Just as I am about to interview this year’s Women’s prize winner, debut American novelist Virginia Evans, at the party on a drizzly evening in a leafy London square, we are interrupted because someone wants to congratulate her. The fan is Richard Curtis.

A warm-hearted weepy with a sprinkling of gentle humour, Evans’s prize-winning novel The Correspondent is prime Curtis material. In fact, he is too late. “I think he just wants to be my friend,” Evans jokes modestly – Notting Hill is her favourite movie of all time. A film of The Correspondent is already in the pipeline with Jane Fonda playing 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp, the crotchety correspondent of the title. Evans will be one of the producers and will have a cameo appearance, “walking a dog or something”.

It is a far cry from when Evans wrote the novel in a closet (she removed her husband’s clothes) over nine months in a rented house in North Carolina, during the pandemic in 2020. She never expected her story, written entirely in letters, of a former legal attorney, to be published, let alone become a word-of-mouth hit, which spent 32 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

But the author, who turned 40 earlier this month, is no overnight success. She has been writing for two hours a day, between 5am and 7am, since she was 19, completing seven unpublished novels before The Correspondent. “It is my debut,” she says. “But it doesn’t feel like the first baby, it feels like the eighth baby. It feels as if I’ve always done this.”

Over the years she has received “thousands of rejections” and sent letters to every literary agency in Manhattan “at least once”, she says, before trying those in London and finally finding Canadian agent Hilary McMahon, who recognised that she “had what it takes”. But still The Correspondent wasn’t an easy sell. “It took months, and there was a lot of silence and a lot of ‘nos’,” she says. “It just felt like rejection and ultimately failure was my thing. And it was for a long time – until it wasn’t.”

During this time she did a number of “paycheck jobs” – including working for a lawyer and a surgeon and as a barista – while bringing up her two children, Jack, 13, and Mae, 10, without any childcare. At the point when she moved her desk into the closet, she was contemplating starting law school. But somehow she never gave up. With each rejection, “I felt, ‘OK, I can do better and I have to do better,’” she says. “If you’re a writer, you just can’t not write.”

The novel’s form was inspired by Helene Hanff’s 1970 epistolary memoir 84 Charing Cross Road, which Evans read in a single day during lockdown. She found it so comforting she wished it had lasted longer. So she set about writing a novel in letters that would take in a whole life. John Williams’s 1965 novel Stoner also served as a template of how to turn a seemingly unremarkable life into quietly heartbreaking fiction.

Ornery and outspoken, Sybil, a long-divorced mother of three, is an unlikely heroine in the mould of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (it is surely no accident that the new paperback cover bears striking resemblances to those of Strout’s). Past tragedy, late romance, betrayal, revenge and gardening club rivalry are all documented in her correspondence: letters to her childhood friend Rosalie, her brother Felix, a troubled teenager, a Syrian refugee, as well as real-life figures including Ann Patchett, Joan Didion and George Lucas.

“I love any book that plays with the format on the page,” Evans says of her decision to tell Sybil’s story in letters. “I think it’s very generous to your reader to give the eye a break. There’s something about letters that feels like a trick. You fly through because the visuals are easier, but the content is not less.”

Despite its warmth and light touch, Evans describes The Correspondent as a book about grief and disappointment. Early in the novel we discover that Sybil’s son Gilbert died many years ago in an accident. While she was writing, the six-year-old son of some very close friends died. Suddenly she felt what it would feel like to lose a child “as closely as I could without it being my own”. When she returned to the book “the echo of his life and the echo of the manner of his death and what it does to a family,” resonated in every passage. She asked her friends’ permission to include Wade in the acknowledgments. “They read it and they said that they would be honoured,” she says. “When the book came out, it wasn’t a big thing. But now it’s all over the world. His mom frequently reaches out to me and says, ‘every time I see the book somewhere, I just think that these people also now know of his existence.’ So that is really one of the best things about this success.”

Maggie O’Farrell has said that she delayed writing her former Women’s prize winner and now Oscar-winning film Hamnet, about the death of Shakespeare’s only son from the plague, until her own son was safely past the age at which he died. Evans took the opposite approach – and made Gilbert eight, the same age as her own son Jack at the time she was writing. She listened to an interview with Zadie Smith in which the novelist said of the maxim that you should write what you know, that you should also write what you fear, because they are equally vivid in your mind. “I realised that it’s so true,” she says. “I could only write that grief accurately by trying to get as close to the thing as I could.”

