Ryan Napier is the author of Four Stories about the Human Face (Bull City Press). He lives in Massachusetts. More at ryannapier.net and @ryanlnapier on Twitter.

**Thank you to Klankbeeld for the lovely sounds and SighPilot for the music

Brittney Uecker is a librarian, writer, and Scorpio living in rural Montana. Her work has been featured in HAD, Taco Bell Quarterly, Kalopsia, and others. She is a Best of the Net nominee for fiction and tweets (@bonesandbeer).

This story originally appeared in Dark Entries Journal in October of 2021. 

Today's guest is the great Hannah Lillith Assadi. Her new novel, The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, was published by Riverhead in early January. It was named a Most Anticipated book of the year by The Washington Post, Good Morning America, Bustle, Lit Hub, Hey Alma, and The Millions. I recommend Stars, especially if you're fond of unreliable narrators, the slippery nature of memory, and the Great Mystery. 

In this interview, we discuss creating and executing unreliable narrators, Faulkner, toying with time and chronology, the good and bad of publishing, Hannah's revision process, death and dying, the afterlife, and more.

Not only is Hannah a brilliant writer, but she's also a professor of creative writing at Columbia's MFA program. You'll learn much from her, I have no doubt.

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