Sofia Samatar speaks with Kate Wolf about her new book Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life. Opacities is addressed to a fellow writer, Samatar’s close friend Kate Zambreno, and considers both the process of composing a book—the wellspring of inspiration, wishes and anxieties that accompany it— as well as the distance between a work and its author. Samatar explores how to stay alive as a writer through things such as community, extensive reading, and research alongside the dissonant ways writers are often asked to codify their identities and constantly promote themselves. Drawing on the words of writers like Eduard Glissant, Maurice Blanchot, Clarice Lispector, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Opacities is at heart a book about the furnace of creativity, and the fuel that keeps it burning despite its many trials, risks, and disappointments.

Also, Eugene Lim, author of Fog and Car, returns to recommend Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal.