Welcome to episode 10 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This week Jonathan and Gary have a delightful conversation with Nghi Vo, whose The Empress of Salt and Fortune won this year’s Crawford Award and is a Hugo finalist, and whose debut novel The Chosen and the Beautiful, a fantastical revisioning of The Great Gatsby with a queer, Asian Jordan Baker as narrator, is out this week.
We discuss the value of fanfic, the virtues and vacancies of Fitzgerald’s classic novel, the question of whether any narrators are ever reliable, and how Nghi managed to convey the sense of a full epic fantasy in The Empress of Salt and Fortune and then shift to a very different narrative mode in When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, the second novella in the “Singing Hills” cycle. We also get a preview of the forthcoming novel Siren Queen, with its intriguing exploration—again in fantastic terms—of the early Hollywood film industry as experienced by an Asian actress.
As always, our thanks to our guest, Nghi, for her time. We hope all of you enjoy the episode.
Episode 491: Ten Minutes with Sarah Gailey
Episode 487: Ten Minutes with Maureen McHugh
Episode 490: Ten Minutes with Amal El-Mohtar
Episode 489: Ten Minutes with Daniel Abraham
Episode 488: Ten Minutes with Brooke Bolander
Episode 486: Firing the canon
Episode 485: Ten Minutes with A.T. Greenblatt
Episode 484: Ten Minutes with Cheryl Morgan
Episode 483: Ten Minutes with Alec Nevala-Lee
Episode 482: Ten Minutes with Arkady Martine
Episode 481: Ten Minutes with Molly Gloss
Episode 480: Ten Minutes with K.M. Szpara
Episode 479: What Comes Next?
Episode 478: Ten Minutes with Sarah Monette and Katherine Addison
Episode 477: Ten Minutes with James P. Blaylock
Episode 476: Twenty One Minutes with Peter Watts
Episode 475: Ten Minutes with M. John Harrison
Episode 474: Ten Minutes with Jane Yolen
Episode 473: Ten Minutes with Nancy Kress and Jack Skillingstead
Episode 472: Ten Minutes with Kij Johnson
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