Poured Over: R. F. Kuang on Babel

“We’re all constantly translating ourselves to the world—we all are trying to take the inevitable stuff that happens in our psyche, our fears, and hopes and desires and dreams and trying to communicate that with others. And some of us are more successful at it than others.” A group of four friends find themselves at the center of a deadly battle between good and evil at an alternate 1800s Oxford University in Babel, the epic new novel from R.F. Kuang, author of the bestselling Poppy War series. Rebecca joins us on the show to talk about world-building, friendship, colonialism, her literary inspirations (including The Secret History by Donna Tartt), Victorian ideas of masculinity and queerness, how she writes, and more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from interns Issa and Jenna.

Featured Books (Episode):

Babel by R. F. Kuang

The Poppy War by RF Kuang

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation by David L. Eng

Featured Books (TBR Topoff):

The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode:

B&N: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over. And if you don’t know the byline R. F. Kuang yet, I’m going to ask you to please, please, please pick up Babel as soon as you can. Her fourth novel is out. It is a little bit like The Poppy War series that she’s done, but it’s also very much its own creation. And Rebecca, I’m going to ask you to describe Babel before we really get into a conversation about character.

R. F. Kuang: Sure, well, first, thanks so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here. And I’m very excited to be launching my fourth book Babel in just under a month. Now, I would describe it as a dark academia historical fantasy set in 1830s, Oxford. It’s about secret societies, anti-colonial revolution, the romance of the academy and the magic of translations. So it’s really me building in all the little nerdy subjects that I’ve been studying and obsessing over over the past few years. I think in terms of how it reads it’s a perfect blend of The Secret History by Donna Tartt. And Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark. So if you like that kind of Victorian pastiche, obsessed academic vibe, then I think Babel might be the book for you.

B&N: Oh, it definitely is. I’m just gonna step in right now and just say everyone needs to read Babel, it is a page turner, the characters are fantastic. There’s a little nod to Charles Dickens to with some of these character names, which we’ll talk about in a second. But you are working on your PhD in Chinese history, if I have that correct. Yes?

RFK: Broadly East Asian languages. But Chinese Literary History is good enough way to sum it up.

B&N: Okay. So you started your undergrad with Chinese history, you have two master’s degrees from the UK. Now you’re getting your PhD. So that’s four degrees for novels. Can we talk about the cadence of your writing for a second and hat when you started writing Babel?

RFK: Actually thinking about my novels in terms of which degree I was working on when I wrote them makes a lot of sense. And it’s helpful to separate out the different phases of my creative career. I wrote The Poppy War trilogy when I was an undergrad at Georgetown, and I was studying Chinese military history then and I ended up writing my dissertation on the commemoration of the rape of Nanjing in 1937. And the different ways that it’s been represented and memorialized over the decades as mainland China’s geopolitical position changed. So it made a lot of sense that The Poppy War trilogy was deeply concerned with these questions of communist mythmaking, and what you do with historical atrocity. Then when I went to the UK for my two master’s degrees, my interests shifted from straight history to literary history and now to a proper strong blend of history on the side. And then I started getting deeply interested in questions of translation, and how texts travel and how texts speak to one another. And in the year before I had started working on Babel, I had begun translating Chinese Science Fiction professionally. And I received a lot of good advice from Ken Liu at that point on how to do relations. And I remember sending him this email asking him, what do you do with questions of accuracy, you’ve made all of these suggestions and my translation that diverge from what I thought would be the best literal translation of the original text? So what are your thoughts on questions of authenticity and faithfulness to the source? And that was the beginning of my realization that there is no such thing as a purely authentic or a purely fake. Translation always involves some sort of warp or new interpretation or new creative construction on the part of the translator because I was very obsessed with absolute literal translation in a very academic sense, because I thought, if I change what idiom is being used here, or substituted with another idiom entirely, then that that’s academically not accurate, right? But it does change the way it is read if, for example, use an idiom that’s not very well known in English but very casual and popular in Chinese it, it makes the target audience approach the text with with a different understanding and, and the vibe is different. And sometimes if you want to keep the same effect that the author was going for, then you do need to substitute in your own phrases or idioms. So that I became obsessed with this question of how is it possible for two languages to talk to one another? And what do we do with the people and the texts that are moving in between those worlds and cultures? And at that point, I was studying at Oxford and surrounded by all this beautiful architecture and thinking about Oxford’s colonial history and I’m very deeply influenced by place, and my novels always reflect where I was and what I thought about where I was. I’m in Italy right now reading a lot of Dante. So my next novel will involve a lot of Italian and a lot of Dante and I just could not get over the the magic and strangeness of Oxford and especially feeling like an outsider and thinking about ways in which so many other scholars of color must have felt like outsiders at Oxford over the decades. So that’s when the seeds of Babel started coming together. Later now, it’s a proper novel.

