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Episode 25: "Austerlitz" by W.G. Sebald, translated by Anthea Bell, w/ special guest Mark Haber
111 Plays6 months ago
We’re joined today by Mark Haber of Coffee House Press (formerly of Brazos Bookstore in Houston). Mark is the author of two novels, Reinhardt’s Garden and Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, and the forthcoming novel Lesser Ruins, as well as a forthcoming novella, Ada. We chat about his work as well as Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, translated by Anthea Bell. A quick note that there was some construction noise we didn’t detect during the recording but did get picked up by our mics. We’ve eliminated it to the best of our ability, but if you hear a bit of an odd thrumming in the background or our voices crackle, it’s not your ears.
This is a fantastic and wide-ranging conversation, really digging into a lot of what makes Sebald’s work unique (and how it does or does not influence Mark’s own work). We discuss memory, liminality, style, surveillance and organization, the lack of literary feuds on TikTok, and more.
Titles/authors mentioned:
W.G. Sebald (all of it, but especially):Vertigo, A Place in the Country, and Campo Santo
Sergio Chejfec: The Dark and My Two Worlds
Javier Marías
Franz Kafka
D.H. Lawrence: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Rainbow, and Sons & Lovers
Anthony Trollope (like, all of him)
Juan Jose Saer: Scars and The Sixty-Five Years of Washington
Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled
Follow Mark on Instagram (@markhaber) and follow Coffee House on Instagram (@coffeehousepress) and Twitter (@Coffee_House_). And be sure to pre-order Lesser Ruins from your preferred indie bookseller!
Click here to subscribe to our Substack and find us on the socials: @lostinredonda just about everywhere.
Music: “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” by Traffic
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introduction to Lost in Redonda
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. And I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda. Hey Lori, how are you doing today? Tom, I'm doing well. How about you?
00:00:20
Speaker
doing all right.
Climate Change Effects in Chicago
00:00:22
Speaker
It's early spring now, I guess, in Chicago, my, my daughter has informed me that every groundhog everywhere failed to see their shadow. And she was very disappointed because she wanted more snow. But yeah, that's, that's kind of where we're at. How's, how's Dallas, Trina? I thought that spring didn't come to Chicago until like Memorial Day. What's going on?
00:00:43
Speaker
I think it's called climate change. I think that's exactly what we're looking at. Yeah, Chicago winds up in one of those strips on the map that as things get warmer or more erratic, it becomes more temperate, which also means our mosquito season has become absolutely disgusting. So yeah, good times.
Introducing Mark Haber
00:01:03
Speaker
We have a special guest today. I'm very excited. We do. I was going to move us on from our usual weather chat and say hello to Mark. Hey, Mark.
00:01:13
Speaker
Hey, Tom. Hey, Laurie. How are you? Glad to be here. Thanks for joining us. So Mark Haber is joining us for our backlist conversation today. He is the director of marketing at Coffeehouse Press. Prior to that, he was at Barazzo's bookstore. And has it been a full year that you've been at Coffeehouse at this point, or are we approaching the year mark?
00:01:35
Speaker
We're approaching a year, I think around toward the end of February, I was brought
Mark's Relocation and Pandemic Reflections
00:01:40
Speaker
on. So a little less than a year, but we're getting there. We're getting to that year mark. And then I worked remotely for about a month or so and then became kind of a transplant along with my wife in May. I mean, you made that big move from Houston to the Twin Cities, which is a hell of a move.
00:01:58
Speaker
It is, it is big, big change. And I love Houston. It was always good to me. It was a great experience. But it was, we'd been in Houston about 11 years. I've been at Brazos for about 10, almost 11. And I think we were just looking for a change. I think a lot of people during the pandemic kind of looked at what they were doing and things were good, but I think we were all ready to kind of move on and do something new and exciting.
00:02:20
Speaker
So how have things been at Coffee House? I mean, I guess to preface, Coffee House is absolutely one of my favorite presses, does some of my favorite books. When I was a buyer, I would get to that section of the catalog and just pretty much go down the line with like sixes or tens or what have you and demand every arch imaginable.
00:02:39
Speaker
so that's a very very cool place to be working basically don't don't don't dispel my illusions i'm i'm hoping that it's as good as i think it is no the magic is here no absolutely i mean there's been a lot of changes i think overall in just publishing and really the world and any kind of uh business you can look at so there's been a lot of change but um but no the magic is still here and
00:03:00
Speaker
You know, I think the quality of the books in coffee houses has remained really, really consistent and really steady. So
Changes at Coffee House Press
00:03:06
Speaker
even though there is behind the scenes, a lot of people leaving and coming on, that aesthetic, that kind of quality, I think never really suffered. But no, things are going really good. We started last year in what we call our NVLA series, short for novella. So it's a novella series and we do two novellas a year. So one every season.
00:03:25
Speaker
And it's been great. And we've got one coming out very soon by K.Ming Chang. And it's been really challenging, but in a good way. It's been fun. And you have quite a budding writing
Mark's Writing Journey and 'Lesser Ruins'
00:03:38
Speaker
career. Well, I don't even know whether I could say budding at this point, Mark. You've got two acclaimed novels under your belt and you're about ready to publish your third. So I'm assuming the move has also been good for your writing.
00:03:51
Speaker
You know what? It has been. I wrote so much when I was in Houston, I kind of had a schedule to time myself to write in the mornings before the bookstore and retail obviously is different than this is more of like a traditional office job Monday through Friday. So I don't know yet if it's good for my writing or not, but I think it has been. I think
00:04:09
Speaker
And this isn't meant to brag or anything, but I've got this imagination that it's hard to turn down and slow down. So even when life is hectic or there's moves or there's changes, something in me is like, well, find that little window of time to do it. And I'm sure at some point that'll dissipate a little bit as I get older, but I'm very lucky that way in that I don't want to say I have writer's block, but I've got that thing where I need the ideas to actually slow down sometimes.
00:04:36
Speaker
Tell us about your book that's going to be released, I think, in October. Is this right? Yeah, October 8th. I just saw yesterday kind of the, I don't know what you'd call it, the proofs of the galley. I got to see the galley in the back and the blurbs. Yeah, so it's coming out October 8th. It's called Lesser Ruins. It's bigger than my first two books, probably about twice as big. I think it's just under 300 pages. I think it's my best book. I'm extremely proud of it. It's got the absurdity and the humor of the first two.
