How do you hold onto hope in the dark? This question feels more pertinent than ever right now, and we couldn’t think of anyone we’d rather ask than author Jenny Offill, who we spoke to from our various quarantine locations this month. Her new novel Weather is a sharp, insightful meditation on how regular humans process catastrophe, and while it’s particularly about the climate crisis, as you might imagine it’s become weirdly relevant in our current situation too. But listen, rather than bring you a show about catastrophe, we also wanted to make a show about hope. ‘Obligatory note of hope’ is an expression a character uses in Weather, and it’s also a website that Jenny set up with resources she found during her research (https://www.obligatorynoteofhope.com/). So, as well as talking to Jenny and giving all the usual recommendations, we’ll be thinking about what it means for a book to be hopeful, and talking about which books and authors have personally given us hope over the years. So, Pandora: shut that box just in time, and join us for the next hour on Literary Friction.
List of books mentioned that give us hope:
Octavia: The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson; Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid; Just Kids by Patti Smith; Octavia Butler and Ursula K Le Guin’s writing; The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz
Carrie: Middlemarch by George Eliot; Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson; When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson; Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout; Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo; The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn; Ways of Seeing by John Berger
General Recommendations:
Octavia: Wrechedness by Andrzej Tichý https://www.andotherstories.org/wretchedness/
Jenny: Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin https://oneworld-publications.com/fever-dream.html
Carrie: Bad Behaviour by Mary Gaitskill https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/312/312616/bad-behavior/9780241383100.html
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This episode is sponsored by Picador https://www.panmacmillan.com/picador
