When RF Kuang was doing research for her latest novel, Katabasis, she threw a paradox party. She was developing a system of “analytic magick” for the fantasy world she was creating, and so she invited some logicians from the department of philosophy and linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology – colleagues of her husband – to help refine it.
“Logicians are always happy to teach you about logic if you give them a glass of wine,” she says cheerfully. “I asked them to come with a paradox, ideally of rational decision-making, but any logical paradox that could possibly have magical effects, and they did.”
Many of these paradoxes – the Painter’s Paradox (a shape with finite volume but infinite surface area requires infinite paint to cover it, despite only being able to hold a finite amount of paint inside), Sorites Paradox (a heap is still a heap when you remove one grain, but how many grains must you remove before it’s no longer a heap?) – made it into the final text, and the logicians are thanked in the book’s acknowledgments.
“Many people brought handouts. The people who didn’t have handouts demonstrated the paradoxes on the whiteboard in our livingroom. I think any good party should involve a whiteboard and magic markers.”
RM Block
The definition of a good party is different for everyone, but this kind of cerebral merriment seems right on brand for Kuang, who, in addition to authoring the Poppy Wars trilogy (2018), Babel (2022), and the bestselling sensation, Yellowface (2023), holds an undergraduate degree from Georgetown, graduate degrees from Cambridge and Oxford, and is about to finish a PhD in east Asian languages and literature at Yale. Not bad for someone who doesn’t turn 30 until next year.
The amount of obligations does expand, and you don’t want to let people down
— Kuang on promotional duties
Katabasis, her sixth novel, draws on philosophy and logic to tell the story of two students of “analytic magick”, Alice and Peter, who journey into hell to rescue their recently deceased PhD supervisor. The book, a fantasy campus novel (or what the kids on TikTok might call a dark-academia-enemies-to-lovers-romantasy), was an attempt to write what Kuang calls “nonsense literature”, in which a protagonist goes to a place that keeps getting inexplicably weirder and more disorienting (think Alice in Wonderland).
The version of hell experienced by Alice and Peter is eerily familiar to the university campus they have just left, no doubt confirming the suspicions of many a PhD student, that what they’re doing is hell on earth. But what began as “a kind of silly satire – a romp through hell as a commentary on academia”, took on darker themes the further Kuang proceeded.
“I’d started my PhD and I had a really, really hard time with it,” she confesses. “It was the worst I’d ever felt about myself, and the worst I’d felt mentally.”
In the midst of this, her then boyfriend, now husband, was hospitalised for what turned out to be a chronic illness.
“For months he’d been suffering, but we just hadn’t got a diagnosis, and we had no idea what it was. It just kept getting worse. I was terrified. He was so thin and sick. It was our lowest point physically, emotionally, mentally.”
As she wrote, Kuang found herself investigating questions around “your relationship to your body when you feel like that body is betraying you”, and “your relationship to your mind when you feel like your mind is spiralling”.
The book became both a humorous takedown of academic systems and institutions, and a deeper philosophical inquiry, examining ideas such as what happens when you lose the will to live.
“Alice and Peter decide to sacrifice half of their remaining lifespans and go to the underworld. I think that’s a really on-the-nose metaphor for giving up on life,” says Kuang. “But it’s actually my most optimistic book, because they emerge on the other end with a new set of priorities and a new philosophy of what it means to live.”
For those who discovered Kuang through Yellowface, all of this might seem something of a departure. That book, which told of a struggling author who steals her deceased friend’s manuscript and tries to pass it off as her own, was a work of literary fiction in the realist mode. It was one of the bestselling and most-talked-about books of the year, not least because it skewered the publishing industry and its approach to diversity.
But Kuang was not a nobody when Yellowface came along. She had been making her way in publishing since she was 19, when she wrote the first of The Poppy Wars trilogy, a fantasy series inspired by 20th-century Chinese history (the first in the trilogy was published just before her 22nd birthday). Then came Babel, a historical fantasy epic that confronted British imperialism and the opium wars. For long-time fans of Kuang, Katabasis signals a return to her fantasy roots. (So far she has used the moniker RF Kuang for fantasy novels, and Rebecca F Kuang for literary fiction).
Culturally, we’ve seen a big step backwards from the heyday of identity politics and emphasis on diversity
It was Babel, not Yellowface, that propelled Kuang to literary fame, debuting as a New York Times bestseller. So, in a sense, she was prepared for the madness when Yellowface became a hit, and the discourse around the book took on a life of its own.
