1--What is the title of your latest release?
AT THE END OF EVERY DAY
2--What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
A loyal employee of a beloved theme park notices increasingly strange things as she works her last couple of weeks before the park’s closure; meanwhile, a brother and sister exchange letters, revealing why there are secrets that are meant to stay behind the park’s dark and dazzling curtain…
3--How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
The location was the thing with the book. When I had hit a roadblock with a few other manuscripts, I sat down and asked myself what I could write about for months and months on end without getting exhausted, and I decided that it was the psychology of theme parks and animatronics. It’s always been an obsession, especially the really high production value parks where glitches and ride break-downs mean a total rip in the fabric of reality for guests.
4--Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
Definitely a few times, but I think she’d start to creep me out after a while. I’d probably come up with an excuse to bail on our plans, and then try to avoid her for the rest of my life.
5--What are three words that describe your protagonist?
Unmoored, swoony, acerbic.
6--What’s something you learned while writing this book?
That you shouldn’t be afraid to take a big swing. Not everything has to be an elegant little metaphor or a nonspecific vibe. You can have some real crazy events unfold in your story – unlikely and bizarro events, as long as those events are earned and make sense within the logic of the universe you’ve created.
7--Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
I tend to edit in large sections, maybe 25 pages at a time, and then write the next chunk fresh, cyclically like that until I reach the end. But I don’t know if that’s great for momentum. I’m going to attempt a full draft of my next book before starting to edit. With Book 2 I’ve done a lot more decision-making in advance, which will hopefully make the whole process more straightforward. (She said, as though nothing there could possibly go wrong.)
8--What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
I’m a goat cheese fiend. I have a fantasy that I find the global authority on goat cheese on a mountaintop, or like, a secret goat-cheese-El Dorado on a hidden island, and convince them to train me up.
9--Describe your writing space/office!
I wish I could tell you! I’ve never found anything that consistently feels right. It’s a rotation. There are a couple of libraries, a handful of noisy east London cafes (one with wifi one without, to suit my purposes), and occasionally my home, but I get antsy there. And if my baby’s nearby then forget about it. He’s too fun. Huge distraction. I think I always work best in transit, specifically on trains. I wrote an essay about it for Glimmer Train years ago. https://www.glimmertrain.com/bulletins/essays/b130reiche.php
10--Who is an author you admire?
Nell Zink. Reading her fundamentally changes your brain chemistry. She’s so lucid in a way that makes you feel like you’re on speed. And she’s got such a wonderful disregard for any of the ‘rules’ of plot and structure and - I think most importantly - character. All her characters are sort of spiritually related in the same way that batches of sourdough can be related (which is something I don’t understand and don’t want to be corrected about.) She writes till her characters have experienced something they need to experience, and then she stops. I think her latest, Avalon, was criticized for that reason: it didn’t have the familiar contours of a capital-N Novel because the characters weren’t built to satisfy us, but rather to fulfill their own piquant and weird mini-teleologies. I loved that book; for me it just felt extremely refreshing. She reminds you that a novel can feel like a vignette, a short film, a series of odd anecdotes, as long as it’s done artfully. She’s also just the coolest person in the world, right?
11--Is there a book that changed your life?
The Magicians by Lev Grossman. It was the first novel I read as an adult that hugged me into that semi-conscious stupor that we bundle ourselves up in as children who are just starting to read. I loved it for that coziness, but Grossman was also able to shoehorn in this devastating, heartbreaking stuff about what a curse it is to be told you’re special when you’re young, and then to be released into the world and realize that you’re not. Or rather that you might have something exceptional about you, but that that’s not a guarantee it will ever matter. I think about the basement tattoo scene all the time and get choked up. That whole second act, the depiction of the hungover ennui that I felt when I was in my early twenties….I don’t know, it made me feel excited about the potential of genre fiction – that it could be sensationalist and fantastical, sure, but it can also lend insight into hyperreal and unglamorous and sad and boring truths about being alive. Oh, and I never saw the TV series.
12--Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be
published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
The previous week I’d received an email from my agent telling me that someone at Atria was reading the manuscript, but because of the time difference I think I was out and didn’t want to get my hopes up. It just felt like sure, someone’s ‘reading it’, and that’s exciting, but what were the chances that Simon & Schuster was going to go for this extremely strange, sort of amorphous book that was born of a really niche obsession? And then on Monday at about 6pm my agent called and said things were moving, and as we alternated emails and phone calls I remember curling into a ball on the floor by my bed and emitting this high-pitched noise. It was some instinct to go into armadillo-mode as my dreams were coming true. I tried to stay really calm when I told my partner about it, and we were just sort of eyeballing each other like…Could this really be happening? And then it was a lot of waiting on details, and when it got finalized - I can’t even remember. I think it was just an excitement-blackout. Shrieking, etc.
