![]() ![]() To Paradise is another meaty, emotionally-charged tale - albeit entirely different in plot from its predecessor. "I started thinking about the idea of paradise: America as a paradise, and whether we've been interpreting and billing America correctly all this time." "It was shortly after the Trump inauguration, and during the announcement of the Muslim ban," she says. Yanagihara wasn't sure she would write another novel, but then an idea came to her that felt urgent, and like a story only she could tell. But the book was an unlikely success story: After an initial slow burn, it sold more than 2.5 million copies, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and Booker Prize. What was once a social novel crumbles into a grief gospel, with Jude's trauma leaking through every paragraph. As they build careers and go to dinner and meet lovers, the author reveals the devastating backstory for the main character Jude. It follows four best friends who move to New York after college (two of them to an illegal sublet in a dilapidated Lispenard Street building). It's 720 pages long, and at least 700 of those pages (un-scientifically speaking) are devastatingly sad. ![]() She has a big day job - editor in chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine - and A Little Life, which followed her modest-selling debut, The People in the Trees (2013), by all accounts should not have been very popular. Yanagihara never sought out literary stardom. I also relay that yesterday, after finishing A Little Life for the second time and while under the impairment of a sob-induced haze, I took a wrong turn out of the subway and accidentally alighted on Lispenard Street itself. It's one of the first things this reporter tells her when arriving at her apartment - architecturally stunning, meticulously decorated, stuffed with books, of course - which sits in another of her book's symbolic locations in downtown Manhattan. ![]() The entire story is so deeply rooted in place, and those places are the sites of such soul-crushing tragedies, that it's impossible to divorce Yanagihara, 47, from her infamous streets. They come to see where protagonist Jude spends the formative, troubled years of his early adulthood. Though it's just two blocks long, the abbreviated thoroughfare along the border of New York City's Tribeca, SoHo, and Chinatown neighborhoods is the site of pilgrimage for dedicated readers of 2015's A Little Life, the author's sleeper-hit second novel. Lispenard Street is precious to Hanya Yanagihara fans. ![]()
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