One of three siblings, Evans grew up in Maryland. It wasn’t a particularly bookish household. But, like Sybil, she has always written letters, especially to authors she admires. Ann Patchett became a pen pal and is now a friend and supporter of the novel. Evans had a little uneasiness about the imaginary letters from Didion and Larry McMurty included in the novel. Both authors replied to fanmail and she was careful to make sure they were based on things they had written. “I love to receive a letter,” she says. “It’s like an artefact. I have some letters that are real treasures.” Now she is inundated with letters and has to have help to reply to them all.

For all its sadness, she wanted the novel to have an “uplift”, she says gesturing with her hands. “A lot of books, you get to the end and you feel, ‘Oh dear, this is very, very bleak.’” She thinks this hopefulness may account for why the novel has struck such a chord, especially today. Redemption is unfashionable in fiction, she admits, which she worried might count against The Correspondent. “It says something really beautiful to me that so many people were willing to entertain my book. A book about hope and a book about forgiveness and a book about grief and disappointment. That those things are so valued makes me feel quite optimistic.”

Its success means she can finally write full-time, although she sticks to two or three-hour stretches once the children have gone to school. And she has come out of the closet: she now has a room of her own – “a little porch”. She is well into a new novel, about making a movie. But she still can’t quite believe in her own triumph. Recently she asked her agent: “’Do you think this thing will sell?’ She laughed at me, said, ‘Yeah, now it will sell. Everything will sell.’”

Israel’s attack on Iran is only the most recent example of its degeneration in recent decades, coming on top of its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, genocide in Gaza, invasion of Syria and relentless bombardment of Lebanon. The fact that the US joined in this illegal war confirmed to many in the region what they have long suspected: that the country is an outpost of western imperialism in the Middle East.

The state of Israel, which arose from the ashes of the Holocaust 77 years ago, has received an unprecedented degree of international sympathy and support ever since. This support was partly due to western guilt and partly due to the perception of the Jewish state as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. The country’s Declaration of Independence promised to uphold “the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of race, creed or sex”. In the early years of statehood, Israel was seen in the west as an icon of liberal, progressive and egalitarian society.

Today, it is widely regarded as an immoral, violent, cruel and oppressive apartheid state. The Israeli response to the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 was a major milestone in the gradual slide to its status as an international pariah. Israel claimed the right to self-defence, but proceeded to act in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law. The international court of justice in The Hague found that there was a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and ordered Israel to take a series of measures to stop it. Israel, as is its wont, ignored the ruling. A UN commission concluded that Israel was, in fact, guilty of genocide. The international criminal court issued a warrant for the arrest of the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes. The Israeli state thus stands credibly accused of war crimes, of crimes against humanity, and even of the crime of crimes – genocide.

The moral and political degradation of Israel is the subject of this remarkable book. The author, Omer Bartov, has impeccable credentials for writing it: he was born on a kibbutz, he served as an officer in the IDF, and is currently professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University in the US. It is dedicated to his father, Hanoch Bartov, “the last Zionist”, a reference to the liberal brand of Zionism to which the whole family were evidently dedicated. Yet this book is written more in sorrow than in anger. Its goal is not to condemn Zionism but to explain its evolution from a dream to a nightmare.

To do so, Bartov goes back to the formation of Israel in 1948. In a chapter entitled The Missing Constitution, he bemoans the failure of the founding fathers to resolve the question of how a multi-ethnic state can remain both Jewish and democratic; in other words, their failure to square the circle of ethno-nationalism and pluralism.

Had a written constitution in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence been adopted, he argues, and had generations of Israelis been raised with respect for the constitution and pride in a bill of rights for all human beings, “the creeping racism of Israeli society might have been tempered, and the astonishing indifference to the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza and the daily crimes and pogroms on the West Bank might have elicited a greater sense of scandal”. Maybe. History does not disclose its alternatives. Arguably, however, Bartov does not go back far enough in history to explore the roots of Israeli racism. Zionism is a self-avowed settler-colonial movement and its principal political progeny – the state of Israel – is a settler-colonial state. The logic of settler-colonialism is the elimination of the natives in order to take over the land and its resources. Ethnic cleansing is the means by which this goal is achieved. In 1948, the newly born state of Israel carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine: 750,000 Palestinians became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. This is what Palestinians call the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe”. From the point of view of the victims, the viciousness of Zionism is nothing new; they have known it all along.