13--What’s your favorite genre to read?
Literary fiction, but literary fiction that plays with the surreal and the supernatural and the impressionistic. So anything authored by someone interested in how far they can push the boundaries of their story before it becomes genre fiction, if that makes sense.
14--What’s your favorite movie?
This is the most impossible question. I think about it all the time, and I had a running list in my Notes app for years but then it got deleted! So to name a few… Return Of the Jedi. The World, The Flesh And The Devil. Toni Erdmann. Children Of Men. 12 Monkeys. Altantique. Trainspotting. Empire Records. Call Me By Your Name. Mustang. Yeah ultimately I think it might be Mustang, the 2015 Deniz Ergüven film about five Anatolian sisters. I saw it eight years ago and I think about it probably every other day.
15--What is your favorite season?
I’m a total sun-grump. I’m gonna say late autumn, early winter.
16--How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
Realistically, an all-day pub session with lots of food. But the dream would be a very low-key destination-celebration. I spent my 30th in a farmhouse in northwest Iceland with 17 friends who’d flown out from all over the world. It was July and it never got dark, not even at midnight, so we lost our minds a little bit. We scurried around under waterfalls,, injured ourselves on trampolines, drank Black Death, sat in a hot tub for medically unsafe stretches of time, got attacked by wild terns, tried to trick each other into walking underneath a cursed stone arch, etc. So something like that every birthday for the next 40 years would be great.
17--What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
My favorite podcast is POOG. Those ladies can talk about Foucault and retinol in the same breath. And to that end, Kate Berlant’s episode of The Characters on Netflix was a masterpiece. I also love Severance, and I’m just such a fan of self-contained sci-fi with a distinct concept that knows where it’s going and isn’t trying to become a franchise.
18--What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Another really difficult one, as I was raised on takeout in the Bay Area, so I’m pretty spoiled and omnivorous. If I could have some skill uploaded to my cerebral cortex à la The Matrix, it would be how to make Indonesian laksa. So let’s go with that.
19--What do you do when you have free time?
Lately with my brand-new kid, I’m so exhausted that when he’s asleep I just kind of lie on the couch and dissociate on my phone. Nothing impressive or ambitious. But before he came along, I’d love getting on the train and exploring new parts of London - or whatever part of the world I found myself in - that I’d never been to before, even if there was nothing remarkable about it. I just love a 50-90-minute train journey, almost anywhere.
20--What can readers expect from you next?
Late-night techno Ashkenazi ghosts.
A Novel
In this haunting debut novel—perfect for fans of Iain Reid, Jeff VanderMeer, and Julia Armfield—a loyal employee at a collapsing theme park questions the recent death of a celebrity visitor, the arrival of strange new guests, her boyfriend’s erratic behavior, and ultimately her own sanity.
Delphi has spent years working at a vast and iconic theme park in California after fleeing childhood trauma in her rural hometown. But after the disturbing death of a beloved Hollywood starlet on the park grounds, Delphi is tasked with shuttering The Park for good.
Meanwhile, two siblings with ties to The Park exchange letters, trying to understand why people who work there have been disappearing. Before long, they learn that there’s a reason no one is meant to see behind The Park’s curtain.
What happens when The Park empties out? And what happens when Delphi, who seems remarkably at one with The Park, is finally forced to leave?
At once a novel about the uncanny valley, death cults, optical illusions, and the enduring power of fantasy, Reiche’s debut is a mind-bending teacup ride through an eerily familiar landscape, where the key to it all is what happens at the end of every day.
Thriller Psychological [Atria Books, On Sale: July 4, 2023, Hardcover / e-Book, ISBN: 9781668007945 / eISBN: 9781668007969]
Arianna Reiche is a Bay Area-born writer based in London. She was nominated for the 2020 Bridport Prize and the 2020 PANK Magazine Book Contest. She won first prize in Glimmer Train’s 2017 Fiction Open and Tupelo Quarterly’s 2021 Prose Prize.
Her stories have appeared in Ambit Magazine, Joyland, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, Berlin’s SAND Journal, Feels Blind Literary, Lighthouse Press, and Popshot. She is a graduate of Goldsmiths College’s creative writing MA programme, and her chapbook Warden/Star was published by Tangerine Press in 2021.
Her features have appeared in Art News, The Wall Street Journal, New Scientist, USA Today, The London Fashion Week Daily, Fest Magazine, Vogue International, and Vice. She also researches and lectures in interactive narrative and metafiction.
No comments posted.
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy