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No doubt we all have a moment when we ask ourselves why we continue to make things. What's the point? Who cares? The world is shit. Still, we keep going, we keep making. I wanted to sit down and talk to a variety of artists to ask them how they go about their process in these contemporary/turbulent times. All art is political. But what can, or what should, art do?

First up in this new conversation series is the essayist and educator Silas Hansen.

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On today's show, some thoughts on Sam Munson's new novel The Sofa.

From the publisher: "Mr. Montessori and his family return home from a trip to the beach to discover that their sofa is different. Once dark and contemporary, it’s now antique, green and yellow, and smelling faintly of damp.

Its appearance and origins are a mystery. A joke? An inverted theft? A break in the fabric of reality? Yes, the police take the “crime” seriously. But what happens next lies outside their expertise. Strange sounds in the night. A half-bathroom toilet with a mind of its own. Odd, fleeting glimpses of something (or someone) in mirrors. The inexplicable vision of Montessori’s neighbor: He swears he saw a burglar. . . .

Montessori’s quest for answers will take him to a dank highway overpass in decayed upstate New York, a very strange dry-cleaning supply concern in outermost Queens, and into the depths of an eerie, warped forest where time and space no longer connect, all while putting his ever-more-troubled marriage and young family in grave danger. But that’s what it costs to find out if we own our possessions — or if they own us.

Munson emerges as a master stylist in this tense, taut work of surreal humor and psychological horror."

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(from New Directions):

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE

Deep in the wilds of the New World, Antonio de Erauso begins to write a letter to his aunt, the prioress of the Basque convent he escaped as a young girl. Since fleeing a dead-end life as a nun, he’s become Antonio and undertaken monumental adventures: he has been a cabin boy, mule driver, shopkeeper, soldier, and conquistador. Now, caring for two Guaraní girls he rescued from enslavement and hounded by the army he deserted, this protean protagonist contemplates one more metamorphosis.

Based on a real figure of the Spanish conquest, We Are Green and Trembling is a queer baroque satire, a surreal picaresque rich with wildly imaginative language and searing critique of subjugation, colonialism, and tyranny of all kinds. In this masterful subversion of Latin American history, Cabezón Cámara finds in the rainforest a magically alive space where transformation is not only possible but necessary. Lyrical and swashbuckling, tender and surreal, Cabezón Cámara's new novel sees glimmers of hope for the future amidst a brutal history of colonization.

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