The Otherworldly Ambitions of R. F. Kuang | The New Yorker
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The author of “Babel” and “Yellowface” is drawn to stories of striving. Her new fantasy novel, “Katabasis,” asks if graduate school is a kind of hell.
Rebecca F. Kuang finished her second year of college with little sense of what she wanted to do with her life. In the fall of 2015, she took a leave from Georgetown, where she was studying international economics, and got a job in Beijing as a debate instructor. In her spare time, she took coding classes online. “I really like mastering the rules of something and then seeing if I can crack it and get really good at it,” she told me. One day, while on a coding website, she came across an ad for Scrivener, a popular word-processing application. Though she had dabbled in fan fiction, she had…
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