Boots Riley wants to 'compel and repel' you

economy to the world, but every story starts with a question.

“And NPR, we stand for your right to be curious, to make sense of the biggest story of”

the day and what it means for you. Follow Consider This, wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air, I'm Tonya Mosley. My guest today is filmmaker, rapper, and community organizer Boots Riley. His work for the last few decades has circled the same argument.

The capitalism produces the contradictions we live with, and that art can make them visible. He made that argument as the front man of the Oakland-based hip-hop group The Koo, and in his screenwork with his 2018 film, "Sorry to bother you." A surreal satire about a black telemarketer who finds success after he learns to use his white voice.

“He's making the argument again in his latest film, "I Love Boosters," which was first”

a love song he wrote 20 years ago about shop lifters, or boosters as their call. . I love boosters the film, stars Kiki Palmer as the leader of a crew of women shop lifters in the Bay Area, who steal from luxury fashion stores, and sell the goods cheap to people who can't afford retail.

Jimmy Moore plays the fashion designer who stores their robbing from, and the Keith Standfield plays a figure who threatens the whole operation. As you heard before Riley made films, he made music.

The Koo released their first album, "Kill My Landlord" in 1993.

Before that, he was a labor and community organizer, a UPS worker, and a telemarketer, a job that would eventually become the subject of "Sorry to bother you." Boots Riley, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks, thanks for having me. You know, I have watched "I Love Boosters," twice, and both times I was thinking, "What

does Boots know about boosters?" Well, I have been a broke rapper for a long time, having to stay fly, you know, just a job requirement, and so I've definitely had to deal with a lot of boosters. When I wrote that song 20 years ago, it was a lifetime of experience. So, and also just saw how much of a service it provided, a community who's, in my case,

the Black community, I don't think they only exist in the Black community, or a community who's style is inspiring these things that are costing more than people can afford with the income that they have. This is the interesting, it's not an inversion, but it is the thing that we sit with as the audience, because we are living this world through the boosters themselves, and so we're

able to see from the inside how they're interpreted from the outside and what's really happening.

But you know, that term boosters, I had never heard that before.

“I think I heard, like, okay, in Detroit, I know somebody with the hookah, or, you know,”

I know a guy. It's funny because online there's this whole debate about where that term came from. There's people in New York saying, we came up with the term, there's people in obviously in the Bay Area saying, we came up with the term, and there's people in Chicago saying, no, no, boosters, we did that in such a, so there's this whole debate, and, you know,

obviously I came, come from the Bay Area, so I'm going to, you know, shoot shots on that behalf, however, yeah, I think it was all over, so and definitely people had different ways of calling it, but, you know, I have no idea where it came from. There's somebody that could probably call in and tell us that the, the, the biology of that. But exactly, and I obviously am out of the loop, but I want to talk a little bit about

what you were saying about the boosters place and what they, how they serve the community. Let's talk about that a little bit through the character Corvette herself, who's played by Kiki Palmer, and she isn't just a booster, she is a designer and Christy Smith, the fashion mogul that she at Myers, who's played by Dimi Moore, steals one of her designs,

When was the first time you kind of realized that idea that like what is being stolen is actually

“maybe yours in the first place? You know, I think you'd have to back it up to when I was 14 or 15,”

you know, and I got involved in supporting people who were organizing a canary worker strike in Watsonville, California, so I got invited to a youth event based on that, and you know, they, they, someone was like, hey, you know, we're going to have this thing will be buy on, you know, will be buy it noon on Saturday. And back then, there's no cell phones, there's no anything, so you could totally go somebody a lot easier, and I planned on it. So I was like, I'm, I'm just,

yeah, come by, I'm not, I'm not going to be there, and so, but I forgot about it, and so they came by with a van full of 14-year-old girls. And they, they were like, hey, you want to go to the