“I think I actually handled that pretty well,” she says. “I’ve had five books up until now to get used to the idea of people discussing my work, with no relation to what I might have intended with the story. My solution is I just don’t look at any of it. I’m not really on social media. I use this app blocker that restricts every single social media platform, and it opens for a tiny window on some days so that I can go to Instagram and do work posts. Otherwise, I don’t see any of it, and I don’t think about it.”
As to whether the publishing industry has changed since she started writing Yellowface, she believes it’s “backslid on its commitment to inclusivity and diverse voices”.
“It was always just following the market, and I think culturally, we’ve seen a big step backwards from the heyday of identity politics and emphasis on diversity, especially over here in the US, where there are active federal government crackdowns and banning of diversity initiatives. Of course, there were always a lot of problems with those initiatives to begin with, which is what Yellowface critiqued.”
Kuang, born in Guangzhou, China, moved to Dallas, Texas, with her family when she was four. A bookworm from early on, reading was “a way to learn English and learn to become American”. Her father would come home with books by George Orwell and Jane Austen, encouraging his children to become familiar with the English canon.
“I didn’t have that many friends, which didn’t bother me,” says Kuang. “I really liked staying at home and just reading all day. I was a natural writer as well. I was writing fanfiction of my favourite movies when I was a kid, and just never stopped.”
She’s been relentless and prolific her whole career long, but when asked how she has achieved so much at such a young age, she’s circumspect.
“I don’t think I’m all that productive. I take a lot of naps. I just really like to write, and I think I got very lucky early on in finding a publisher for my earlier work.
“I’m actually not happy with any of my earlier novels because I think there is a standard of literary craft that I haven’t reached yet, and I’m still trying to chase.”
Like them or not, her books have only grown in popularity, especially on BookTok, where even her back catalogue has taken on a new life.
“The weird thing about publishing a novel is that you publish a snapshot of yourself at a certain time in your life, and a certain level of maturity, and set of priorities,” says Kuang. “Then you grow as a person, but the novel remains frozen in time. It’s a representation of a person who doesn’t exist any more. So it’s very interesting to me when I meet people who have encountered me through the Poppy Trilogy because they’ve met a writer who I no longer am.”
Polite, friendly and articulate, it’s clear this interview is not Kuang’s first rodeo. She’s looking forward to two weeks off before going on a chock-a-block book tour – “when everything gets really crazy”. Literary superstardom, for all its perks, is a complicated reward.
“It’s obviously a blessing to be in a place where I get to go on tour and do all the press and promote the books, but there’s a part of me that really wishes I was alone in my office working on the next manuscript,” she says. “The amount of obligations does expand, and you don’t want to let people down. I have a really hard time saying no to my publishing team, because everybody’s asking these things of me only because they want the books to succeed. So I feel really bad complaining about it, but it is a type of work that I was not expecting that is really different from the work of just writing.”
I found Ulysses very difficult going, so I’m doing the more modest project of reading Dubliners instead
It doesn’t look like the work will abate any time soon, with a TV adaptation of Yellowface optioned by Lionsgate (apart from “it looks good”, Kuang is “not allowed to say” much in relation to how this is progressing), and two new novels acquired by her publisher, Harper Collins.
The first of these, Taipei Story, has already been turned in, and is pegged for release next September. It tells of a college freshman who does a language study abroad programme in Taipei the summer that her grandfather dies. Stylistically, its influences are Patricia Lockwood, Elif Batuman and Sally Rooney, the last of whom she has been re-reading for the brilliant depictions of interpersonal relationships.
“I think [Rooney] is just very good at getting to the core of the miscommunication and misperception that can happen in an encounter between two people.”
As someone who has experienced a similar trajectory to success, does she know Rooney?
“I don’t know her,” says Kuang. “I’ve not met her. But I have a very treasured signed copy of Intermezzo that my friend got for me when she was doing an event in London. So I know that she has written my name on a dedication.”
Kuang’s reading tastes and influences are broad – as research for Katabasis, she read everything from Plato and Aristotle, to Christian theology, to campus novels by Margaret Drabble and David Lodge. This summer, she made it a project to read Ulysses, but “found it very difficult going, so I’m doing the more modest project of reading Dubliners instead”.
She describes her writing process as “messy and chaotic”, beginning with some thematic questions, then developing characters and scenes, and finally structuring the work at the end. But her reasons for writing are straightforward and unwavering.
“Writing is like breathing,” she says. “It’s less, why do I write, and more: how painful would it be to stop writing? It’s this instinct, this compulsion, that I can’t stop, because it’s how I live and how I make sense of the world.”
Katabasis is published by HarperVoyager on August 26th
