Backstory. The killer of many a novel. But the complexity of today’s world and its many voices makes more demand on backstory than ever, so what to do? Listen in to debut novelists Aube Rey Lescure and Shilpi Suneja to hear how they solved this knotty problem in the process of writing and revising their first books.
Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American writer. She currently works as the Deputy Editor at Off Assignment. Aube is the co-author of Creating a Stable Asia (Carnegie 2016) . Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Guernica, WBUR, The Florida Review Online, Jellyfish Review, Entropy Magazine, Medium, and more. Her essay “At the Bend of the Road” will be featured in Best American Essays 2022. Her novel River East, River West is due out 2024.
Shilpi Suneja was born in India. She is the author of the novel House of Caravans, which comes out in June, 2023 from Milkweed Editions. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Guernica, McSweeney’s, Cognoscenti, and the Michigan Quarterly Review among others. Her writing has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship, a Grub Street Novel Incubator Scholarship, and she was the Desai fellow at the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. She holds an MA in English from New York University and an MFA in creative writing from Boston University, where she was awarded the Saul Bellow Prize.
Also mentioned in the episode: Ben Percy’s wonderful craft book Thrill Me
Day 12: Backstory with Aube Rey Lescure & Shilpi Suneja