Latest news with #RFKuang
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Science
- Daily Mail
R. F. Kuang returns in our picks for the best Sci-Fi and Fantasy out now: Katabasis by R. F. Kuang, Hemlock and Silver by T. Kingfisher, The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey
Katabasis by R. F. Kuang (HarperVoyager £22, 560pp) For anyone who has fallen foul of academics, likes their comeuppances laced with diabolic spice and relishes the unrolling of a daring concept, read on! Alice Law is struggling to complete her PhD in Analytic Magick because her brilliant but brutish tutor has exploded after she messed up a spell-casting. What's the solution? Retrieve him from the underworld, of course. Accompanied by a genius colleague, she must navigate Hell's complex geometry, avoiding traps, Faustian pacts and monsters. Is Dante's the last word on Infernos? Katabasis is staking a strong claim. Hemlock and Silver by T. Kingfisher (Tor £22, 368pp) Generous, warm-hearted Anja is a healer with a passion for poisons – to help her cure, not kill. So when the king of her country asks her to find out what's ailing his beautiful daughter Snow, she can't refuse him, even if it means entering the tricksy world of courtly intrigue. Straightforward jolliness is an underrated literary quality, but one that Kingfisher offers in abundance. There's a wonderful contrast between the natural world Anja embodies and the cold, silvered world of intrigue and mystery she must explore. Not so much a retelling of Snow White as a full-on deconstruction, with a bit of Lewis Carroll thrown in for good measure. The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey (Orbit £10.99, 432pp) Life is calm on the planet Anjiin. Scientists bicker over grants, the way scientists do, and just as you settle down to that sort of book, boom! Enter the Carryx, insectoid intergalactic empire-builders. After decimating the population they round up the cream of Anjiin's intellectuals, setting them to work solving Carryx-problems. Splendidly, the scientists start bitching again. Dazzlingly epic, techie and humane, this is space opera at its best.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Katabasis by RF Kuang review – a descent into the hellscape of academia
The more academia has broken your heart, the more you'll love RF Kuang's new novel. Katabasis knows the slow grind of postgrad precarity: the endless grant grubbing and essay marking; the thesis chapters drafted, redrafted and quietly ignored by a supervisor who can't be bothered to read – let alone reply to – an email. Living semester to semester, pay shrinking, workload metastasising, cannon fodder in a departmental forever war. Katabasis knows how it feels to spend your best thinking years doing grunt work to further someone else's ideas, clinging to the bottom rung of a ladder you will never be allowed to climb: less an ivory tower than a pyramid scheme. Academia is a hellscape; Katabasis just makes it literal. The American author's sixth novel is an infernal twist on the campus farce: David Lodge with demons. Kuang's previous book, 2023's Yellowface, satirised the publishing industrial complex with an irresistible mix of gallows humour and gossip. A tale of toxic allies, commodified identity and hollow moralising, it was lapped up – with predictable irony – by the very people it skewered, like a real-life version of the stunt novel in Percival Everett's Erasure. The year before Yellowface, in the cult hit Babel, she invented an elaborate, counter-historical version of Oxford University – and then blew it up. A literary Rhodes Must Fall. All of which is to say, Kuang isn't subtle. She doesn't allude; she indicts. Some structures are so intractable, she argues – so insidiously self-replicating – they can only be disrupted with blunt force. But she also knows that a joke can deliver the same hard clarity as rage; sometimes more. She doesn't pull her punches, or her punchlines. In Katabasis, hell is not a roiling pit of fire, it's worse: 'Hell is a campus.' Cambridge postgrads Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are here on a quest. They're searching for their thesis supervisor, the recently deceased Professor Jacob Grimes. The victim of a grisly lab accident, Grimes has exploded, and not just in rage. His body is in bits, and his soul is in the queue for judgment. Without him, Alice and Peter's academic futures are equally damned. Their plan is simple: sneak into the underworld and haul him back. It worked so well for Orpheus. This is the 1980s: post-structuralism is eating meaning and theory is eating itself. Our dauntless duo are scholars in 'analytic magick', an archaic and volatile branch of the humanities where philosophy is actually useful (that's Kuang's joke, not mine; don't sic the Nietzscheans on me). It's a similar discipline to the one Kuang invented in Babel, with the intellectual friction of a paradox harnessed and mechanised ('Magick taunts physics and makes her cry'). There's special chalk involved this time, some algebra and pentagrams. Once again, it's best not to think too hard about it. Just surrender to the conceit. The real dark magic in this book is self-delusion. As Alice and Peter wander the 'eight courts of hell' (Dante was mostly right), they come to realise how deeply they've internalised the extractive logic of the academy. They've been taught to mistake rivalry for strength, exploitation for meritocracy, privilege