B&N: And that’s the perfect moment to bring in Robin Ramey, Victoire, and Letty, who are the four main characters and I’m going to stick to their first names only because I think last names might give away a little bit of the story. And I would really like people to be as delighted in the read of this book as I was, there are surprises on every turn, there are big questions and little questions and lots of action, which anyone who’s read The Poppy War can tell you this is to be expected and a novel by R. F Kuang. But you’re doing a lot in this book. And the one thing that I really, really loved sort of from early pages was the way the characters reveal themselves, for better or for worse, they show us who they are. And that’s not always the easiest thing to do. I mean, there’s, you know, it’s a cliche for a reason Show, don’t tell, right as you’re working out this epic 500 page plus story, but was Robin, the first character who showed up for you?

RFK: I actually conceived of those four characters as a group before I flesh them out as individual characters. And the reason for that is, I think one of the most important tropes are at least one of the more appealing tropes of dark academia novels is the idea of the cohort, which is a group of students who enter at the same time and whose paths diverge, but their interpersonal relationships. And the ways in which they support each other love each other fall in love with each other are jealous of each other become rivals, or ways in which cracks show and their foundations that ultimately pit them against each other. I think the sheer messiness and passion of a cohort relationship is so fascinating. It’s one of the things that makes the Secret History One of my favorite novels and something that I was also very lucky to experience in Oxford having this friend group living in this rarefied world of pure ideas and texts that you feel like you would die for. So the first thing I conceived of was the idea that there had to be a cohort and it had to be messy, and they all had to be in love. Next Robin did come first, because he’s the point of view character. And because I have a background in Chinese and no Chinese history particularly well, he just happens to be the most convenient character for me to write about authoritatively. It also helps that 1830, which is the decade that I’ve decided to structure the novel around is so important not only for the British Empire, but also its relationships with the Qing Empire and the Opium War that kicks off in 1840, and the massive historical ramifications from that to England’s silver reserves, which really allowed it to pursue a next great wave of colonialism. So China seemed to central to the story. And therefore Chinese was central to the story and therefore a character who could speak both Chinese and English and move through Victorian England as this outsider who is learning it, who can never properly fit in, it seems that was the natural protagonist, but Rami, Victoire and Letty, are all so close to my heart, because they’re all not precisely based on real people, but they contain so much truth of my relationships with a lot of my friends while I was at university letting you especially because without giving too much away, I think a lot of us have that kind of painful, frustrating relationship with someone who we hope will listen to us and understand where we’re coming from. But the message never really quite gets through to but Remi and Victoire. They, they just are the voices of many of my friends speaking to me, and they represent the disagreements that we’ve had over questions of colonialism and imperialism, and violent and nonviolent revolution. So it’s so easy for me to write truthfully and authentically about those cohort friendships because I was just drawing on memories at Oxford. And there’s actually one scene in the middle of the book where and it was one of the first things I ever wrote when I was drafting Babel, and it’s changed very little from that first frenzy to drafting to now and it’s when they’re all in victoires room playing a game of cards and suddenly bursting into laughter and giggles because suddenly there’s a stench of fruit somewhere, but they don’t know where it’s coming from, and they all start interrogating each other and it’s utterly absurd. Certain ridiculous in the fridge doesn’t exist. And they don’t know they’re imagining the smell anymore. But it’s one of those you really had to be there moments. But I had that moment in my friend’s room. And I remember walking home after midnight and thinking, wow, that was just so magical. The Alchemy of that moment where people who I’d only known for a few months, I had suddenly, people I would die for. And I wanted to preserve that lightning in a bottle sense of deep, deep friendships. So yeah, the cohorts really important to me, and they were cohort first before they were individuals.