00:05:02
Speaker
But I think the humor comes from a different place. It's a little more heartfelt, a little more, I mean, it's a book about grief, but it's also very, very, I think, joyous. And there's digressions. It's kind of a love letter to literature. Just digressions into French literature, Russian literature, and I'm really excited about it. And I was saying a few minutes ago, it's written in kind of three big block paragraphs. So there's three chapters, and each one's about 80 or 90 pages. I'm super excited for this book.
00:05:28
Speaker
Thank you. I'm extremely proud of it. I really am. I love this book. You let me know that there's some 19th century Russian stars in it, so that's all I need. I mean, I've read it yourself before, but you got me right there. I knew I would get you hooked that way. I knew my way into your heart, Lori.
00:05:47
Speaker
Yeah, you and I both have bonded over Russian literature and translation in general, but writers are brought up because the narrator, I don't want to go on about the book too much, but the book opens. It's about a week after his wife has died. She had a long illness. He sat Shiva, and he's Jewish, but he doesn't really know that he is. He's one of these people who's kind of socially or culturally Jewish, but he's not a practicing.
00:06:11
Speaker
That comes up a little bit in the book about, you know, what does it mean to be Jewish if I never went to a synagogue? I didn't do this and that. But anyways, he's grieving, but he feels like, well, now I've got the time to finish my project, which he started. He was a community college professor, retired, which is a book length essay on Montaigne, the French philosopher.
00:06:30
Speaker
And so he's obsessed with Montaigne. And a lot of it is flashing back to when he was a professor, not very good, because he would give assignments and then sit and try and work on Montaigne. A flashback to the Berkshires where he was at an artist residency, high Jinx and Sue. So he's like a lot of my characters. He's kind of a high IQ moron.
00:06:48
Speaker
He's very, very smart, but he's his own worst enemy. And I think I stole that term from Saul Bellow. I love those characters that are very, very smart, but they're their worst enemies. They're just kings that self-sabotage. So it's very ecstatic. The writing just goes and goes. And it's very heartfelt, but I think it's also very absurd and very funny. And it's a love letter to coffee. This is the most caffeinated book you'll ever read. Wow. I mean, it is drenched in coffee. Yeah. And he talks with the writers in coffee. I mean, Kafka in coffee.
00:07:16
Speaker
and published by Coffee House. I know, seriously. I mean, who would have thought? Yeah, this was accepted before I even knew I would work here. Coming here was very quick. So the manuscript was already accepted. And then I was hired a few months later.
Publishing and Marketing Insights
00:07:29
Speaker
But I'm really excited to share it with people. It's, you know, publishing is so slow that I've been writing it and gestating it. And I look back at parts of this book that were written when Trump was president, when the pandemic hadn't begun. Whereas the first two, I wrote it kind of in a sprint, much, much more, much quicker.
00:07:46
Speaker
And you've seen the cover art? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I love, I love the cover. It's different than the first two, but yet speaks to them. Same designer. Cool. So different than the first two, but, but very similar and kind of speaks to them. Well, we'll definitely share both Mark and, uh, coffee houses, social handles so that, I mean, I think any of our listeners listening to Mark describe his book will pretty much everything you just said there are 19th century Russians, Montaigne coffee.
00:08:11
Speaker
I have to imagine that's catnip for all of them. But I was actually going to say, when you're talking about the weirdness of how slow publishing can move and the distance between the writing and the finishing of a project and its actual release into the world, the first event I ever ran was for Erwin Welch.
00:08:32
Speaker
a wild card. Very funny guy. But he was asked about, I think it was the book about the chefs, like the sex lives of like undead chefs or something weird like that. One of his odd titles. But he used to live in Chicago. So some of the people at the event
00:08:49
Speaker
uh, knew him from that time and remembered him writing this. And this is several years removed from when he lived in Chicago. So they were asking like, what is, why did this take so long? What is it like going on tour for a book that you finished like two years ago? And he actually described it as necrophilia. He felt like he was
00:09:07
Speaker
He said that it very much feels like I'm committing some sort of obscene act by talking about this thing when I've already got two other books. One is finished, one I'm in the process on, and this is the thing I'm talking about. So I'm not claiming that you're having a predilection in that direction, Mark.
00:09:25
Speaker
No, but it is, it's very strange. And I can look back at parts of the book and I'm like, wow, I mean, I'm still that same person, but I'm also not. I mean, there are parts where the main character is talking about the French countryside in Montaigne's time. And he talks about, you know, a lot of people may think it was a beautiful time with golden meadows, but no, there was plagues left and right. And if you didn't get the plague, you were waiting for the plague. And if you missed that plague, well, there's another plague right around the corner. And I'm writing this and, you know, six months later, suddenly we're in a global pandemic. I'm like, wow, I'm looking at this way differently now.
00:09:54
Speaker
Yeah, because the world changes and then you change and then you kind of look at the book and the book might be the same, but you see it differently. So it is a little bit strange. You feel this book, I don't feel that removed because so much of me is in it, but I could see that happening with other books. Absolutely. Where the distance of time just makes you kind of feel like it's a stranger. And you're also responsible in a lot of ways for shepherding it into the world even more than you were as an author, right? I mean, like you're heading up the marketing and
00:10:23
Speaker
working with the sales reps and working with the booksellers in a much more day-to-day profound manner than simply as the author of it trying to do everything you can to get it out there. That's very neat. I can't imagine there are too many people who've been in that position.
00:10:39
Speaker
I hope it's as much fun as it sounds. It is. And hopefully no one thinks it's too incestuous. And I really do have very much hands off in that we have Laura who actually worked with us at Brazos. She moved up with us a few months later and she's the publicist. So she's kind of handling all duties. Like we had a pre-sales meeting with the reps and she and Jeremy handled it because to get up there and go, oh, it's my book now. I'll let Laura talk about it and get off the screen and come back on. It just seems kind of awkward. So I'm doing some things, but also to kind of avoid a conflict of interest. I'm letting
00:11:09
Speaker
And that lighting, lore is kind of spearheading that. And I don't think we have to worry about incestuousness in the publishing industry. It's all very much that. Man, I am just knocking it down with uncomfortable commentary already. Necrophilia and incest. Yeah. The question is, based on the rule of three, what is the third one going to be? And I got to tell you, I don't even know what it's going to be. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Discussion on 'Austerlitz' Themes
00:11:35
Speaker
Yeah, but that's probably a great question.
00:11:37
Speaker
In order to perhaps get me off of that track, we should probably switch gears and start discussing the backlist title, which is Ostrilitz by W.G. Sebald. So this was your recommendation, Mark. Why don't you get started? For those who haven't read Sebald,
00:11:57
Speaker
There is a lot of plot, but to try and describe plot is almost impossible at times. But if you could give the try. And also, I guess you threw out a few titles, but why did this one in particular occur to you as a title for us to chat about? Yeah, that's a great question. And first of all, have both of you read this before? Either of you, was it the first time reading an Austerlitz?
00:12:20
Speaker
I'd read it before, but I think it was Laura's first time. Oh, good. I hope you liked it, Lori. I loved it. It was my first time reading this title. I have read Sebald before, though. For some reason, I read other things and not this title.
00:12:33
Speaker
Okay, yeah, so to answer your question, and then I'll talk a little bit about the book. I think I chose this one because I'd read it twice, over probably 12 years or something, and I love it. And to me, it's his most accessible book. I think his other ones, the writing is just as good. But once you fall in love with the language and what he's doing, it's very kind of slow and kind of moody. And of course, deep reflections on history and war.
00:12:58
Speaker
But getting a foothold can be challenging, you know, for lots of readers. And Austerlitz has always been kind of my favorite of his because I feel like there's, it's easier to get a foothold. But yeah, the plot is basically, it's almost like a framed story, like Heart of Darkness, where the story of the narrator is kind of second to the story that he's hearing from this gentleman named Austerlitz. And there's a long kind of opening. This man is traveling and he meets this man named Austerlitz and they end up kind of
00:13:25
Speaker
meeting over time by accident at first at different places in Europe. I think at first it's in Belgium. I could be wrong. I think Belgium. Yes, Belgium. And finally, after a decade or plus apart, they run into each other, I think, in London. And Austerlitz basically tells him his story, which is kind of the story of the novel, which is him growing up in Wales. He was adopted. He doesn't really know his story. He doesn't even know that his name is Austerlitz. He finds out later. And suddenly you're kind of transported
00:13:53
Speaker
into World War II and the Holocaust and these children that were sent out of occupied Nazi occupied countries to save their lives. Of course, we'll get into the photographs he uses in his books, which he's known for, but it's kind of this meditation on history and can you ever escape the history and do you have to atone for the crimes of the past? It's just a lovely book and I love what I consider restraint. He has a lot of restraint where
00:14:22
Speaker
He's one of these writers where I don't read him and go, wow, I'm getting ideas. I could, I could kind of borrow this and make it my own way. I just read and go, I don't know how you do this. It's so beautifully translated and so slow. And it's just a, it's a lovely, lovely book. I think it's one of those books. I know it's not good to throw around the word perfect, but it just seems almost like perfect to me. It's just kind of a work of art. One of the things about Seybald for listeners that have not read him before is he integrates a lot of photographs into the book.
00:14:52
Speaker
And I wonder what you think the impact of that is, Mark, on the reading experience and in terms of his authorial choices of kind of when to
00:15:10
Speaker
when to highlight a story that he's telling through a picture? Yeah, he uses these photographs in all his books and of course they match what he's writing about. They're not just kind of dashed into the book to do it. They connect to the story and the narrative. You know what? I don't really know. I don't know if I have an answer that it's such a great question.
00:15:30
Speaker
I don't know there's something very eerie and beautiful about his writing but also the photographs and he even speaks about it in the beginning about photographs and how once a photograph is taken that person is already they could already be dead when you're looking at someone or they've moved on it's a snapshot of time and so besides using the photographs they're also kind of comments about them toward the beginning of the book. I don't know I don't know what to say about it except that it's um
00:15:56
Speaker
It's done in such a way that you end up, if you are this kind of reader, you Google, oh, does that building so exist? I started looking at buildings that he mentions. I know, of course, there's a lot of writing about architecture in this book. And I think the choices he makes are just really, really original and strong. And I think in lesser hands, it could be a gimmick. And of course, with him, it's not a...
00:16:20
Speaker
It speaks to the book, and the book speaks to the pictures. It doesn't even speak to it, it's part of the book, but the narrative and the pictures kind of coexist, I think, wonderfully.
00:16:30
Speaker
I think coexist is a great way of putting it because I don't know that they're just necessarily correlation per se. I mean, there, there is to a degree, you know, when there is a photograph of a suggested that it's to be of Austerlitz, um, as, as a young boy, there are definitely photographs of some of the buildings mentioned, but the placement or even the occurrence of the photograph isn't necessarily side by side with that particular discussion. And frequently the photographs are so grainy.
00:16:56
Speaker
as to invite you to stare deeper and deeper and the more you stare at them the less you actually see. And I feel like that's reflective in some ways of even the prose style, which is all these words and all these descriptions and all this information.
00:17:13
Speaker
amounting to what precisely? There is narrative flow, there is this progression of ideas, but it's also, I've always had the experience of not really being sure where I am in the process of reading any of Seybald's work. I think actually Vertigo might have been the most extreme version of that.
00:17:33
Speaker
They're just something about the interaction of the photographs and the prose that I think really kind of throws the reader into an even more unmoored, uncertain state.
00:17:48
Speaker
I agree, I agree. You can get lost in a sayball book, and I mean that in a good way, but you do. You feel as a reader sometimes very unmoored. As you said, yeah, the photographs can often connect to what he's talking about, but sometimes they're not placed directly where they are. Or, I don't know if either of you caught yourselves doing this, but he described something, and suddenly you want a photo of that. You're like, well, why don't you give me a picture of this thing that you're talking about? I want to see that. It's really unique, I think.
00:18:14
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really, that's a really good point, just that he does include photographs of some things, but not others. And, and, and then it kind of, there's almost a, it's almost infuriating in a way when you, when, as you're saying, you really want to see something and it's not there. No, that's, that's, that's a, that's, that's a really good point. Yeah.
00:18:34
Speaker
Austerlitz, the protagonist of the book, is a historian of architecture, which I think is really interesting. And so much of the book I found focused on railway stations and this kind of liminality about a railway station. Of course, it's here in the here and now.
00:19:03
Speaker
It existed in the past, and he talks about the history of some of these places, but it's very much a transition point, right? You're already, when you're in a railway station, looking forward to where you're going or where you think or you want the train to take you.
00:19:23
Speaker
And Australitz's memory gets triggered in a lot of these different railroad stations around Europe. And it seemed to me that this liminal space issue is such a strong theme of the book. Did you have any thoughts on that, Mark?
00:19:42
Speaker
I think that's, that's a great point there is this kind of and also going back to the architecture I think there's so much to be said about how humanity builds these buildings with, you know, with, with our, you know, enormous egos that we think in our minds, maybe this will last forever and I think studying architecture is kind of studying.
00:20:00
Speaker
photographs or the past or things that like civilizations, they come and they go, they're built and then they crumble. So I think there's definitely a theme there that ties in with architecture and buildings. And then that liminal kind of space of train stations, it's a fantastic
00:20:16
Speaker
insight. I think that ties in also with what Tom was saying about feeling and more like you're coming and going but you're never kind of static you're never in that place and I think that ties in with the with the feel of the book with the themes of the book whether it's Austerlitz leaving and going to Wales as a child to both of the the protagonists or the narrator and the Austerlitz bumping into each other everything is kind of coming and going and there's nothing that stays in place and I could be reading more into this than
00:20:45
Speaker
maybe he intended, but there definitely seems to be something about the idea of, you know, nothing stays.
00:20:52
Speaker
I was gonna ask if either of you had read, ever read Sergio Shekbeck. He was, yes. So he, I just, it's only a quote. He has this line in a book and I love and it just says, everything built is the promise of a future ruin. And I love that line because everything you built is really just at some point, you know. So I think that's a great insight though about the train stations and that transitory kind of state in the book. There's also a,
00:21:21
Speaker
a brief passage from the very beginning, because their first interaction is in Antwerp, Antwerp, I believe, or at least, I mean, part of what's interesting
00:21:30
Speaker
Well, I'll get to that part in a second. But the passage is on page 12. The movements of all travelers could be surveyed from the central position occupied by the clock in Antwerp's Antwerp Station. And conversely, all travelers had to look up at the clock and were obliged to adjust their activities to its demands. In fact, said Austrolets, until the railway timetables were synchronized, the clocks of Lille and Lige did not keep the same time as the clocks of Gent and Antwerp. And not until they were all standardized around the middle of the 19th century did time truly reign supreme.
00:22:00
Speaker
So there's also this notion of time and how time is being regulated by movement, by the needs of travel. And Antwerp Station itself was built by, they go into a bit, by Leopold II, to be a monument to what
00:22:17
Speaker
Belgium has accomplished its wealth, but that wealth is made possible by the movement through the railway stations by that like transit, but also that wealth is built on the backs of slave labor in the Congo. I mean, so like, I don't really think you can, I do think you can over read things. I don't care as
Sebald's Style and Kafka Comparisons
00:22:40
Speaker
much about what an author intends, but I do think
00:22:43
Speaker
I do think that Sebald is trying to, trying to open up as many pathways as possible into these notions of movement, of time, of creation and ruin. And that's also, yeah, that's also part of what the role, I think, the photographs play, as you were saying.
00:23:03
Speaker
Yeah, and if you think about what you just said, all those things, it's such heavy, eternal time and ruin and movement and civilization, and he's tackling the real big subjects.
00:23:14
Speaker
There's a line in the book, I'm on page 19 of my edition, that almost echoes that Sergio Chefek quote that you talked about, Mark, and it's on the top of 19. We know by instinct that outsized buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them and are designed from the first with an eye to their latter existence as ruins.
00:23:41
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. That's the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. I think Sergio Shek that probably was inspired by that. I bet. That's, yeah, it's the same exact idea. Yeah. Both, I think, written eloquently. One thing I was going to also bring up, or we can bring it up later, is also Sable as a stylist, his style of writing. And I love
00:23:59
Speaker
Tom, but you mentioned in an email how you kind of read and discovered, or at least read, Javier Marias and Sebald, kind of, you know, at the same time. And they've got these long, winding sentences. And I was reading up on Austrolets, or maybe there was a reviewer of something in the last week or so, that someone compared Sebald to Kafka, and the fact of being, I guess you'd say, a stylist. And he said, they're very, very easy to read.
00:24:23
Speaker
but it's so deceptive because you can read Sebald and he's not you're not looking up words it's very very fluent in Kafka also very very his writing is very i don't want to say simple but it's very approachable
00:24:35
Speaker
But that's a trick because there's so many things happening. It's so complex and it obviously inspires conversations like this. But I love that type of writing and same with Maria's in a lot of ways that it's very approachable. I don't want to say it's conversational but it's very easy to read and it lets you in and then once you're in it starts to really challenge the reader with ideas and themes and things like that.
00:24:59
Speaker
I think the conversational point is an interesting one because I do think Seybalt style is far more conversational than Maria's and in much the same way that
00:25:10
Speaker
The trick, I think, that all three, though, Kafka, Sebald, and Marius are pulling is that they welcome you into the flow of the language. And after a little bit, you look up and realize, well, wait, wait, what the hell am I actually interacting with here? Like what's going on? In Marius's case, it might be that the sentence structure was such that you have to flip back two pages to figure out what the entry point was. But I think for both Sebald and Kafka, it's much more the ideas that are then
00:25:39
Speaker
in Kafka, all of a sudden you're trying to parse what this actual situation is that the narrator is finding himself in. In Sebald's case, it's notions of time, eternity, mortality, and all that, which really seem to be kind of the cornerstones of what he's writing about. I'd also say that if folks are interested in Sebald or become particularly interested in his style,
00:26:12
Speaker
It's deeply disappointing in the sense that it's unfinished and it's recognizably unfinished, but it does give you some insight into how much he worked over these novels, like how much he worked and rewrote and adjusted and pulled the piece from here and pulled it to here and the kinds of, I mean, he is a real, like a serious, serious stylist in the construction of these works. And Campbell Santo is,
00:26:34
Speaker
his unfinished work, Campo Santo, is a really
00:26:40
Speaker
is fine, but it really does kind of show that it's an early draft of something that he was going to work towards. Yeah. It's so tragic that he died so young in a car accident, I believe. I think we were deprived of some incredible works. I have not read that. I know Campo Santos, but I did read A Place in the Country, which
00:27:04
Speaker
It's kind of 40 pieces. I forgot exactly what it is. I think it was published before he died. It wasn't posthumous, except in English. It was published after he died. And that's a wonderful book. It doesn't feel unfinished. It's a lovely, lovely book.
