Bill Cheng is making one bold debut, said Julie Bosman in The New York Times. Southern Cross the Dog, his novel about the travails of an African-American refugee of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, has received strong early reviews. Yet Southern readers might raise an eyebrow at the fact that its Queens, N.Y.–born Chinese-American author has never set foot in the Deep South. “I don’t have the advantage of being from there, from that region, of that race,” says Cheng, now 29. “How do I justify this, you know, secret thing in my mind against an experience that I’ve never actually had? I don’t really have an answer for that.”
Even so, Cheng never doubted that he had a right to tell the tale, said Kelly McEvers in NPR.org. The book was inspired by the blues music the author long loved. “It is definitely a love note to those old blues players,” he says. “I knew I had to write about something that was both personal and important to me.” To imagine himself into the shoes of, say, a black man whipped by a white overseer, Cheng learned, he says, to extrapolate from his own memories of pain and fear. And camping out in a library didn’t hurt— allowing him to read deeply about the mind-sets, the music, and the speech patterns of 1920s Mississippi. “All that stuff doesn’t necessarily make it into the book. What it does is, it makes it into the writer,” he says. “It lends a certain confidence, and allows the writer to imagine, which is really what fiction’s about.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”