was kind enough to become a memory. Memories didn't call. Memories didn't nag. Memories stayed golden and young and you kept the ones you wanted. Memories didn't have lesions on their brains and chairs in their showers. She used to be young and pretty. Did she know when she opened the oven to check on dinner that taking care of kids was how she was wasting the best years of her life?

That was what I was aspiring to do, but at least I knew it. At least I experienced college and watched enough television with female leads to know exactly what I would regret. She wasn't stupid. Having a family was a popular way to waste your life, so maybe it wasn't the worst way. You had to do something or do nothing. She knew she would have finite time to be in her physical prime, so why did I feel bad? Why did I have to be implicated? Why did I feel guilty that she had wasted it on me? She lived the life she wanted. It was her choice not to finish school, not to have a career,

to marry an old man she didn't love. She had her eyes wide open. All the pain went back to my mother. Freud didn't seem that deep. It was natural to contemplate the very beginning, the first person you ever met, whose job was to keep you alive when everything was brand new and you were perfect with all kinds of perfect futures.

I popped another Xanax. Things were going to be absolutely fine. Oh, I'm going to read that. It is really good. Can I just talk about something? I can't do it in a normal way. I have been really enjoying Chip Zdarsky's run on the spectacular Spider-Man, which is an adjacent title to the main arc of The Amazing Spider-Man.

And it's just very funny and contemporary. And it's just the best Spider-Man I've written. And you've always wanted to write a Spider-Man movie. I've always wanted to write a Spider-Man comic. And now the movies are obviously, they quite big have you ever if you have and um when i was uh sort of having what what's referred to as the beauty pageant with my with film and tv agents eight eight or so years ago um my this one agent the only agent to ever ask me what would you like your career to look like in 10 years time

and i said i would really like to write a spider-man film and she was the agent i ended up going with and recently she was like we've got a year and a half left we're gonna make this happen and meanwhile like some comic book writers who i i know who write for marvel they're like do you want me to send an email and now like now that there's like it's not a pipe dream and there's a possibility i'm freaking out guys because it's been so it's been so like in the distance of a future that will never happen that i feel like i've got stage fright when those when that second line of spider-man comics was introduced the idea was really to just get more spider-man comics out there right so stanley and Marvel knew that that was their big property.

So the idea was to double up the number of Spider-Man comics that they could sell every month. But over the years, they go in and out of a dance with one another, don't they? Right. And at the moment, it's quite interesting what you're saying that the amazing Spider-Man is. It's okay.

Right. But, you know, there's been what, nearly 50 years of peter parker you know and he hasn't aged a day but um it's it's really hard to kind of to keep it to keep it going and the amazing spider-man is like the arc of his life but the the the side titles allow allow writers to have fun with him so you know you'll have a run where he goes off and has like a six-part adventure with deadpool or wolverine and that's much more fun to read because it's not there are no stakes that feed into the larger picture when the spectacular spider-man run um kind of keeps him away from like all the avengers stuff because like you know he's he's he's part of the avengers

team so he'll go off and fight space aliens But the spectacular Spider-Man run kind of keeps him on the street level, which is the more fun Spider-Man, where he's fighting the Marvel Universe version of the Mafia, which is called the Magia, which I think is also the name of a coffee maker. Oh no, it's Gagia. Gagia Coffee Makers. But maybe we should have, this is a John Mitchison style link, but maybe we should have a coffee and drink it elsewhere and talk about comics and films. Yeah.

Hey, guys. This is so good. That's beautiful. That regular host that you know. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. I'm in.

Now, here are our sponsors telling you what to do. Nikesh. So, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer. So as we said earlier, this book came out about 15 years ago. It came out in the States first, appeared here a year later. It's a book of eight short stories. I will read out the blurb in a moment. But first, let's ask you, where how did you come to this book where did you hear about this book when did you first read this book it was actually probably i think

i picked up in 2012 i knew about zizi packer i'd read one of her short stories in the new yorker i thought it was great but i hadn't picked up the book and i think nivin gabindan and stewart evers were both telling me this is the book you need to read you know i'd i found a copy of it on um uh an a site that won't be named because it's not in print anymore i really remember reading it in like in my childhood home I'd gone to visit my dad and I had the book and I just sort of lay like we were in the process of moving my dad out the house and so I was on a mattress on the floor and like just picked the book up and read it over the course of an evening and then the next morning and I did that thing that you do increasingly rarely these days you get to the

