Shawn Andrew Mitchell: What do you do for work?Ĭharles Yu: I’m still working as a lawyer.

For him it was a quiet Saturday evening in Los Angeles. I beamed onto his phone from the future of a quiet Sunday morning in South Korea. Recently he took time out of balancing his work, family life, and the incessant demands of the advanced computer we carry in our pants in order to talk about reading, writing, philosophy, the management of time in and out of fiction, and human-to-robot consciousness transfer-all via the virtual conversation interface we call Skype. His work has been published in The New York Times, Playboy, Slate, and elsewhere. Yu’s previous books include the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Pantheon, 2010), which was a New York Times Notable Book and named one of the best books of the year by Time magazine as well as the story collection Third Class Superhero (Mariner Books, 2006), for which he was the recipient of the National Book Foundation’s Five Under Thirty-Five Award and a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award. It’s good fun to watch his characters feel their way around in the dark. It’s a tall order for any writer to fill, but Yu does it with aplomb while still managing to churn out direct, funny, heartfelt, and frequently lyric sentences. His characters again and again find themselves in worlds beset by technologies and afflictions they never anticipated and certainly don’t understand, and they want to make sense of things, giving language to their experiences in prose styles that both reflect and create their realities. If you could farm out the experience of having just clicked over to Fiction Writers Review while sitting at your desk sorting through paperwork or copy or spreadsheets, or trying to forget the old man who just coughed up spittle on you on the subway, or blocking the memory of the person who just broke up with you via text, or contemplating your receding hairline while mourning the loss of your grandmother, would you do it?Ĭharles Yu’s 2012 collection of fiction, Sorry Please Thank You (Pantheon), traffics in these kinds of questions, plopping intelligent and often humorous narrators into situations that could easily come off as whimsical or zany if they weren’t handled so deftly. This interview was originally published on May 6, 2013.

In today’s feature, part one of a two-part interview, Shawn Andrew Mitchell talks with Charles Yu about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, consensual grammar, favorite gadgets, and more. Editor’s Note: For the first several months of 2022, we’ll be celebrating some of our favorite work from the last fourteen years in a series of “ From the Archives” posts.

Charles yu