The Passage

Max Lury reads from No Ghosts, his unsettling debut novel about grief, friendship in the modern era of technology, and (just maybe) the afterlife. In his passage, a woman is anonymously emailed a strange, possibly AI-generated video of her missing best friend, or something close to her. Max chats with Jon and Cory about:

• The trickiness of writing about a character watching a video
• The creepypasta story that has stuck with him since he was a teenager, and the elements that might have seeped into his novel
• His first stab at the idea that became No Ghosts: a George Saunders–inspired short story about a bouncer who joins a séance community
• Not shying away from texting and the outsized role smartphones play in our modern lives
• Watching AI technology catch up to his fiction over the five years he spent writing the book
• Typing out Don DeLillo passages in his own font and printing them out to demystify them

Max’s passage from No Ghosts, available from Peninsula Press:

There were two files, which took less than a minute to download. In that time she tried to work out who might have sent them. They’d been sent the day of Annie’s memorial, which could mean something, although she wasn’t sure what. It could be spam, too. There were bots that could scrape for your name, find your details: this kind of thing wasn’t uncommon. A dozen reasons for it, which she was sure would come to light when the download was finished. The small circle became one colour. Harlow opened the first file with VLC media player, and clicked play.

The film was shot from just inside a hallway, an open door framing a woman alone in a room. Harlow paused it and exhaled. She said, fuck, out loud.

The woman on the screen looked like Annie. Although, not exactly. The image had her red hair, the same eye bags, the same freckles which clumped to make formless blotches – but it was still somehow an approximation. Compiled from disparate elements. It was how Annie’s face would look if she wore it as a mask.

Harlow closed her eyes for a moment and pressed the tips of her fingers against her eyelids. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. It was still Annie. At least, a version of her. Almost her.

Harlow pressed play again.

The woman sat alone on a sofa, in a wooden cabin. There was a fur throw under her and the window behind was whited out. She folded small clothes, presumably a child’s, in her lap, rocking ever so slightly as she did so. Her hands were half-rendered, only meant to be visible in motion. The figure stopped what she was doing, her face going slack, and her fingers tapped one by one against her thumb.

She looked up and as she did, the scene ended.

It cut and started again. The shot was in the same position, peering into the same room. Harlow took a closer look, trying to see if the woman really was Annie, or if she was just projecting. It was the same figure again: red hair; that big, ungainly mouth. But this time the woman on screen seemed distressed, her lips were moving as if she was saying a word or a name over and over, running her hands through her hair, eyes wide, something upsetting to it, that same mad panic Harlow had seen so many times with Annie in hospital waiting rooms and on bedroom floors.

But it was, Harlow felt, undeniably Annie. Alone, and afraid. Annie, or almost-Annie, looked up. Her eyes came to rest above the camera, widening just a fraction in what could have been recognition or panic. There was no way of telling.

In the last scene the cabin was empty, and the throw was gone. The window had been smashed but there were no shards of glass on the floor. Something like a shadow fell across the shot, coming from the hallway behind, and then the video was over.

Lydia Millet reads from Fair Ones: A Double Novel, her experimentally-structured story of two women navigating the sudden and unexpected death of their best friend. During our conversation, the Pulitzer- and National Book Award-nominated author reflects on her evolution as a writer and chats with Jon and Cory about:

• How she and her publisher decided on "A Double Novel" (and the many alternatives they considered)
• Her love of dialogue (and how much she hates reading it outloud)
• The increasing influence of pop culture on her writing
• Her obsession with fonts
• Writing exclusively outdoors

Lydia's passage, from Fair Ones:

“Let yourself go,” said Jen. “It’s your turn to be a leaf. Or, like, the plastic bag in that egregiously overrated movie from the nineties. The pedophile fantasy dressed up as cinematic art? With the rose motif? You can just float there, like the bag. Swirling in an updraft. In a super-obvious yet oh-so-gritty metaphor.”

We headed to the men’s room with Jase and Patrice, where, as always, there was no line. Locked ourselves in and consumed.

[...]

Just don’t be rude, I warned myself. [...] But my own potential rudeness sat on my shoulder like a gremlin.

At the same time, I did feel like a floating plastic bag. I was a floating plastic bag, indifferent to the breeze that carried me. The bag was thin, and sometimes full of air, but had the imperviousness of plastic—it would last, it would go on and on, though it tumbled and soared. It might snag on a tree or bush, but there it was.

I was several metaphors at once, and it wasn’t a problem for me.

The gremlin was only a figment.

On Jase’s coke I wasn’t bothered by any of the conversations. When Elise touched on the event, I gave the appearance of listening. Though, in reality, I felt apart from it and supernatural. A superhero. The plastic bag was a miracle! Who had made it? Who had made me?

If Claire had been a bag she’d be floating there too. Or we might be snagged together in a tree. A green tree, I thought, with squirrels and nuts and birds . . . slowly shedding our plastic bodies, shedding and shredding. Filmy tatters we’d be, across the bare winters. But there, perhaps, for all eternity.

Or at least, till someone cut down the tree.

Isaac Fitzgerald reads from American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed, his memoir about following in the footsteps of one of America’s great folk heroes. In this episode, we discuss the book’s opening passage, learning how to write, and how walking became a way to write about family, loneliness, and home. Isaac also talks to Jon and Cory about:

• Putting “tension" in the bank to keep readers turning pages
• Polishing first lines to a high shine
• The benefits of writing an entire manuscript longhand
• Using voice memos and photos as notes
• Storytelling and the art of stand-up comedy
• Cutting the “throat clearing” from early drafts

Isaac’s passage, from American Rambler:

I’ve been drinking a bit less and praying a lot more than I used to.

