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| photo: Wynne Photography | |
Mia Tsai is a Taiwanese American author of speculative fiction. She has a hard time picking favorites, which is displayed in the sections below. When she's not writing, she's editing, teaching, photographing, taking care of her orchids and trying to convince her dog to play fetch. Her debut novel, Bitter Medicine (Tachyon, March 14, 2023), is a contemporary fantasy about how a Chinese immortal and a French elf navigate love, family loyalty and workplace demands.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
You want:
- Magical calligraphy
- He's a 10 (but has anxiety)
- Action
- Romance
- Xianxia
Bitter Medicine has:
- All that.
On your nightstand now:
Drizzle, Dreams, and Lovestruck Things by Maya Prasad; The River of Silver by S.A. Chakraborty; Partners in Crime by Alisha Rai; The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I had so many. I was a bookworm who read anything I could get my hands on.
Elementary school me:
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell; King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry; Pioneer Germ Fighters by Navin Sullivan. (I found this book at a book sale for 45 cents, and it was old even then. I still have it. It smells like old paper and it's wonderful.)
Upper elementary school me:
The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander; The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien; The Hot Zone by Richard Preston.
Middle school me:
Anna to the Infinite Power by Mildred Ames; E. coli 0157 by Mary Heersink; The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley; Mythology by Edith Hamilton.
High school me:
Sabriel by Garth Nix; The World According to Garp by John Irving; The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan; the Exiles series by Melanie Rawn; Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey.
Your top five authors:
John Irving, Garth Nix, Siddhartha Mukherjee.
I feel it's very unfair to pick only five, because if I include certain authors, then I must include others (like my favorite romance authors, or my favorite speculative fiction authors, or my favorite... you get the idea). So I will just stop here!
Book you've faked reading:
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Folklorn by Angela Mi Young Hur.
Book you've bought for the cover:
David Mogo Godhunter by Suyi Davies Okungbowa (a gorgeous, gorgeous cover and also a fabulous novel!).
Book you hid from your parents:
The Nancy Drew series, because it wasn't "serious literature" or considered part of the "classics."
Book that changed your life:
Too many to list. The World According to Garp. Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Beloved. David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day. The Lord of the Rings. N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, which rekindled my love of fantasy and has one of the best turns in all of speculative fiction. The Childcraft encyclopedia series, every volume of which I read cover to cover. DK's Eyewitness series about space, which led to Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe.
Favorite line from a book:
I can't think of anything right now, but my hunch is that it was probably written by Kazuo Ishiguro or Toni Morrison.
Five books you'll never part with:
My signed copy of Sabriel; The Chicago Manual of Style; Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones; The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen; Homer's The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.