last few words and then you just go back to the beginning and start again and i think it's one of those books that i'm really glad i reread quickly because um the language is so rich in it and she has this really wonderful kind of languorous sense of place that I think you know with short stories you know short stories that you need to read them quite slowly I think and so reading it twice quite quickly really kind of made it for me feel like a really powerful book I think I think she's amazing I think I think it is that a book that makes you go that really does make you go back back to the beginning again because it's such a it's one of those books where you sense she's so she really feel control that she's in control she's she's she knows what she's doing and each of the stories does add to your

to your sense of almost what she's trying to do with the whole collection and i think we get to the end but last story is a particularly brilliant story. And it sends you back. It did send me exactly that same thing, going back to the beginning again and thinking, I want to read a little bit more carefully because I think it's so dense what she's... We're going to do something

that we don't normally have the luxury of doing on Backlisted which is we've got a clip of the author reading from the book and from reading from the first story in the book which is called Brownie which I think we'll talk about a bit but I think it would be nice to hear ZZ Packer herself read us a paragraph or two from quite early in the story sorry in the UK we call her ZZ Packer herself read us a paragraph or two from quite early in the story. Sorry,

in the UK we call her ZZ Packer. Daphne hardly ever spoke, but when she did, her voice was petite and tinkly, the voice one might expect from a shiny new earring. She'd written a poem once for Langston Hughes Day, a poem brimming with all the teacher-winning ingredients, trees and oceans, sunsets and moons. But what cinched the poem for the grown-ups, snatching the wind from Octavia's musical ode to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were Daphne's last lines. You are my father, the veteran. When you cry in the dark, it rains and rains and rains in my heart. All the kids clapped, though none of them understood the poem, and I'd read encyclopedias the way others read comics, and I didn't get it. But those last lines pricked me. They were so eerie, and as my father and I ate cereal, I'd whisper over my Froot Loops like a mantra,

you are my father, the veteran. You are my father, the veteran, the veteran. Until my father, who is a Shakespearean actor and not a veteran, marched me up to my teacher one morning and said, can you tell me what the hell is wrong with this kid? You can hear what she reads all of that story on a University of California podcast. We'll have that link on the website. Brilliant. Oh, she reads it as well as you'd hoped she would read it as well.

It's brilliant. So rhythmical. I've never heard her read before. Also, that's quite different, that version, which was recorded about three or four years ago, from the printed version. Really? And I'd be fascinated to know if she's still working

the material despite it having been published 15 years ago or whether she read from a pre-edited galley i don't know it's but it's still you can hear or what a lot of writers do which is slightly re-edit for readings and performance yeah i i re-edit all the time i mean there's i there's that old quote i don't know someone told me it's attributed to oscar wilde but books are never finished or any ever abandoned um sadie smith says that she always knows when a book is finished it's two years after she's published it and she's about to go and read from it at a book festival because she's sitting back going oh i should have done that should have done that it's now now it's too late i can't you do get i mean zz packet is not known for her productivity

which there's a novel uh buffalo soldiers which has not appeared but it but she's been working on. I mean, but she hasn't published anything since. So it sounds to me like she probably does work over her stuff quite carefully. But we've got another clip later where she says in that that she's just trying to finish the book, and it's a big statement and a big piece of work. But she's out there. She's not like she's reclusive she's not reclusive i i sometimes wish i wrote slower i think i'd probably write too fast because my thing has always been to get drafts down quickly and then

edit them and edit them and edit them and edit them whereas i wish i spent more time with that first draft. And so I really respect writers who take their time because I think taking your time just gives you a bit more care with the language. And, you know, these aren't short stories. They're all, what, 5,000 to 8,000 words long short stories. They're all very long, but they don't feel careless. No, they pull off that great trick of feeling considered without feeling um um constrained right and there's lots of room as john was saying for the reader to wander around in the stories that's the thing i almost like most about them i mean the the

prose is terrific and i'm almost taking it for granted but I really loved the extent to which she didn't provide you with the ending you thought you might get the ending you might want or in several cases an ending that you would sort of finish the story and sit back and think what uh what did I just read where where am I supposed what am i who am i looking at but i love i love that so someone once told me that uh really good short stories tell you the middle of the story and they they allow the reader to kind of piece in the beginning of the end and i think she's she's really good at that she's really good at kind of just throwing you into the middle of a situation and often leaving it very very unresolved yeah but in not in a not in a not in an annoying

unresolved way i mean they're just that it's as good a collection of stories as i can remember reading for i mean ever really well they're, these are the problem we're talking about short stories on this. They're all great stories, and it's difficult not to jump around and say... This is the first time anybody's ever used talking birds as a brilliant device in a story that I can remember, which is the birds in the back of the car,

kind of, you know... The Ant of the Self is a story about a man that i think he's the only male narrator in the movie he drives his father ray bivins jr who is fond of referring to himself as ray bivins jr to washington dc to sell birds at the million man march i made the reason i'm able to say that with some clarity is I went through the book and made notes on what, if you had to write one line on each story, what is it about? And, of course, that's not what that story is about at all.

You know, that superficially is the MacGuffin. The selling birds on the Million Man March is the MacGuffin for the story, but it's not what the story's about. A lot of these stories seem to be about, like this one, like brownies. They seem to be, for want of a better term, they're sort of coming-of-age stories, aren't they? They're about the moments where the protagonist of each story, there's a little shift in how they look at the world

or how they look at their relationship with a parent or a... Yeah, there's a lot of, like, seeing behind the curtain of a parent or a guardian or a person in authority because, you know, there's also, like, these sort of flawed elders in the church who are often doing quite untoward things and, you know, I think the father-son relationship and to the self is really

beautiful and difficult as well. And there's the mother-daughter relationship in the last story and the one about Doris. That is wonderful. That broke me apart.

I'm going to read a little bit from Doris' coming. I don't want to do it yet. I think that was probably my favourite story. That's the eighth and final story in the collection. I thought that was... But also, it's such a brilliantly arranged collection because, in a sense, Doris is Coming, that story, it's about a young girl or a...

No, she's a high school student, right? 14, 13, 14? Yeah, 1961. 1961, who is watching the sit-ins on TV and decides to, well, we'll read a bit later, but decides that she will stage a sit-in. And again, it's like the moment of maturity, not just for her as an individual, but by extension for the community for the black community in the states the choice of year seems very specific you know that she will be in her

20s at the end of the decade but the really the genius the genius is also which is what why i love her writing is that it's also the year of the rapture okay that was new year's eve 1961 was when the rapture was supposed to happen and that was very important in the pentecostal community that she was that she's a member of it's just i mean to have that but those two experiences of of important experiences in in southern black culture culture being represented in the same story just seem to me to be proper fiction and really brilliantly done. There is anger in that story, but it's coming out of the can. She could hear the main church door open and felt a rush of cold air,

the jangle of keys being laid upon wood. The service wouldn't begin for another two hours or so, and she felt cheated that her quiet time was being disturbed. At first she thought it was her mother, then for a brief moment, Reverend Sykes. When Sister Bertha Watkins appeared at the far end of the aisle, she tried to hide her disappointment. Sister Bertha unbuttoned her coat, inhaling grandly the way she did before she began her long testimonies well are you ready almost ma'am i'm doing the dusting and polishing before sweep and mop no sister bertha smiles not are you finished are you ready for the rapture you know that's that's the that's the that's near the beginning of umis is Coming.

Nikesh, when you first read the book, so you said you read it like once, you read it again. Was there a particular story that stood out or was it the voice of the whole collection that really spoke to you? The thing that she's really good in all of the stories is she's really good at navigating silence. There's, you know,

there's a lot of silence in the book and she doesn't do that thing that most American writers do, which is sort of go into the internal monologue of those silence. She's really good at writing the movement of silence, a really incredible trick. Cause to, to, to describe that,

someone might go, well, that sounds boring. Like someone is narrating the movement of silence. No, like, you know, we are, incredible trick because to just to describe that someone might go well that sounds boring like someone is narrating the movement of silence no like you know we are we are silent for large parts of the day and our movements are mannered and considered and um i mean brownies is brilliant because it it navigates this incredible fallout of like some racial divisions in a brownie troop on a summer camp and you know