Now, that’s not to say I’m drinking less than most people—I’m not—nor that a doctor would sign off on my lifestyle as a healthy one—they wouldn’t—but self-betterment has to start somewhere, and for me that means choosing sobriety occasionally. More often than I’m used to, which is to say more often than any sane person living in these modern times would want to.

As for the praying? It’s not that I’m praying some saintly amount, but it’s another habit I’m developing, a healthier one. Like most of my habits, I picked this one up from my parents—only to abandon it for decades—taking prayer out on semi-rare occasions like car accidents, late rent payments, or particularly bad hangovers. But over the past few years I’ve found myself doing it more and more, and not only when I’m in trouble. Sometimes in moments of happiness. Other times, contentment. Every once in a rare while, during a moment of peace, I find myself with my knees in the dirt reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

Which is what I’m doing right now—though it should be noted that I’m on my knees because I’m hiding behind a bush, and that this is very much one of those vintage “Oh shit, I’m in trouble” prayers, not one of contentment or peace.

On top of all that, yes, I’m sober at the moment, though I’d rather not be, as I’m trying to avoid a railway police officer—known as a bull—who is slowly but steadily heading my way, and the stress of the situation is getting to me.

In my mind, I put an emphasis on “And forgive us our trespasses . . .”

Scott Hawkins reads from Blacktail, a dark fantasy in which a wolf seeks revenge on humanity for the death of his house dog mate. In this episode, we unpack a passage from the opening chapter, told from the perspective of a lynx, that sets up our introduction to the book’s titular character. Scott chats with Jon and Cory about:

• Writing from the perspective of animals
• The multiple scrapped projects he wrote between his debut novel, The Library at Mount Char, and Blacktail
• His wife as his trusted first reader
• The checklist he created and reviews drafts against
• The 80,000 words he spent trying to crack the first chapter of Mount Char that ended up on the cutting room floor
• The storyline Mount Char borrows from The Godfather (as well as King Lear)
• His time at the Taos Toolbox writing workshop with Nancy Kress and Walter Jon Williams

Scott's passage, from Blacktail (sorry, the whole passage wouldn't fit so it was edited slightly for length):

The snow stopped shortly after dawn. The sky remained gray, though. A faint disk of white sun glowed behind towering clouds. Hate didn’t mind. He liked things gloomy.

He hadn’t gone far before he encountered the first of the scent poems that marked the boundary of the wolf lands. He sniffed it idly, sighed. When marking his own lands he would usually keep it simple, something like “Mine. Leave or die.” The damn wolves, though . . . they always had to make a production of everything. It was even worse than their singing. This one said:

White-Eye

forgotten daughter

alone and childless

mate of none

claims these lands.

None other may hunt here.

Yup, Hate thought. That’s wolves for you. Why just get to the point if you can whine first? He sniffed closer. This mark was old—last winter or thereabouts. Last he’d heard, White-Eye was still mateless. But she had borne a litter in the spring, a male and three females. That, in no small part, was why Hate had not been sleeping well, why he had been looking up the mountain when the gunshots rang out. White-Eye alone was bad enough. But with a pack behind her . . . a young pack . . .

[...]

When Hate first came to this patch of forest, he was young, cocky. Not content to take his share of the rabbits and leave well enough alone, he challenged White-Eye for the mountain one fine spring day. White-Eye subjugated him, leaving a shredded right ear that flopped when he walked. For a while he thought he might lose an eye as well, but in the end it healed. Sometimes, on cold nights when he couldn’t sleep he lay and wondered about that day. Why had she not killed him?

He didn’t know.

At any rate, he had not tried her again. Instead, he comforted himself with the knowledge that White-Eye was the last of her kind around here and, for all he knew, everywhere else. She would not live forever. He could afford to be patient. He had guile, and Guile as well. Eventually the mountain would belong to them, to their kittens.

But now . . . it seemed he had miscalculated the degree of White-Eye’s desperation. The rumor was that she had lowered herself to mate with a house dog, some mongrel slave who’d been drawn to the wild lands by the scent of her estrus. As far as he knew, though, no one had ever caught scent of the father.

[...]

Alone, White-Eye could live well enough off the meat that dwelled on her hill. She had no reason to challenge him. But with four more mouths to feed it was inevitable that she invade Hate’s valley.

He remembered her tooth shredding his right ear, the sting of it. Hot murder boiled up from his belly. His claws thrummed.

Bathsheba Demuth reads from Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, billed as the first comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic lands and waters that stretch from Russia to Canada. In this episode, we discuss a passage about walruses and the challenges of writing about nontraditional history subjects. Bathsheba talks to Jon and Cory about:

• Turning an academic dissertation paper into a trade history book
• Researching the history of commercial whaling in the 1840s
• Taking inspiration from poets
• The luxury of writing as a graduate student
• Creative nonfiction writing exercises
• Writing while running
  

Bathsheba’s passage, from Floating Coast:

Walruses are coastline embodied. They cannot eat without the sea, feeding a hundred or more feet underwater, where they root beds of clams and benthic worms from the mud. But they must breed and birth in the air. So the herds slide and wallow between, riding the edge of the sea ice south in autumn, then north through the Bering Strait in summer, sometimes leaving the ice to flop onto patches of sandy earth. Like whales, they concentrate rich seas in their bodies—over a ton for females, more than two tons for males. Walruses are not as fat as bowheads; the mussels they eat take their cut of the sunlight. But beneath inches of furrowed skin, a third of a walrus’s body weight is blubber. They do labor no person can, transforming submarine muck into useful tissue and hauling it to shore, drawing a line of energy from the sea onto the solid world.

Joshua Kendall reads from Trudeau & Doonesbury, his new biography of Garry Trudeau, the famously press-shy Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist. In this episode, we discuss a passage outlining the sexism found in strips Trudeau created during his undergraduate years as well as his evolution into more progressive, feminist politics as he reached the national stage. Josh talks to Jon and Cory about:

• Mining the two hundred boxes of papers that Trudeau had donated to Yale
• Finding Trudeau's crude early strips on his first day in the archives, and the doubts it raised about taking on the project
• The value of a good paper trail, and how phones, email, and texting have made biographers' jobs harder

• His first biography of a living person, and why dead subjects are easier to write about

• Approaching his biography as if he were writing a nineteenth century novel, with his subject’s story as a bildungsroman

• His membership in the Biographers International Organization and why biography is a relational problem before it's a writing problem
• Robert Caro's Working, and copying Caro's trick of standing in a place at the exact hour his subject would have been there
  
  Josh's passage:
  Trudeau himself would soon be shocked and disgusted by the blatant misogyny of his earliest strips. And within a few years of finishing Yale, he would be open about his own boorishness as an undergraduate. As he told journalist Katie Leishman in 1975, “I was singled out as the number one male chauvinist pig on campus. The woman had documented proof—you know, they'd print something about me and then submit a cartoon I'd drawn as People's Exhibit A. Of course, they were right. If you read those strips now, they'd turn your stomach. I did a lot of soul-searching and reading.” In September 72, Trudeau created the character of Joanie Caucus, who, he added, enabled him to address “women's problems in the context of real women.”
  

  But the sexism of Trudeau's earliest strips would eventually be mostly forgotten. In 1989, Emily Bazelon—the scribe for The New York Times Magazine was then a first year student at Yale— worked on a book of essays commemorating the twentieth anniversary of coeducation. “I stuck in a bunch of strips from Doonesbury,” she tells me. “It was a relief and very exciting to see his feminist sensibility,” she adds. When I allude to the earlier crude strips in bull tales about Mike's dating woes, Bazelon admits, “Well, I never knew about those!”
  

Rich Larson reads the opening passage of “In the Hours Preceding the Fall of Tau-Sants,” a cyberpunk-flavored short story published by the online magazine Reactor and available to read for free at reactormag.com. “In the Hours…” follows two operatives that arrive in a rain-drenched city to commission a mysterious weapon. Rich talks to Jon and Cory about:

• Dropping readers into a scene “as late as possible”
• Coining a phrase like “quantic canal” first for how it sounds, then reverse-engineering its meaning for the story
• A bus ride in France that inspired the story's mood, before any plot existed
• Working on five to seven short stories simultaneously and sometimes using a rolled die to decide which project to work on
• Publishing prolifically (nearly 200 stories in the last 15 years) rather than polishing rare, perfect stories, and the peace he’s made with that tradeoff
• How this story became the “test palette” for a science fiction novel set in the same universe that Rich is currently writing

Bestselling spy novelist Dan Fesperman joins Cory and Jon to discuss Pariah, a satirical thriller about a disgraced comedian recruited by the CIA to spy on an authoritarian Eastern European regime.

The passage he reads is a masterclass in building suspense through, let's say... unconventional narrative choices, balancing tension with humor, and crafting dialogue that feels anything but crafted.

We also discuss journalism as preparation for fiction, the beauty of the spy novel, the tradeoffs between creating fictional worlds and deeply researched real ones, and the disciplined writing routine that has produced more than a dozen novels over the past two decades.

Dan’s passage, from Pariah:

The Passage:

Pavel excused himself into the hallway, where he ducked into the door for the washroom. He was halfway to the urinals when he heard the door open behind him, followed by footsteps. A sidelong glance showed that it was Sarić, who stooped to pick up one of those rubber wedges that janitors use to hold open the door during cleaning. But Sarić jammed it beneath the door to hold it shut. They were locked in. Pavel, who felt as if he didn’t dare move, much less unzip his trousers, watched as Sarić quickly checked all three stalls to make sure they were empty.

Then, still without a word, Sarić stepped over to a sink, where he unscrewed the cap of his orange water bottle, pulled out some sort of filter attachment with a plunger, and refilled the bottle. Pavel, who needed badly to pee, fidgeted as he watched this odd ritual. After filling the bottle, Sarić reinserted the filter plunger and pushed it to the bottom, the same way you made coffee with a French press.

Sarić screwed the top back on and eyed Pavel carefully.

“I suppose you think this is a foolish indulgence. I know that’s what others say.”

“No. Not at all.”

“They have the same attitude toward a lot of security precautions. ‘Oh, that’s harmless, why bother.’ Of course, they said that about Kelenić as well.”

Sarić set the bottle onto the rim of the sink and faced Pavel from ten feet away, like a sheriff in an American western. Pavel crossed his feet and tried to hold it in, his bladder feeling like a water balloon that might burst at any moment.

“So, what do you think?” Sarić asked.

Pavel cleared his throat.

“About what?”

“The evening. And our American guest. The way he comported himself.”

“I think it went as well as could be expected. The president seemed to enjoy his company.”

“Yes, I think that is correct. In that sense, it was a success.”

“I’m glad to know that.”

“I don’t like him.”

“Mr. Knight?”

“He’s an actor. They’re paid to fool us.”

“He’s really more of a comedian.”

“Even worse. Watch. By the end of the week, he’ll have us laughing at ourselves. When people start doing that, they miss things. Important things.”

“Yes, well… maybe we could use a few laughs.”

“Fine, then. Laugh your way through the entire week. But don’t lose your focus, because you have a role to play, a job to do. For me.”

Sarić closed the distance between them and clamped a hand on Pavel’s shoulder, the grip uncomfortably firm. Pavel had to shift his feet to hold his balance, even as he continued to concentrate on not peeing in his pants....