Moreover, the Nakba was not a one-off event; it is an ongoing process. This process reached its climax in Gaza in the aftermath of the Hamas attack. Israel’s original aim was to depopulate the whole of the Gaza Strip, with its 2.3 million inhabitants, by pushing them across the international border into northern Sinai. When this plan was resisted by Egypt, Israel resorted to the wholesale destruction of Gaza to make it uninhabitable. As Bartov notes, ethnic cleansing can escalate into genocide, and genocide in Gaza was accompanied by the intensified ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.

As a historian, Bartov believes that the first step in building a better future is understanding the hopes and aspirations of the other, as well as the errors and sins of the past. One hopeful conclusion that he draws from Israel’s campaign in Gaza is that, in the long term, it will liberate Israel itself from its status as a unique state rooted in the Holocaust. This will hardly help the 73,000 Palestinian victims, but it does give rise to a faint hope that the licence that Israel has enjoyed throughout its history may be expiring.

Anyone seeking an explanation of Israel’s “fall from grace” will find no better guide than this perceptive, sophisticated, erudite, elegantly written and strikingly fair-minded book. Even traditional supporters of Israel, who are feeling discomfort, perhaps even disgust, at its recent atrocities, may find in Omer Bartov, to borrow the title of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon’s famous 12th-century book, A Guide for the Perplexed.

In 1845 British citizens and companies were already legally prohibited from owning or buying enslaved people overseas, yet that year 385 captives were “transferred” to a British mining company in Brazil named St John d’El Rey.

Despite a global campaign waged by the UK against slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, the move was not technically illegal because the enslaved people were not sold but “rented” – a practice permitted overseas under the 1843 Slave Trade Act.

There was a maximum term of 14 years, after which they should all have been freed – but that did not happen. The British ambassador to Brazil became aware of the case but, citing a lack of evidence, looked the other way.

It was only more than 30 years later, when it was brought to light by a Brazilian abolitionist, that the 123 survivors were finally freed in 1879. The vast majority, however, had died in captivity.

The case is one of the most notorious examples of British involvement in illegal enslavement in Brazil, said historian Joseph Mulhern – and a stark symbol of how, even after the UK Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, British citizens and companies profited from slavery in Latin America’s biggest country for another half century.

“These connections [between the UK and Brazilian slavery] are very much overlooked,” said Mulhern, who recently published the book British Entanglement with Brazilian Slavery – Commerce, Credit and Complicity in Another Empire, c. 1822–1888.

Britons learn about the country’s involvement with slavery “almost as a self-congratulatory narrative”, said Mulhern, as if the country had been a “self-appointed moral arbiter in the demise of the slave trade and slavery – despite the fact that the UK was one of the biggest countries involved in the slave trade.”

In 1831 after intense pressure from the UK, Brazil banned the trafficking of enslaved Africans. For about five years, the new law was enforced, but it was later widely ignored, which is why it became known as a law “for the English to see” – giving rise to an expression still used to refer to measures taken merely for appearances.

In his book, Mulhern shows that the disregard for the law was made possible by British merchants in Brazil who, by supplying goods and long-term credit, enabled a new class of traffickers to emerge and operate illegally. British “officials in Brazil and their superiors in London were all too aware of the intricate connections between British commercial interests and the Brazilian slave trade,” he wrote.

The trade only effectively ended in 1850 with a new law – ironically, also under pressure from the UK – but only after about 750,000 Africans had been illegally brought to Brazil since 1831.

Earlier phases of Mulhern’s research at Durham University’s department of history revealed how British banks profited from slavery in Brazil.

British financial institutions treated enslaved people as “collateral assets” for loans and mortgages. When debtors defaulted, the banks forced auctions to recover their capital – at one such sale in Rio de Janeiro in 1878, a 22-year-old mother, Caetana, was separated from her three-year-old son, Pio.

The book also includes a rare “census”, compiled at the request of Britain’s Foreign Office in 1848 and 1849, listing all “subjects” who owned enslaved people in Brazil.