00:27:18
Speaker
Speaking of some of how he deals with time and memory so beautifully, I think 20 years from now, if I never look at this book again, the scene or the thing about it that I'm going to remember is this remarkable episode
00:27:38
Speaker
that Australis has at Liverpool station in London. And he is again in a train station, the underground. Well, Liverpool is also an overground station, but I forget the exact circumstances, but he kind of gets, they're doing work on it.
00:27:58
Speaker
And he's able to get access to this area that's been closed off because they're going to completely, I guess, demolish this area or renovate it or whatever. And when he sees it, he starts having flashbacks and realizing, I've been here before, I've seen this before. And that's kind of a real
00:28:23
Speaker
pivotal point for him kind of exploring how he got to Wales and his whole history. And it just seems to me, I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but these kind of liminal spaces like Liverpool Station also emphasize or highlight
00:28:42
Speaker
the liminal aspect of memory because when we're remembering something, of course, we're kind of, I mean, where are we when we're remembering something? If I'm remembering something now, of course, like, yeah, I'm physically sitting here in this chair with a memory, but of course, my brain is somewhere in the past and this kind of thing about
00:29:10
Speaker
You don't really know where you are in time and space. I just think it's such a lovely thing to explore, but such a tricky metaphysical thing to explore as well. I would think as a writer, it'd be very hard to articulate, but he does it in such a beautiful way.
00:29:26
Speaker
I, everything you said, a thousand percent. Yeah, absolutely. And you're right, that Liverpool station is very pivotal and it kind of ripples throughout the book. But yeah, I've never really thought about that when you're remembering something, where are you kind of at that moment that you're remembering? And I mean, obviously I'm sitting here now, but if I'm remembering, you know,
00:29:45
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think it's, it's gotta be very difficult to write about memory because it's so, I don't want to say it to us, but it's, you know, it's, it's ephemeral. It's, you know, uh, uh, and I think you've got to really be a master to kind of handle it well. Um, as same old does, I mean, and it's also the case that, I mean, even physically we don't understand how memory entirely works, you know, like it, there was a long held idea that across cultures that it just sort of was a thing that existed in you somewhere that you would access that memory. And we now know that's.
00:30:13
Speaker
not the case, but how do we somehow hold on to it? Just, you know, the mysteries of consciousness and whatnot. But I think also alongside of that, or maybe the other side of the coin that he's addressing is the idea of forgetting or the forgotten.
Memory and Morality in 'Austerlitz'
00:30:28
Speaker
his journey as one of rediscovery, really, discovering where he came from, how he ended up in Wales, and what happened to his family. He was part of the Kinders transport, as Mark said, getting kids out of countries that were either being taken over by the Nazis or about to be taken over by the Nazis. And so he lost the people who bore him, the people who raised him for the first part of his life.
00:30:58
Speaker
As he talks about even as he talks about architecture and buildings and even as a narrator reflects back on ones that have since been destroyed or changed or what have you, there is an argument against forgetting that's taking place throughout here. I feel like at one point when I read more save all there was a lot more or at least I was paying more attention to
00:31:20
Speaker
discussions or arguments around whether or not he was, because I also read him around the same time that the revelations about Günter Gras came out, that his childhood affiliation with the Nazis. I felt like there were, and I think there still is in Sebald studies, a conversation around what is he arguing around morality around Germany. And
00:31:46
Speaker
I can't really engage with that. But I do think that there is a gaping wound that he is almost constantly addressing. And I think it might be via this idea of, of liminal spaces of memory of whether or not you can actually, can you actually recreate a place can but
00:32:07
Speaker
Do you have the right to actually forget a space either? Yeah. That's great. And I think what you said is really true about forgetting.
00:32:18
Speaker
him understanding what happened where he's from, Seibald I'm talking about, right when he was born or before he was born, I think there was probably a wound or a guilt in forgetting that he feels like if you forget this, it's almost like a sin. It's something that's wrong. And of course, forgetting and memory are kind of two sides of the same coin or they're opposites, but they speak to each other.
00:32:41
Speaker
One thing I was going to also bring up, and I didn't think of this until you read that passage, Laurie, about the control over our lives and how that kind of came about in the modern world with the clocks and the time being wrong. And suddenly, time is accounted for. Everything is kind of organized. And I was just reading a biography. I kind of got into this D.H. Lawrence gig in this past six months.
00:33:03
Speaker
I read, I think, Lady Chatterley's Lover after high school. I was like, okay, it's good. And then something triggered me probably toward the end of last year to read The Rainbow. And I'm like, my mind was blown. I don't know if either of you have read The Rainbow, but one of the best books I've ever read. It's incredible. Anyways, I'm reading this biography of Lawrence. And during World War I, he's stuck in England. He's stuck there because his books are being banned. He doesn't want to be there. But you couldn't really go anywhere because of war. And then once World War I ends,
00:33:33
Speaker
He leaves and he goes to Italy with his wife but in the biography it's talking to me and I thought this was interesting before World War one you could just cross the border and it's it's land just walking across land but suddenly you need this thing called a passport and suddenly humans are being accounted for you need to know you're being trapped in a way.
00:33:51
Speaker
I mean, much more today. You were probably on camera 40 times a day. But I thought that was really interesting that that's just, you know, civilization progresses or regresses, you know, everything is accounted for. And
Historical Insights and Literary Themes
00:34:03
Speaker
suddenly he's in this world war world where you could cross, you know, from Spain into Italy and there's no paperwork to be stamped. There's no one asking who you are. Suddenly you're just, well, I'm in another country. And it's just strange that idea of our lives being kind of controlled by time or by borders.
00:34:19
Speaker
That's the thing that shows up in Maria's quite a bit, especially through the characters of Wheeler and Relance, who actually at one time had the same last name and the fluency with which you could alter your names at one point in time. I hadn't thought about that, but that's a really good
00:34:38
Speaker
That's another interesting connection across those two writers. Yeah, absolutely. And suddenly you're like, oh, you need this thing called a passport. You know, we've, of course, never known anything different, but there was a time not very long ago when there was no need for a passport. Just, well, I'm in Italy now, or I'm in, you know, I'm in Poland. Didn't matter. So the rainbow was incredible, by the way, guys. And he's not, he's not in fashion, D.H. Lawrence, which is kind of makes me love him even more. But the rainbow like blew me away.
