Téa Obreht, Sunrise

Brett sits down with Téa Obreht to discuss her latest novel, Sunrise. They talk early years and learning English, the mythology of heroes, good samaritans, some advice for writers, and a fantastic book rec. 

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Transcript

Brett Benner 0:01

Hey everybody, and welcome back to another episode of Behind the Stack. This was such an interesting conversation today, and one I was so excited to have. It's with Tea Obreht, whose new book, Sunrise, is so good. But as I say to her in the interview, I just couldn't wait to talk to her. But I'm desperate to talk to other people about it because it's just that kind of book. So it's gonna be the perfect kind of book for a book club because of that, 'cause there's a lot to unpack here. A little bit about Tea. Tea was born in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia and grew up in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States. Her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and it was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and an international bestseller. Her second novel, Inland, was an instant New York Times bestseller. It won the Ballard Prize and the BRLA Southwest Book Award and was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize. In 2024, her third novel, The Morningside, was a finalist for the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading and has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Vogue, Esquire, among others. She was the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and was named by The New Yorker as one of the 20 best American fiction writers under 40. From 2020 to 2022, she served as the endowed chair of creative writing at Texas State University and San Marcos. She currently lives in Wyoming with her family. So I hope you enjoy this episode of Behind the Stack. Welcome back everybody. I am so excited to sit down today with Tea Obreht for her new novel, Sunrise Which is so good. And here's the thing, Teja, I have to tell you, my only beef with your book, my only beef, is that I finished it and I have no one to talk to about it yet- Ugh because no one's read it. And the only-

Téa Obreht 2:16

I'm here.

Brett Benner 2:16

I know. And the only other two people are Greg Marshall and Lucas Schaefer, who, um, like, first of all, adore you, but they're reading it. And I was messaging with Lucas last night and I was like, "Are you done yet? Are you finished?" And he's like, "No, no." And I'm like, "Could you guys please get done?" 'Cause I literally wanted to get on a call with him last night and be like, "We have to break this down." So, congratulations on creating one of the most, uh, frustrating books I've read this year because- Yeah it deserves and needs to be discussed.

Téa Obreht 2:47

Thank you so much. I, I, I, I can't think of a higher compliment. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. The, uh, um, truly the, the, the, the urge to go and talk about a book immediately with someone is, um, a, a, a thing that I aspire to, to provoking as a, as a writer, and that this makes me intensely happy.

Brett Benner 3:05

So really quickly before we dive into the book, just some background about you for our listeners and our viewers. So you were born in the former Yugoslavia, and then you landed up in the British school system, uh, in Cyprus, right, when, when the war started. Correct? That's right. That's right. Yeah. That's how you learned English.

Téa Obreht 3:22

That's right. That's where I learned English. I, I had sort of a very informal learning process, in English as a, as a young child, because my grandfather would bring bootleg Disney, VHS tapes from Italy when he, when he traveled for work. Uh, and so I had a lot of old Disney classics memorized without really knowing what they meant. So, you know, sometimes, sometimes my responses when I started learning English formally, my responses were sort of, uh, were, were, were odd, I think, because I would, I would just sometimes like say like a Disney line. But yeah.

Brett Benner 3:54

Wow. That's amazing. Also, I, I read or saw, I think maybe in an interview that you said r- writing really too was a way for you to find your way into the language.

Téa Obreht 4:02

Yeah, absolutely. When we moved, you know, I was an only kid. I, uh, didn't have any friends yet. And, and we were sort of in... There were a lot of expats in, in the, the neighborhood in which we lived. And so English was sort of a, we, we were all trying to grapple with our own languages at home, and then, and then with English as well. And my mom brought a, a, a laptop, like the newest laptop, and th- this was, you know, '92, so it was like, just like a giant- Right giant brick. Um, and I wanted to play with it. I was fascinated by it, but the only way that I was allowed to do this was if I was doing something productive. And so I would write these little short stories, these vignettes. And one day I, I wrote a short vignette about a goat who has a bad day. I liked the, the shape of the letters. I think that the, the sh- the shape of words was always something that fascinated me, and I, and I notice it even now- Hmm that like sometimes I will choose a word based on how it- looks versus how it sounds. Um, and then go back and correct it obviously if it's the wrong one. But, uh, yeah, that was how I, I wrote, I wrote my Goat Has a Bad Day short story. Went to my mom and said, "This is what I wanna do. I wanna write."

