RB: It would be okay if there were some humility attached to the gate keeping of publishing. I don’t remember what model it was. EP: Obviously, I don’t go to it since I don’t know what it is. EP: Yes, right. Q. EP: It begins with the Torah being delivered, and so I had hoped that the Torah would always be somewhere in the back of the reader’s mind. RB: The story’s last two lines were quite powerful. Very interested in diving into a work of nonfiction from him. Why did you name her Tess? EP: It is something that clings to you and that you fall in love with. As for the other characters, it has to do with the role that the King assigned to them, their names signal the tension between what they might or might not want to do and what power expects from them. I go to bookstores. EP: You were going to tell me the third story you liked. “Kingdom Cons,” also by the Mexican author Yuri Herrera, floored me. And the prize givers ought to be more humble and certainly the writers. RB: Are you tempted to write what seems to be a current trend–. RB: I am disturbed by that — I am reluctantly drawn into thinking about the business part of book publishing. Edith Pearlman: Interesting question. The Irish tradition has been very male heavy. Many years ago, the writer Rivka Galchen loaned me Francisco Goldman’s first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens.The musicality and irreverence of the title was equally manifest in the verve of the writing, and in the novel’s searching questions about a … (Laughs). I’m trying to think of fiction — I am sure there are others. ’s debut novel, Sugar Run, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books in 2018. TM: I’m interested in the influence of fairytales, folklore, and fables on your writing. EP: The Worst Journey in the World, which is about Scott’s last expedition. I don’t think they need much teaching and I was one of those. So I have probably read each book five or seven times. RB: This belabors the obvious, but this a world that is far different than what we were raised in. Her short stories and essays appear in Tin House, The Oxford American, Hobart, The Barcelona Review, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and other literary journals. YH: I don’t know if it’s the main reason, but it’s something that you are going to have to face if you truly engage with the creative labor, because art implies creating new ways of looking at familiar subjects, and in order to do that you have to disassemble rules, meanings, certainties, you have to look at the arbitrariness of certain aspects of reality, or at the nonsense of cruelty, or at the complications of love, and in this manner you can not only mess with your readers’ emotional stability, but with your own. (Both laugh). Yuri Herrera in an interview with Armida Zepeda in A Literary Season Online “Many people think that books have a universally positive or healing function, I think that is not true: they are not there to make you happy, but to give you certain tools.” EP: She had to get over her rage and humiliation first. As did Roxana Robinson. I usually like movies when I see them. And Ben Katchor, he started early. I do not want to tell others what is their moral or social responsibility, but the way I see it, literature gives you the opportunity to intervene in the public sphere from a freer margin, one more difficult to tame. The following are edited excerpts of the interview. Especially when a small amount of people show up for an event — has that happened to you? In the case of Lisa, we have had a very rich dialogue, with each book we exchanged daily emails for months, and even though I suggested ways to do it, the final decisions were hers, she always found graceful, inventive solutions. I don’t think Dickens appears. RB: That was a while ago — it just came out in paper. They don’t let you do that now. He admits that, while writing, he has an outline, but things can and do shift with frequency. I was making my living as computer programmer, so writing was in those days confined to letters. EP: I liked The King’s Speech. I go to festivals. Let Us Help You Pick Your Next Book. He approaches a white dude with a beard sitting at a table and typing away at a laptop. And that is fine, that is something that should be embraced, precisely because it is a way of expanding the life of a text. We know what we are and we’re good with it. EP: I go to literary events — mostly at colleges. EP: Only one person speaks in her own voice — that’s the mother. That is to say it was chance that some Jews lived and some died. We realize Yuri’s event starts in less than ten minutes. EP: All of those things. I can’t remember which one. I know how you felt. He pauses and squints his eyes. RB: The percentage may not be the different but the cause may be and thus the hold it has on our civilization may be different — more tenuous. All else flowed from that. Isn’t there a whole bunch of culture you are missing? In the case of the novel, not naming certain places helps avoiding clichés and easy formulations of issues that are much more complex than what the mass media and government speakers say. [She writes:“My only challenge was to keep from interrupting myself as I read. For example, he says, he “could write an entire chapter just so it could include a single word.”, I mention the presence of phonetically-spelled words and expressions in his books’ Spanish versions. And she either says, “This is almost done” or “Go back.” And I do. They had previously been published in magazines. Silences are important because they are the most eloquent part of a creative work in how it allows the readers to reveal themselves when they fill them. There are very few movies I don’t like. At the time, he worried that