00:35:05
Speaker
I'm not sure Lawrence has ever actually been in fashion. Not really. I think he's been popular, but whether or not he's been in fashion or especially, yeah, there's always been something circling around him. I've actually read any of his, I haven't even read Lady Chatterley's, so I should probably rectify that at some point. I think I read Sons and Lovers. Yes, which I ended up reading that too and loved it. And it's almost like an earlier version or a younger version of The Rainbow in that it's very much
00:35:31
Speaker
Sons and Lovers is one boy's kind of childhood growing up to be an adult, and Rainbow is just a bigger expanse. It's kind of three generations of a family. But as much as that turns me off, I'm like, I don't want to care about a gender. It's almost mystical. I mean, the landscape and the family, and it's incredible. So I keep talking people's ears off about the Rainbow, but... No, that's wonderful. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to check that out. I think this was the last book that was published before Sebald died.
00:36:01
Speaker
That sounds right, and it's also...
00:36:04
Speaker
in the grand tradition of writers getting published in the States by New Directions and then their big seminal work jumping somewhere else. Yes. I have a story about that, actually. Please. Oh, let's hear it. Directly with Seybald and Barbara Eppler, the publisher of New Directions. She told the story once. I went to Everpie Winter Institute or BEA or something, and she was saying, you know, Seybald was the nicest guy. And he called and he goes, look, Barbara, you guys are my publishers. I love New Directions. You guys will always be my publishers.
00:36:34
Speaker
I can buy a house. I can do this thing. So it's that conundrum of the author going, well, this big publisher could change my life. And so I guess he was kind of asking forgiveness in a way to Barbara going, look, I love you. But these people, they can do something you just you can't do. You don't have the pockets to buy me a house and this and stuff. And I can send my daughter to college or whatever. And it's kind of the sad reality of any business.
00:37:01
Speaker
You know, so, but yeah, like you said, New Directions, they get these, you know, have your Maria's same fate. Yeah. Although I would, I mean, I, from, from our reading, I think Lori, Oh, I don't know. I'm not going to speak for you on this one, Lori. Um, I would argue that your face tomorrow was a seminal work and New Directions did get it until the backlist, you know, shifts over. But, um, I know that you have a very, Lori has a very strong fondness, especially for, um, the, uh, the later Maria's. Thus bad begins is my all time favorite. I really love that.
00:37:30
Speaker
But I do think it's fair to say your face tomorrow is his seminal work. I mean, if you had to pick what's the most significant thing that Mireas did artistically, I think it's indisputable that it's that. It's just not my personal favorite, but you know.
00:37:46
Speaker
I'm in a total agreement. Yeah. Cause what he does is like, Oh my gosh. But then if you just want, you know, you could read, uh, you know, whatever, uh, tomorrow in the battle, think on me or, you know, a heart so white, whatever. But, uh, I, yeah, I agree completely. So it raises the question of what would a, like a almost maximalist save all book look like? What would that have?
00:38:08
Speaker
What would that have been? A three volume Sable novel would have been. When we were talking about how he died tragically at such a young age, the first thing that came to my mind was, oh my God, just like Roberto Bolano. But I feel like, I feel like we did get a seminal work from Bolano with 2666. Absolutely. Which I adore that book. Me too. But yeah, I guess.
00:38:34
Speaker
I don't know. Austerlitz, I guess, is going to maybe have to stand in for the seminal work that maybe we didn't get from Sebald. Yeah. And I don't know if you would have gone on to write five or six more kind of 200, 250 page novels, or if you would have ended up writing something, who knows what the future would have held. But yeah, it is interesting to see these similarities and these differences between really, I think, modern writers that we all love.
Influences on Mark's Writing Style
00:39:00
Speaker
So I know, Mark, that Thomas Bernard has been a big influence for you in terms of some of your earlier novels, but I wanted to ask, how do you think that Sebald has influenced your work if he has?
00:39:15
Speaker
It's funny because I read writers like Sable, because I don't feel like I'm a subtle writer. I feel like I kind of hit you over the head. My writing is very manic. It's a lot of energy. And I feel like there's a lot of salt bellow in my books, hopefully. I mean, that's not me trying to compliment if I can get that Chicago writer. If I can get that kind of that
00:39:36
Speaker
rhythm and intensity that his writing has. I don't think I'd ever be on a prose level of Saul Bellow, but a writer like Sable, I don't know if he influences me or if he's one of these writers that I just kind of stand back and all go, wow, you really got that down. Where I can read Thomas Bernard and go, oh, I kind of know how I can do that and make it my own or I get influenced directly.
00:39:58
Speaker
Whereas Sable, I feel like I just read and I go, maybe in themes a little bit, but I don't know if he's a direct influence. I don't know. He's one of these writers where I just go, he does something that's not my wheelhouse. His book strike me as very quiet and subtle, and I'm neither of those two, really.
00:40:14
Speaker
You know, um, yeah. And even with Bernhard, his, his books are very, uh, kind of monologues and they're very interior and a style I think I've definitely, you know, barred and been influenced by. Um, but I think my writing is a lot more, it's got a lot more silliness and hijinks.
00:40:30
Speaker
Things happen in my books that Bernhard would never do. He's like, that would be silly. Why would I do that? Stupid. And things happen in my books. There's actually physical activity. And I think Bernhard's books are very interior, where it's all very psychological. And some things happen, but not a lot. Mostly it's in the mind of the narrator, I think.
00:40:48
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know if he is an influence as much as just a writer. I really admire. And hopefully what I'm working on now, I just started something a few months ago. We'll be a little bit quieter. I'm trying to, in a way, remove the safety net of humor. The humor in my books is never forced. It's just it comes up. That's how my mind thinks. But I am trying to write something without dumb.
00:41:07
Speaker
without just going for, I don't want to say the humor for me is low-hanging fruit, because I know for a lot of writers that try and write something funny, it's difficult. And for me, it's always been, I think, pretty easy or effortless. And a lot of people go, I don't even think your books are funny. But what I think is funny in my books has come pretty easily. So I think the challenge is to try and do something a little more with a straight face, like straightforward. So I think Sable may have an influence in future work.
00:41:31
Speaker
And do you find that, I'm assuming that's a challenge that you've set for yourself since you say that kind of your natural reaction is to treat things with some, and I love it, this great, dry, dry humor. Thank you.
