Indigenous peoples must be in expressions for all the work. We are only five percent of the world's populations, but we are protecting eighty percent of the world's biodiversity, so we are not only a victim. We are also a solution that was hindu, Umaru Ibrahim, a row. towards laureate in environmental advocate who works to raise the voice of indigenous people to help tackle climate change, to discover, other inspiring leaders visit in white, I'm dot com, flash modern dash leaders, hey my name's alexandra cream and I'm a novelist and a contributor to the near times magazine. When I write fiction. I get to construct the universe but with a profile I have to really observe and come to understand

when, as they are, who is the person behind the work? And so this sunday read you're about to here, is approved I got to write about, may be the most well known writers, writer? literary world ye and lee yields had a pretty sending career when she was young ring material was scarce in beijing where she grew up. She was so hungry to read every scrap of tax she could which saved the newspaper from the fishmonger to read later in private. later in life. She attended the best year see in china and then eventually and I want to work on a phd in immunology, but during that time should be in writing stories and private. While working in the hospital she in english and french at any academic training before

she attended any emma Faye programme. She got a story published in the paris review. I followed ye and work for many years. I think she someone who can put difficult emotions on the page in this really crisp new and complex way, particularly grief. I know several people who, after losing someone close had been pointed toward her books, and I think it's because ye and manages to avoid all the pre packaged things that people tell you about loss he wrote a novel based on the loss of her son title where reason ends Published in twenty nineteen, the book ass, a conversation and between a mother and son who is no longer here. It's a person combination of form and feeling, even though the story is told through sparse dialogue, the strong

presence of someone who no longer exists the same way. They once did- and I think it's that paradoxical aspect of was the key and capture so well in lives and teachers and prince in new jersey, and I went out to visit her bare a couple months ago. She just so curious about the world she paused. While we were talking about to examine swallow tail butterflies, orbiting, some flowers or alike landscaper, setting out a type of frankly, we had never seen before when you're with her. You see the world through that set of eyes in new, more aware of what's happening around you know there are those writers have low, to tell you their story buggy and would rather sit back and listen to yours. So here's the article how ye and we became a beacon for rigorous in mourning

by Emily rue sailor, this was recorded by autumn to listen to our stories from the new york times, the new yorker vanity ere, the atlantic and other publications on your smartphone download autumn on the app store or the play store visit autumn. That's you: d m dot com for more details. The as a teenager growing up in communist china. The expatriate novel as he only discovered her gift for writing propaganda what channel language through the rhetorical modes of the great patriotic writers she had studied in school, spilling out long, moving passages embroidered with beautiful cliches, about boats where, turning to the motherland,

There were moments in life when I would be performing those public speeches, knowing that I did not trust anything. I said she told me as we sat in the cool shadow of a library at princeton university? Where lay teaches creative writing she remembers gazing out in her audience after giving a patriotic speech missing with some horror the tears on their faces. She couldn't leave how deeply they believed her eye that was the end of my relationship with Chinese. She said her His quiet and steady amid the sound of landscaping equipment buzzing in the summer heat. I know Chinese is beautiful. I love it's poetry, but the moment I speak I always think of that day. I moved people to tears Now, forty nine, the author of ten books and the recipient of countless honours,

from awaiting award to guggenheim and macarthur fellowships lee is repulsed by dogma. I would never say I know this. I am certain that this is the key. Yes, I will never say that an english she told me. I feel the most ridiculous thing is certainty. Lee as a steady, serene gaze, her face youthful round beneath dark crop, tear that shows a subtle web of gray. In her author photos, she exudes and almost zealous com, but in person. Intensity is mitigated like sunlight. Filtered through leaves she smiles easily in a close mouthed way that and rate as either stern or mischievous meticulous. In her thinking She takes even offhand questions seriously, but When, while walking through princeton disney ask downtown, we came across a comedic scene,

and again in a high and clothing store window with its shorts unfastened and pulled down around its feet. Spare limbs strewn round the floor. She stopped to take us. Series of photos from slightly different angles: delighted by this glimpse of hey arson and otherwise straight laced, shop, full of boat shoes, and she, when leaned describes herself. She says that she can be quite dull, she can become almost invisible in many situations from time to time has had the experience of having someone talk at her vigorously for several minutes and then tell her that she wonderful conversationalist, even though she and said a word but as we wound our way, slowly through the gothic grounds of the university was startled at how time seemed to arrange itself into singular subtly memorable moments when I was at her side, a gardener explained to us how he feels in his body the harshness of the plants, a little girl sitting.