Despite under-reporting, the document recorded 3,445 enslaved people held by British interests, more than half belonging to mining companies such as St John d’El Rey, which would only close more than a century later, in 1985.

The scandal of the rented enslaved people was exposed by the prominent Brazilian abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco, and is regarded as one of the trigger events that would ultimately lead Brazil to abolish slavery in 1888 – the last country in the Americas to do so.

Although the majority of enslaved people held by Britons were owned by companies, many small traders were also involved, including the owner of a pub.

“Even some of the very poorest British immigrants owned enslaved people,” said Mulhern, who in the book debunks a myth widely circulated at the time that Britons were “benevolent masters”.

“An analysis of the treatment of those enslaved, including illegal enslavement, acts of physical violence and sexual assault, quickly dispels that myth,” he wrote.

My earliest reading memory
Asking my mom if she could stop reading my bedtime book to me and just let me read it on my own, since I felt she was going too slowly. The book was either Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or its sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, both by Roald Dahl.

My favourite book growing up
I loved Stuart Little, and all his small, clever things – his tiny canoe, his tiny sailboat. He had such a relaxed demeanor and was so dapper! I also loved Mary Norton’s The Borrowers series – tiny people living under the floorboards and improvising household goods out of “borrowed” safety pins and match boxes and so on. Clearly I had a thing for miniatures.

The book that changed me as a teenager
Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories, because he was having such a good time and seemed so so smart, but was also mischievous and irreverent. It may sound corny but these stories made me grasp the existence of a world of art and literature. And Barthelme lived in Houston, where I was growing up, yet he was a major world writer.

The writer who changed my mind
In the early 90s, while I was in graduate school, I read Sigrid Nunez’s short story Chang, which later became a portion of her first book, A Feather on the Breath of God. “Chang” had a seismic effect on me. Up to that point, I can’t recall having ever seen a multiracial character in fiction. I was so accustomed to the default whiteness of fictional characters that I didn’t even notice the absence of characters from other backgrounds. And even as I was trying at that time to write short stories about my father’s life in Korea, I would give those characters white-sounding, European-sounding names, as if I was hoping to disguise their specificity. It really pains me now to look back on this tendency in my writing, which proceeded directly from the sorts of writers I was taking as models, like Virginia Woolf and Henry James. When I read Sigrid’s story I was astonished that the narrator was the daughter of a white European woman and a brown Asian man – just like me! I hadn’t realised this sort of character was possible. It’s sort of heartbreaking that my thinking was so constricted, but the disruption to that thinking was thrilling.

The book that made me want to be a writer
I wanted to be a writer from such an early age it’s impossible to choose a single book to hold responsible, but the book that made me want to be a certain kind of writer was To the Lighthouse. I so desperately wanted to write the way Virginia Woolf does in that book that it made my writing insufferable for a very long time.

The book I reread
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, which I despised at school, but now I’ve come to love the way I love certain comfort foods. It’s not the most nutritious and in some ways it’s repulsive, but the deep familiarity of it always hit the spot.

The author I came back to
Charles Dickens. For so long I associated him with unbearable Christmas television specials, so I didn’t actually sit down and try reading him until shockingly late, and then I was enthralled. I read Bleak House for the first time during the pandemic – it was one of the great reading experiences of my life.

The book I could never read again
Anything by Tom Robbins. Another Roadside Attraction, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Jitterbug Perfume: they seemed great in my teens but now even just the titles make me cringe.

The book I discovered later in life
Homer’s Odyssey. Obviously I’d heard of it and must have read it for the first time in college, but it wasn’t until recently that I became completely fascinated by it and started wanting to reread it in different translations.

The book I am currently reading
I recently finished JA Baker’s The Peregrine, which is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. It’s quite short, but the writing is so uncategorisable,immersive and transformative that I felt as if I’d been sucked into a different time-medium.

Matt Giles, the thirtysomething protagonist of The Long Shoe, is having a run of bad luck. Shortly after losing his job as a bathroom salesman, he learns that he and his girlfriend Harriet are being evicted from their flat. Can life get any worse? Apparently, it can. Matt finds a note from Harriet saying she has left him and that he shouldn’t contact her. But then he receives a call from a stranger offering him a job that comes with a luxury apartment, leading him to wonder if his fortunes are turning.

Perhaps Harriet will come back if she knows they have a fancy new home. The third mystery novel from comedian Bob Mortimer comes with his trademark quirky touches including a talking animal in the form of Matt’s cat, Goodmonson, and whimsical metaphors; for Matt, trying to place a familiar face is akin to “trying to find a mouse’s handbag in a builder’s skip”.

The narrative is built around the alternating viewpoints of Matt, Harriet and their neighbour Carol, a sharp-tongued divorcee. While Mortimer reads Matt’s chapters, Arabella Weir gives voice to Carol, whose liking for a younger man frequently lands her in trouble. Harriet, who we soon discover hasn’t left Matt at all but has been the victim of a crime, is read by Diane Morgan, whose delivery is as drily funny as you’d expect from the star of Philomena Cunk. If the plot strains under the weight of numerous contrivances, the surreal humour and sharp performances will be enough to keep you listening.

Available via Simon & Schuster, 7hr 25min

Further listening

Every Kind of People: A Journey into the Heart of Care Work
Kathryn Faulke, Penguin Audio, 9hr 48min
By turns poignant, funny and uplifting, this memoir by Faulke, a home care-worker, lifts the lid on the lives of the old and infirm and the people who tirelessly tend to them. Narrated by Ayesha Antoine.

The Mighty Red
Louise Erdrich, Little, Brown Audio, 11hr 27min
Marin Ireland reads this sweeping story of secrets and regret from the author of The Plague of Doves. In the Red River valley in North Dakota, a bride and groom with very different expectations for the future are set to marry.

Trope, POV, backstory, character arc. In the 30 years since I was a student of that benign, pipe-smoking, elbow-patched man of letters Malcolm Bradbury, the private language of creative writing workshops has taken over the world.

What writers used to say to small circles of students in an attempt to help them improve their storytelling technique has become a familiar way, often parodic and self-knowing, of interpreting the grand and not-so‑grand narratives of our time. “Don’t worry about Liz Truss’s YouTube series – she’s just having a main character moment.”

The most intense distillation of this system of thought (if you can even call it that) has always been the craft book, the writing manual. These are sometimes written by the most successful in the profession (like Ursula K Le Guin’s Steering the Craft) or the most successful at advising the profession (Robert McKee’s Story) but most often they are put together by novelists and screenwriters towards the close of their academic careers as creative writing tutors. John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction is the grandaddy of this subgenre.

With A Long Game, Elizabeth McCracken has come pretty late to the party. And she’s determined to liven things up. For a start, she does not agree with craft books, either their sentiments or their usual tone: “chipper, cheerleaderish, generally with an encouraging second-person narrator meant to make the whole exhausting process of writing a book seem possible”. It’s obvious she’s thinking of such motivational titles as Walter Mosley’s This Year You Write Your Novel.

We know from her big entrance – sentence one, page one – that McCracken, novelist, memoirist and former tutor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is going to cause more than a few cocktails to be spat out or spilled. “Nobody knows how to write a book,” is how she starts. “I don’t like craft books. It’s possible that I’ve never read one through.” She proceeds to demonstrate how she has more than a few thoughts on the cosy consensus that preceded her. She’s a self-confessedly epigrammatic writer, and her quips yearn to be underlined: “To feel ashamed about writing isn’t interesting, but writing about shame is fascinating.”

In this, she’s not your usual wise old literary hand. Instead, she is naughty, perverse, quietly exhibitionist and bracingly unashamed. She reminds me of the teenage older sister of one of my best friends at school. She lived in a world I didn’t. She behaved or misbehaved just as she chose; and sometimes she did the wrong thing, the bad thing, because it was more interesting.

McCracken’s is the naughty older sister view of writing. And I agree with it. Writing isn’t about compiling a list of rules and then obeying them. If it were that, then none of the really great writers I’ve ever read would have been interested in it. Not for half a day. Writing is a form of sustained mischievous truancy. It’s not about being good.

This attitude will be amazingly freeing for many rule-haunted writers. If you are being poisoned by a particularly cliched piece of workshop feedback, “Show, don’t tell” or “Write what you know”, McCracken will supply an antidote. It will be intense, distilled from experience, and the inoculation may cause you pain. But afterwards, you’ll stop sweating and shivering, and get on with living. Here McCracken is on that most hated and hackneyed piece of advice, “Write every day”: “Every-day writers have a clear answer to the question, How will you get your work done? Me, I harness the power of my own self-loathing.”

