Saïd Sayrafiezadeh on Debt, Cults, and Our Inner Algorithms
The narrator of your story “ Minimum Payment Due ” is mired in debt and, from the outset, trying to
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Crystal King is the author of The Chef’s Secret and Feast of Sorrow , which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and was a Must Read for the MassBook Awards. She is an author, culinary enthusiast, and marketing expert, and has taught at multiple universities including Harvard Extension and Boston University. She resides in Boston. You can find her at CrystalKing.com , or follow her on Threads , Facebook , and Instagram . In this interview, Crystal discusses how being told one genre wasn’t sellable led her to combine genres with her new gothic historical fiction novel, In the Garden of Monsters , her advice for other writers, and more. Name: Crystal King Literary agent: Amaryah Orenstein, GO Literary Book title: In the Garden of Monsters Publisher: MIRA Books Release date: September 24, 2024 Genre/category: Gothic, Historical Fiction, Mythology Previous titles: The Chef’s Secret ; Feast of Sorrow Elevator pitch: A Gothic retelling of Hades and Persephone from the point of view of a model that surrealist artist Salvador Dalí brings to the Sacro Bosco—Italy’s Garden of Monsters—as his muse. Bookshop | Amazon [WD uses affiliate links.] What prompted you to write this book? It was the middle of the pandemic, and I was struggling to sell a historical novel about a Renaissance food figure. “Renaissance books aren’t selling right now,” I was told (not long before Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait hit the bestseller list). I was discouraged. This sentiment also didn’t bode well for the book I was writing about another obscure Baroque-era steward. I was lamenting about the whole thing on Zoom with an author friend, Kris Waldherr. “If I were going to write something that would actually sell, what would it be?” I remember her tilting her head in thought. “Well, gothics are hot right now (she had just finished a gothic masterpiece about the women of Frankenstein, Unnatural Creatures ).” And I thought to myself, Hmmm. If I were to write a gothic, what would I write? Immediately, the location came to me. And if you’ve read many gothics, you […]
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The narrator of your story “ Minimum Payment Due ” is mired in debt and, from the outset, trying to
Hanif Kureishi You have been back in your London home for several months now, after a year in different hospitals,