with her parents interrogated them about the diet, coke that Lee was drinking. Finally declaring I want to drink that too as if taken notice of others as leaders, reflexively also cost, them to notice her details of behaviour in character were heightened by her receptivity to the world. Sat together on a smooth stone bench. We noticed a girl of may be eleven or twelve years old, sitting a long arms length away, watching us silently and steadily paused. To ask her the sort of small uninteresting questions that adults ask children are used encompass. Are you with your parents she stared mutely, giving only the slightest one shoulders rugen response both our minds, turned naturally unavoidably towards our observer as we tried to continue a conversation until once when we looked up

we saw her walking away. Small hand hung lightly on her fathers palm gazing, Let him in saying something that we could no longer here after we left Lee was still thinking about, girl, who watched us silently who was so comfortable, claiming to speak I think she was amazing. She said with reverence I wonder what life is going to be like for that girl. Wondering about a person, a real or fictional, often marks the start of a story. Freely who has a habit of speaking about her characters as though there were people she knows personally people she might have caught up with the week before her latest novel, the both of goose being published in late september by ferrars strauss andrew found its origin

point in a conversation between two adolescent girls living in post war, France, an yes and fabienne- that appeared in least thoughts, one day as though it were a private conversation, she was eavesdropping on fabienne poses question to an yes. How do you grow happiness when on? Yes, wonders whether happiness can be grown at all. Fabienne admonishes, her telling her you can grow anything just like potatoes. Fabienne proposes that the two of them tried to print approaches, one growing happiness as though it were a crop of beats me growing it as though it were potatoes, a philosophical discussion about the nature of the good life Conducted in their own private terminology, but acquiescing, however, innocently to this nonsense proposition an yes begins. The process by which their friendship will be cleaved in half the book of goose's, told from a point five

in the stories future by an older and yes, who looks back on their youth together with a mixture of sadness in amazement, the girl, we're two halves of one odd magnetic pole, but the effortless balance between them begins to shift when fabienne decides that they could write a book together and eventually, pressures on yes to be the public face of the story, collection and yes, is thrust into the spotlight. A prodigy from rural france. body and authenticity and unnatural talent that others are hungry to manipulate and shape, and experience of literary fame, that slyly echoes some of the ways in which others have tried to push Lee to write more appealing commercial novels asian american families, navigate broadly recognisable, stories of assimilation and ambition. Ultimately, Lee admires both characters for their ability to

we had a path for themselves in an inhospitable time that offered little for women of their class other than manual labour and child rearing in berlin image of Elizabeth bowen, who defined flat characters those who have no alternatives on yes and fabian fabricate alternatives out of pure imagination, the since other writers, work. lean narrates from the fringes of her own experience, subverting the notion that a writer should be bounded by her own identity. Identity is both personal property in territory to be defended. She insists saw her own unconquerable perspective, breaking rules in a slice stubborn way there, her almost radical commitment to character and interior. Already over plot lay. She aligns political argument in favour of individual character studies. Her personal canon of classic russian

authors intermingled with unfriendly british and irish writers like Rebecca west john mega ahern, Elizabeth bowen and William trevor She's specializes in the movements, faints and fragile suspensions of what she sometimes calls life with a lid on borrowing, a phrase from bowen stories, capturing the rich. and depth of inner life that is not guaranteed an outlet, inaction or even outward expression, sir, times. It feels to me, like this, almost old fashioned nineteenth century sense of authorship, the novelist garth greenwell, who grew close to Lee and twenty sixteen at the bread loaf writers conference told me,

where one feels that the writers attention toward her characters is like what one imagines gods attention to us would be like this sort of utterly unsolved concerned. Unsentimentalism love a kind of brutal attention, this podcast supported by humanity, today's top candidates value if it's in healthcare in years past employers might have overlooked benefits like dental envision insurance. Now those benefits can help tipp the scales in a competitive labour market. That's why you man is committed to doing more for your employees. Well being, while lowering your costs, we call that human care to learn. more about humanity, plans for companies of all sizes and benefits budgets visit human, a duck slash employer, I manna Martin, the host of the modern love podcast in every episode, into an intimate corner of someone's life and learn about what love means to them.

five years with another person. I've never spent that much time with anyone else. So we built kind of said. I love you pretty fast as long as they keep the dance up I'll keep the denser and she felt the same way, an instant connection. It's a window into how real people navigate all kinds of love. I mean room, and take family friendship, dog based their stories of life changing moments, some all joys, big revelations. My advice is that it's ok, it hurt a lot of the way that you manifest. Your love for your children is through cooking and I remember just looking at them in or almost like wow. You know so much that I could even dream of knowing about my brother You can listen to modern love wherever you get your podcasts, lee was born in beijing and nineteen seventy two the year prison richard Nixon visited china and her.

As to memory is of an earthquake that shook her awaken the middle of the night with its rolling rhythm, she Her family rushed out onto the street where she saw entire neighbourhood standing together in their underwear in bed clothes. I think that was them, that I became a writer. She told me watching all those people youngest of two daughters, raised by a father who was reticent about his work. As a nuclear physicist and a mother who worked as a school teacher, she often preferred the position of an observer to that of the sentimental participate, she was admonished by a teacher for turning to examine the expressions of her classmates during the memorial service for chairman MAO going up under communist austerity, she had a fierce appetite for stories and we felt that there was enough to read. She would save the fragments, newspaper that fishmongers wrapped their wares and and unfurl them in private or rush home during

school lunch break to listen to the cereal lies narratives read out over the radio each day at noon: russian levels were more available in china. At that time she poured out turgenev in particular as well, stole tolstoy Google Chekhov around aged oh, she began learning English in school still remembers what it was like to open an english language book. For the first time I have to say This was my favorite memory. She said laughing. when she began to read in english the thing that struck her most acutely was the letter I running rampant across the page. Serving in its profusion, served her mandatory military service before attending peking university on the science track, doing millet drills and learning marxist history during the day and reading,

read it readers digests on photocopied paper in her spare time in ninety ninety six, as a talented scientist with a degree from china's most prestigious university, lay moved too. I was city to begin a phd in immunology, researching the communication between He sells and be cells to specialised types of white blood cells that work together to coordinate immune responses In her twenty seventeen memoir dear friend, from my life I write to you and your life. She wrote that she liked the concept of the immune system, because its job to detect an attack non self. It has memories some as long lasting as life. It's me You can go awry selectively or worse indiscriminately, leading the system to mistakes self as food.

And as something to eliminate after four years in her course of study working with lab mice and giving birth to her first son, she told her huh and that she no longer wanted to be a scientist. She wanted to write. She took an evening class taught by a poet and wrote for two years on her own working at a hospital during the days until eventually, she completed immortality and ambition generation spanning story written in the voice of a collective. We, where individuals surface from the vast c of the narration, taking a precious breath before they are enfolded once in the brutal sweep of history, a movement replicated in one of these favorite books, war and peace, immortality was plucked from the slush pile of the paris review and published by the editor at the time rigid hughes, who has become a lifelong friend from then on,

ignition, came quickly admission to the highly selective iowa writers workshop for an emma faye in fiction. The paris review The coveted Clinton prize for debut short story, writers and to book deal for her first story. Collect even in the novel, the vagrants about a remote chinese village and the consequences of the execution of a young local woman who resisted the communist order. Was forty. One and writing. Must I go a novel. California, woman named lily, reflecting on her life and the untimely loss of her daughter to suicide. When her eldest son took his own life at age. Sixteen, the tragic coincidence, halted her work on the novel. lee describes her family as stoic though they mourned and long lasting ways. She went back to teaching the next week fearful of spain.

Being unstructured time alone with her thoughts, the grief and pain that Lee carried with her, took the shape of her lean piercing, twenty nineteen novel where real in the end, a fictional dialogue We need a mother and a teenage son lost to suicide. They discuss the richer and argue over. The meaning of metaphors She tells him details of the physical world that he is no longer able to perceive the whether the new house they moved into the garden out back where his flowers, bloom Where reasons and is startling, in its spares dark emotional, lady and its formal innovation in its utter rick, he's alive melodrama. When I first read it familiar with the premise I grow in my mind, to find the emotional vantage point from which the story is told, because it is so different from most of trauma and laws, nikolai the name