Oana Aristide reads the opening pages of Astronaut!, her recently-released novel set in late-80s communist Romania. Astronaut! follows two main characters: an eight-year-old girl caught up in a rigged school contest and a detective ordered to pin a string of murders on a man-eating bear. Oana talks to Jon and Cory about:

• Why the opening was the last chapter she wrote, and also the most difficult
• Deliberating over the pros and cons of opening the book with humor
• The challenges of writing from the perspective of a child
• The trickiest aspects of writing in a fourth language
• Thinking and drafting in scenes rather than pages or word counts
• Her love of Chekov’s short stories
• Getting feedback from her two long-running writing groups

Oana's passage:
Sighișoara, March

Lia is being walked home by Comrade Blaga, the shopkeeper, who is holding her hand. A couple of times she tries to get out of this embarrassing situation, makes her hand go limp, or folds it together in the shape of a small bird wriggling out of a nest. But Comrade Blaga does not let small birds go.

They are walking by the road along the river embankment. It’s Mother’s birthday and also Friday afternoon, and the buses are bringing people home from the factories. From the corner of her eye Lia catches a glimpse of one, so full it’s almost dragging its belly along the tarmac. It’s an accordion bus – it has that creaky, bendy rubber bit in the middle – and there are people clinging to the steps and to its three wide-open doors, a bit like bees swarming to a hive.

Everyone on the passing buses can see her and Comrade Blaga walking home hand in hand.

The river is far below. Murky as always, barely moving along. Mother explained that it used to be higher up and wild, liked to burst its banks whenever there was heavy rain, flooding houses, shops and roads, and so the people made it live in this river-gutter instead. If the shopkeeper were not still holding her hand, Lia would be leaning over the railing, throwing pebbles into the trapped river.

It’s Mother’s birthday today and she has no present.

Lia couldn’t believe her luck when she first spotted the vase with a big yellow sunflower painted on it, couldn’t believe that it was something people could buy. And so today, Lia had pointed at it in the homeware shop, and Comrade Blaga took the banknote from her. He looked her up and down – it was then that the bad-belly feeling started – then he locked the door of his shop. There was no one else inside.

And now – no money, no vase, no hand.

Author M Lin joins us to discuss her fantastic debut collection, The Memory Museum, a series of stories that move between contemporary China and imagined futures to explore memory, family, censorship, loss, and—perhaps unexpectedly—joy.

The passage M reads for us, from the collection’s title story, comes from a scene she added only after nearly a year of revisions—a late breakthrough that ended up recontextualizing the emotional core of the story itself. It's a fascinating conversation about the unreliability of memory, and the satisfaction of “uncovering” elements of a story you didn’t realize were there.

M also talks to Cory and Jon about why writing is sometimes less an act of creation than one of patient discovery, how the process of writing itself gradually narrows a blank page’s infinite possibilities, the challenge of writing a hopeful story using the conventions of dystopian fiction, the influence of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and classical music, why she abandoned the rigid outlining habits she’d developed as a screenwriter, and how learning to trust her instinct became one of the most important parts of her creative process.

M’s passage, from The Memory Museum:

It took me years to uncover what I owed Lu Tian—my own memory of the afternoon when my father was first taken away. As the first step, I paused my visits to the library, shelving Laolao’s reconstruction into the subconscious. Several years later, I requested its audial and olfactory profiles and experienced them strictly on their own. Initially only to the point I used to stop at, then all the way to the end, to the huge fight between my mother and Laolao, which started with Laolao telling my mother to give up what she and my father were doing and ended in my mother packing up and leaving. Once I synced the profiles again, my brain cells went giddy, as if they were cooking up a big surprise but did not know the recipe. The fluster lasted a long time, straining my excitement into frustration. Often I thought about admitting defeat, but Lu Tian always managed to send me back to the memory tank, hopeful again.

One day, I left the two profiles playing on repeat and resigned myself to keeping my eyes closed. Very soon, time lost its grip on me. I couldn’t count how many times they ended and started over again. At some point, toward the end of a cycle, the audio glitched, but I didn’t open my eyes. The profiles continued playing but the sound became faint, as if everything were happening far away. It was then that an unfamiliar image flickered. In Laolao’s memory, after my mother left, we sat together in the living room, mindlessly watching a children’s patriotic education program on TV. Now that the show’s voiceover sounded more remote, I realized that my memory of those few minutes differed: I had not been with Laolao but by myself in the adjacent room, looking out from five floors above, the TV’s sound reaching me at a subdued volume. The unfamiliar image was familiar after all: It was of my mother in the courtyard, standing below our window with her suitcase. She bent her arms overhead, making the shape of a heart, and waved goodbye to me. In my memory, I could not hear her, but somehow she convinced me to move away from the window first, to return to Laolao in the living room, to resume the life of a child, with the show on TV, dinner on the table, and family by her side, so that, I understood now, her daughter did not have to imprint on her mind the image of her mother walking away, leaving her behind.

Award-winning author and actor Sonya Walger (Lost, For All Mankind) joins us to discuss her latest novel, Wifehouse—the story of a woman who has always defined herself as a wife and mother, and who, in trying to put her own happiness first, pursues an affair with a much younger French tutor. As Sonya puts it, it's ultimately a novel about "a mother who leaves,” and the questions such a story raises: Why would a woman make that decision? And what happens after?

The passage Sonya reads centers on a real-life story that inspired one of the book's most pivotal scenes—and one of the hardest for her to get right. It’s a great conversation about concision, pacing, metaphor, and how an ordinary podcast anecdote can find it’s way to unlocking the emotional heart of a novel.