it strays so close to farce and never quite goes over into farce that is really funny the two women who were kind of there the authority thing

useless and crying. I mean, what Nikesh said, the awful thing about it is, what Nikesh says is right, that it's set up brilliantly to give you a big laugh on that, right? Yeah. So those girls are totally wrong-footed. Yeah. And then what it does brilliantly in the last couple of pages,

that story, is again this thing I was talking about earlier, that it kind of mutes the colours. You realise that the protagonist is accidentally looking at the world a different way. There's a brilliant line looking at the world a different way there's a brilliant line here at the end i now understood what my father meant and why he did it though i didn't like it when you've been made to feel bad for so long you jump at the chance to do it to others she's learned something really bleak about herself and other people as a result of what's been a bit of a lark and seems kind of farcical like you're saying such a good story i mean she's

just the best at ending stories i think i and that's one of the things i love most. But I thought also that the long speaking in tongues story, which is about the girl who, again, escaping from a kind of oppressive religious sort of environment and goes to try and find her mother in Atlanta. And that whole arriving in a city for the first time is unfamiliar. I might read a bit of that later. And then how she kind of gets sort of taken up by Desi, the kind of slightly creepy, apparently kind, maybe he is kind,

but the whole way of that, the complexity. She doesn't make any of that. It could so easily be shocking or ring sort of obvious notes, but she's such a subtle writer. And then the clarinet all the way, you find yourself in the story worrying about whether she's got a clarinet or not all the way through. That story, Speaking in Tongues,

that does a fantastic thing in the last few pages of where you've got the 14-year-old girl, Tia, as you say, who's run away. She's been taken in, in all senses, by a man called Desi and a woman called Marie. Or has she been taken in by Marie? And there's this terrible scene on the street, this fight, where I felt like the prose was really kicking in there. There's a real release of energy, like the whole story has been building, building, building, building.

And yet it doesn't quite... It's not an easy ending either. It's full of energy, but it doesn't run off in the direction you think it's going to. Again, brilliant. Nikesh, do you want to read us something? Yes, I do. energy but it doesn't run off in the direction you think it's going to again but in the case do you want to read us um something yes i do okay uh i'm going to read from the beginning of the ant of the self excellent opportunities my dad says after i bail him out of jail

he's banging words into the dash as if trying to get them through my thick skull. You've got to invest your money if you want opportunities. It's October of 95 and we're driving around Louisville, Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky in my mother's car. Who knows why he came down here 40 miles south of where he lives, but I don't ask questions that are sure to have too many answers. I just tried to get my father ray bivins jr back across the river to his place in indiana what i mean what i love about that is you get an entire history in that in that short bit you know yeah you've got the relationship with the mother set up the relationship with the father set up you've got what kind of person the father is you

know the the sort of the extraneous way that his full name is given, Raymond Binders, is brilliant. Also in that story, she does a great thing with that narrator, which is the narrator doesn't quite suffer blackouts, it seems to me, but there are little gaps for you as the reader, where you're not quite sure what's happened next, but like the father isn't there. He's been there and then he turns around and the father's gone. They have a row they have a round and then he's in another bar and it kind of yeah it's almost

he gets himself in such trouble at the march or people are kind of basically questioning his attitude yeah but what i love about that is he thinks the narrator thinks that he is the one who's in control but there are hints all the way through the story that things are getting away from him somewhat, right? Partly as a result of his dad's appalling behaviour, but maybe he himself has issues that he's not able to quite cope with. Yeah, it's one of those classic father-son relationships where your father has this hold over you. They can kind of make you regress just from, you know,

no matter what age you are, you will always be like 11 or like your worst age. And it's brilliant because he's a brilliantly ridiculous dad. This book starts with a quote by Alex Haley from the book Roots. And I'll just read it. Here it is. Join me in the hope that this story of our people can help to alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winners. And here's a clip of Zed Zed Packer talking about that quote and why she put that quote in front of it i'm writing these stories and the stories are predominantly these you know african-american young african-american characters almost always when you see a story it will start off with you

