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Rebecca F. Kuang

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65
first
2024-01-24
most recent
2024-01-24
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Yes, I've given lectures on craft, but I think that's a bit different. You can be good at lecturing about craft and you can deliver talks to an audience, but I'm thinking about writing instructors who work with you over the same period of time and read and critique your work. And I've only worked with one of these, Jean Cabellus, who runs the Odyssey writing workshop, which used to be a six week sci-fi fantasy writing workshop in New Hampshire, but now has become a year-long, more accessible model. And I think she was absolutely fantastic. So I'm just trying to figure out exactly what it was about her approach that I found so effective. And I think one thing is that she recognized that she was very good at isolating the problem, but gave you space to generate the solution.”

    2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I just turned in an essay to British Vogue about all the things I hate about going on book tour, which is the indignities of travel and worrying about making my flights and worrying about showering and composing myself before I come downstairs and say hi to booksellers, but I think the thing that makes it all worth it is interactions with readers, right? I wonder if you feel this way when you do public events. You can be exhausted, your face can be strained from smiling, you can wish you were in bed, but then somebody comes up to you and has a conversation and you remember why you went on the road in the first place.”

    2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Which by the way can take months, sometimes over a year to negotiate, I've had contracts take over a year, so you don't get the money right away, and then you get another fifth upon delivering acceptance of the manuscript, and that comes at the end of the editorial process. You get another fifth when the book actually comes out on publication date, then you get another fifth, 12 months, and then 18 months after the fact. And this whole process can stretch out over two to three years. So it might seem at the start that 100,000 is quite a lot of money, but if you're realistically making about $30,000 a year, then you can't just write and make a living. You have to be doing something else at the same time.”

    2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Auth Well, maybe some authors are less, but this is a related conversation. It's not just that the amount of the advance is not livable. And I say this for the average book deal, right? Obviously, I'm in a very lucky position now where my advances are sizable. But if you look at the average advance that's paid out and you subtract the agent fee and you subtract taxes, if you're writing a book a year, you probably aren't making enough to live on. And then you think about the schedule according to which an advance is paid out. So you don't get your entire advance up front. Currently, the advances are divided into, I think they're paid out in fifths now, which means that you get a fifth. Say you get $100,000 advance. You might get $20,000 paid immediately when you sign the contract.”

    2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Think about the editors specifically the acquiring editors who are deciding which new talent is worthy of getting a book deal worthy of being put on bookshelves. It's unfortunate that the makeup of that room has largely seemed unchanged year after year and there are many reports on industry statistics that back this up. It's a very homogenous group of people who are deciding which books to buy and we want that to change. We want different editors selecting stories, pruning them and cultivating them for readers, then it has to be a livable industry to enter in the first place.”

    2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “You know, nobody has asked me this question in part because it seems so utopian. I think I would Increase entry level wages to make publishing jobs livable in cities like New York and London, and I say this because based on conversations with friends who are either part of the Harper Collins Union or folks who are trying to enter the publishing industry and become one of those gatekeepers, one of those people who can decide which manuscripts are valuable, worthy of getting a platform, worthy of being put in front of readers, everyone circles back to the same problem that it's nearly an impossible industry to enter unless you have previous connections or more importantly inherited wealth, family wealth, some situation that lets you live in London or New York without worrying too much about your income because entry-level wages are really so atrocious and this trickles up right when we”

    2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I still haven't read any of his novels. I read the essay about cruises and enjoyed that greatly, but I don't have a position on his fiction.”

    2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I love pale fire for my birthday this year one of my friends Rodrigo got me this special edition that has the cantos printed on index cards so you can go through the index cards as you're reading the narrative proper or you know the notes on the poem and Once I have a bit of spare time, I'm going to sit down and read Pale Fire the way that perhaps the book of intended with the index cards in hand.”

    2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “That's right. I actually haven't finished House of Leaves. My fiance loves it. He thinks it's one of the scariest books he's ever read, but that's part of why I can't finish it. I always get a third of the way through and then become too frightened and my mind's not in a good place when you put it down, but it's such a massive book that if you put it down, you'll have to start from the beginning to tackle all over again.”

    2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, that's true. In Perinacea doesn't follow an exact template. And if you go in thinking that it's going to be like Jonathan Strange and Matt precisely onto some historical metaphor or even have that much of a linear plot, then you may be disappointed. But if you read, be transported, I think, into a different frame of mind than you come away delighted and enchanted.”

    2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Tolkien will be around forever. I really hope that Susanna Clark lasts. I'm a big fan of her work. I hope Perin AC becomes one of those immortal works of fiction”

    2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “That platform and gains an audience rightfully deserved because Ken has decided to introduce it to that audience. So I'm thinking a lot about the economics of how text travel and what gets platformed and what doesn't. So without arguing that, I don't think that these works are interesting or important or innovative. I think we also have to consider why is it these authors that have been put in front of us.”

    2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Unfolding Beijing is a fine place to start. I do really like that story, so I'm not doing shock that you call it important. I will say there's also an interesting way in which what is canonical or what is deserving of critical acclaim or what gets the Anglophone audience really relies on the role of the translator and the venue and the literary economics of it all, right? So when we talk about Liu Tishin and Hao Jingfang and their work, we can't leave out of the picture Ken Liu, who is both critically acclaimed writer of science fiction and fantasy in English and a critically acclaimed translator. And there's a lot of inks filled on this already, so I'll just direct readers to go look up his work. What Ken has decided is interesting, and it occupies”

    2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Big fan of musicians, the three body problem trilogy, and he's telling me he can see where the Clark influence comes from. So that's somebody who really likes to get into the nitty gritty riot of how literary movements come to be and those specific, trans-specific multicultural influences. I hate making claims like, oh, all Chinese fiction is this way when clearly it's not and so many writers within those movements occupy very different social positions, have very different prose styles and have different concerns with what they're trying to accomplish in their fiction.”

    2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I really resist these broad generalizations of national literatures because you always find a lot more diversity within a genre, within a national literature than you do differences between two national literatures, I think. So it's really hard to talk about significant ways in which Chinese science fiction is different from American science fiction because there's no broad quality that you could subscribe to American science fiction either. And there's also a lot more trans-Pacific movement than people realize. There's so much translation going back and forth and authors are mutually influenced by one another. It's well documented that Leotashima's heavily influenced by the Golden Age of Anglophone science fiction like Arthur C. Clark. My fiance is reading 2001 a Space Odyssey right now in its sequels.”

    2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source