Sonya also talks to Cory and Jon about her process of “writing into a question,” how the experience of interrogating a script as an actor lends itself to novel-writing, why more actors should write novels, the art of turning life’s observations into fiction, and what makes airplanes great places to get some work done (hint: it’s the fact that you’re trapped).

Sonya’s passage, from Wifehouse:

She gropes for her phone in the dark, finds a podcast to drown out her thoughts. The host of a news review show tells a story about a group of tourists on a guided tour bus in Iceland who got off at a rest stop to stretch their legs and take in the scenery. One female traveler decided to change her clothes before getting back on the bus. When it was time to leave, the passengers boarded the bus, and one of them alerted the driver that they were missing a passenger—a woman in black who had been sitting by the window. The driver agreed to wait, and they all sat on the bus, patiently awaiting this woman’s return. Eventually, when she did not appear, they decided to get out and search for her. The female traveler joined in the search. Local police were summoned, the fire department deployed, all beginning an increasingly frantic search for a missing woman in a black jacket. It was many, many hours before the female traveler realized that she was, in fact, the person for whom they were searching. She informed the authorities, and the search was called off. The host laughs as he tells the story.

Annie is wide awake now. She pictures this woman, trudging through the tundra, searching for the missing tourist. She wonders how long it took her to realize her mistake. She wonders how long it took her to admit to it. Did she hesitate, Annie wonders, did she for one wild moment wonder what would happen if she never owned her mistake but allowed that other self to vanish into that treeless horizon? Did she, for a moment, hover on the threshold of becoming someone new, someone naked, reborn, free?

Annie stares at the darkness. She, too, is walking in the wrong direction, knowing full well that she is the one who is missing.

Nigerian short story writer and novelist ’Pemi Aguda reads a passage from her latest work, One Leg on Earth, and discusses the challenges–and rewards–of short vs. longform writing, the writers who keep her inspired, and how liberating it can be to scrap your book and start from scratch. 'Pemi’s critically acclaimed work mixes elements of supernatural, speculative fiction, folk horror, and contemporary literature to haunting and mesmeric effect.

It was fantastic to talk to her about her process and her debut novel, “a richly patterned work of tangled mysteries” (The Guardian).

’Pemi’s passage, from One Leg On Earth:

"When a man eventually approached her, two-thirds into the green bottle, the night was already set on its path. Of course, he sat without waiting for an answer to “Fine girl, may I join you?” Of course, he said it should be a crime for a pretty girl like her to be sitting all alone at an hour like this in a city like this, and maybe it was destined, yes, destined, that Yosoye would tilt her head until her maroon braids pooled on one shoulder, and ask if he was there to remedy that.

The lines came unrehearsed to her lips. The script of a worldly woman. She who had always been a hesitant speaker, one who revised her sentences in her head over and over until her conversation partners repeated themselves, assuming she’d never heard them. Was she the same girl? Yosoye from five days ago would have been gobsmacked, would have clapped her hands like a Nollywood village girl and said, “Ehehn? Na you be this? This is you, yeah?” She was heady with unexpected success, so when he rose and took her hand, she didn’t protest. She didn’t think, too-fast-too-fast-too-fast. No. She thought, “Give me, give me.”

This was exactly what she wanted from Lagos: unpredictable turns to a day so that what was up was suddenly sideways, and that 8 p.m. would bring adventure that 6 a.m. never dared to anticipate, and enough courage to stop her from curling back into herself, retreating into the loneliness she was used to, the comfort of its grasping arms.

In the cheap motel that smelled too strongly of air freshener, Yosoye removed her clothes with a determination alien to her, a forthrightness that belied inexperience. A handful of painful times was the extent of her sexual knowledge, cold clutches and dry entries, but she did not remember those discomforts in this moment. All she thought was now, was yes, was give me. She flung off her blouse, impatient for what came next, for her future. Her flesh fed on its own hunger, slicked from her eagerness alone, did not look to this man to generate the wet heat needed. She would not remember the air conditioner giving up with a short bang, or the diamond patterns of the bedsheet, and when his socks dropped to the floor, she could not be sure if it was rat or shadow that darted over them.

Yosoye would deliberately refuse to remember him complaining about the condom, pulling out, tugging swiftly and efficiently enough to suggest practice, flinging the rubber into the foliage of a fake indoor plant—to be found by a whistling cleaner, or to ferment there forever. What Yosoye did remember was the feeling of being tugged along this Lagos night, lured, pulled, towed. Not the rhythmic smacking of his sweaty paunch against the inside of her thighs, but a grander hypnotic feeling of being swept up in a current, dragged in the surge of a ravenous tide."

Musician, writer, and biographer Jan Swafford reads not one but two passages! The first from the opening of his biography of the American composer Charles Ives and the second from his massive book on the life of Beethoven, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph–9n his words the hardest thing he’s ever written.

He also talks to Jon and Cory about:

• Why a musical biography has to reflect the subject–an Ives book should be Ivesian, a Beethoven book should be Beethovenian.
• His start as a “hack writer” writing Civil War history books for hire and learning how to do research.
• His research process and the value of a solid chronology.
• What you can learn about how people think and talk–from reading–and retyping–letters.
• The temptation to interpret a subject and the risks in doing so.
• Why writing about Beethoven’s process of composing his monumental Eroica symphony was the hardest passage he’s ever worked on.
• The importance of instinct–and of having a good early reader to give you honest feedback.
  
  Jan’s first passage, from Charles Ives: A Life in Music:
  
  In the old Ives house in the middle of Danbury, Connecticut in 1874, among the warren of rooms smelling of beeswax and fruit, these sounds were familiar.
  