know she walked down the street and everyone assumes that the she is going to be white and uh not you know african-amerAmerican or not Chinese-American, whatever. And this idea that you have to kind of almost sort of erase that assumption from the beginning already implies a little bit of work. So for me, you know, I don't consider myself a protest writer or even a political writer. protest writer or even a political writer. But it does take on a sort of political edge in that you realize that what you're doing is you're trying to write from the point of view of the people who don't always win. And I don't even just mean the winners in terms of, you know, great battles or victories or anything like that, but the people, but just being able to get that sort of level of, to be able to take for granted that this is the person who's the she

this is the person who's the he or the protagonist unless otherwise named or unless otherwise elucidated and so that you're already sort of starting out at a kind of disadvantage because you're on the one hand i won't say being didactic but you're almost thrust in the role of educator and your job really is to just tell the story. I think that's a really interesting quote. You know, the extent to which the book is political and not political. What do you think? Well, I mean, that quote is pretty much why I wanted to do The Good Immigrant. It was to shift the default of what constitutes the universal narrative

i once wrote a short story for the book slam did a couple of anthologies i wrote a short story about a group a friendship group that is kind of crumbling everyone's grown up and they're all they're all falling apart and it traces backwards through to the moment they all meet in halls at university and have like the best night of their lives and you kind of then realize that everything that happens afterwards is about them trying to recapture that perfect first night that they met and um a review of this anthology one of the where they talked about my short story the the guy said that he found it hard to follow because of all the indian names i read that and i was like well you know one of them's bengali not all indian and um then he ended his review by saying he was heartened to

see that indians went through the universal experience as well and i thought whoa i didn't realize that the word universal didn't mean universal and um and i think you know listening to zz packer say that you know and say that about her characters and the assumptions that people make about the narrator i think that's really really important i've definitely sat in rooms where you know the i've written scripts i've read or the scripts I've written or books I've written or stories I've written where, um, Pete, you know,

commissioners or editors have said to me, but I feel uncomfortable that there, there are only two white people in this and they're both not very nice characters. So I've been like, well, you know, the, the,

why, why, why does that bother you? And I think that's because you got most narratives need a white character who who is good you know and um when when you when you read a book like this that comes with so much texture and nuance you know it's not about it's not necessarily about zz packer trying to give people necessarily the language to be able to understand what it is to be black in the 60s 70s or 80s or even 90s in america or specific the the specificity of being black and

from the south or being black and from atlanta georgia it all comes through through the language and you know but like i think the power of her her work is that she never needs to give you the language you need because she's good enough to just immerse you in the story. And I think, A, that's great writing. And B, that's because she gives no fucks about who is reading the book. And I think that's really important. I think there is a really fantastic balance of voice in this book that you wouldn't say it was a neutral voice but at the same time it's not overpowering as she just said there it's not didactic but it's but it's there it's an acceptance of the power relationship and attempt to redress it just a little bit from

doris is coming because i just thought this is i think just writing of the highest order because what she's doing is she she's she's doing it through the character she's not she's not a puppet master in that way so they're they're driving they've been to see a movie doris who's the main character in the book livia drove a turquoise and white mercury park lane a far cry from doris's father's huckmobile they saw splendor in the grass at the Vogue, Livia sitting in the coloured balcony with Doris. Finally, Alice came up too. It was the second movie Doris had seen since her family had joined the church. The first had been a French movie she saw for extra credit, the one time she'd gone against the church's teachings without confessing what she'd done. They drove from St Matthews to Germantown, covering the city. When they got to

Newburgh, Alice let out a long sigh. I bought my dress for the winter dance, she said, turning to Livia. It's a long satin sheath with roses on either side of the straps. The straps are that minty green colour everyone's wearing, but the rest is one long flesh-coloured sheath. Mama would die if she saw it, but it's what's bought is bought. Flesh-coloured, Doris said. I know, scandalous.