studying literature in the academic sense “would unduly influence” his own writing. With excerpts included, Herrera explores his use own of language while describing the transience of memory and the challenge of translation. RB: It means I have shifted more responsibility to the writer. (Both laugh). EP: My husband plays early music — he plays the viola de gamba as an amateur. One is tempted to attach the pop-cultural sobriquet “overnight sensation” to writer Edith Pearlman’s current moment in the sun. I read them in order to live in them. EP: It is being attacked so to speak. RB: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 has seemed prescient to me. My grandson is the same way. I point out that he has more compensated for any lack of an undergrad lit degree, having finished an M.F.A. Yuri Herrera studied Political Science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, obtained a master's degree in Creative Writing at the University of Texas, El Paso and a Ph.D., 2009, in Hispanic Language and Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.He is the editor of the literary magazine El perro and a Mellow Postdoctoral Fellow at Tulane University. The use of tho felt slightly off kilter in a really good way and it seemed perfect because Lobo is someone for whom spelling is probably not a main focus—it seems like a wonderful way to show what a slang culture he is living in. Put them to shame. RB: That’s the Frankfurt Book Fair. I don’t feel I have to read anybody. RB: What’s it like to be on book tour? Biography. EP: Well, in Dickens, each time I find something, some turn of phrase, a manipulation of plot or a character I hadn’t appreciated. On the other hand, booksellers were beatified as if they weren’t merchants and capitalists. I wrote it in pieces. at UC Berkeley. Yuri Herrera. The Millions' future depends on your support. He accepts, and, only after my wife insists, sits in the front passenger seat. By fallible human beings. EP: When I start out, it’s a lot of improvising and I write many pages of improvisation and then I begin to see what story I want to write. And looking around today, it may be true but the contemplative life seems to be losing the battle. Some of her recent translations include Such Small Hands (winner of the 2018 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Award) and A Luminous Republic by Andrés Barba; Signs Preceding the End of the World, Kingdom Cons and The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera… And I try to understand what kind of language, what kind of landscape, what kind of behaviors are organic to that core that generates meaning. She writes back to her editor expressing her anger. RB: For some reason, the 3200 comes up in a few stories. It has a slightly angelic appeal to me. This [current] book seems to get a crowd. My own take on Ms. Pearlman’s fair-weather fame has something to do with the limited attention paid to the practitioners of short fiction — when I grouped her in the company of much heralded short story maestros Alice Munro and William Trevor, Edith blushed (though she did not demur, false modesty is not an attribute she has). I started a book, I think, at the age of three. Anthony Doerr got very good reviews. So often I wanted to stop and say to the audience, ‘Did you hear that? There were plenty of children’s books around — maybe I read Five Little Peppers and How They Grew or–. Chapel Hill? Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World is a masterpiece, a haunting and moving allegory about violence and the culture built to support and celebrate that violence. Maybe a few were/are heroic — Truman Metzel of the late Great Expectations in Evanston Ill., or Sylvia Beach in Paris, Vincent McCaffrey in Boston. It’s not one — something I dream–. And I read somewhere that Nabokov wrote his novels that way on 5×8 cards. program, “Foucault can show you a lense to view society and power, but will not teach you how to write a good story.”. People who read, people who write–. EP: No, no. “Signs Preceding the End of the World,” Yuri Herrera — very excited to dive into this one! Kingdom Cons includes lots of recognizable archetypes that appear in fairy or folktales across the globe—the King, the Witch, the Commoner, the Heir—can you talk a little bit about your choice to use these sorts of stock mythic characters? RB: A guy takes a trip to some backwater town, and takes a train back to the capitol and meets a woman. EP: Thirteen new stories that had not been in a book. RB: I don’t remember the chain of events that brought us together — it must be because you are an overnight sensation (laughs). I confess to him that I have not yet read Kingdom Cons, Spanish title Trabajos del Reino. His writing style is like nobody else’s, a unique turn of language, a kind of poetic slang. EP: I would, but I am not a proselytizer. A few months. RB: Where does that impulse come from? I start all over again with the knowledge that I have gotten from the improvisation. RB: Besides fatigue, there aren’t a lot of cultural prompts. RB: All right, I scratch that line of thought. EP: Thank you very much for putting me in that threesome. The editor doesn’t respond. EP: No, no. It was luck. Yuri’s Uber is running a few minutes late, so I step into the Fellini Caffe in Rice Village, our agreed meeting place, and order an Americano. Any polar expeditions? EP: It started even earlier. Although I reread 100 Years of Solitude three or four times. He responded, “Yes, after 20 years in the Borscht Belt.” I’m not an overnight sensation, but at the moment I’m in demand. The MTS Martech Interview Series is a fun Q&A style chat which we really enjoy doing with martech leaders. My purpose is not to find new things. RB: Rereading