  The intimate patter of rain, the measureless peeling of thunder, the jingle of sleighs in winter, the sure of spring peepers from springs and ponds, the clatter and clop of buggies down dusty Main Street, and the deeper rolling rumble of wagons on their way to shops and factories. From the congregational church next door are the muffled sounds of choir and organ and the great bronze booming of the bell, and all day Sunday the sound of distant bells like intimations of a presence beyond the horizon of this moment of this life.
  
  At holidays, the brass bands marching past, the rattle and crump of fireworks, the clang of the fire bell, in summer the cries of icemen and boys selling newspapers, inside the house the groaning of old floors, the antiphonal voices of a big family's comings and goings, and every night the bright rising and falling of music, cornet or piano or violin or bands, little orchestras playing in the park, outside in the shed or in the barn playing quick steps and hymns and Beethoven and Stephen Foster.
  
  On October 20th, 1874, from the large bedroom over the South Parlor, rose the Keening whale of newborn Charles Edward Ives, who would register the myriad sounds of home as few people have, and who would never forget them in the intimacies of their timbers and in their deeper human resonances.
  
  Jan’s second passage, from Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph:
  
  The dots and quilled and penciled on the page define an accumulating and clarifying vision of the work. Beethoven has never seen a battle, but years before, on the road from Bonn to Vienna, he encountered armies heard the bustle and rattle of troops on the march, the bugle calls and martial music.
  
  The overarching conception and the minutiae of melody and rhythm and harmony feed on one another. As usual, conceives his ideas in terms of familiar formal outlines. So now I'm talking about the process and the finished at the same time. For the first movement, he needs a Thema for the opening, then what he calls the Mittelgedanke, subsidiary ideas. Then he needs ideas for the Durchführung, his term for the development section.
  
  His forms are not molds to be filled with notes, but general guidelines to help organize the conception. This time, the conception is a name, Bonaparte.
  
  Whatever the form becomes, it has to be measured and cut to that subject. He wears out one quill pen after another, notes spreading over empty staves, pages accumulating in the sketchbook...

Horror and dark fantasy writer Nathan Ballingrud reads a passage from his novella, The Butcher’s Table, originally published in the short fiction collection Wounds (The Atlas of Hell). He talks to Jon and Cory about:

• The story’s origins as a blog serial
• His initial struggles to commit to the significant tonal departure from the stories in his first collection, North American Lake Monsters
• The fear of being taken less seriously by writing pulpy, fantastical fiction
• How Mike Mignola's Hellboy inspired him to commit to something as over-the-top as an angel-possessed squid
• Switching between laptop and pen and paper to unlock looser, more reckless drafting
• Learning to write by mimicking Stephen King and Clive Barker
• Attending Clarion Workshop
• Why he tries to avoid reading reviews (including those on Reddit, Goodreads, and social media)
• His love of Mervyn Peake and the Gormenghast books
  

Nathan’s passage, from The Butcher’s Table:

It spoke a word that fractured the jaw of its host, registering the pain as a curiosity. Upon hearing the word, one of the roosting angels took flight, rearing against the sun in a flare of black feathers, and plummeted into the sea, where it sank from sight like a corpse weighted with stones. The angel descended quickly, a dark-feathered ball, until it passed beyond the reach of sunlight and the water grew cold and black. It fell more deeply yet, oblivious to the atmospheres pressing against its body, its eyes pulling from the lightless fathom darting shapes, shifting mountains of flesh.

It found a host, made a bloody gash and wriggled into it, and filled the beast with its holy spirit. Skin split in fissures along the length of its form, and it jetted forward with fresh purpose, its tentacles trailing in a tight formation behind it, its red saucer-shaped eyes incandescent with hunger.

[...skips about 10 pages…]

It was a squid, a deep-sea monstrosity with tentacles nearly as long as the ship itself, and it was inverted in the sky. Its arms pulled the sails from their masts, yanked yardarms free of their moorings. People slid from the deck and into the churning water. The squid hovered in the air, its skin split lengthwise, revealing the white flesh of its interior, as though something within itself did not fit. Ragged black feathers jutted from the wounds. Its tentacles splayed in the air around it, a corona of horrors. Its glaring eyes smoked in the beating rain.

The great Russian translator Michael Katz reads a passage from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and discusses the painstaking process, many challenges, and hard limitations of translation, which he considers a “recreative” act vs. a purely creative one. He also talks to us about what keeps readers coming back to Dostoevsky’s strange, often difficult books, and why a good translation is only good for about 20 or 30 years.

Michael’s passage, from his translation of The Brother’s Karamazov:

He had a strange dream, utterly out of keeping with the time and place. He was somewhere out on the steppe, where he’d been stationed a long time ago, and a peasant was driving him through the slush in a cart with a pair of horses. Mitya felt cold; it was early November and snow was falling in large, wet flakes; it melted immediately, as soon as it hit the ground. The peasant drove along swiftly, boldly snapping his whip; he had a long fair beard. The driver wasn’t an old man, perhaps fifty, wearing a gray peasant’s homespun coat.

There was a village not far off. He could pick out the very black huts; half of them had burned down, and there were only a few charred beams sticking up. Standing along the road leading out of the village were lots of peasant women, a whole row of them, all thin and wan, with brownish faces. There was one in particular at the edge, such a bony woman, tall, looking about forty, but perhaps only twenty, with a long, thin face; in her arms she held a little child who was crying; her breasts must have dried up, with no milk left in them. The baby was crying, crying, holding out his bare little arms, his little fists blue from the cold.

“Why are they crying? What are they crying for?” he asks, briskly flying by.

“It’s the babe,” the driver replies. “It’s the babe crying.” And Mitya’s struck by the fact that he says it in his own way, the peasant way, “babe,” and not “baby.” He likes the peasant’s calling it a “babe”; it seems as if there’s more pity in it.