Not your usual piece of creative writing workshop advice, but true to the particular insanity of this scribbled life.

The American author Louis Sachar’s most celebrated book, 1998’s YA novel Holes, was a huge word-of-mouth success on both sides of the Atlantic. Its short, punchy chapters tell the story of plump, hapless Stanley Yelnats, sent to a summer camp for wayward boys, where a terrifying Warden has peculiar ideas about character reformation. The 5ft-deep holes the boys are required to dig turn out to have a surprising purpose. Shifts of time, register and perspective render a simple premise mesmerisingly intricate. It has peril, love, crime, wickedness, redemption and friendship in, well, spades.

A quarter of a century later, Sachar has written his first supposedly adult novel, in which many of the same ingredients reappear. A man “dressed like a typical American tourist”, but with an odd habit of storing cake crumbs in the pocket of his hoodie, has arrived at the castle of the title, filled with curiosity to see how much has changed in the past 500 years. He seems to know intimate details about daily life back then in the court of King Sandro, Queen Corinna and the headstrong teenage princess, Tullia. Anatole, the king’s bumbling magician and alchemist, was fast losing prestige due to his abject failure to turn black sand, brought in from Iceland at huge expense, into gold. But the magician evidently achieved one stunning success, for Anatole is our present-day narrator. Grisly legends have built up around the castle, as eagerly related by the tour guide, but are full of errors. Anatole decides to recount the real story.

This former contemporary and rival of Leonardo da Vinci, now an immortal wanderer, explains how the near-bankrupt kingdom of Esquaveta depended for survival on a dynastic marriage between Princess Tullia and Prince Dalrympl of wealthy Oxatania; his betrothal gift of a tiger gave the castle its name. But Tullia loved Pito, a young scribe. Incensed, Dalrympl demanded that Pito be beheaded during the wedding feast. Anatole was tasked with ensuring the royal wedding went ahead and thus saving the realm. Timid and compromised, he brewed various bizarre concoctions supposed to inspire love and delete memories, but became embroiled in the lovers’ situation, especially after recognising Dalrympl as the swine who caused the death of Babette, his own sweetheart.

The portrayal of science in the period is lightly comical but never patronising. Although he can’t conceive of a building block of matter any smaller than a grain of sand, Renaissance-era Anatole is almost on the point of discovering penicillin via his experiments with mouldy bread. In the present day he has centuries of scientific discovery to call upon; all the same, he muses, is the notion of the four humours any more fantastical a metaphor than the periodic table? Operating at the birth of modern science, Anatole had it both ways, creating effective medicines while also commanding respect as a controller of evil spirits.

Despite a daring escape, pursuit and the threat of retribution, the air of whimsy throughout mitigates any sense of genuine peril (and we obviously know Anatole survives). Just as in Holes, Sachar knots plot threads together in unexpected and satisfying ways. There’s a dash of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume in Anatole’s experiments, but without that novel’s sombre heft. If the narration were given over to Tullia or Pito, this would be a standard YA novel; but then we’d be without the pleasures of Anatole’s long view and his gentle scepticism about love, war, human nature and politics.

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America’s unseen book bans: the long history of censorship in prisons

May 09 2024

Tens of thousands of books are banned in US prisons, in an often arbitrary process that limits education opportunities.

On a Monday night, just after six, Alicia Williams waits for the last stragglers to take their seats in her cramped classroom at the Washington corrections center. Her students braved western Washington’s fall weather to get here and they enter the room still ruffled from the wind, their khaki uniforms flecked with rain.

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On Wednesday, writer Gabriel Smith shared what at first glance seemed to be an email sent by the singer Charli XCX, asking if she could use the title of Smith’s forthcoming debut novel, Brat, for her next album, which is also being released this summer. “I have been a HUGE fan of your writing for ages,” the email states, adding that using the title would be a “tribute”.

Yet, looking closer, it is clear the email is faked – the recipient is Charli, not Smith. On Thursday, Charli responded to the faked email: “ive never heard of you. good luck with your book tho !” she wrote.

