Literary Friction - Books about Books with Ruth Ozeki

Regular listeners will know that we love to get a little meta here on LF, and this month author Ruth Ozeki gave us the perfect excuse to indulge ourselves as we slide into the holiday season. Ruth's latest novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, is about a boy named Benny who loses his father and shortly thereafter begins to hear the voices of inanimate objects, including the voice of the novel itself. In honour of Ruth, and Benny, this show is all about books about books. We'll dig into the ways that literature can be about itself, from books set in libraries to stories about writers to metafictional texts about their own means of creation, and ask what the joys and the pitfalls of this kind of self-referentiality can be - plus all the usual recommendations.

NBC News - Zen Buddhist priest and novelist Ruth Ozeki transcends genre in her exploration of grief

“Categories are more for academics and booksellers and librarians...I’m not dissing that, but for me, every time I find myself in a category, I want to break it.”
— Ruth Ozeki

November 1, 2021
NBC News | Asian America | by Victoria Namkung