B&N: And also that intimacy that comes with youth. And that kind of immediate bond that they have is really exciting to read on the page, because as you said, they would die for each other. And, I’m not actually giving anything away when I say that, but their friendship is so key to how the story moves. I mean, we really don’t meet a lot of characters from their past or outside of the university. I mean, Robin’s father is part of Oxford, and he’s a very big part of the story. And Robin’s half brother is part of the story as well, but they really become a family. These four kids,

RFK: I really like found family tropes I loved describing a found family in the popular trilogy. And obviously, echoes of those type bonds and betrayals show up in Babel as well. I think college, undergrad in particular is such a magical time, because you’re away from a lot more. Most people are away from their biological families, or you know, their adult parents for the first time in their lives. And it’s a unique period where your friends just live down the street. And you can see them every single day and lead me to see them every single day to recreate that sense of community and belonging and comfort that you’ve just left after you turn 18 and left home. And as I’ve been getting older and moving through my mid 20s, I’ve had lots of conversations with friends where we were surprised. So I have some close friends in New Haven that I see almost every day and commenting on how strange this was that we’re just crazy people who invite ourselves over to each other’s home for dinner all the time, because we need that emotional support. And I thought no, this isn’t strange at all. It’s actually very sad that the expectations of your 20s now is that social life is so atomized that it’s not normal to see your friends every single day in every single moment. And I think a lot of adults feel isolated and feel that it’s harder to make friends once you’ve left college. And I think many people have nostalgia for the undergrad days when you could just show up in the dining hall and see your friends and talk about how your classes that moment that morning had gone. So I think writing that cohort for me is also nostalgic about how easy it was to make friends and fall in love with them with a deep, deep passion in college and how that’s something you never quite get back as you get older, which is why there’s so much focus on that, that portrait that they take. And why Victoire after everything that happens with Letty stills holding on to that portrait.

B&N: I would like to go back to Robin for a second because he’s navigating this space in a lot of ways he’s really unsure of himself. And it’s partially because his dad doesn’t really see him as his son, he sees him as an asset to Babel. And not as not even really as a person. Can we talk about the dynamic between Professor Lovell and his son.

RFK: droppings, interiority and his relationship with his father was the most interesting challenge for me to tackle in drafting the book to begin with Robins, the first male protagonist I’ve ever written. And I was really interested in 19th century Victorian ideas of masculinity and queerness, and how different men access the privileges of masculinity from different certifications. So that’s why I wanted to push myself and write Robin as a man for once instead of Ren who has her own issues with fitting into the patriarchy. This is something that I really struggled with in the drafts, Robin, he suppresses things a lot, and he’s very quiet. And he’s a very divided person in many different ways, linguistically, culturally, he often feels like a split personality. And because of that, he makes contradictory decisions. He’s not sure of himself, he waffles he does things that seems irrational. And when I turned in the first draft of the novel, my editors, they sat me down and we had a long chat about him, because fortunately, I’ve gotten to the point where my revisions don’t involve that many structural changes because they have a better grasp now on pacing and what keeps the plot chugging along. But the biggest editorial change was that they it’s not that they wanted me to change how Robin was acting, but rather making it clear to the reader the complexities of the psychological journey. He was going through because so much of it is denial and suppression and refusal to acknowledge the truth both about who he is and who Professor Laval is and how he feels about that. So I ended up reading a really fascinating text by David Chung and Shin Han. And David, I believe, is an English Lit scholar. And she home is a psychotherapist and it’s called racial melancholia, racial disassociation on the social and psychic lives of Asian Americans. And Rob is not Asian American. But that text got to a lot of parallel issues about not feeling like you belong and not feeling a deep relationship to either one of the identities you’re scribed and feeling split and feeling like you’re being asked to choose which Robin being mixed race and having been born in Canton, and growing up in England is struggling with constantly. And this all comes to a head at a pivotal chapter in the novel where he finally realizes he can’t keep living a split existence. And you can’t keep being a divided man that ultimately has to choose what he stands for and who he wants to be. And that can’t be determined by external factors. That’s something that he needs to use for himself. And spoiler alert, it gets very explosive. It really picks up the pace and where everything changes. But yeah, it was a difficult relationship to write about and goal, a personal journey, but it really forms the backbone of the entire novel.