“beach, and I was like, oh, yeah, I definitely want to go to the beach for child, and they were like,”

but first, we're going to stop and stop off and support the Watsonville canary workers strike,

and then so that's kind of how I got hoodwinked into it, because I entered the van with, you know, flirtatious goals, and then I met these girls who were like, they were talking about things that were on the news, they were all the events, these sorts of, and, and things that I purposely was trying to ignore, because I didn't have a sense that I could have any effect on it, right? I didn't have a sense that I, like, it didn't matter if I paid attention or not, because

what am I going to do? These are the things that that happened, and they were talking about it, and I realized that they felt that they could have some, something to do with the, was what happened, yeah, and that, and it was connected to this canary workers strike that we were going to, that this was not only about someone trying to get higher wages, but it was about how you might be able to create a movement that has the power to affect those who are in power,

and it started to me talking, started the conversation about what power actually is under the system. So I went in that, in that one trip from one and a get with these girls to one and a beat them. Yes, to one and a beat them in understanding, they're opening you up your world, but you grew up in a household with a father who also was teaching you through his actions, being an organizer, and working into great on behalf of the auto workers. And yeah, but the thing

is that you don't, one thing that I think was good is my parents didn't, like say here,

“you have to learn this in blah, blah, because I probably would have later thought of it as their”

stuff and not mine. I don't know if they did that intentionally, or that's just how it was, but yeah, they'd have when I was, when we lived in Detroit, we lived there until I was six.

They'd have meetings, but the meetings would always, and I didn't know they were meetings,

because they would always end in, like, bid-wist parties, or like, you know, playing records and dancing. So I just knew people were around sitting on couches, talking to each other, and they end up having fun. So I just thought they were having parties, but it did shape what I thought community was. Something you do in this particular film, I love boosters. The news is always there. It's the radio. It's the TV. It is like, but since we're sitting in the world of the boosters,

we are the boosters. Yeah. We are seeing what is just such a short distorted view of them, because we see their whole worlds. Yeah. When did you start to also understand that, and you know, I'm super interested in this as a journalist, that, oh, what I am seeing is just a very small part of what is my reality here. Yeah. Well, okay. So after the Watsonville Cannery workers strike, the night was helping to organize something called the anti-racist farm workers union, and we did

all this stuff, and you know, you're a 15 by 10. That point, I'm 15, you know, and, and, you know,

fields, you got to make signs, you got to make a skit, you know, all these things, you got to plan

“the caravan thing, we're doing this door to door thing. So it was like, you know, and, and I was”

willing to do more because I wasn't where anybody knew me, like I, you know, 15 years of trying to

be cool, and you don't want people to see you doing certain things, I would have never,

like walked up to someone and passed them a flyer because it is maybe they'll think that's nerdy or something like that, I don't know, but I got involved doing all this stuff. So then I get back to school and one of the first things, and so I'm totally, I'm a revolutionary at that point, I'm a communist by then, and I'm like, okay, so I start using these ideas of how to get people involved, and there was a bunch of students and me, started this, this walkout against year-round schools.

It's pretty easy to get high schoolers to walk out against the idea of going to school year-round. Yeah. Yeah. And so you get 2,000 students to walk out. So get 2,000 students to walk out, and, you know, this is very different than what I'm doing, because I know everybody and, you know, so I have the bullhorn, I'm wearing front of the school, and I'm saying things about what we're going to do, the plan is to march down to the school board,

and the principal, Mr. Alieri, who is an ex-cop, buff, like, and walked around, like, in a pose with his arms out. So you knew that his biceps were too big for his arms to go at his side, right? And he walks out there and he says, Riley, give me that bullhorn. And so I was like, okay, and everybody was like, what are you doing? And as I was handing it to him and trying to take it back, like, a good 15 or 20 students come and help me to try to pull it

from him. And we eventually get the bullhorn back from him, but this guy naven, it cuts his arm and it splurts out onto Alieri's shirt, right? And we all march down to the, we all marched down, they were so, this was the 80s, this was 86. And so in my lifetime, my conscious lifetime,

“I'd never seen anything like that, but I think it scared the school board to where as soon as we got”

there, they came out and announced they were reversing their decision. Wow. And so we were drunk

with power, basically, we're like, what is this easy, right? Right? And the next day was the first time

