September Newsletter

Axiomatic is finally here! Maria Tumarkin will be traveling to the U.S. to launch her award-winning work of narrative nonfiction this week, with events in New York and the Bay Area. Here's where you can find her:

Friday, September 20, 7:00
Community Bookstore | Brooklyn, NY
in conversation with Rebecca Godfrey, author of Under The Bridge

Sunday, September 22, 2:00
Brooklyn Book Festival| Brooklyn, NY
together with Edwidge Danticat, author of Breath, Eyes, Memory, and David Chariandy, author of Brother, on "Tragedy and Trauma"

*Transit will also be at the Brooklyn Book Festival at Booth 309, with new releases, old favorites, totes, and more. Stop by and say hello!*

Tuesday, September 24, 7:00
East Bay Booksellers | Oakland, CA
in conversation with writer and critic Ismail Muhammad, reviews editor for The Believer

Maria Tumarkin Interview in LARB

Tumarkin spoke with novelist and critic Mireille Juchau, for the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Juchau: Axiomatic deploys reportage, interviews, commentary, and atmospheric exposition in its searching accounts of cultural crises. You’ve said you’re not “a debunker, an apologist, a historian or a social commentator.” How do you describe your method in Axiomatic?

Tumarkin: My readerly desire is for a writer to respond to their material acutely and honestly and in real time, i.e., as they are researching, thinking, being thrown around, writing, and for that response to not be filtered through a preexisting template. Memoir–broader research–memoir–broader research. One-two-one-two.

Juchau: English isn’t your first language, yet it’s the language in which you became a published writer. You’ve spoken about trying to preserve your wry and exuberant writing style which several editors have attempted to sanitize or correct. How important is this voice to your work? Are you conscious of preserving or amplifying it while writing?

Tumarkin: If I could have passed for a born-into-English speaker I would have happily passed, but it wasn’t happening and I needed to work out what to do about sticking out so much—and hating the experience of being "smoothed out."

Apart from my sentences being wrinkly or knotty or unfriendly or foreign, I was reprimanded for my general breathlessness. Take the reader by the hand, I was told. Lead them, but don’t run in front of them, no pulling them this way and yanking them that. I wasted years figuring out that writing as strolling hand in hand with my reader was not for me. I am the yanking type.

You can read the conversation in full at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Axiomatic in The Paris Review

"I have always dreaded movie sequences in which a human life—a normal, long life, unshortened by illness or war—gets condensed into a few emblematic scenes."

Read an excerpt from Axiomatic in The Paris Review.

News, Reviews, and More

1. The Chicago Tribune calls Axiomatic one of the "books you need to read this fall." 2. Vol.1 Brooklyn, The Millions, and Ms. Magazine include Axiomatic in their September books previews. 3. Full Stop calls Maria Tumarkin a "clear-eyed excavator of much pain and sorrow." 4. Electric Literature previews Suneeta Peres da Costa's Saudade, which "explores what it means for colonial subjects to be complicit in oppression and racism." (Out October 1.) 5. Saudade makes the shortlist for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2019.