into the sun and a name liese, sun, sometimes used for himself and fiction, has a shifting. bantering challenging presence throughout the book and is at so animated that the reader loses her grasp. On his context, shifting back and forth between his possible liveliness and the standing apprehended again and again, that he is no longer alive in prose that's tender and funny and at times painfully cutting lee managers to bestow on nickolay that, paradoxically, ephemeral and enduring vitality that belongs only two fictional characters. Lee has become no for a distilling, the essence of unbearable grief and so with exactitude an unexpected lightness. She has written extent Fifthly, about her own struggles with suicide, allergy and depression, always in an elliptical focused way that alludes cliche in familiar sentiment,

terribly won rights in order to stop oneself from feeling too much on an ugly one rights to become closer to that feeling self reads: one effort: mystic passage from twenty seventeen memoir when in difficult pieces Leon her editor at the new yorker cressida liason, speak of putting a text under her anesthesia separating it from the pain of its content, People always say you dissect characters, you dissect the world Lee says, but Cannot dissect anything until you have removed that arise on the page is a shattering emotions stilled for examination, something that can be really did without abandoning reason entirely. This quality has At something of a beacon to those suffering beneath unbearable weight and anew, it will roll for a person with reclusive tendencies. The most difficult messages lee risk

You are from far away teenagers struggling with suicidal impulses and she tries respond to every one. Sometimes rangers right from circumstances very similar to her own. One message in particular left the lasting effect on I'm sure he had lost a child, but he didn't say that Lee told me he said I have written to many people in my career, but I've never into an author because of her work and then he gave me a haiku by isa about losing his child, and he said this has sustained me. For years I hope it will sustain, knew the poem written by the eighteenth century. Japanese poet, Kobayashi isa reads in its entirety So this world of do is a world of do and yet and yet.

Lee balances a certain tension between reading as the ultimate act of privacy and as a way of connect with other minds, both real and functional. but during the early days of the pandemic, reading became for her a public square where people gathered at a distance as her friend, brigitte hughes, shut down the offices of the literary journal, a public space lee had plans, in her annual re reading of war and peace, and they thought it might be interesting in a time of forced solitude, to read the book collectively, what emerged was tolstoy together a project where a large and diverse group of readers including others, like Carl philips, as may, waging Wang Matt Gallagher and Amitabha kumar portioned out the classic novel over course of eighty five days. Reading daily observations from Lee about each section and posting their own. There was this

strong ordinary community of people who were all reading together on twitter of all places, and I think that that gave the experience a certain momentum. He was told me over the phone that you can sort of power in and find a stranger who felt like a leader or some one, who noticed a detail that you had overlooked too invited into liese way of reading. She sighed through several books in a day focusing on ten to fifteen pages in each sitting. Is to share in liese intimate relationships with the characters, letting stories defuse throughout the mundane tasks of living, exe reinforcing this book over such a stretches like decanting, had the critic alexander for its road in the new yorker about the experience it begins to breathe to take on new color and flavour and perfume thing with its own essence. Liese observations, eventual

collected in a volume and published by a public space alongside a selection of reader comments range from delight at encapsulation of a character in the description of a handshake, to room Nations on their tolstoy and distinction between awkwardness and embarrassment, Lee rights than awkwardness is visible to wall but embarrassment as a sort of self consciousness experienced by only at subject the moments of startling residence in the way. The crises of tolstoy time resemble our own mundane in the extraordinary sidling close the softness, in particular, ready of human beings bent into new shapes by historical forces, Lee rights. When people say you can skip the war parts of war and peace and read the peace parts only they be saying: let's pretend we could skip this pandemic or any catastrophe.

Uncertainty and inconvenience and make the world go as we wanted to here's. What training? Now you can defer pay of a full nets: we'd implementation. For six months. Thirty three thousand companies have already upgraded to met, sweet, gaining visibility and control. Over their financials inventory, hr e commerce and more everything they need to reduce manual processes, boost efficiency, build forecast and increase productivity. Whether your business generates millions or hundreds of millions of dollars take, vantage of the special financing offer of no payments or interest for six months at net: sweet dot, com, slash n Y t, that's net, sweet dot com, slash n Y tee There's, a chinese proverb that translates roughly as please

enter the urn as detail goes at dynasty official who served as a member of the secret police was sent to extract a confession from colleagues suspected of conspiring against the empress over a meal. He asked the man what he would do to x act a confession from a particularly recalcitrant subject. That's easy! The man said I would get a big earn and set a fire beneath it. When you put the accused inside, they will tell you everything the official had an earn brought a fire made and then heat and to the man who had given him the idea and invited him to step in lee used the phrase in an email she sent before we met after. I ask her a question. Found in where reasons end in the book, the mother confesses that what she really wish