You mean the colour of your flesh, Doris said. Well, who else's would it be? Alice looked to Livia as if searching for a sane opinion. You mean your flesh colour and Livia's and Mr. Fott's, not mine. Alice stared at Doris. For the love of heaven, it's just a word, Livia said, but why use the word if it's not accurate? It's simply not the colour of everyone's flesh. Well, how should I say it? What should I say when describing it? Say, oh, I bought a dress the color of everybody else's skin except Doris's. I'm not the only one. I could say it was a flesh-colored dress and everyone would know what I was talking about. Everyone would know exactly what I was talking about. I'm sure they would, Alice, Livia said. She laughed and high and free everyone would alice pinched

her fingers together as though holding a grain of salt it's those little things doris why do your people concentrate on all those little itty bitty things it's just a great passage and i i like to concentrate on those little bitty things as well. I've done many an event where people have given us flesh-coloured microphones. And I've always said, not my flesh, my friend. Well, I think it's the thing that great writing does. And what she does is she pays attention. And it forces you to pay attention. I mean, that is sort of what writing is about, I think,

is noticing the subtlety the complexity but it's it's i can remember what the challenges were publishing this so like i said i worked for the publisher published this yes okay that's interesting and the and the challenge then is actually funny enough i don't think would be quite the same now it which is like this was 15 years ago just selling short stories, which is traditionally quite difficult, has probably become slightly easier in the last few years. But in 2003, it was hard. It was a hard thing to do because at whatever level you're selling not one story, but eight, and you're selling stories in which the narrative is not the most important element.

Lots of people buy books to read plot. Yeah. And so, you know, the idea that people didn't want to read short stories was ingrained in agenting publishing retailing it's taken the last few years the internet small presses to really turn that around and start putting stories in front of people and people responding to them you know it's the i i i'm all quite interested in sort of seeing if there's any mileage behind kickstarting the slow reading movement. Because I think reading short stories and reading individual poems in poetry collections forces you to slow down, I think. It was really interesting seeing who won the Man International Booker that prize, because it's a book that forces you to read it slowly

and um it's lovely you know when when we have everything so quickly available you know when you can like binge watch stuff and when you you know you kind of when books have sort of heralded is unputdownable and i read it in one sitting. Actually, I want to read books that make me read closely and make me read them deeply. I don't want to read a book where I'm just kind of moving from plot point to plot point to plot point just to get to the bottom of the page just so I can turn it. Obviously, there are times where I do want to read that.

And watch it. I agree with you. I don't always want to be gripped. You know, sometimes if I be gripped yeah you know sometimes if i'm gripped by a book i think someone's played a trick on me yeah i mean do you think she's obviously a writer who takes immense care sentence by sentence level do you think that that that degree of of control and of concentration might make it more difficult for her to finish a novel i'm just i'm just it's curious that she hasn't written hasn't published anything i mean you've

done you've done someone who's done screenplays and novels and short stories do you think you get you need to get into a sort of different headspace to work on a novel in isolation for a very long time and i think it it becomes hard to kind of unpack it other than like this huge body of work and and some i think you work on it long enough and it feels unwieldy yeah um because the one who wrote destiny you say i mean that's been a you that's that's you started on that and you when you were in your 20s yeah my second year of uni um and it took me years and years and years but i i persisted with it i knew that i wanted to do stuff with those characters i didn't always put them in the right situations i didn't always make like puppet master

master them around in the way that they needed to. But, you know, that was the book that I was really struggling to finish. And, you know, I think about, so Akhil Sharma wrote, what was it, Family Life, which for me is one of the best books I've read in the last decade. And I remember talking to him about it and he said the first draft of it was like 700 pages long and it was, everything was on the page. It was, it was like, it sort of, there was some, it was somewhere between an autobiography of a very specific time in his life and this sort of unwieldy auto fiction. And the thing that he needed to do was just slow down and just whittle it down and down and down. And it took him seven years which i think is not that actually that long i've had a great story i'm not going to say what the what

the book is because it was told this was told to me privately but but one of my favorite novels of the last 10 years uh i was talking to the agent of that book and i was saying god i love that book so much amazing what's so great about it is it's so punchy. It's been taken. It's really disciplined. And she said, yeah, it's about 70,000 words. Do you know how long the first draft was? Half a million.

Half a million down to 70. Wow. And done with it. I suspect that she's probably got a massive BMF. I never want to read it. Author and editor working together. I suspect that she's probably got a massive BMF. I mean, the story, it sounds fascinating. It's the black soldiers from the south who went west. Well, I said earlier, didn't I, that she isn't reclusive.