I ever saw a color picture on the cover of the Oakland Tribune. And what was it? There was a color picture of disciplinary with blood all over him, saying that students attacked principal Alieri on the way to, you know, and so that was a quick lesson. That was your first real lesson. Yes, about that perception there. I was really fascinated by that news component in this film, too, because we see that dynamic about protests all the time, where there's a particular part of the protest that

becomes the new story versus the protest itself. And many instances, it's because of the looting, the looting is the thing that we see the most more than anything else. So also, I want to put this in

“the context in the movie, because what you're making is a great point that I think, but what I'm”

setting up in the movie has to do with, when I would be watching TV a lot, I was like,

addicted to TV. And my father would always be like, you know why you think it's interesting,

why you think those people's lives are interesting. And he would say, because they're not watching TV, because the reality for many of us is we're spending so much time watching these screens. And so I'm like, and so for me, what we do see on these screens is a huge part of our life. It's a huge part of what affects us. And so I want that representation on there, not only the interpretation from what happened in real life to what's happening on the screen,

but how we are affected by all these things. It's interesting about the casting of this film,

Kiki Palmer, who's been around since she was 11. She's been famous. Yeah.

And the key Stanfield, part of whom you made famous with, you know, sorry to bother you, but he's since gone on and done so many things. And what's interesting is I interview Tessa Thompson a little while ago, and she told me the story of how you almost took her out of the cast of sorry to bother you, because she hit gotten a Marvel movie. And you felt like she might be too exposed and too well known. It wasn't just the Marvel movie to be fair, but yeah. But the fact that

she was well known, so what has changed for you and in this idea, because in this film, I mean,

“you've got all these heavy hitters. I think maybe just more confidence in myself,”

like I saw with Tessa, like how we made that a very specific thing, you know, I'm saying,

and I'm like, yeah, and that I can write it in a way that we can shape it in a way where it does have its own specificity. And so, and I think maybe I was more reacting to how a lot of movies do. Like it's the George Clooney is George Clooney, uh, breaking into banks. It's George Clooney being a sniper. It's George Clooney. And I was like, I don't want the, it's George Clooney doing this thing. I want it to be this character, right? And I think that what I've realized

is that even though the star of it all stars, the how big someone is, can make people come to a movie for that, then it's my job to make them forget what they know about that person, right? What they know about that actor. And it's also the actors job. So I'm picking people that can pull that off. Why was Kiki the person that had to be Corvette? Oh, I saw how in other movies, they were like, okay, she does this one thing, or these two things, this certain cadence,

and they were like missing this whole other piece of her. So Kiki? Yeah, and not in all the things

“they did, she's, she's, she's shown herself that's how I knew it, right? And also I met with her.”

And I could see this thing and her willingness to go there, you know? And in the same way that often I'm trying to cast against type. In that way, I saw with this, like, this is a chance to see someone do stuff that they haven't done before and that she has this whole skill set that people were underappreciating. You've said that you love stories that live inside of a contradiction. And what strikes me about this moment now and your life is you might have the most contradictions

of all that you're living in this moment. I mean, you have produced a $20 million film,

you're inside the system, critiquing the system. But I'd like to know, how are you thinking about that? Yeah. Well, I think that we're all inside the system. I think if I had a job, I've had many jobs at retail, I've had many jobs, you know, doing stuff of constructed redwood decks, all sorts of things like that. Yeah. I'm inside the system, like there's no getting out of it until we have a movement that creates a whole different system. But in particular, though, I mean, when your first

movie, I'm sorry to bother you came out, it was like a breakthrough of, oh, he is, he is really speaking to the system. He's talking truth to power. It's very anti-capitalist movie. But now you're like us, you're entering the seasoned successful role. Almost to the point where you are the

“system. Yeah, and I think what my films and my music has always said is that we all are the”

system and my goal with my art is to instigate class struggle. So the reason that people know about me, for instance, is because of originally, because of the music and now, because of the movies. But from day one with the music, we were on EMI records. No longer existing corporation, but they were maybe one of the most owned by a lot of heinous multinational corporation, multinational corporation with investments all over the place. The reason is, is because I want this out on a platform

to talk to people who, you know, they're not seeking out alternative things. They're not going to do the punk DIY spot. You got to get inside in order to get to the people that you want to talk to. But I wouldn't even put it that way because we're, we're inside already. Like, there's no getting out of there's no make even if you make a commune in the woods by virtue of you not actually

rapper and organizer Boots Riley. His new film is titled "I Love Boosters." I'm Tanya Mosley,

“and this is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is Boots Riley.”