00:41:50
Speaker
But I guess, I guess to try to kind of change gears has got to be difficult. It is a little bit difficult. And what it is is that it's not me consciously going because a lot of, I mean, really, I always want to write something organically. Like I don't sit there and go, I want to do this thing now. It's more about I start to do something and I'm catching myself going, I've done that.
00:42:09
Speaker
Like I've done that before. I've done that already. I don't want to do it again. So it's kind of that wanting to avoid repeating yourself and also getting bored. If you've done something, you feel like you've done it, not to have to revisit it. So after I wrote Lesser Ruins, I wrote a novella that actually got in and Lesser Ruins and the novella's title data were both accepted from coffee hours before I was hired.
00:42:31
Speaker
and it'll be in their novellas. There's probably next year or 2026. So talking about a gap between what you write, what you don't, and that book is almost like a cousin to Reinhardt's garden. It's in a castle. It takes place in like an afternoon and it's absolutely absurd. I mean, it's just an absolute comedy. And I think writing something new, I was like, I don't want to go for the jokes. I want to try and do something that's a little more, I don't know. I don't want to say the word stoic where it's me. And you can tell it's something that I wrote, but maybe not not just relying on trying to be absurd.
00:42:58
Speaker
Yeah, so we'll see. I can't wait to share Ada too. I think Ada's, you know, it's really good. And if you want to hear the premise, I can give it to you in like 20 seconds, but... Yes, please. You don't know what period it is in Europe, but it's probably in the 1500s, 1600s. He's this man that rules a country. He's not sure. It's either Bavaria or Saxony. He's not even sure. But his Saxon and Bavarian peasants, he calls them Saxons or Bavarians. He doesn't know.
00:43:23
Speaker
And he's waiting. His father was assassinated. He's a Frenchman, so he's come over and taken over this country that he inherited from his dad. And he hates it. He's a proud Frenchman. He's waiting for this woman named Ada, who he fell in love with in Paris five years earlier as a student, to come over the cliffs in her carriage to get to the castle with her husband so he can say, I loved you. We only spent one night together in Paris, but I love you. And I'm going to challenge her husband to a duel. And so the entire book is him waiting for her to come over the mountaintop so he can challenge her husband to a duel.
00:43:53
Speaker
devote his love and life to Ada. Well, being the rusephobe or rusephile, I should say that I am not phile. Is there a Nabokov thing here going on with Ada?
00:44:06
Speaker
No, there really isn't. I kept writing, but I really should change the name. Nothing to do with Nabokov at all. I wish I could say there was, but no, it just, that was the name that stuck. And once it kind of sticks enough, and names are just kind of like their placeholders, and they always stay unless it just kind of runs me the wrong way. Then I'm like, well, no, that doesn't feel right. And Ada just always kind of felt right. So I think Ada is here to stay, but nothing to do with Nabokov.
00:44:32
Speaker
But that sounds, the novella sounds wonderful. It's, I think it's a riot. I can't wait for people to read it. And like, I don't know, two years from now, I just want to like print copies and mail it to friends. I'm like, it's really good, but I have to wait. So yeah. So, so, but it is fun to kind of explore something that's a little more kind of serious and maybe even somber. And I touch on that lesser ruins, but it's still got a lot of, a lot of absurdity in here too. That's awesome.
00:44:56
Speaker
Yeah, thank you for asking about my writing, guys. I don't want to ever pontificate and just talk about it. So thanks for listening. No, as someone that has never really seriously written anything creative, I'm always just amazed that you were talking, Mark, about the fact that you can't shut your ideas off. I guess I've always thought that I just don't really have
00:45:25
Speaker
the wonderful imagination I think it takes to write fiction. It really is. A lot of people go, well, that's just lazy to say it's imagination. But it really is. It's funny because I always think I'm my best on paper. If people meet me, I'm like, you're going to be disappointed because my wife is like, Mark, you're a dummy. You can't do this. I'm just this person that is bad with directions and everything.
00:45:49
Speaker
I think you get me at my best when I write because I feel like my gift is imagination. That's where I'm really strong. And I think if you meet me in person, I'm just like, yeah, it's in the book. The book's better than me. We've both met you in person and that's objectively untrue. Thank you.
00:46:04
Speaker
You're very kind. But no, I'm excited. And just being able to talk about these books and translation and how they all kind of talk to each other, it's the magic of literature, of having these friendships where we haven't seen each other in person in years.
Value of Literary Friendships and Conversations
00:46:20
Speaker
But having that relationship based on either a book we've read or a conversation we've had, it's just so much richer than having a conversation with someone about a football game, I think. Agreed. No offense to the sports.
00:46:34
Speaker
And it's usually a lot less partisan, I think, talking about books. Sports can be very, you know, divisive. Yes, yes. We need to get some more partisan conversations. Yeah, Sable versus Maria, you know, let's go.
00:46:51
Speaker
I would love TikToks of, I don't know, yeah, Sable versus Maria. People complain about Maria showing up at every conversation, every conference about Sable, Maria shows up and it turns into a Taylor Swift Travis Kelsey. I would kill for that. That'd be fantastic.
00:47:11
Speaker
I've actually really been kind of instigating Trevor over at the Mooksy and the Grapes to do a Dickens versus Trollope. Because I personally think Trollope beats the shit out of Dickens any given day. And I think Trevor thinks that too, but he won't admit it. But I think getting a little discussion or debate about that would be an interesting one.
00:47:39
Speaker
That would be great. Laurie, I absolutely have never read Trollope. What should I start with? What is it just a favorite or one that would be maybe a good entryway? Well, a lot of people start with the series. There's the Rochester series and the Pallister series, but if you want a good standalone, I don't think that's the best. A lot of people, if they do a standalone Duke,
00:48:03
Speaker
Can you forgive her? But I guess I would go with The Warden, which is the first of the Barchester series. Yeah, I just think it's a very quiet book and it's about this rural clergyman, basically. But you keep seeing him and the town he lives in kind of through all of the successive books. Tom, have you ever read Trollope?
00:48:30
Speaker
I haven't actually now. I haven't either, yeah, at all. Then you will love the rainbow, Lori. You'll love it. Okay. I got to read it. Tom mentioned getting back to Mr. Sablet. I don't want to give him short shrift, but... Absolutely.
00:48:45
Speaker
But Tom mentioned a, you know, kind of this reading Marreas and Sebald at the same time and kind of seeing some similarities. I'm kind of hard pressed to think of another author who is reminiscent for me in terms of like Sebald. You know, if you like Sebald, you'll like this. Tom, why are you laughing?