is a great thing. Corridos aren’t only true; they’re also beautiful and just.” When I read this quote I couldn’t help but wonder if your writing process is anything like the Artist’s? I wondered if there is an equivalent word that you used in the original Spanish or is this something that only exists in translation? ‘Those things you really want to silence are precisely those you should interrogate’ He would need a “truly original” idea before attempting it. Of the writers of my generation, the one I most admire is Yuri Herrera. I also have a non-fiction group of four and we meet once a month too. The main character has a name that sounds more like a nickname, Lobo, and very quickly he becomes simply the Artist, and he is surrounded by the Girl, the King, the Heir, the Commoner, who in the final pages of the novel becomes simply She. I tell Yuri that he mentioned in an earlier online interview that he enjoys reading The Bible and viewing it as a work of written craft. EP: I took a course in college and a course or two in my 30s. I have three favorite stories in Binocular Vision. I tried and was told that the director did mean for you to see it that way. He grins and acknowledges that, looking back now, he was probably wrong and perhaps foolish even. Robert Birnbaum: What was the first book you remember reading? And I always had a small following. I think that’s what reading may become. I have lots of friends whom I meet for coffee. Anything And Other Stories brings out is worth checking out and Yuri Herrera in particular is just a fantastic, fascinating writer. That short fiction writers are looked as artisans? Outside, Fall weather has yet to take hold in Texas: it’s sunny, slightly muggy, and over 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Yuri sits a bit back from the table with his body open to the entire table. It can be healthy to purge dark things, but it can also excavate old and new suffering that needs to be attended to. RB: Really – writer’s block? TM: At one point in Kingdom Cons the news arrives at the Palace that the Artist’s songs have been banned, the DJs get “orders to shut his groove down.” Something similar to this happened across northern Mexico in the early 2000s, city governments implemented bans on narcocorridos, claiming that they would poison the youth by glamorizing the narco lifestyle, a similar critique to one that has been voiced in the United States about gangster rap. He becomes the court bard at the King’s lavish palace, but soon finds out that the price he must pay to stay in this elevated world far outweighs what he receives in return. Plus the optimistic message for the readers, we have bear the costs if we wish to live in a better world. I note that his other novels – Signs Preceding the End of the World and The Transmigration of Bodies – have strong endings. The project is important. People are made by the books they read and I think I am finished. The ban in Ciudad Juárez has apparently since been lifted because the new mayor is financially invested in several radio stations and the ban was not good for business, either way it did not really matter because the songs by groups like Los Tigres del Norte only got more popular when they were outlawed. This is something that has to do not only with the lexicon or the syntax, but with how the new version sounds; sound creates meaning, even if you cannot articulate it in words. How do these decisions get made? Why indeed? Not wholesale revision. This is the big American convocation of the book industry. RB: Right. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. I’m curious what your relationship is to your translated texts? Tags: aaron bady, borders, kafka, Mexico, modernity, poetics, Signs Preceding the End of the World, The New Inquiry, violence, Yuri Herrera The Rumpus Interview with Francisco Goldman By … RB: Movies are made that way — out of narrative sequence. RB: There is this meme of the educated working class guy who finishes his shift on the assembly line and goes home and picks up William Faulkner. A man who looks like Yuri walks hastily into the Café. EP: I have a lot of books I haven’t read. It’s supposed to be a tragic ending. I recognize his face and glasses, but he doesn’t see me. Yuri Herrera writes about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. RB: Do you have any sense that it’s being drowned out? RB: Big city life in Baltimore — drugs, unions, corruption, public schools, politics, media. RB: Richard Russo introduced the volume of Best American Stories he guest edited with an amusing anecdote about Isaac Bashevis Singer visiting the campus where Russo was teaching and answering a graduate student’s inquiry with the “task of literature is to instruct and entertain.” Apparently the gathering wanted a more elaborate answer. I was charmed by their initial close proximity which was brought to some fruition much later. So I am sure if that story gets re-collected she’ll change some things. It received these very good reviews. In Spanish with English subtitles. RB: In the course of your writing career I read that you had written over 250 stories. RB: How do you know? I have a few — one is a [portable] Hermes 3000, which reportedly was the typewriter of choice for journalists. I am happy for you, but that’s a bit of journalistic gimmickry. Yuri Herrera (Actopan, México, 1970). It’s not a temptation so much as I am not through with that character, so I want to write another story about them. I love the narrative. And passionate and they don’t write early music — it’s already been written, but they play it and adapt it. Story collections are a delight because despite what is usually a deliberate sequence you can go through and begin with titles that you find appealing.