“But why is he crying?” Mitya persists like a fool. “Why are his little arms bare? Why don’t they wrap him up?”

“The babe’s chilled to the bone; his little clothes are frozen and don’t warm him.”

“But why is it so? Why?” foolish Mitya persists.

“They’re poor people, burned out; they haven’t a crust of bread; they’re begging because they’re burned out.”

“No, no.” Mitya still seems not to understand. “Tell me: why are these poor mothers standing there? Why are the people poor? Why is the babe poor? Why is the steppe barren? Why don’t they all embrace and kiss? Why don’t they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from black misery? Why don’t they feed the babe?”

He feels that although his questions are unreasonable and senseless, he still wants to ask them and he has to pose them in just that way. He also feels that an emotion of sweet tenderness is rising up in his heart, one he’s never experienced before, and that he wants to weep, he wants to do something for everyone so that the babe won’t cry anymore, and so that the dark, dried-up mother of the baby will no longer cry, so that no one will shed any more tears from this moment forth, and he wants to do all this at once, at once, without delay, in spite of all obstacles, with all of the Karamazov recklessness.

Science fiction writer Tom Toner reads a passage from his latest novel, The Immeasurable Heaven, published under the pen name Caspar Geon. He talks to Jon and Cory about his many notebooks full of longhand worldbuilding ideas, finding inspiration for alien species in David Attenborough nature documentaries, writing under contract vs. writing on spec, and a unique drafting process built more around addition than subtraction.

Tom’s Passage, from The Immeasurable Heaven (slightly abbreviated for space):

In the silt-suspended gloom something huge uncoiled. It scratched itself with a few lazy sweeps of its fins, scraping a peel of dead skin into the depths, before extending a tongue shaped like a fabulously intricate key and latching into the receiver. The apparatus glowed into life, startling a flitting ecosystem into the shadows and revealing the full, serpentine bulk of its user in a ghostly wash of light. The interior of the water-filled space lit up with every flicker and flash to reveal a cavern of gnarled, artificial stalactites and equipment that poked like instruments of torture into the creature’s lair.

The Translator, hundreds of meters from snout to tail, had never seen the galaxy with its own eyes, for it possessed none. It was likewise completely deaf, as most other species understood the term, relying instead on the single most sensitive organ for light-years around: a tongue equipped with twenty million pressure receptors per cubic centimetre, a tongue it had never seen.

The receiver pulsed with flowing light as the Translator cycled through a wealth of options, sorting the signal vaults. Trillions of rising transmissions had been collected from the fissure in the realities as if with a giant net and left to stew, their caches of interference filtered and stored in separate branches of Obaneo station for further analysis. Today it was moving downwards through the datastores, so to speak, into a vault that had been left unopened for millennia.

The Translator clenched and relaxed one of the hundreds of muscles in its tongue in rapid succession, exploring a chronological sensochart and discovering that the signals in today’s vault were pre-Throlken, over five hundred million years old, the deepest it had ever gone. It made itself comfortable, suckling a jet of Jatsotl milk from the reservoir below the receiver while a population of Tickler species went to work massaging its ancient, scaly body, and dialled the pressure volume to medium, looking forward to the stimulating glut of undiscovered languages it was about to sense for the very first time.

The Translator opened the vault, recoiling a moment later as the waters of its nest clouded with dark, sulphuric blood.

It shut the receiver off, yanking its tongue free and nursing it inside its mouth, every nerve howling in pain.

It could only think of one sufficient word for what it was: a scream of a strength never recorded before. The older transmissions were always diluted and weak; nothing even a tenth that antiquated had ever come through so potent, so painful. Converted into sound it would surely deafen—perhaps even kill—anything unlucky enough to be born with ears.

The Translator gingerly reinserted, probing carefully through the data to check the signal strengths—something it really ought to have done beforehand. There. Nine thousand one hundred on the scale. No wonder its poor tongue had almost split in half.

It labelled the vault as unsafe and coiled into a knot on the floor of its cavern, thinking, the nest’s filtration systems already dispersing the blood. Such a signal would take colossal amounts of power to produce, whole star systems’ worth, the output of a widespread and successful interstellar civilisation. All that power, channelled straight into its mouth.

Food writer and memoirist Anya Von Bremzen, author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, reads from the epilogue of her latest bestseller, National Dish, and discusses what happens when world-historical events dictate last-minute rewrites—and a project becomes personal.

Anya’s passage, excerpted from National Dish:

On February 25, 2022, I woke up after a turbulent night checking news updates about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Amid the shock, bouts of crying, and adrenalized doomscrolling, a seemingly trivial yet intimately unsettling thought entered my mind. I realized that after years of investigating national cuisines and identities, I no longer knew how to think or talk about borsch—a beet soup that both Ukraine and Russia claimed as their own.

I grew up in Soviet Moscow eating borsch—борщ in Cyrillic, no “t” at the end (that’s a Yiddish addition)—at least twice a week. For better or worse, it always signified for me the despotic, difficult home we had left. Here in Queens, a big pot my mother had just made sat in my fridge. But who had the right to claim it as heritage? That tangled question of cultural ownership I’d been reflecting on for so long had landed on my own table with an intensity that suddenly felt viscerally, searingly personal.

Back in Moscow, at the height of Brezhnev’s “stagnation,” I never regarded borsch as any people’s “national dish.” It was just there—a piece of our shared Soviet reality, like the brown winter snow, the buses filled with hangover breath, or my scratchy wool school uniform.

Our socialist borsch came in different guises. Institutional borsch, with its reek of stale cabbage, was to be endured indistinguishably at kindergartens, hospitals, and workers’ canteens across the eleven time zones of our vast Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Personal borsch, on the other hand, brought out every Soviet mother’s and grandmother’s quiet ingenuity—although to me, it all tasted kind of the same in the end.