Brett Benner 5:08

That's just incredible that you knew that. All right. So for our listeners and our viewers, do you have, like, an elevator pitch for Sunrise?

Téa Obreht 5:15

I, I do. I think... Well, I think I do. I, I feel like I'm still, I'm still learning it. So this is a book that starts with a plane crash. Nina is a 24-year-old nanny for a rich New York couple. She's also an art grad student, and she is the least likely person to survive the ordeal that happens to her. Her- the plane that she's riding in, which is piloted by her boyfriend, Ben, falls out of the sky and into a Wyoming lake and, um, that's how the book begins. And she, finds herself alone lakeside, in a place she doesn't recognize and know how to survive with, like, a couple of protein bars, um, with a phone that doesn't work, and with no idea what to do. And as she's grappling for how to survive this ordeal and for how... And, and, and sort of what her odds are anyway, she stumbles into what she quickly realizes is an abandoned Old West mining town. This is one of the storylines. In crashing into the lake, she has also crashed into the other two storylines, one involving the erstwhile gunslinger, Anton Vargas, uh, who was a sort of a hero of the Old West, a dime novel figure. And in the 1902 storyline, he is returning to the town of Sunrise, which he helped found and which he helped put on the map. He's middle-aged. His body's really shaken up from all the ordeals that he's been through in his life, and he's also incredibly ill. And he's arrived back to town sort of on a, on a mission to find a man with whom he, uh, hopes to reconcile, named Preacher. And he gets rolled up in the mystery of a boy who has disappeared. And then the third strand, unbeknownst to Nina, is the story of a young man named Cole. He is a historical re-enactor from the town of Salt Draw, which is near the town of Sunrise. He has been running the historical ac- re-enactment forever. His father is sick, which is why he's come back from college. Uh, and he's sort of... He's trying to navigate this sort of, these feelings of being back home in a place that he doesn't love for an indefinite period of time. And into his life at a particularly challenging moment as he's embroiled in a, in a scandal with an animal in a bar, comes a writer, a young woman from the city who, uh, brings news of a revision in the story that he's known all his life. And these three storylines converge at the end rather, I hope, explosively.

Brett Benner 7:28

First of all, it was a little reminiscent to me of almost, like, David Mitchell in the way, in terms of taking these, uh, disparate pieces and then threading them all together, what I love so much. And then I also just, I marveled at the way that you just created these such distinct stories in and of themselves, and that the way that these things begin to drop as it came to the end, and then those final kind of like- 10 pages. Incredible. Um Thank you. So my first question is, where was the genesis? Where did this start? Who did you start with? Because I'm so conscious of not wanting to drop any spoilers at all. So it, to me, so much of this is about the construction of the book.

Téa Obreht 8:08

Sure. And I think the construction of the book is, is the thing that, that I feel most attached to as well in a, in a kind-- Now that it, you know, I feel like when a, when a book is complete and then readers arrive at it, the author experiences it in a completely different way. And its construction is something that I'm still sort of trying to, to puzzle out after the fact, and so I'm delighted to talk about it. The first person I started with was Anton Vargas. This started as a, um... Well, how to, how to do this in a spoiler-free way? Um, I, I was interested in the idea of someone coming home in a physical condition that was less than ideal and feeling that a clock was running out, and, um, what it would, what it would be like for sort of a, a gunslinger who had built his reputation on these dime novel stories and who had really leaned into his own mythos to be unpacking it at the end of his life. Um, and to, to need to find the people who had been there at the beginning in order to tell him or to help him figure out who he actually is. So that started, and I wrote, I wrote versions of that strand. I was writing them as early as 2014. Wow. And yeah, it's, it's been a long time. And there's a, a real kind of nostalgia, I think, in, in talking about Vargas when I, when I think about him now because he, he's gone through so, so many, uh, permutations of character, of sin, of relationship, and it's, it was really wonderful to arrive at this final one and be like, "Right. This is him, and this is the real story, and this is the correct way to convey it." Because the challenge from the beginning was, how can you clue the reader into what a person's reputation might have been culturally 100 years ago? They, they've got to be the reader of that story too. You know? They have to experience- Hmm some, some measure of that cultural significance in the pages. And so it was always going to have to be a story in which the act of reading was involved for some other character through which the, the reader in this world could experience that.