His new film, "I Love Boosters," is a satirical look at a crew of women shop lifters in the Bay Area. Before Riley was a filmmaker, he spent more than two decades fronting the political hip-hop group the crew whose albums include Kill My Landlord, Steel This Album, and Party Music. Before he was a rapper, Riley loaded packages onto airplanes for UPS, and before that he was a teenage labor organizer. He came up alongside radical politics. His father, Walter Riley, is a civil rights and criminal

defense attorney in Oakland who organized auto workers and Detroit before going to law school.

I want to talk a little bit about your use of the body and all of your bodies of work. So I'm not spoiling it because I'm sorry to bother you, has been around for many years. So I can talk about how the workers turn into horses, seeing it yet that's on you. Right, exactly. But, in sorry to bother you, the workers turn into horses. And I'm a Virgo, Cody is like this 13-foot tall presence in a world that doesn't make space for him.

In boosters, I can't talk about, you know, there's a spoiler there, but the key stand feels character. It is very much in the body. So every one of your political arguments is something done to a body. So in your film's capitalism doesn't just show up as a system. It also shows up

“in like the very physical manifestation. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, why is it physical for you?”

Well, I think it might be connected to my work in music, right? No matter how, you know, like, so when I started, when I decided to become a rapper, I was not good at all. I wasn't just not good. I was bad. Not only did I know that. Yeah. My friends knew that. Yeah. So it was surprising to them. And that in what sense? I was just not good. I had to learn, you know, how to not be corny. I had to learn, you know, all sorts of things.

And it is, you know, it is a skill. It is a talent. It is something that you build on you home. And only because I came from a discipline party, did I know that I did, did I have the

“philosophy that I could get better? Yeah, that I could just work on it and figure that out.”

Why was rapping the thing you wanted to invest in to get better? I was, first I saw it around me.

And so I thought that it was a cool thing to do. But when I solidified, when it solidified that I'm going to do this was we were working in, in the double rock projects in San Francisco. This is 89. And there was a case in which a woman named Rossi Hawkins and her two twin sons got beat down her two twin eight year old sons got beat down by the police. And the neighborhood of double rock came out and started charging the police. And the cops shot in the air, the crowd ran away.

And the story that everybody tells the thing that made everyone turn around was someone started chanting, fight the power, fight the power. And that was 1989, do the right thing, the song from do the right thing, fight the power and was all over the radio. And that was a unifying rallying cry. So I started seeing what music and now are in general how it could have that place. So I started doing that. Now, started doing music, taught myself a blah, blah, blah. But I learned from music.

Yes, about the body. Yeah, is what I learned from music is that it doesn't matter because I got known as a lyricist. So it didn't matter how great someone's lyrics were. Like it's up to a couple like rap lyric nerds, whatever. It didn't matter. People are like, what does the beat sound like? What does that, how does that beat make me feel? And a lot of that, for in particular, it was a visceral thing. Like that eight away you feel it. The way the music might drop out or

something come in, it makes you, it makes your heart pump in a certain way. It makes you feel connected.

through cinema. Right. And so it's how the camera moves. It's everything. And so part of what I'm

“also doing is making you think about something physical, right? Something like how do we touch”

the system? We don't just think about it. It's not just theoretically theoretical things because I'm starting my art from a very personal place. And sometimes it can get growth tests. Yeah, I can't grow tests like in sorry to bother you. And they turn into horses. I mean, it's a very disturbing thing to feel. Thank you. So disturbing things in this movie, too. I would say, but it's definitely definitely. So what I want to do is compel people and repel people at the same

time. Right. I want to have that push and pull. I want people to be able to feel things

to know. This is made by someone. This is made by hundreds of things. Because killing does what in that way. Yeah. It makes you engage with it in a different way. So let's say a very basic thing. If I'm like this person is sad and therefore we're playing the violence. You know, like you'll be like, okay, they're sad and you want to even question it like they're sad and blah, but you go on automatic and I don't want people to be on automatic. I want people to be understanding, you know,

it's like seeing the brush strokes, right, in something like it doesn't take you out of the painting and see the brush strokes. It brings you into it more. And so I want people to think about engage with this work in a different way. And so that goes from, so that the, the grow test part

