Rufi Thorpe

Rufi Thorpe's new novel is Dear Fang, with Love. From her Q & A at the publisher's website:

Q: Can you describe your visit to Lithuania, and what about the country stuck with you enough to set DEAR FANG, WITH LOVE there?

A: I went to Lithuania as part of a writing program with Summer Literary Seminars, run by Mikhail Iossel. I had absolutely zero knowledge or understanding of Lithuania, so I just sort of arrived in a haunted city in the middle of a forest. Lithuania, and Vilnius in particular, is an exceptionally strange place and has a certain reputation and self-image as a pagan, unearthly, magic place. The history is very complicated, the cultural roots are both tangled and deep, the violence and political oppression the country has seen are a bit beyond the American imagination. And there I was, just sort of stumbling through it, thinking, “Why didn’t I know about all this?” I fell in love with it. I suppose setting a book there was just an excuse to learn more about it, a refusal to let the trip end when after a few weeks I had to return to the US.

Q: You undoubtedly have a strong connection to California–you were raised there, much of your first book took place in Corona del Mar and now you are raising your family there. What was it like to write about an entirely new place in this book?

A: In a lot of ways, even though the action of the book takes place almost entirely in Vilnius, I think it is still secretly a book about California, or at least about...[read on]

Visit Rufi Thorpe's website.

Writers Read: Rufi Thorpe (July 2014).

The Page 69 Test: The Girls from Corona del Mar.

My Book, The Movie: The Girls from Corona del Mar.

--Marshal Zeringue