Brett Benner 10:20

Sure. It's also, 'cause again, the unpacking of all of this, it's such an interesting kind of, I don't know if meditation is the right word, but the idea of myth and the idea of kind of the level of what we believe about someone and what we've been told to believe about someone versus the reality. I was thinking about us as children with our parents who we believe as children they're completely infallible, right? Yeah. This belief. And then I had an English teacher once say that the biggest disappointment for a child is when they realize their father is actually a real person, and their second is when they realize their mother is the same. And that always stuck with me, and especially as becoming a parent, I'm always like, "Well, sure." I mean, Yeah. But there is that, but even this myth that we put around, like, the, the culture of celebrity and who these people are or politicians of what we believe people are versus who they actually are, so much of that came up with me with this character.

Téa Obreht 11:19

I'm, I'm so delighted to hear it. Thank you so much, and I'm, I'm really, I'm, I'm, I'm glad that there are sort of- I'm glad that I was hopefully able to write Vargas in a way where, where that feeling of like disappointment with celebrity, questioning of celebrity, um, you know, the idea of somebody being kind of vainglorious, buying into their own myth a little bit, you know? Um- Yeah. Yes or not even a little bit, but like a lot. Yeah. That, that those things, they're, they're still so applicable now. And, and, you know, on an even grander scale, I suppose, and, and it's a fascinating morass of, of sort of like reflections of the self and like, you know, how you're reflected back by other people's view of you and, you know. I think Vargas has come to sort of receive a little bit of chastisement. Mm-hmm. And I think he knows it, even when he arrives.

Brett Benner 12:09

But it's also interesting, too, even creating a character, Vargas, you didn't create him like... It's not John Wayne. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. It's not... It's, the fact that he's not white, and I don't know, I'm so interested to ask you about your own fascination or interest with the kind of American West or Westerns and that kind of culture. But to know, and I didn't know this, the, the extent of how many g- what we termed as cowboys were not white. Mm-hmm. I mean, we've been led this like Taylor Sheridan view of, you know, everyone's blonde and pretty and rugged and, and that wasn't just what it was. And for me to even see that when I was looking up stuff about this book and I thought, "Well, all righty." And so I just love that, uh, you were very consciously making that choice, but it's just very interesting.

Téa Obreht 12:50

Um, thank you so much. Yeah, no, I, I, I, I live in, you know, I live in Wyoming. I'm very fascinated by the, by the history of Wyoming in particular and, and, and, and the, the, the West in general. As you say, I, I, I grew up on Westerns. My, my grandfather loved them, and sort of, I think took that, took his obsession with me when I first arrived here just as a visitor, um, and was deeply fascinated by the layers of complexity and the pervasiveness of the myth-making that had taken root here and the way it had taken root here. And I mean, like, you know, the West is in, in many ways the, was at that time and still is today, um, when you look at shows like Yellowstone, like a pro-propaganda machine for the country, right? It's like, "Come, come to the West." Yes. "Be white." You know? Like, "Take what you like and be a man." Like, its messaging is, uh, overwhelmingly one-sided. Um- Yeah and, and, and in reality, you know, uh, when you, when you start from the point of, of conquest, genocide, broken treaties, and then go from there, all of it's built on this illusion, right? And, you know, in Wyoming, as you say, like, one in every three cowboys was Black because this was, this was a territory for a long time. The laws were different here, and people could own property and, uh, exist in society at least on a, on the, on the, on the level of law differently than they could in the actual United States. And, and so yeah, it's a fascinating place for what it was and now also what it has become.

Brett Benner 14:18

Yeah, totally. Moving on to Nina. I think this could be anybody's nightmare, right? Anybody's nightmare to be, like, literally fall out of a plane, survive it, and then it is like the worst reality show ever, right? And so knowing that you started with Vargas, how did you pull her into this and this story?

Téa Obreht 14:36

Well, she was part of a different project for a long time. Mm-hmm. I, I wanted to write a, a, a story about a shipwreck- Mm on like a tropical island and, and I tried it for a really long time. I was like, "I, I really want this, I really want this young woman to, like, be stranded," and, and unlike a sort of, you know, a, a Robinson Crusoe story where, you know, she, like, learns how to live off the land and like she's actually quite astute already. I, I wanted to, I want her to be like a complete fish out of water. I want her to not know anything about, like, making fires or like what she's supposed to do. I want it to be a nightmare. Because when I, when I think about that experience, it would really be nightmarish for me. Like, I would run out of contacts on the first day, and then I'd just be like, "Well- Whatever's coming can take me. Like, I'll just see. I would do the same way. Just lay down. Yeah, exactly. I'll just, I'll just wait. Right. Um, and, and so, um, I, I really wanted her to have that, like, visceral experience of, like, utter helplessness and to grapple with that. This is, I think in many ways one of the connecting strands between, between all three, uh, stories is that none of these characters are what they hope they are, and including Nina, you know, who hopes that she can do this and, uh, you know, many things that happen to her positively are an issue of luck. But she was, she was supposed to, to crash land on a, on a tropical island a- and for years I, I tried to make that work and then one day I was like, what if, like, what if the environment is wrong? Like, why are you trying to force this tropical island story when you don't really know anything about the landscape? Like, what if she just like crashed in the mountains? And, and the, the moment I had the thought, I realized that I had that strand that was going to pull Vargas out of the past and into a larger storyline. Mm. A storyline with readers and with resonance in modernity that, like, these things that had happened to him and had been metabolized by others for so long were going to come in and affect a life that knew nothing about him, and that he, of course himself, uh, would, would never be aware of, but that these two lives unconnected across time were actually going to affect each other very profoundly because of this moment.

Brett Benner 16:51

Yeah. And what I love, you had said, this is a bit of advice that you gave to some of your writing students and, and it pertains very much to Nina, and I think it came out of your own experience possibly with your surgery that you had when you had knee replacement, and I could speak to that whole thing 'cause I had a hip replacement. Oh, fun. It sounds exactly the same. So I totally know what that is like. But you said to your characters, "Give them discomfort and see what happens," and I loved that.

Téa Obreht 17:16

Yeah. Um- It's, it, it's, it's a fun thing to... It's fun for you, you know, as the writer. Yes. Right. and not fun for them.

Brett Benner 17:22

Yeah, play God. But I also loved about this, and with all these characters, the revelations that come out throughout the course of their own individual journeys, and what you learn about them, not only as they go through the particular circumstances in the moment and the revelations of kind of like learning either about themselves or how that affects them. But also, and I know in particular, without giving any spoilers, there's a very kind of crucial thing with Nina that comes out towards the end that is so great. Like, that just, popped for me, that I was like, "Oh my God." And I read it, and then I went back and was like, "Did I read that correctly?" 'Cause I wanna know that's what actually happened. And, and so I just found that they're almost like Easter eggs that you put in that just kind of reveal themselves, and I think it's so clever.

Téa Obreht 18:05

Thank you.

Brett Benner 18:05

All right, so then let's go on to our historian for a moment. He the last to get incorporated into all of this?

Téa Obreht 18:11

He was. I, I had, I had been thinking about him sort of in the periphery as like, as, as, as someone in a short story that I, that I wanted to write. I wanted to write a, a short story about the incident in the bar. And then I, I think these connections always come from me from the search for who the character really is and what their background is and sort of what they're thinking about, what their discomforts are, what their delusions are. And so as soon as I had that m- moment with Nina and Vargas, I realized that Cal was the third strand, and that, um, he was the sort of connective piece of the puzzle that would bring them towards each other. Yeah, I wanted to write about someone who thinks he's better than everyone, thinks he's immune, I think, in many ways, to the draw of Western masculinity in particular. You know, someone who is a child of his town but feels like he was born for better things, and, like, he isn't about all that and, you know. And at the same time, is really captivated by the myths of the place where he was born and feels that he is the correct steward for them.