for prestige, and endurance for resilience. To thank the system that feeds on them. The lie was so simple: you can be the exception, if you're willing to be exceptional. And it was Grimes – rapacious, scornful and addicted to his own myth – who made them believe it. The quest to save him begins to curdle, but old allegiances run deep ('Professor Grimes hadn't tormented just anyone. He'd tormented them … whatever they became when he was done with them would be so dazzling'). It's not easy to shake a validation fetish. Scathing about the institution, faithful to the ideal: Kuang is a campus novelist to the core. Katabasis is a celebration of 'the acrobatics of thought'. A tale of poets and storytellers, thinkers and theorists, art-makers and cultural sorcerers. It jostles with in-jokes, from the Nash equilibrium to Escher's impossible staircase; Lacan to Lembas bread. This is a novel that believes in ideas – just not the cages we build for them. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Babel ended in cleansing fire. There was something queasy in that final, flaming gesture – a flirtation with martyrdom that never quite questioned its own romance. Death as purity. Destruction as justice. Katabasis is messier, and more generous. It turns away from the allure of heroic sacrifice toward something far harder: survival. It doesn't ask what we're willing to die for, but what keeps us here – the oldest and most obstinate of our philosophical questions, and the most beautiful. Katabasis is far from perfect. There's a pair of blood-drunk villains who feel like a gory distraction, and a nonsense MacGuffin. Bone creatures clatter through plot holes. Grand mythologies collide and compete. Chunks of the novel read like a Rowan Atkinson sketch. And the 1980s faculty politics look deceptively – or perhaps wearily – like our own (a fascinating companion read would be Helen Garner's 1995 landmark provocation The First Stone). But none of that really matters – especially if you have a score to settle. The heretical glee of this novel is irrepressible. I escaped from my PhD 14 years ago, and it really did feel like an escape; it still does. This book reminded me why. It also reminded me how it felt to ascend from a hell of my own making and not look back. I read Katabasis in a single sitting and then slept the deep, unburdened sleep of someone who'd never even heard of Foucault. Katabasis by RF Kuang is published by HarperVoyager (£22). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Katabasis by RF Kuang review – a descent into the hellscape of academia
The more academia has broken your heart, the more you'll love RF Kuang's new novel. Katabasis knows the slow grind of postgrad precarity: the endless grant grubbing and essay marking; the thesis chapters drafted, redrafted and quietly ignored by a supervisor who can't be bothered to read – let alone reply to – an email. Living semester to semester, pay shrinking, workload metastasising, cannon fodder in a departmental forever war. Katabasis knows how it feels to spend your best thinking years doing grunt work to further someone else's ideas, clinging to the bottom rung of a ladder you will never be allowed to climb: less an ivory tower than a pyramid scheme. Academia is a hellscape; Katabasis just makes it literal. The American author's sixth novel is an infernal twist on the campus farce: David Lodge with demons. Kuang's previous book, 2023's Yellowface, satirised the publishing industrial complex with an irresistible mix of gallows humour and gossip. A tale of toxic allies, commodified identity and hollow moralising, it was lapped up – with predictable irony – by the very people it skewered, like a real-life version of the stunt novel in Percival Everett's Erasure. The year before Yellowface, in the cult hit Babel, she invented an elaborate, counter-historical version of Oxford University – and then blew it up. A literary Rhodes Must Fall. All of which is to say, Kuang isn't subtle. She doesn't allude; she indicts. Some structures are so intractable, she argues – so insidiously self-replicating – they can only be disrupted with blunt force. But she also knows that a joke can deliver the same hard clarity as rage; sometimes more. She doesn't pull her punches, or her punchlines. In Katabasis, hell is not a roiling pit of fire, it's worse: 'Hell is a campus.' Cambridge postgrads Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are here on a quest. They're searching for their thesis supervisor, the recently deceased Professor Jacob Grimes. The victim of a grisly lab accident, Grimes has exploded, and not just in rage. His body is in bits, and his soul is in the queue for judgment. Without him, Alice and Peter's academic futures are equally damned. Their plan is simple: sneak into the underworld and haul him back. It worked so well for Orpheus. This is the 1980s: post-structuralism is eating meaning and theory is eating itself. Our dauntless duo are scholars in 'analytic magick', an archaic and volatile branch of the humanities where philosophy is actually useful (that's Kuang's joke, not mine; don't sic the Nietzscheans on me). It's a similar discipline to the one Kuang invented in Babel, with the intellectual friction of a paradox harnessed and mechanised ('Magick taunts physics and makes her cry'). There's special chalk involved this time, some algebra and pentagrams. Once again, it's best not to think too hard about it. Just surrender to the conceit. The real dark magic in this book is self-delusion. As Alice and Peter wander the 'eight courts of hell' (Dante was mostly right), they come to realise how deeply they've internalised the extractive logic of the academy. They've been taught to mistake rivalry for strength, exploitation for meritocracy, privilege for prestige, and endurance for resilience. To thank the system that feeds on them. The lie was so simple: you can be the exception, if you're willing to be exceptional. And it was Grimes – rapacious, scornful and addicted to his own myth – who made them believe it. The quest to save him begins to curdle, but old allegiances run deep ('Professor Grimes hadn't tormented just anyone. He'd tormented them … whatever they became when he was done with them would be so dazzling'). It's not easy to shake a validation fetish. Scathing about the institution, faithful to the ideal: Kuang is a campus novelist to the core. Katabasis is a celebration of 'the acrobatics of thought'. A tale of poets and storytellers, thinkers and theorists, art-makers and cultural sorcerers. It jostles with in-jokes, from the Nash equilibrium to Escher's impossible staircase; Lacan to Lembas bread. This is a novel that believes in ideas – just not the cages we build for them. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Babel ended in cleansing fire. There was something queasy in that final, flaming gesture – a flirtation with martyrdom that never quite questioned its own romance. Death as purity. Destruction as justice. Katabasis is messier, and more generous. It turns away from the allure of heroic sacrifice toward something far harder: survival. It doesn't ask what we're willing to die for, but what keeps us here – the oldest and most obstinate of our philosophical questions, and the most beautiful. Katabasis is far from perfect. There's a pair of blood-drunk villains who feel like a gory distraction, and a nonsense MacGuffin. Bone creatures clatter through plot holes. Grand mythologies collide and compete. Chunks of the novel read like a Rowan Atkinson sketch. And the 1980s faculty politics look deceptively – or perhaps wearily – like our own (a fascinating companion read would be Helen Garner's 1995 landmark provocation The First Stone). But none of that really matters – especially if you have a score to settle. The heretical glee of this novel is irrepressible. I escaped from my PhD 14 years ago, and it really did feel like an escape; it still does. This book reminded me why. It also reminded me how it felt to ascend from a hell of my own making and not look back. I read Katabasis in a single sitting and then slept the deep, unburdened sleep of someone who'd never even heard of Foucault. Katabasis by RF Kuang is published by HarperVoyager (£22). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
CBC
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
R.F. Kuang comes to Toronto to discuss her latest book with Mattea Roach
Social Sharing American author R.F. Kuang will join Bookends host Mattea Roach on stage on Sept. 17 at 7 p.m. at Koerner Hall in Toronto. The event, which is part of a series by the Toronto Festival of Authors, will be broadcast on a future episode of Bookends with Mattea Roach. Kuang is the New York Times #1 bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, the historical fantasy novel Babel and the satirical thriller Yellowface. She has received Nebula, Locus, Crawford and British Book Awards for her writing and is pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Kuang will discuss her previous novels and rise to success. She'll also dive into the inspiration behind her latest book, Katabasis. Katabasis tells the story of two graduate students with an intense academic rivalry who must put aside their feud to save their professor and get a coveted recommendation letter. To do so, they must travel into the depths of hell — a journey that is never without consequences — and bring up feelings they've so desperately tried to suppress. Roach is a Toronto broadcaster, writer and book lover. Now the host of Bookends, they appeared on the game show Jeopardy! in 2022, where they won 23 games, the most ever won by a Canadian contestant. Roach also won Canada Reads in 2023, championing Ducks by Kate Beaton. They are from Halifax.
Yahoo
28-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Authors call on publishers to limit their use of AI
An open letter from authors including Lauren Groff, Lev Grossman, R.F. Kuang, Dennis Lehane, and Geoffrey Maguire calls on book publishers to pledge to limit their use of AI tools, for example by committing to only hire human audiobook narrators. The letter argues that authors' work has been 'stolen' by AI companies: 'Rather than paying writers a small percentage of the money our work makes for them, someone else will be paid for a technology built on our unpaid labor.' Among other commitments, the authors call for publishers to 'make a pledge that they will never release books that were created by machine' and 'not replace their human staff with AI tools or degrade their positions into AI monitors.' While the initial letter was signed by an already impressive list of writers, NPR reports that another 1,100 signatures were added in the 24 hours after it was initially published. Authors are also suing tech companies over using their books to train AI models, but federal judges dealt significant blows to those lawsuits earlier this week.