00:49:07
Speaker
Because I was, so Mark, I think I only even prepped you for this when we were first talking about doing the podcast together. But the thing that we usually do at the end of the backlist episodes is books that you would, books that are similar, books you would recommend or books that resonate with the book that under discussion to try and like build out a little bit of a suggested reading list. And I realized that A, I hadn't warned you about it, but B, I hadn't done it myself. So I've actually been spending a little bit of time as we've been talking.
00:49:35
Speaker
sort of like background thinking, okay, associations, associations. And so, Lori, for you to bring this up makes my life easier, because I can't. I can't think of anyone else that, like, that twinning, I think, makes a lot of sense, Marius and Sebald. I don't know who else to... I don't know how to make that, you know, a throughple or make them triplets or whatever. I don't know... I can't. I can't think of anyone.
00:50:01
Speaker
I would, and this is, I think he came up to my mind strictly because he is such a similar writer would be Sergio Scheckvac. As far as mood, I don't think his sentences are kind of as winding or serpentine as like as Seibald, but he's got this mood and there's kind of a strangeness and an otherness to his books. I've read, I guess, three. He has four or five, I think, in English.
00:50:25
Speaker
but one is called Darkness and the other is My Two Worlds and those are both very, very, I mean My Two Worlds is just a writer who's at a conference in Brazil and he decides to walk around and he goes to this park and it's all about walking, it's all about, it's really kind of, I guess it does have plot, it's not devoid of plot but it's about him walking and it gives the Sergio or the narrator an excuse to kind of reflect on things
00:50:48
Speaker
and being in a hotel room, things like that. I'm almost guaranteeing that Chef Jack was influenced by Sebald. I'm almost certain he was. I mean, I guess stylistically, maybe Juan Jose Eser a little bit. Scars are the 65 years. I mean, they also have similar, like what you're talking about, similar constructions in terms of conversation or even when it's interior, it's a conversation within the individual's head. But especially Scars has some
00:51:18
Speaker
meanderings to it that stylistically could kind of fit in a bit in a similar family to Marius and and Seybald that way. I feel like that I feel like that's a bit of a stretch and some folks might dispute that that comparison. Well I've tried to rate Seyar and I've got scars I need to give that a shot because I know people who love him and and I've really not ever given him a fair shake about reading his work but I do have a couple of his titles at home. What about you Laurie anything come to mind?
00:51:45
Speaker
Yes, but I don't know if it's a very good one. That's okay. We're forgiving. I'm going to say it's going to sound weird. I'm going to say Ishiguru, but only
00:51:56
Speaker
The Unconsoled. None of the other Ishiguro, I think, works in my mind. And I think I've read all of Ishiguro's fiction. But yeah, maybe The Unconsoled, because that's... I don't know, have you guys read that one? That's a weird one. No, I need to read it. Yeah, he's great. I kind of forget him, I think, because he won the Nobel Prize and he's just always there, but he's such a fantastic writer. Wow, he's great.
00:52:21
Speaker
A lot of people love him and I do too for like his very plot driven books like Never Let Me Go, Like Clara and the Sun. To a lesser extent, The Remains of the Day has some memory stuff in it, but The Unconsoled is a very meandering and the protagonist who's a pianist
00:52:45
Speaker
goes to this foreign country for a concert and he finds himself in all of these situations where he's got this uncanny feeling that he's remembering these same places. So there's a lot of memory and the travel kind of thing about the book. It's a strange one and it has some odd things about it that Sebald doesn't, but
00:53:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's the best I'm going to do. I think that... I love it. I think that there's not a lot of writers like Sebald or a lot of books like this that I can think of. Yeah, I agree. I think he's pretty singular.
00:53:29
Speaker
there's a ghostliness to this work and some of the others that I think Sebald is embracing in a way that others kind of shy away from. I mean, Austerlitz knows who he is and as he discovers where he's from, but there's also this ambivalence about making any such statement. I think that kind of is in the background, not explicitly stated, but just in the way that it's told and the way that he discovers things.
00:53:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, Laurie's, you brought it up in a number of times, but the liminal, the liminality of a lot of the spaces, the way these things are discussed, it's uncomfortable. And for whatever reason, Seybald is very, very good at it and very good at, at making that.
00:54:15
Speaker
making that work in a way that, which is the goal, right? To get the reader to feel and react the same way. Yeah. So this is just an absolutely remarkable book. And I'm very, very glad, Mark, that you made me read
00:54:32
Speaker
Oh my God, thank you. Well, the reason I chose, as I said, I don't want to, you know, what is perfect. It's all, you know, of course, subjective, but like I said to Lori, I don't think he's an influence because there's something so crystalline and there's something that's very hard to get at that I just so admire that it's almost like, well, how can I be influenced by he's so good, you know? Yeah, he's really fantastic. He is. And there was something ghostly about his work. I think this book especially.
00:55:01
Speaker
Mark, thank you so much for joining us. Before you go, where can people find you and find Coffee House online, especially for the cover reveal and so they can get their pre-orders in. Oh, thank you. Absolutely. Yeah, so I think that we're going to announce our fall books, which my book is part of in April. But I think I'm going to have a cover reveal. I think Southwest Review at a Dallas is going to do a cover reveal in March next month, probably early next month.
00:55:29
Speaker
And I'll be in Dallas in April, actually, Laurie. I'll email you and let you know, but I'm going to be there in like mid-April for like a festival that Southwest Review is putting on. My handle is just my name on Instagram. I'm not on Twitter, but I think it's just at Mark Haber. If you type my name, I'm sure I'll come up. Coffee House Press is just Coffee House Press on Twitter. The same with Instagram. We're actually on TikTok now, you know, so, you know, with the cool kids.
00:55:54
Speaker
And it's very easy to track down. And coffeehousepress.org is where you can pre-order our books, order our books. Mine and my season's books that I'm part of are not up on our pre-order page yet. They'll be up there in April, I think. But we have lots of good books coming out, poetry, fiction, nonfiction. And this has just been an absolute pleasure. It's so good to see you guys. Even though it's virtual, it's good to see your faces and have such really great conversations. I really relish it. It was wonderful. Thank you, Mark.
00:56:23
Speaker
Yeah. Have a great day. Thank you guys. Bye.