My mom was inordinately proud of her hot, super-quick vegetarian version. I still have an image of her in our trim Moscow kitchen, phone tucked under her chin, shredding carrots, cabbage, and beets on a clunky box grater right into our chipped enamel family pot. It was her recipe, she always insisted—a miracle of a shortage economy conjured from a can of tomato paste and some withered root vegetables.

Author Gabby Squailia reads a passage from her debut fantasy novel Dead Boys, a macabre, rollicking story set in the afterlife. She takes us through the unconventional road from idea to published book, and explains how her writing process continues to evolve.

Gabby’s passage, excerpted from Dead Boys:

Just beyond the edge of the path, an upended water tower was half-buried in a mound of debris, and beyond its rusted curve lay a view of the River Lethe unparalleled in the city proper. Jacob, despite his unmoving lungs, gasped.

Its purplish waters were wide and slow-moving. The motionless corpses that floated on its surface were surrounded by glittering shoals of refuse and roiling rainbows of oil. There, past the bobbing shape of a claw-footed bathtub, was the stretch of river-bend where he’d thrashed out of the mud and onto his newly lifeless feet nearly a decade ago. With this unexpected glimpse of his point of deathly origin, it all came rushing back: how, after days of toil, he’d propped his numb body up on one palm, then another, only to lose his purchase in the slippery mud and splash face-first into those amniotic waters, where the whole humiliating process began anew.

Giving his full attention to his footsteps, Jacob was surprised at how well-tended the interrupted path became as it led to the seer’s door. Someone had packed it down, forcibly and recently. Stepping lightly now, he rubbed his reupholstered palms together, the high-pitched scrunch of their leather soothing his mind.

“Greetings!” he cried, jerking one hand over his head, but as soon as he’d had a good look into the murk of her chamber, he choked on his prepared speech. From the roof to the rust-bitten curve of the floor, the room was packed with filth-encrusted children’s toys. Quilts and blankets spewed moldy down onto jacks-in-the-box with broken springs. Board games missing their pieces served as tables for eyeless dolls. In the center of the candy-colored sprawl sat the seer known as Ma Kicks, her body so thoroughly ravaged by time that Jacob felt a professional ache at the sight. From forehead to foot, her skin was full of holes, flashing elbows, cheekbones, and knuckles alike. Her face was a soiled handkerchief askew on her skull, incapable of expression.

“My name is Jacob Campbell,” he said, steadying himself enough to bow. “I come with a gift — and an uncommon question.”

Ma Kicks still hadn’t moved, but at the sound of his voice, something within her did. Startled, he staggered backward, fixing his attention on her belly.

She must have been near her ninth month of pregnancy when she’d died. Since then, her womb had given way, and from its dark cavity two tiny, skeletal feet emerged, dangling over the edge, kicking into the open air.

Writer Daniel Magariel reads a passage from his remarkable second novel, Walk the Darkness Down, and delves into how he creates his characters, his research methods, and the sustained meditation of the writing process.

Daniel's passage, excerpted from Walk the Darkness Down.

At the age of eighteen, when he first started scalloping full-time, Les suffered from sleep paralysis. The condition is not uncommon among fishermen. It lasted only a few years, fading away as the work–rest cycle on the trawler normalized. Back then he went down easy, but dreams would float up fast, mischievous and terrifying dreams from which he would attempt to will himself awake so urgently that his mind would come alert though his body still slept. At first, confused by this disharmony, he hallucinated a presence sitting on his chest, pinning him down as his mind screamed and flailed and wept until he bolted upright in the berth. But as the condition advanced, the dreams evolved. The presence disappeared and the time it took Les to wake lengthened. He could be trapped inside himself for what seemed like hours. In that paralyzed state, he would feel himself falling down, down, down into a depthless sea. Body still, mind wild, he watched the light near the surface of the water wither as he dropped deeper into a blackness so vast that it used the world for a reservoir.

That is what it feels like when Les loses consciousness over the hollows of the sea.

Despite his immersion suit, the cold stunned his limbs once he dove into the water. He swam with desperation, with purpose, swam for survival, for warmth, restricted and protected by the buoyant neoprene. He swam toward the blinking light on John Wayne’s suit, away from the boat, powering through the swell, churning onward. He imagined his body like a machine, the kind that recycled its byproduct as fuel. When his limbs grew tired, he swam for rest. When his breath was short, he swam for air. When dread crippled his mind, he swam for courage, for faith. He swam and swam until he ground to a halt, lungs burning, and stopped to take his bearings. The light on John Wayne’s suit had vanished. The trawler was nowhere to be seen.

He rested for a moment before sinking into a fear that sputtered like his breath.

Panic surged and he swam again, this time with wasteful, failing strokes.

He changed directions impulsively, his entire body filled with unexpected movement.

Sucking air, he vomited from the salt water and exertion.

He was forced again to rest, to calm down, held up in the swell by the suit’s flotation.

Les did not lose time, but the hours that passed took on the effect of sleep. There was blackness above, blackness beyond, the sea a glistening obsidian. Rain poured down relentlessly. Cold set in, creeping up from the toes, slowed the flow of blood. Stilting his thoughts. Mind lurching. Lunging? Lurching.

He swam for clarity. Only a few strokes and stopped. Spasms in his feet, his legs. His mind. Shivering. He couldn’t feel his fingers. Fangers, as his father said the word. Old man dead in all this wudder for water. Locals used yuh for yes. Marlene spent a year trying to get their daughter to say it right. Daughter. Her name. Angie.

Angie.

Angie.