“is something that I think is connected to, you know, what we might, the horrors that we see”

and atrocities we see happening in our real life and how do we get a hold of that. And to do that

in the midst of something that is ultimately optimistic. Yeah. When you say ultimately optimistic.

I think what the art that I make is optimistic and to put that in these, this context is something that that makes you think about what's in front of you in a different way. Like I show the seams and stuff and that has to do with I'm trying to make things that are janky and with this beautiful clutter and it's very inspired to me. And you use the term janky, you know, which is typically a negative term. Like it's janky, it's busted. Yeah. It's so is not good. Pumpkas in that negative

term. But you're not using it that way. So you're not using janky in a negative. No, I'm, I'm like, this is like the jankiness of life. And obviously, I'm choosing what's in the frame and, and it's very, it's very made, right? And it's heightened. But I want something that makes you think about that jankiness and see the seams and see, see things. So I can say like we have, and it's about textures. We have miniatures. We have stop motion. You know, we have all sorts of stuff.

Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is filmmaker, rapper and organizer, Boots Riley. His new film, I love boosters, arrives in theaters on May 22nd. We'll be right back after a break. This is fresh air. This is fresh air. I'm Tanya Mosley. And my guest today is Boots Riley. His new film is called I love boosters out May 22nd. You know, Boots, you have talked a lot about your father. And there's so many parallels between you and him.

You know, we're recording this the day after Mother's Day. And I had me thinking about your mother because there's something that you said years ago about your late mom that is stuck with me. You said that she put her hopes and dreams aside and that watching her life taught you

“that many women don't have a chance to realize theirs. I don't remember saying that, but it sounds”

right. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about your mom. So my mother was born to a black, pre-beat poet named Lawrence Patterson and a German Jewish mother named Anita Pinner and in New York and she's born in the 40s. So just even then being mixed, it wasn't something that is prevalent as now. And she got pregnant with my sister when she was 15. Wow. And kind of was left alone. She cared for her. Yeah. Yeah. And before that time, she was part of the children's theater

workshop that became Sesame Street. Wow. And what way? She was one of the cast members. Really?

this would come up all the time about because she then had four kids up. And so she would sometimes

let folks know. Not just sometimes a lot of times. Let folks know what she gave. Well, what she gave up. Oh. And I didn't find out until after she died, she wrote a lot of poetry in by reading her journals. Don't read your mom's journals after she dies. You'll find a lot about other men and very specific things that you don't want to know about your mom. But you also found out that she was a poet. And her mother also, though, was a poet. Her mother also

was involved in theater. And was the director of Oakland on Symbol Theater. Because she then later came, even though her mom moved away from her when she was a teenage mother, she came to be like,

“"No, you're going to help me with this." And she moved to Berkeley. That's how she got to the”

West Coast. So your grandmother, your mother's mother, is what introduced you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it was it definitely did not make me want to do theater. Because that's a whole experience. Yeah, just like in the sense that it was boring old people stuff, you know, like somebody sitting on the couch

arguing with each other. There was always a slap. Like, I think the actors of a certain age,

they always want to slap. Right. They'll be like, "Should they slap me?" You know, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. That's like the emotional thing. What's the things I'll say, boots, that struck me, though, about that quote that you don't remember, that you said about your mom. I mean, it sounds true. When did you realize that, though, that, wow, my mom maybe didn't have a fully-realized life? Was that something that you had emotional intelligence as a child or was it

“when you were-- Well, I think, you know, she told us. And also that was what she was doing later”

was like, "Okay, I'm doing this now because I've had this other life." Right. She was a round artist.

She was a round musician. I was a round jazz musician. John Handy. You know, like, "All great ones." Oh, really? Yeah. Oliver Johnson. One time she took us to France and we were with all these jazz musicians who were from Oakland. You know, that was around the same time on his 15th. So I saw this stuff. At the same time, I did also see like, "Oh, these people don't grow up." Like, I had this idea about artists and musicians specifically. Like, there's a rest of development

compared to the rest of the rest of whoever I knew, right? And so I was like, I definitely don't want to be a musician. Because I want to grow. I want to be a musician. Yeah. I felt like it was just, and it was maybe the particular people she was around, right? So, but my point is, is that she wanted to be around the excitement of creating things. And so it took, you know, all of these things about art and music that she was exposing me to. And so there was definitely a huge artistic influence from that and

from her whole side of things. But it was, yeah, very much I could see like, she wasn't making things in the way that she wanted. Maybe not, you know, fulfilled. Yeah. Which it strikes me with I love boosters. If this is a movie about women who are creators and their dreams are happening against a system that won't let them. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, that story is just so prevalent. Around this people I know, you're right, you're pointing out some connection that I didn't think about.

But I think for the same reason that I wrote the song, I love boosters. I wanted to spend time with those characters and they seem interested, the real version of those characters. They still do exist. How do you think your radical 15 year old self or 25 year old self would look at yourself today? They'd be like, are you kidding me? You're making star wars for radical politics?

“When can I see it? That's how you describe this film is Star Wars for radical politics.”

You feel like this is the star wars for radical politics. Yeah. Well, I mean, but to be fair, Star Wars was supposed to be the star wars for radical politics. George Lucas and I've confirmed this with him in person and you can find him online talking about it. That just want to drop the

was supposed to do what became apocalypse now? Yeah. And after American graffiti, he had this hit, he figured he could do whatever he wanted. So it's based on hard of darkness. So he was doing hard of darkness, but where the main characters were the vehicle. Yep. And the person that they were going to get their version of Kurtz was someone who had betrayed them and started working with the United States and became evil in that. They were like, it's too radical. You're not going to,

you're never going to make this movie. Nobody's going to find it and he couldn't get funding.

And he was like, how about if I put it in space? Yeah. And that is a story that like I can see why

“you hold on to that. I think that's really interesting. For you though, I just wonder, you know,”

that uses like space and science fiction and things. And your art is much more on the nose. It's much more on the head. It's much more it's using metaphor, but it's telling you. Yeah, well, here's my thing. I feel like as long as I can keep you like, so I've just done a tour since South by Southwest. I've played this movie 35 times, maybe. And I've sat through it every time.

Boystrous laughter, sometimes I'm worried people aren't getting the dialogue because they're laughing

over certain parts. And, you know, it's crazy. So my thing is, in the same way with my music, if I keep you dancing, I got you, right? In this case, all of that stuff, whatever. If I keep you laughing and keep you interested and keep you on the edge of your seat and feeling surprised and engaged, then then I have license to do almost anything. So, but it's, it ends up being a balance because if I'm going to do this thing that says, "Hey, it's like A, B, and C, I have to have something

that's still pulling you in." And so that's actually been the thing that I've honed for 30 years.

“This is my second film, but it's not my second thing. Right. And I think what makes the film”

work is that it just works on a basic level. And then you think about like, "Oh,

this is what he's saying." But it's very clear what I'm saying. This is not, it's not my basic thing. There's no, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I like art that does that. Boots Riley, thank you so much for this film, and thank you for this conversation. Thank you so much for having me. Boots Riley's new film is I Love Boosters. It opens in theaters on May 22nd. Coming up, Book Critic Marine Corrigan reviews two new novels that are worlds apart,

but united by the bond of loneliness. This is fresh air. This is fresh air. Our Book Critic Marine Corrigan says, "Although the main characters and new novels