Smith’s fake email has been viewed 7m times and liked 15,000 times, while Charli’s response has been viewed 4m times and liked 54,000 times.

BBC Radio 1 were fooled by the email – Dean McCullough read it out on air and commented on the “beautiful synergy between novels and records”. A few minutes later, McCullough corrected himself, saying that he had been the “victim of fake news”. Co-host Vicky Hawkesworth added that “it’s very clever isn’t it, it’s smart because now we know all about his book”.

Smith said that a couple of people had texted him about Charli XCX’s next album title being the same as his book, and he started thinking it would be “hilariously egotistical” to claim that the singer had been inspired by his “completely unknown, yet-to-be-published” novel’s title. “The idea is ridiculous, so it’s funny. I like making fun of how insanely, deludedly self-important novelists often act.”

Smith has a history of internet pranks: he claimed to have been appointed senior fiction editor of Gawker magazine, which led to an editor having to deny it; he used AI to create a fake photo of the “famously anti-advertising” writer Samuel Beckett posing with a Bowser mascot at a launch event for Super Mario Bros 2. Smith said that because of his previous pranks, his followers are aware that something he tweets may be fake, but they retweet it to people who do not know he is “just mucking about”.

“A lot of people online seem to think it was funny,” said Smith. “But a lot of other people have been calling me various slurs, mostly homophobic. My agent texted to check that I wasn’t upset, and I was like: ‘Are you kidding, it’s hilarious.’ I love it. I can’t stop laughing about it. I get off on provoking people and if you grew up posting online then obviously you’ve heard it all before.”

Smith is not the first author to pull controversial publicity stunts. In 2010, writer Jennifer Belle paid actors $8 an hour to read her book in public in New York City and laugh while doing so. The women were sent to the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Times Square, Washington Park and on to two subway lines. The story was picked up by the New York Times and Page Six, and radio shows invited her on to talk about the stunt.

Other stunts have had a darker edge. In September 2020, a Facebook post by somebody claiming to be the daughter of romance author Susan Meachen said that the writer had died by suicide. The next month, the “daughter” encouraged fans to buy Meachen’s “final” book in her honour, posting a link to it. Then, in January 2023, Meachen resurrected herself: she posted on Facebook, claiming that she “almost died” and that she is “in a good place” and “hoping to write again”.

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Thriller author Mark Davis wrote a book about a disgruntled novelist who, after a series of rejections, kidnaps the daughter of an agent and gives her a deadline by which to get his book into print. Davis then took inspiration from his plot, staging and filming a kidnapping to post on his website, and sent an email to agents: “By the time you receive this, I will have already kidnapped your child.”

“The first phone call I received the next day was at 7.30 in the morning, from an agent,” Davis told the Lynchburg News and Advance. “She was yelling at me, saying: ‘Are you crazy?’” The author eventually secured a book deal with a small publishing imprint.

In 2008, when Nam Le was 29, his debut garnered international attention. The Boat, a collection of stories unusual in its scope and global eye, brought prizes, headlines and lavish praise – and contractual commitments for a novel. Sixteen years later, Le has released his second book. Not the novel (it’s “getting there”, he says), but a brief, hardcover volume titled 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem: a collection of poems, or perhaps one book-length one.

While working on the novel, Melbourne-based Le, who did a stint as a corporate lawyer in an earlier life, had set himself strict limitations – no other projects, no distractions. But in the months after the birth of his first child (he has two), this intense focus was difficult to sustain. He turned back to poems, where he’d started. “I sort of let myself off the hook,” he says. “To be honest, I think it saved my connection with writing.”

36 Ways hums with the furious desire for, above all else, a private, uncategorised soul; the space to make art as “a complicated writer with full selfhood and scope” – and not as “an emissary”. The question always recurring for Le is “what it means to write as a writer that will always be described as a Vietnamese writer, or a hyphenated-Vietnamese writer – whatever you want to call that”. He is pushing, now as then, against “the onuses of representation, of explanation, of embassy … [the] limited stock of tropes and stories assumed and expected of such writers … and then the whole industry wrapped around that”.

The paradigm that’s emerged around “authenticity” is problematic, Le says. “You’re [then] already trading in the vocabulary and the ethos of branding because something that is ‘authentic’ can then exclude the other things that are ‘not authentic’” he explains. “I think that that is such a trap, especially for writers of colour.”

“Just write about Vietnam,” one character tells the narrator of The Boat’s first story. In 36 Ways, Le does. But as he catalogues the many modes of his identity, his cultural and family legacies, and of the poetic form itself, he takes a scalpel to certainty on any of them. The subject makes him animated. “[For those] accustomed to and expected to write about certain things because of their visa status, or how they look, there’s not a lot of infrastructure to be read in other ways. So to write from a place of anger, or scorn, or self-doubt – or contempt, even, or ugliness – is confusing, I think, to a lot of readers. And to the infrastructure.”

36 Ways revels in this confusion. Le prods at the feelings “typically disallowed certain writers” (“You won’t let me not – / Lick the leash or bite it.”), the “unimpeachability” assigned to valorised versions of marginalised experience (“unbelievably / composed, above all, composed”), and the impossibility of ever fully defining one’s interiority (“What’s Vietnamese in me / Could fit in a poem.”). And through it all runs a thread of quicksilver – a dark, cutting humour and sense of play.

“What I would hope readers would get from the ludicrous rhyme of ‘Asia rhymes with erasure’ as a subtitle for a poem,” he says, wryly, “is that there is a tongue firmly in cheek in these moments.”

“I wanted to be able to say: ‘Look at this, this is ridiculous! Look in the mirror!’ to both writer and reader and myself. And at the same time sort of recalibrate, retune that way of writing, that way of reading: to hopefully see it again, anew.”

When we meet, Le’s searing vignettes of deep familial love and hurt have been on my mind for days – “the flailing net ropes of filial piety”, as one poem has it; the father and son in that story from The Boat, “locked in all the intricate ways of guilt”. In both books he stretches the testing of an ethic: what is yours, or anyone’s, to write? I ask Le where he’s landed on this and he laughs, cynical of “any sort of resolution about ‘X has the right to write about Y because of Z’.”

“If I wanted a rule that would apply to a body of people in an effective way, I would go into advertising,” he says. “When it comes to family, writers legitimately land on different thresholds: different apprehensions, and senses of risk and worth – so there’s no right answer. But I think that if the question hasn’t been seriously dealt with, then the work will not be serious.”

Serious art, for him, can be “read as a process rather than resolution” (on his list: Terrance Hayes, Monica Youn, Cathy Park Hong, Kaveh Akbar, Solmaz Sharif, Diana Khoi Nguyen). 36 Ways is drenched in allusions – Ho Chi Minh to TS Eliot; Emily Dickinson to Li Po – a book of clues Le hopes allows for refractions and reframing, that resists conclusion. His dream is that the work can sustain a “cold read” as easily as “an academic assault”. And, critically, “without condescension”.

“If you’re a serious chef, you wanna cook stuff that anyone can walk in off the street and be blown away by, and not feel ashamed for enjoying,” he says. “Then you also want to create food that speaks to the tradition in which you’re making [it] – that honours … the other cooks, and hands and minds and mouths, that brought you to this place.”

Le’s writing is intensely physically grounded. The Boat is full of bodies – yearning, grieving, ageing, giving up – but the sensuality of 36 Ways feels fiercer, more personal: “My heart, for me / To heave – and how! – / Into my own damn mouth.” He considers this. “It’s really important to me that the work live in the breath and the body,” he says. Two, electric, “reclamatory” poems seek “to re-mascularise Asian men’s bodies, and to desexualise, to some degree, Asian women’s bodies” (“essentialised into nothing”, reads a line elsewhere.) “It’s terrible and tragic to even have to say this, but the fact that basic scope of humanness – namely, bodily awareness, and allowance of other bodies – is so vexed still tells you how far there is to go,” he says.

There’s so much to talk about: Le’s screenwriting; his foray into film (as DA on Goran Stolevski’s Of An Age – something, he says wistfully, he wants to do more of); the use of fear in his work (“as long as I’m kind of terrifying myself a little bit with what I’m doing, then I feel like I’m on the right track”); and a certain cultural tendency he keeps noticing, a smoothing over. Which, if it’s not apparent by now, he is committed to destabilising. “Complexity is the weather of our lives,” he says. “That not-knowing – that having doubt, and changing your mind, and being full of contradictions and contrariness and antinomies – is just normal. It’s being human.”