B&N: And speaking of difficulties, we need to talk about colonialism for a second, because colonialism, obviously is huge part of Babel, and China’s experience of colonialism is not the same as India, it’s not the same as communities in the West Indies. It’s not the same as a lot of places. So Remy and Victoire, have slightly different POVs from Robin, but let’s talk about their experience of colonialism and how that comes together with Robin.

RFK: It was important for me to include the characters of Remy who’s from India and Victoire, who’s from Haiti as foils to Robin to emphasize first how global and interconnected the British Empire was, but also different perspectives of colonialism because it’s not a black and white issue where you just have the victims and the end people who are morally in the right and the evil, bad aggressor. They’re all these complicated and nuanced differences in how the British Empire interacted with China and India. So for example, China was never properly colonized by the British, its history is referred instead as semi colonialism, which is a bit of a messy term. And it’s not clear exactly what that means. But I think works well enough in this context, as opposed to what the British did in India, which was much more direct, much more brutal and pervasive in every aspect of social life and governance. So Ramy and Robin, therefore, are hugely split on questions of the benevolence of the British Empire, and what to do about it. And I wanted to contrast heavily their personalities, and also their attitudes and willingness to support revolution because Robin is much more timid and Wofully and unwilling to commit and Rami, for example, who has grown up watching the British colonized his home has much stronger feelings about the British Empire, and about the necessity of violent revolution response. Victoire, on the other hand, comes from the first black Republic, and one of the shining examples of doing the impossible in history. I read a lot of Haitian historians while doing research on Victoires’ background and a theme that came up over and over again was the sheer and imagined ability and the perceived impossibility that something like the Haitian revolution could ever occur. And I was playing a lot with the theme of doing what seems unimaginable and impossible in the course of revolution. The the idea that revolution or successful revolution always seems impossible, because the Empire is so powerful, it’s so pervasive, is so overwhelmingly mismatched in ability compared to rebels are the people trying to overthrow their current system of domination and the fact that Victoire has this legacy and it’s from a place where it was indeed possible is a beacon of hope for the rest of them and, and that’s why her name is Victor one. That’s why she gets the last chapter of the novel. And that kind of optimism and doing the impossible is something that stands in stark contrast, again to Robin who was infected by a sense of pessimism and fatalism as the novel goes on. And I don’t want to give too much away but one of my is, I wrote was in the final chapters. It’s this confrontation between Robin and Victoire. And she basically tells him that she refuses to die for the revolution because she won’t just be some shiny, pretty martyr for white abolitionist appointment and say, That’s so sad. Let us use the example of her pain to inspire us. She refuses to be that she wants to survive, and she wants to live and thrive and she gets the ending she deserves. And I think having that to counterbalance Robins sense of martyrdom, which he whips out all the time in, in a kind of escapist move was very important to the plot and to the complexity of the entire discourse about colonialism revolution going on throughout the book,

B&N: But you also build off of a lot of small moments, too. I mean, obviously, revolution, huge, huge, huge colonialism huge, multifaceted, but I want to read a little bit from sort of towards the end of the book, and Robin is being guided, he’s writing pamphlets, and he’s being guided by an older student who says, Be careful with your language, you’ll want to avoid rhetoric about anti colonialism and respecting national sovereignty use terms like scandal, collusion, corruption, lack of transparency and whatnot cast things in terms that the average Londoner will get worked up about, and don’t make it an issue of race. So you have tapped into sort of a greater moment of Let’s even say it’s a little more modern than the 1830s. I mean, Babel is obviously firmly grounded in Victorian literature. But you know, reading that makes me think, Oh, dear, we haven’t really come that far, halfway, these kids are seeing the same things that we’re seeing centuries later.