We've got one more clip. This is from a panel event that she did at Shakespeare and Co., our friend Shakespeare and Co. in Paris. So this was a panel on fiction under Trump. OK, and it had several American writers and Zizi Packer was one of them. And, you know, we know more now than we knew then. But this is what she had to say a year and a half ago. You know, we know more now than we knew then, but this is what she had to say a year and a half ago. Northrop Frye used to talk about how fiction is not a lie. It's not just saying, oh, here's the fact and you're going to tell the opposite of a fact.

You're going to tell a lie. Fiction is a hypothetical imagining of reality such that it can actually be more available to the audience than reality itself. And it speaks in this very oblique form so that you can actually access it. What you really have now with Trump is that you have someone who is not just telling lies, but he's actually providing this sort of hypothetical framework in the way that fiction does so that he uses the power of a sort of fictionalizing a kind of reality that we have so that we're lulled by it and so that we begin to accept it as reality. So he actually is, I will say, I would never go so far as to say that I think Trump is smart or whatever, but he, in terms of the devices that he uses to be able to grip various people's imaginations or even sort of mitigate and anesthetize other people's imaginations.

And I mean, you know, the liberal elite, where you're talking about tweets and tweets and tweets and you're not talking about other things, you know, is amazing. And we really need to be on watch for that. What she's saying, John saying is trump is a master story oh god yeah but i mean that's pretty it's true though it's true it's true he's totally reading he's he's the guy who's running the narrative absolutely ahead of the game i think and i mean the head of the game do you think giving Garth Marenghi a lot of credit but this I'm this book struck me as being ahead of the game this book shouldn't

be out of print this book should be available for people to go and buy and read right now it felt really I love I love it it's part of the canon yeah right if I was if I was a creative writing teacher this this would be part of that canon And that's why you give it to people. A, it's a great book, but it's also, if you want to know, if you want to know how to write great stories,

God, I mean, you know, this, these, like I say, as good as I can, as I've read in a long time.

Nikesh, have you got something to, you could read us, just to take us out with? Yes, I do. That's, that's brilliant.

Um, where are we? So I just want to read this short bit from Brownies, which is very funny. Serious Chihuahua, Octavia added. And though neither Arnetta nor Octavia could spell Chihuahua had ever seen a Chihuahua, trisyllabic words had gained a sort of exoticism

within our fourth grade set at Woodrow Wilson Elementary. Arnetta and Octavia would flip through the dictionary determined to work the vulgar sounding words like jubitee and asinine into conversation. Caucasian chihuahuas, Arnetta said. That did it. The girls in my troop turned elastic. Jemma and Elise doubled up on one another like inextricably

linked intertwined kites. Octavia slapped her belly. Janice jumped straight up in the air, then did it again as if to slam dunk her own head. They could not stop laughing. No one had laughed so hard since a boy named Martez had stuck a pencil in the electric

socket and spent a whole day with a strange grin on his face. It's just a joy. It's a joy, this book. Huge thanks to Nick Esch, to our producer, Nicky Birch, to Unbound, and to our sharply turned out sponsor, Spoke. We've just got time to slip in a quick Unbound project worth backing. It's Tales from the Colony, The Lost bohemia of Bacon, Belcher and Borde, planned to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the closure of London's infamous arts establishment, the Colony Room in Soho. Former member Darren Caulfield has written the authorised and hair-raising history

of its 60 years, a drinking club where more romances, more deaths, more horrors and more sex scandals took place than anywhere else. And if they didn't actually happen there, they were definitely planned there. Lovers of a seedy underbelly look no further. And remember, if you pledge for it or any of the other 322 Unbound projects currently live on the site, you will get free postage on that pledge by entering the special code PACKER as you check out. You'll be able to download the podcast plus follow up all the links, clips and suggestions for further reading on our website, backlisted.fm.

And of course, you can still contact us on Twitter, Facebook and Boundless. And we hope you've enjoyed it as much as we all have. If so, please consider leaving a review on with as many stars as you feel able to spare, iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for for listening we'll be back in a fortnight until then goodbye goodbye you can choose to listen to backlisted with or without adverts.

If you prefer to listen to it without adverts, you can join us on our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash backlisted, where you also get bonus content of two episodes of Locklisted, the podcast where we talk about the books and films and music that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks.