History of Wolves is a first novel for Emily Fridman, and as a hitherto relative unknown, she doesn't even have a Wikipedia page yet. She is around 40 years old and has worked mostly as an English professor and short-story writer. Her first collection of short stories, Catapult, was published the same year as History of Wolves and was nominated for the Mary McCarthy Prize. The first chapter of History of Wolves was initially published as a short story, which Fridlund then decided to expand into the novel, which was a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. It won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. History of Wolves was also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of USA Today’s Notable Books, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, and a #1 Indie Next pick. (The last part of this paragraph was lifted wholesale from Emily Fridlund's page on Cornell University's online catalog.)
North Woods of Minnesota
Fridlund grew up in a family of three children in Edina, Minnesota (southwest of Minneapolis), and her family used to vacation on the north shore of Lake Superior, the area where History of Wolves is set. She attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, then Principia College in Illinois, where she earned a bachelor's degree. She earned an MFA in fiction at Washington University in St. Louis, and a doctorate at the University of Southern California. It was while living in LA and missing real winter that she started work on History of Wolves. (See this interview in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.)
Her academic research has included:
Craft of Fiction
Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature
Twentieth-Century and Contemporary British Literature
Gender Studies, Feminist and Queer Theory
Narrative Theory
the Gothic Novel
Ecocriticism
Animal Studies
Creative Writing
Also because she only recently became a famous author, there is not much on YouTube in the way of interviews. In fact there were only two, one of which had been shot with a phone which had the advantage of being brief, but her voice was barely audible. The one I am posting here is somewhat long, but more interesting, and her voice is easier to hear, although you may still have to crank the volume way up.
Kevin Kwan is the author of Crazy Rich Asians and its sequels, China Rich Girlfriend and Rich People Problems.
Kwan grew up in Singapore until he was eleven, when his family moved to Texas.
After getting his degree in creative writing from the University of Houston (1994), Kwan headed to New York, where he earned his BFA from Parsons School of Design and began working for high profile publishers.
Kwan spent time at Martha Stewart’s Living and Interview magazines before opening his own creative consulting firm, specialzing in visual projects for fashion designers, celebrities and publishing firms.
After ten years as a designer, Kwan wrote his first novel, Crazy Rich Asians, a breakout best seller and a popular “beach read,” famous for its nutty characters and their delightfully wicked excesses.
Kwan followed with China Rich Girlfriend in 2015, and Rich People Problems in 2017, just as the filming of a film version of Crazy Rich Asian was underway.
The Wikipedia bio is more detailed and interesting, and I suggest you check it out, but as it is Wikipedia, know that it may not be 100% accurate.
The following is a brief interview with Kwan about Crazy Rich Asians:
Singapore Album
The world's most expensive city.
The colonial-era Raffles Hotel, now considered just a tourist destination by the locals.
A colonial-era "black and white" house.
Singapore National Archives (former site of Anglo-Chinese School)
Singapore Botanic Gardens, behind which Nick's grandma's mansion was found
The video below shows a time lapse of a tan hua flower blooming:
If you're like me (and you're probably not) you knew Crazy Rich Asians was a movie before you knew it was a book. The trailer is below. Just from watching the trailer, I saw several differences between the book and the movie.
Ann Hood was born in 1956 and grew up in Rhode Island. After she earned her BA in English from the University of Rhode Island, she worked for TWA as a flight attendant. She attended graduate school at New York University, studying American Literature. Hood began writing her first novel in 1983 while working as a flight attendant and attending graduate school. Her flight attendant career ended in 1986 when TWA went on strike and the flight attendants found themselves replaced. This gave her the opportunity to become a full-time writer.
On April 18, 2002, Hood's five-year-old daughter, Grace, died from a virulent form of strep. For two years Hood found herself unable to write or even read. She took solace in learning to knit and in knitting groups. She gradually made her way back to her craft, writing short essays about Grace and grief. To make sense of her own grief, in late 2004 Hood began to write her novel The Knitting Circle, about a woman whose five-year-old daughter dies from meningitis. The woman joins a knitting group of others also struggling to heal from loss. Hood’s best-selling memoir Comfort: A Journey Through Grief chronicles her own struggle after her daughter’s sudden death.
Hood is a faculty member in the MFA in Creative Writing program at The New School in New York City. She also teaches at New York University and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
She is the recipient of the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Best American Spiritual Writing Award.
Hood lives in Providence, Rhode Island. She has two children, Annabelle and Sam, and is married to writer Michael Ruhlman.
Her body of work includes:
Novels
Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, 1987.
Waiting to Vanish, 1988.
Three-Legged Horse, 1989.
Something Blue, 1991.
Places to Stay the Night, 1993.
The Properties of Water, 1995.
Ruby, 1998.
The Knitting Circle, 2007.
The Red Thread, 2010.
The Obituary Writer, 2013.
An Italian Wife, 2014.
The Book That Matters Most, 2016.
Young-adult novels
How I Saved My Father's Life (And Ruined Everything Else), 2008.
She Loves You (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah), 2018.
Short story collection
An Ornithologist's Guide to Life: Stories, 2004.
Nonfiction
Creating Character Emotions (textbook), 1998.
Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time (memoir). 2000.
Comfort: A Journey Through Grief (memoir), 2008.
Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting (essay, anthology), 2013.
Knitting Pearls: Writers Writing About Knitting (essay, anthology), 2015.
Morningstar (memoir), 2017.
In the video below, Ann Hood talks about The Book That Matters Most with a group at the Norwich, VT, library.
Yaa Gyasi was born in Mapong, Ghana, in 1989. When she was two years old, her family moved to the US so that her father could get his PhD from Ohio State. The family moved several times before settling in Huntsville, Alabama, where Gyasi lived from age 9 through high school graduation. She received a BA from Stanford and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Homegoing is Gyasi's first novel and it received much pre-publication publicity based on the seven-figure advance offer Knopf made to Gyasi. In the video below, Yaa Gyasi talks about Homegoing with PBS Books.
In Ghana
There was indeed a Cape Coast Castle, and it still stands. In the video below, the Obama family takes a tour of the castle.
There was also a Golden Stool of the Asante, and it was indeed the cause of a war between the British. As we learned in the book, the Asante lost that war, but I was delighted to learn that even then, the Asante were allowed to preserve the stool free of interference from the colonial British, which was refreshing given the record of the British on looting precious artifacts. No one has ever sat on the Golden Stool. It rests on a blanket on a chair, and during coronation ceremonies, the new king is held over the stool and not allowed to touch it.
In America
Yaa Gyasi said that when she was doing her research for the book, the one thing that came as a surprise to her was learning about the coal mines of Pratt, Alabama, and about how the convict leasing system was used to provide labor to the mines. The following picture is of one of the plants at the Pratt coal mine. If you look at the raised platform at the lower left of the picture, you can see a mule pulling a tram car with waste rock.
I just found out that starting this Sunday, November 18, HBO is broadcasting a four-part miniseries of Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, which the Readers Roundtable read back in August of 2016. If you get HBO via cable or are subscribed online, check it out.
Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New York by Francis Spufford
New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island, 1746. One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat arrives at a countinghouse door on Golden Hill Street: this is Mr. Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion shimmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge sum, and he won’t explain why, or where he comes from, or what he is planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money. Should the New York merchants trust him? Should they risk their credit and refuse to pay? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him; maybe even kill him?
Meet the Author
Francis Spufford was born in 1964, the son of a professor of social history and a professor of economics. He received a BA in English Literature from Cambridge in 1985. He was Chief Publisher's Reader from 1987–90 for Chatto & Windus and was a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Anglia Ruskin University from 2005 to 2007. Since 2008, he has taught at Goldsmiths College in London on the MA in Creative and Life Writing. He is a practicing Christian, married to an Anglican priest, and is active in the layman's organization of the church.
For most of his writing career, Spufford has been known as a writer of nonfiction. His nonfiction works included:
I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, 1996.
The Child That Books Built, 2002.
Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin, 2003.
Unapologetic, 2012.
True Stories and Other Essays, 2017.
In 2010, Spufford wrote Red Plenty, a fiction-enhanced historical account of life in the early 1960s Soviet Union, a time when it seemed that communism had triumphed and would really bury capitalism. This fusion of fact and fiction prepared him for writing Golden Hill in 2016, his first complete work of fiction, which was set in colonial New York in the 1740s. Golden Hill won the Costa Book Award for a first novel and also won the Ondaatje Prize.
Further Reading
Linda sent me a link to a blog that is dedicated to all things Golden Hill, including in particular this page that discusses the physical layout of the city of New York in the 1740s when it is set.
To put you in the spirit of the 1700s, here's a video of people dancing the minuet.
And a panel from "A Rakes Progress," by William Hogarth, which may or may not remind you of "Mr. Smith."
Three young men, and one unforgettable woman, come together in a journey from India to England, where they hope to begin something new—to support their families; to build their futures; to show their worth; to escape the past. They have almost no idea what awaits them.
Meet the Author
Sunjeev Sahota was born in 1981 into a Sikh immigrant family in England and grew up in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. He had never even read a novel until the age of 18 when he read Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. He majored in math in college and worked for an insurance company and a building society (credit union). He also became a prolific reader of novels.
After the London bombings of 2005, Sahota was inspired to write a book from the point of view of a terrorist, Ours are the Streets. His second novel, The Year of the Runaways (2015), is set in Sheffield, where the author currently lives.
Untouchability, "Hindutva," and the Ongoing Civil War in India
The fourth protagonist of the book is Tochi, referred to by the other immigrants as a "Chamaar," one of the untouchable or "scheduled" castes of India. Back in India, when Tochi got his first regular passenger as a driver, she made a big deal over what to call him, reminiscent of US debates over "politically correct" terminology. I was able to find an article discussing that very thing.
"Hindutva," roughly translated as "Hindu-ness," is one of the current strains of Indian politics, manifested by Hindu fundamentalism and nationalism. The men who attack Tochi and his family are from such a group. The current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, has been linked to similar groups.
The night Tochi loses his family, the spark for the conflagration is said to be attacks by Maoists on upper caste Hindus. This makes reference to a very real armed conflict that is currently going on in the eastern part of India, which has the Maoists facing off against both the Indian government and right-wing paramilitary forces (attribution).
Kanyakumari
After all the hostility, politics, and strife, here's the view of the southernmost spot in India at night (attribution).