RFK: One of the themes I tried to tackle with Babel was the way in which we’re all constantly translating ourselves to the world, we all are trying to take the inevitable stuff that happens in our psyche, our fears, and hopes and desires and dreams and trying to communicate that with others. And some of us are more successful at it than others. And some of us by virtue of where we’re from, or where we’re located are able to be heard and understood more easily than others. And that’s just as true today as it was in the 1830s. So in that scene, Anthony is explaining to Robin the ways not just in that moment, and how they have to present themselves to white people, but how he has been performing and putting on a veneer and comporting himself in a certain way around white people his entire life in order not to be treated worse than they otherwise would have. And Anthony is an extreme example. But I think even today, a lot of people of color that I know, learn to code switch, and they learn to speak to white audiences in a different way. I know that when I do book events, for example, if I’m talking mostly to white people, I’ll talk about issues in a different way. And I might not be as honest or as blind or as direct about some things I feel strongly about as I would with an audience of people who are coming from a more similar social location. So it’s not just a question of talking white, but also a question of who you trust and who you’re speaking to, and how much trust you have in your audience to really listening to what you’re saying. We’re all constantly trapped in this web of self translation and the difficulties there have, and I think you’re totally right, it is equally a problem today, as it was back then.

B&N: Do you think it is possible to change institutions from within? I mean, it’s a question we’re wrestling with now. And I’m not asking you for, you know, a perfect answer or anything like that. But what is your gut say?

RFK: Can we actually do this? I want to say yes, because I want to be an optimist. But I think about this mostly from the perspective of the academy, and whether it’s possible to change the Academy for good from within. And sometimes the way that I justify being at institutions like Cambridge and Oxford and Yale to myself is by saying, well, at least here I have the kind of resources I need to do the research that I want have access to almost any book that’s been published in the last 100 years through our extensive digital collections, I am able to get grant money to go to places like Italy to go to DC to look at the National Archives if I want I am so enabled as a scholar here than I would be at different institutions. But at the same time, academia thrives off of people loving its comforts too much to want to do anything to change it from the inside. So we have a lot of discourses within this discipline about how tenure track or tenured faculty don’t do nearly enough to support junior colleagues and how indeed, if you speak out about existing power structures, you’re labeled a problem. So people who’d get on those ladders then start defending themselves. And I think the question of do you defend yourself in order to stay within the institution and continue reaping its rewards and privileges is something that’s made very stark and babble because at the end of the day, you don’t want to lose those accesses. You want access to the library, so it’s it’s this trap. And I honestly don’t really know what to do about it. And I don’t know that I would make the kind of radical choices that Robin and the Hermes society ultimately do. It’s it’s very difficult, it feels like revolutionary change. Now, it’s much harder even than it was in the 19th century, just because power disparities, and inequality has gotten so drastically worse. So I don’t know what change looks like. But community level efforts inspired me and seeing strikes succeed, for example, and seeing unions succeed across grad students at different universities over the past year has been inspiring. So I think that there are little things you can do on the ground. But it remains very tricky to exist within the academy and be critical of it, but still have a job. And it’s something I struggle with all the time.

B&N: I don’t think you’re alone in that. I think we’re all figuring out what power means, what access means, how to bring about change, that is fair, I think there’s just so much in front of all of us, but want to go back to you for a second. Babel is 500 plus pages of history and story and character and twists and turns. And one, are you a linear writer and two, did anything surprise you because this is not a tiny book. This is an entire world.