“by Nigerian writer Payme Aguda and American writer Elizabeth Stroud are worlds apart,”

they're united by the bond of loneliness." Here's her review. In Beloved, Tony Morrison writes of a kind of loneliness that is wrapped tight like skin. I don't think Morrison's taught similarly has been topped, but two new novels attest to the inexhaustibility of language to describe a state we all unwillingly experience. Peak at the multiple categories that Peme Aguda's debut novel One Leg on Earth is shelved under,

and you'll start to understand how distinctive her writing is. Amazon, for instance, sells the book under horror, occultant supernatural, city life, and literary fiction. It's all those and more. Aguda's shy main character is a 23-year-old Nigerian college graduate named Yosoye. A communications major, she feels lucky to have been assigned to an architectural firm in Legos for her year of national service. Determined to shut off what she thinks of as her

inward tilt, Yosoye walks into a local joint shortly after moving into her one-room apartment. She convinces herself to sit down and order a beer, and when a man approaches, she goes off to a cheap motel with him and has sex. Then she discovers she's pregnant. In addition to all the mundane reasons why this pregnancy comes at a less than ideal time for Yosoye, there's also something weird happening in Legos. Pregnant women have been walking into the ocean, jumping into lagoons and drowning

supernatural before in her 2024 short story collection Ghost Roots, which was a finalist for the

National Book Award. Here, it's not only the mass suicides that render Yosoye's Legos sinister, it's also the locale of the building project where she works, churning out promotional materials. Omi City will be a preserve of the wealthy built on a peninsula reclaimed from the ocean. Right now though, it's just miles of empty sand occupied only by the architectural firms rough headquarters. The self-important employees there barely acknowledge Yosoye's existence.

Her lifelong loneliness motivates Yosoye to keep the pregnancy. Here's her thinking.

“An outline. That's what Yosoye had always felt like, a hollow outline of a person moving through”

space. It explained why people looked at her and looked away. An outline had no mass, no grounding force. This baby was now a dark little spot inside that outline. Yosoye felt its weight as it grew, she would be shaded in until she became a real person. Through uncanny language and images, Aguda enchanse her readers into an intimate connection with Yosoye. Talk about enchantment. Every time Elizabeth Strout brings out a new novel, which is often,

I think to myself, she can't pull off another great book again, and then she does.

Strout's signature subjects of loneliness and class humiliation reappear in the things we never say,

although Lucy Barton, a mainstay of her recent books is absent. Instead, we meet someone new. Arty Dam is a 57-year-old high school history teacher. The kind of teacher who genuinely cares about

“his students and changes some of their lives. That said, Arty finds himself leading a secret life”

of sadness. He even contemplates suicide. A puzzling separation from his beloved adult son is one cause, but there's also Arty's low-level feeling of isolation. For instance, arriving home

after a cocktail party, Arty says to his wife, "Eve, I wonder why people never said

anything real." "Eve, a therapist, dismissively tells him not to be an idiot. We're told that Arty, as he walked to the closet with their coats, felt a dismalness returned to him." There's a major secret revealed in the course of this story, an Arty special area of interest, American Civil War history, allows the novel to make some profound commentary about our own

“contemporary civil wars. But strout readers know her most overwhelming epiphanys, sneak up in”

throwaway moments, fragmented short paragraphs. I'll leave you with one of those paragraphs, courtesy of strouts omniscient narrator. So blind we humans are, so blind, to each other and to ourselves, moving through life as though through shadows, putting out a hand in the dark, and thinking we have touched someone, and maybe we have, but mostly we travel through life unsighted, grasping only the smallest details of one another's selves, including our own, thinking all

the wild that we can see. Marine Corgan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University, she reviewed two novels by Payme Aguda, and Elizabeth Strout. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, as President Trump heads to Beijing for his summit with Xi Jinping, we speak with China expert in former national security official Rush Do Xi. He says events of the past year show that China now faces the U.S. as a true peer as they square off over trade and tariffs, the Iran conflict,

and the future of Taiwan. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Briger, our technical director and engineer is Audrey Benthum. Our engineer today is Adam Stanishaevsky.

and Marie Baldonato, Lauren Crimzel, Theresa Madden, O'Nick Nazareth,

“Faya Challenger, Susan Nuckundi, Anna Balman, and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler.”

Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesfer,

Roberta Shura, directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.