EP 17 Askold Melnyczuk

Stories and Humanitarian Action

In this Episode, I speak to Askold Melnyczuk, an American writer whose publications include novels, essays, poems, memoir, and translations. Among his works are the novels, What Is Told, and Ambassador of the Dead, House of Widows and Excerpt from Smedley’s Secret Guide to World Literature.

In his essay, Why My Favorite Characters to Write Are Often Unsympathetic and Unforgivable, he says, “I’ve felt my understanding enlarged by fiction whose charge isn’t to soothe readers by providing exemplary characters as “models for emulation” but rather to quicken them to a heightened awareness of the imagination’s, and by extension life’s, vast range, and so bring us closer to reality. Fiction should use its singular devices to disillusion us, lest we be deceived by placebos and lies. The best fiction tells lies that lie deeper than truth. Indeed, disillusionment is one hugely positive side effect that arises from reading the very best fiction.”