RFK: I am not a linear writer. And I really wish I was because it would make the drafting process a lot simpler, but I struggle with two contradictory impulses. The first is that I am completely unable to write a scene or get excited about it. If I can’t feel it very vividly and, to use TikTok speak, if I’m not vibing with it really hard in the moment, which means it’s impossible for me to do things like write detailed outlines and project because I don’t know what plot twists are going to resonate, because I don’t know the characters yet. And I don’t know the decisions they’re going to make. And I also don’t know what the major conflicts of the book look like yet. So all I can do when I’ve first come up with the seed of a story and I’m playing with is just to write a bunch of scenes that I think are exciting and interesting and see and watch the world slowly take shape and the unconscious and slowly get to know the characters. And I always write about 50,000 to 80,000 words of this brain vomit zero draft before my thoughts clarify. And I’m able to step back and look at what the story really is and what its structure is. And it’s at that point that my second impulse, which is a deep love of structure and the geometry of stories kicks in, I really love reading about x and how you can divide stories into the 3x structure for example, which I adore and I’m happy to get back to you and the 5x structure and and things like the Save the Cat beat progression that is so popular among screenwriters, I really love thinking about crafting that way. And it’s just this geometrical elegance to me when you can see the different acts of a story and their peaks and crescendos and their dips. And that makes me very happy. So it’s at that point that I figured out what structure works for the novel, and then retroactively go back and see if I can map a lot of the plot points along that structure. And this means I end up deleting 10s of 1000s of words every time because I’ve just written stuff that doesn’t fit into the novel anywhere and with Babel is also difficult because you asked what surprised me what surprised me with this is that it could not be a three act structure. Now, look at the popular trilogy, it follows the rule of threes in basically any chance that I get, or it’s a three there. The trifecta is obviously a three there are three novels and there are three acts within each novel. And I was trained at the Odyssey writing workshop where Jean Debellis, the instructor showed me this beautiful diagram of how story arcs happen over trilogies. And it just excited me so much. I’ve been using that for a long time. And so for the longest time, I was trying to make Babel fit that three act structure, but it really didn’t work because it’s a standalone. So you can’t leave story arcs open for books two and three to finish. And it’s also a building’s Roman, which means you have to do all this front loading and the first act to establish where the character came from and the early childhood and watch them becoming a person before you get to the exciting meet at the second third Acts where they as a person are actually doing things. So I wanted it to be a 3x story for so long. But the first act just kept going and going that it felt very unbalanced. And I finally started doing some reading about 5x structures and realized that was more appropriate for this novel. But yeah, that that’s probably more amusing on structural elegance than you wanted. But that was the big technical challenge for me with this novel and it was fun to stretch my structural toolbox that way because now I feel much more capable will have handling more complicated plot progressions than your standard epic fantasy novel employees.

B&N: Okay, I know you just said this is a standalone but there are a couple of moments sort of two thirds of the way through the book, maybe three quarters of the way through the book where I thought you were setting up a sequel. So is that just completely off the table?

RFK: I think if I were to write a sequel, I would want seven fingers for it. And I finished writing it. I wanted the book to be satisfactory as a standalone and I didn’t have open plotlines. The Final Chapter, I think that there is a potential story after the events of the novel. But without giving too much away. I think the next logical place for events to center around would be the American Civil War. For reasons that should be obvious to me unless you have finished the novel. But I would need those seven years to become an expert on the American Civil War and the history of slavery and also teach myself Haitian Creole and French, neither of which I have a very good grasp on right now. And I don’t feel capable of doing that as an artist with the skills I have right now. But I’ve joked about it a lot with my fiance. He loves the Godfather trilogy. And we’ve joked about a possible godfather to type structure where you have a prequel sequel thing going on, and the prequel follows Griffin, and the sequel follows, you know who, but I think it would be very difficult for me to write and that’s not something I’m actively working on right now.

B&N: Babel works as a standalone, I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. It is such a satisfying reading experience. And I was actually I was sad when it was over because I wasn’t ready to leave and the pages just fly. They absolutely fly. There were a couple of little lines you just dropped in there that I was like, Huh, I wonder if Rebecca is thinking about this. You mentioned The Secret History as a literary influence for you. But what might some other examples of that be, but can’t be the only book?

