Emma Copley Eisenberg Jumps In
& a roundup
Hello friends,
This letter is coming to you later in the day than intended due to some spectacular Delta Airlines discombobulation and the inconsistent internet access of rural Maine. Nevertheless, it is Friday, there is a shiny new episode of Thresholds that we are very proud of, we’ve received news that every elephant has her own name, and the WIFI seems to be holding. Things are looking up.
Before we get to today’s episode, I want to mention: the last Thresholds Letter celebrated a beautiful conversation with Amy Lin, who talked about losing her husband suddenly at age 32. A few days after we published the interview, Amy’s house burned down in a freak accident. If you’d like to contribute to the Go Fund Me that’s helping her rebuild, click here.
Today, we’re sharing an interview with
, the author of the narrative nonfiction book The Third Rainbow Girl: the Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, as well as her new novel, Housemates. (Emma is also the co-founder of Blue Stoop, a community hub for writers in Philadelphia, and the author of an excellent newsletter, Frump Feelings.) I’ve admired Emma for her criticism and narrative reporting chops, and Housemates feels both totally in keeping with her prior work and like a revelation of whole new skillsets. The novel is about the responsibilities and risks of making art, what it feels like to be young and queer, American landscapes, and sex. I keep saying to people that it feels like a warm book that is also a smart book, which is a combination I like very much.
Emma had a mystic puzzler of a threshold. One day, when she was working on Housemates, she had something like a vision: she was standing on a cliff over the ocean, and her two main characters were bobbing in the water below, calling up to her that she had to jump in. She didn’t want to. They insisted.
I won’t say any more about it than that. You’ll just have to listen.
Mentioned in the episode:
Carmen Maria Machado’s short story “The Husband Stitch”
The opposing literary worldviews of Grace Paley and Ottessa Mosfegh
Jazz by Toni Morrison, and the spectral narrator
Not mentioned in the ep, but a great read: Emma’s essay on fatphobia in fiction (The New Republic).
I saw several writer acquaintances sharing a list The Atlantic put together of 136 works that define the Great American Novel. But while the list highlighted characters of diverse races, ethnic backgrounds, gender identities, and sexualities, those with disabilities were virtually absent. And by my count just one of the selected novels was substantively about a fat person. In the introduction, the list’s authors characterized their mission as selecting works that “accomplished ‘the task of painting the American soul.’” But what about the American body?
In other news:
Thresholds alums are up to all kinds of interesting, accomplished, exciting, lightly intimidating things in the world. Here is our incomplete list:
Join us in congratulating Sarah Thankham Matthews on the 2nd birthday of her novel All This Could Be Different and subscribing to her excellently-titled Substack,
.Sarah Manguso’s new novel, Liars, is about rage, divorce, sex, and housework, and people are talking about it. Interview describes it (in the preamble to an interview with SM) as“the story of a marriage told by the woman transformed into a wife within its grindhouse captivity.
“I floated facedown in housewifery. I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew.” (Interview)Jeff Vandermeer has a new novel coming out in October and you should absolutely preorder it here.
We have fallen in love with Leanne Shapton’s watercolors of dogs. (NYRB)
For all the aspiring novelists in the audience, Hilary Leichter is running a year-long novel generator workshop starting this fall and you should absolutely be in it.
That’s all for now! An interview with the witty, precise, extremely stylish Sigrid Nunez coming next. In the meantime, if you like what we’re up to here, please share the newsletter and the podcast far and wide — it really does help.
Til soon,
Jordan
So many good recs in here! Thank you!