Best-selling novelist R.F. Kuang has released her long-awaited fantasy novel Katabasis, a book that chronicles the afterlife.
Kuang, known for her racial satire book Yellowface, has drawn real-life inspiration from her current studies as a graduate student at Yale. In Katabasis, two graduate students explore the underworld in a quest to save their professor, who has recently passed.
Kuang is not new to the genre of fantasy. Her historical fiction fantasy novel Babel, released in 2022, debuted at the top spot on The New York Times Best Seller List. Her award winning science fiction series The Poppy War also made the rounds on BookTok, a community on TikTok that has emerged with some of the platform’s most popular content.
The acclaimed 29-year-old author explained in an interview with ELLE Magazine that the world of Katabasis is more intricate and complex than her prior books.
“Maybe strange is not so apt as indulgent. With previous fantasy works, I tried to create a secondary world with clear historical references and rules,” she continued. “But Katabasis is really a world of ideas, and I liked the freedom to chase a logical paradox or a philosophical puzzle.”
Kuang shared that Babel and Katabasis share an important theme: their critical commentary on academia.
“I like to think of Babel and Katabasis as two parts of a dark academia duology. There’s no continuity in terms of characters or plot or anything, but they’re both examinations of the university and its problems—and the really weird type of person who decides to stay in academia anyway. Babel is a social-historical examination of the role of the academy in colonial violence. So it takes a broader bird’s-eye approach to structural injustice, whereas Katabasis is a much more interpersonal, psychological approach.”
Kuang is outspoken about social justice and cultural appropriation. She commented that although she talks about these issues in her work, she desires to be known for more than her identity.
“I don’t think the most interesting thing about me is the fact that I’m Chinese American,” she said in her interview with ELLE. “I think I’m interesting because of how that intersects with all the other experiences I’ve had. But I think I just really resist, now, being boxed into those reductive, easy categories that don’t say anything about the author being described.”
According to Variety, the novel is already slated to be turned into a series with Amazon MGM Studios. The potential series would be the second of Kuang’s books to be adapted, as her novel Yellowface was also set for a Lionsgate TV limited series starring Constance Wu.
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