RFK: I love Vita Nostra  by Sergey and Marina Dyachenko, who are a pair of Ukrainian writers and Sergey Dyachenko passed away recently, which is a great loss because his work is incredible. And it’s translated from Russian, I believe. And it’s this wonderful, strange, dark academia novel about a girl who literally becomes a word. And it’s hard to follow at some points. And it’s definitely the trippiest novel I’ve read in that genre. But it encapsulates so well the obsession of studying and the toll it takes on your mind and body, and really what it means to not sleep for days on end as you’re preparing for a test. And I did go back to that novel just so I could re familiarize myself with the kind of frantic strain of undergrad education and how that masochistic obsession can become so satisfying, even while your mind and body are breaking down. So I think for readers who are looking forward to Babel, Vita Nostra is a good place to start.

B&N: Okay, so what’s next for you now that you’ve put Babel out into the world,

RFK: I’m in this wild place right now, where I have three books in different stages of production. So I’m getting so many emails from my publisher constantly. And it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on. But Babel is about to come out. Yellow Face, which is my literary fiction debut in May of 2023. And it’s a wildly different kind of novel, The tone is completely different. Instead of a 500 + page historical fantasy, it’s very Zippy and dramatic and silly and absurd, and it’s designed to be read in a single afternoon, but it satirizes almost every aspect of the publishing industry, it involves a protagonist named Jun, who’s white and she steals the manuscript of a dead Asian American writer and passes it off as her own and the novel follows her trying to keep up with this lie even as more and more pieces start appearing in her story. And it’s a trippy psychological thriller about friendships and rivalries gone wrong and the silliness of the publishing industry. And I’m very excited for that to come out because I really love jumping between genres and trying out different modes of storytelling and yellow face is so vastly different from anything I’ve ever done. Then right now I’m drafting my next fantasy novel with Harper Voyager, it’s tentatively titled Eriko, which will make sense to nobody but hopefully it will be a reference that people understand in time and I’m still having a hard time talking about it, because it’s the first novel I’ve written that doesn’t involve questions I actively study instead, it’s really about philosophy, which is my fiance does feel it gets death and reincarnation and logic, paradoxes, paradoxes and rational choice questions of what is a good life and what is an ethical life and what atonement for sins might look like? Like, I’ve also jokingly described it as a rom com between rival PhD student magicians set in hell and and the hook I guess is that two magician scholars literally go to hell to rescue the soul of their dead advisor because they need him to write them recommendation letters so that they can get jobs. So it’s in a sense, a parody of academia. But it is all about all these difficult philosophical issues that I’m still researching and wrapping my head around.

B&N: You know, little questions, right? Just little questions. You’re just gonna keep sticking to the little questions and wrapping an entertaining story around the mom. It’s not the plan.

RFK: I have to write about things that bother me so much they keep me up at night. And I guess right now I am really bothered by Mind Body dualism and reincarnation and eternal recurrence. So there you go. Hopefully, I can make that into a commercially exciting novel.

B&N: Oh, I don’t doubt that you can. Oh, wait, I have zero doubt. And I cannot wait to read yellow face that just sounds like fun. All of your stuff is always fun, though. Okay, Rebecca, I could sit here for hours and listen to you riff on all of this because the way your brain works is amazing. I love the idea that you’re taking these huge ideas and wrestling with them and then wrapping a really cool story around them. So I’m hoping that folks who maybe haven’t read The Poppy War yet will pick up Babel sooner rather than later. I knew I said that at the top of the show, but I’m gonna say it again because I really mean it. And if you haven’t read the poppy War series, you should give it a whirl too because Ren is a pretty cool character. And you know, if you read Poppy War after Babel, you might see some similarities. But you know, that’s four novels that you can take anywhere with you and have a really good time with them. Rebecca Kuang writing is R.F. Kuang. Of course, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. This has been a treat.

RFK: Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time.