9.4 “That In Between Time:” Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary (MAT)

Fernanda Trías’s Pink Slime (Mugre rosa) was first published in Spanish in October 2020, several months into a global pandemic that had bent our world into something uncannily similar to the one imagined in the Uruguayan writer’s fourth novel. Here, an environmental disaster that begins as red algae bloom in the oceans has produced a toxic wind that kills most living creatures. As the plague spreads, the protagonist chooses to remain in her coastal city, caring for a boy with a rare genetic disorder. Published in an English translation by Heather Cleary as the pandemic waned, Pink Slime continues to push against the limits of genre categories, balancing on that delicate edge between science fiction and literary realism.

In dialogue with Cleary—a prolific translator of contemporary Latin American fiction who is also a critic and scholar of translation—Trías unfolds the many different ideas explored in Pink Slime, including the ethical complexities of writing about illness and disability, the difficult intimacies of mothers and daughters (and other potentially toxic relationships), how it is that we experience time and memory, and what it means to live with the looming threat of ecological collapse. Pink Slime, like Trías’s other novels, is also interested in the narrative potential of confined spaces, which constrain the movement of plot and allow for new possibilities in building characters’ psychological depth. The conversation also gets into the question of time and narrative tense when it comes to narrating the experience of disaster—a question that was crucial for the novelist as much as the translator. Together, Trías and Cleary also get into the intricacies of translation, including word choice, sound, rhythm, breath, and how to make jokes work across languages.

Mentioned in this episode:

The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction
Prader-Wilis syndrome
Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
N. Pino Luna
The other pink slime
Trías, El monte de las furias
Plumsock Endowed Residency, Yaddo Artist’s Community (the residency that Trías briefly names toward the end of the conversation)

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Audio: “That In Between Time:” Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary (MAT)

Transcript: 9.4 “That In Between Time:” Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary (MAT)

10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH) – Novel Dialogue

Chicago is the main character, the setting, the obsession, and the historical grist for the mill of Peter Orner’s most recent novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter (Little Brown and Company, 2025). In conversation about his hometown with Novel Dialogue host Sarah Wasserman, Peter brings us into a lost pocket of time. It is the early 1960s, when Chicagoans partied in a kind of “Midwestern Weimar” and the gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet, holding forth as many as six times a week for 60 years, wrote a garrulous, glamorous story of the city. While the increasingly unhinged narrator of his novel investigates the mysterious death of Kupcinet’s daughter in 1963, Peter delves into his own family’s history, anxiously asking “we can’t hurt our dead, can we?” The novel swerves between fact and fiction, including photographs that are both real artifacts from the historical record and staged photos that participate in the fictional world of the novel. Peter laughs off this contradiction, remarking “the closer I get to real things, the more fictional it becomes.” How to describe such a complicated novel? Sarah offers this gem: “It’s as if Philip Roth were less cancellable and wrote a murder mystery,” a line that results in a poignant conversation about what it means to be Jewish and socially striving in Chicago in middle of the 20th century and what it means to be a cultural outsider, “just slightly outside of the circle.” Peter brings the conversation to a close with a memory of going to the University of Tish.Mentions: Reverend Hightower appears in William Faulkner’s Light in August Irv “Kup” and Essie Kupcinet were Karyn “Cookie” Kupcinet’s parents An Edna O’Brien story appears in Andre Dubus’s Dancing After Hours Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano Phyllis Diller at the Palmer House Bette Howland’s line about Chicago being “the raw materials for a city” appears in Blue in Chicago Alberto Paniagua Philip Roth Tish O’Dowd Ezekiel’s Floaters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Tatone, Alicia. Cover design. Pink Slime, Fernanda Trías, Scribner, 2024. Front cover.

10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH) – Novel Dialogue

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