She could ask. Others boils down to a single question. What do you do all day how mettlesome how intrusive, how impertinent nikolai era, eyes, if days are where we live. The mother exe fines in response, I will I want to know how people live in their days. When I asked lee over email, how she spends her days. She demurred sending me the four characters that make up the problem been promising to tell me more later, the next day, along email came. She goes to the office and teaches she swims at the on campus pool she reed's five to ten hours a day and rights some days, but most of all lee road. She works to remain mid. The thought throughout the day

spend it in a mindset of multiplicity and openness full and empty. At the same time, one has to be mid thought when one rights she says I dont think this is the beginning of the thought. The beginning happens before we start typing. The first word and usually the thought doesn't end when a story or a novel ends. The thought several thoughts still goes on. When I arrived at least home to see for myself how she lives in her days, she served me fruit, salad from a large bowl, she brought out of a refrigerator shaggy with family photos and handmade greeting cards, though his younger son, who is seventeen, was upstairs in his room. The only trace of him, I could see, was a stack of tea spoke son, sammy grammar, which he was looking for a linguistics project

some of these eldest son or as quietly present and as inevitable in their home as the punctuation at the end of a sentence from their ecru colored cock up who quintus named by him, because it was the fifth member of the fao me too, the stories and small details. She is continually sharing like a proud parent, whose child is off at college this year, only celebrated his birthday by making a basque cheesecake the sort of choice, singing esoteric recipe that her son loved to perfect in the garden just beyond the glass swallowtail, butterflies, circled one another as they funneled upward into the sky. The proverbs messages about cruelty and justice which you inflict on others may eventually be inflicted on you, but it also suggests some more foundational truth about the way our experience

hence to take on the shape of our mental life to enter the urn is to me, the conditions of your own consciousness to encounter the question of hope. Endure within them. There is a His enter the urine moment whenever you ask leah hazy: question one: you haven't fully thought through when I asked, if she would consider herself a private person. She turned the question back on me and then suggests we look to etymology. We went to her office a chapel legs ass. One shared by a celebrated economist couple who owned the house previously Lee described with unqualified amazement, how she imagines them working simultaneously at the desks she found placed on opposite ends of the room from a top desk, the size of a french church door. Lee extracted her favorite dictionary, samuel Johnson

seventeen fifty five dictionary of the english language from a topography of books permanently on shelved. There was pretty for private communication or joint understanding and privy for a place retirement, but no entry for the word. We needed lee loves to disentangle words to trace the branches back to the time but also loves aberrations like conundrum, which was said to have been cooked up by oxford underwear, intuit's, who wanted to create a knowledgeable sounding word that in actuality signified nonsense. One story places the origins of the western except of privacy in the middle ages, when most homes had few here, your walls and doors to separate cohabited from one another and life was lived in the is of family neighbours and the public square. The wealthy began

to build walls within their homes. To create specialised spaces for reading and study has expanded receive made it possible for individuals to read stories by themselves, rather gathering to hear them read out loud. Thus, it became possible to keep others out and also to invite them even deeper within many of these characters are recklessness of his sword, driven the urge to escape their circumstances or to reclaim their consciousness from the influence of others. They end up withdrawing alone with their stories and in some ways more directly in confrontation with them It strikes me as an interesting sort of subterfuge within this of narrative one can be masked and unmasked. At the same time, aired in places that others might never notice. You could say that presence of a barrier creates the conditions under which disclosure might be possible for how can something

be revealed if it has never been hidden, never been contained in the book of goose a much older on yes, who married and resettled, in a quiet american town wonders about, how she is seen by her new acquaintances who assume that she's passive and unambitious my chickens with their small brains, never seem to tire of king around pecking cooing clawing the geese are much more tranquil. They do not flap their wings at the slightest disturbance and when they feel in the pond they stay still for so long that you know they would not mind spending the rest of their lives suspended in their watery dreams, yet geese are never called passive. Above all, lean loves the way that, unless embodies skills, talons strength that are hit he even to her. She looks malleable. She looks compliant

She does everything they say Lee said smiling, but she knows who she is she hides in plain sight. She asked If I knew the proverb about the hermit, and I asked her to tell me the lower hermit, the little one hides from people in the fields in the countryside. She began the better hurry heads. They hide in the market place we laughed and she turned. the face me with a mischievous look on her face. I am herman that hides in the market place.