Day three of ABA Snow Days began with a thought-provoking keynote panel on “Storytelling in the Cultural Moment,” with four authors in dynamic conversation about upcoming fiction. Emma Straub, co-owner of Brooklyn’s Books Are Magic, moderated the discussion with Jennifer Egan, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and Celeste Ng. All four had read each other’s work to prepare, and they dropped tantalizing hints (but no spoilers).
Straub’s fourth novel, This Time Tomorrow (Riverhead Books, May 2022), considers second chances: her protagonist, a 40-year-old woman with an ailing father, goes to sleep in 2020 and wakes up in 1996, age 16, her father still healthy. What does this wishful plot tell us about our present day? “The older I get, the more I understand novels are a product of the time in which they are written,” Straub said, before asking how the zeitgeist influences the panelists’ storytelling.
Novelist, journalist, and former PEN America president Jennifer Egan jumped in first. “Fiction is the artifact of the collective dream life of the culture that makes it,” she said. Like Straub’s This Time Tomorrow, Egan’s The Candy House (Scribner, April 2022) concerns the remembrance of things past, but Egan’s conceit is a utopian technology, Own Your Unconscious, that enables users to download their own and others’ memories. “I came to it out of a desire to look at the world through the eyes of someone else,” Egan said. “Access to other consciousnesses is of course the thing that fiction does.”
Egan began writing The Candy House in 2012 with the notion of a “rupture” that (like 9/11 in her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad) “created some sort of before-and-after” for her characters. Wrapping it up amid the pandemic and other global shocks, Egan felt her fiction was channeling “seismic events. In our cultural dream lives, we’ve been anticipating something.”
“All of these novels feel like they are about our time,” Celeste Ng agreed. Ng, whose Little Fires Everywhere has been adapted as a limited series on Hulu and whose third novel, Our Missing Hearts (Penguin) drops on October 4, said the panelists’ work—from sci-fi to historical fiction—speaks to our collective now. In Our Missing Hearts, Ng imagines a dystopian future America in which revolutionaries’ children can be removed from their families; under this threatening regime, a Chinese American boy copes with the absence of his mother, a dissident poet whose work is deemed unpatriotic.
Straub, who said she was “slipped a very early copy” of Our Missing Hearts, told Ng that this account of repression rings all too true: “It’s fair to say it’s in a world that runs alongside our contemporary world,” Straub suggested.
“I tried to imagine a world turned up a little bit,” Ng replied. “The world kept shifting so that it caught up to the world I had imagined.” Pandemic-spurred violence against Asian Americans “seemed like something I had to acknowledge in my fiction,” Ng added, and it “worked its way into my book without me even expecting it. That hasn’t happened to me before.” She has noticed a change in her “risk tolerance: how closely I’m willing to look at things that make me uncomfortable” for the sake of addressing injustice.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine, whose short story collection Sabrina & Corina was a National Book Award finalist, reckons with representation and equity too, albeit from a historical perspective. Her debut novel, Woman of Light (One World, June 2022), takes place in Denver (Fajardo-Anstine’s home city) during the Depression era. Through the experiences and visions of protagonist Luz “Little Light” Lopez, Fajardo-Anstine depicts five generations of an Indigenous Chicano family.
Egan told Fajardo-Anstine that Woman of Light “feels really inhabited in a way I found striking and rich; it feels fully metabolized,” and Fajardo-Anstine explained that the book is grounded in archival research and her own place-based memories. Historical research fed her passion for "archival justice and what it means to research as a marginalized person in these spaces,” she said, and it enabled her to recognize parallels between 1930s protest movements and 2020’s uprisings. She marvels at the “disconnect between these two timelines” and reflects that “there has to be a way to a more just and equitable future” through the stories we tell.
“I’m not trying to teach a lesson, I’m trying to expand consciousness,” Fajardo-Anstine commented, and at this, her co-panelists took to the Zoom session’s chat.
“Can we please get that on a bumper sticker or T-shirt or both?” Ng posted.
“The One World team is on it, Celeste!” chatted Ruth Liebmann, Penguin Random House v-p/director of account marketing.
If this chat reminded viewers that the panel was pre-recorded, some saw this as a virtue, not a flaw. “Who would have thought that one of the few advantages of doing this on Zoom … is that the panelists can comment on the discussion while it's happening?” commented David Sandberg of Cambridge, Mass.’s Porter Square Books.
If only for an hour, the panelists were in two places at once, a sensation familiar to writers and readers of fiction. Straub briskly wrapped up the session, exhorting booksellers to “buy one million copies. That’s one million per.”