Brett Benner 19:14

I love this idea of somebody who, the kind of sanctimonious, that he's better than. I, I love this. I, I would think of as his kind of Achilles heel or the realization of himself that kind of takes place through this is so shattering. T- you know, to me, as I was reading it, maybe because I thought for one moment I'm like, "Oh my God, am I like this?" Like, it's the kind of person-- My business partner's ex-husband would be the kind of guy Who would stop by the side of the road for anyone. You know what it is? And this is what I mean, it's the kind of person, if you see something happening in a crosswalk, would you stop your car and get out and, and, and stop it? Or would you drive by and think later, "Wow, I really should have done something." You know? And it's such a, it's such a small thing, but it's the kind of thing that would prey on my mind constantly after, like, "Should I have pulled over? Should I have done something more? Should I have stopped to make sure that dog had a collar on it?" Or, you know, it's just little things, but how it translates to bigger things.

Téa Obreht 20:12

That's such a, that's such a good, good, um, sort of, uh, uh, l- litmus test for his personality. And I totally go through those moments too, and I think there's a, um, I've been thinking a lot about that vulnerability. I feel like we're in a, we're in a time when, people doing extraordinary things because it's very clearly ingrained in their personality is very visible to us, right? Like, people, leaping to the defense of their neighbors, um, and, you know, getting shot for it. Yeah. By ice, for instance. People, people generally doing the right thing, protesting injustice, uh, protesting atrocity, putting their bodies into the path of, tremendous violence. And I think I read somewhere or someone told me, it was part of a conversation years ago, that like, you know, 20% of people are people who would do nothing. 20% of people are people who would risk their lives for anybody, and the middle pack is, like, where you are. And on a, on a good day, maybe you're more toward the faction that would help, and on a bad day, you're more toward the faction that would do nothing. And I think Cole really thinks That he's in the, in the top 20%, that he would just like, that he too is like gunslinger material, you know? Um- Yeah and I, I think that, yeah, I think it's shattering for him to discover that actually, not only is he not, but he's the kind of person who excuses inaction. Right. And in no point in history would rank in that 20% at the top. But it's such an interesting thing. I think about it, like, in terms of the politics currently, like you said, the ICE thing, but, Even the people who say they're frightened to even make that call to a senator or to do some step that would put them out there or make them feel vulnerable, it's a big thing and not to be underestimated. And so perhaps that's why with this character so much, I found myself being like, "Oh my God, what would I do?" Like the bar, which we won't go into details, but that particular circumstance, would I do the same thing he... I would like to think I would do something different, but I don't know what I would do in that particular circumstance. Totally. And I don't either, by the way. I think often in, in moments like that Most people would do whatever it takes to just get through the moment, whatever that looks like, right? Right. Um, and that's shattering too, just this idea of like, well, you think you'd, you know, you think you'd really rise to the occasion. In reality, you would just mark the seconds and be like, "Let's, let's get through to the other side of this and then-" Let's get through it.

Brett Benner 22:44

Even down to something as simple as you're backing out of the parking lot and you hit a car, and it's not big, but you've scratched it. Do you leave a note on the car and say, "I'm so sorry. This is my phone number. Call me"? Or do you look around and see if anybody's there and pull away, and then just be like, "It's not a big deal. Nobody saw it. It's, it's fine. They'll be fine." Right. Right.

Téa Obreht 23:03

Nobody saw it, and like, yeah. Yeah. Now, being, now being Balkan, there's a whole other system of moralities that close in around me because I feel very, very strong. My superstitions are very, very strong, and so I feel like I'm always being watched, even when there's no one there.

Brett Benner 23:21

Yeah, and see, I was raised in a very conservative Christian home, so for me it was always Jesus. You know what I mean? Always watching me. Always. And so that's what it was for me my whole life. And I'm sitting here just bringing up all these examples and suddenly I'm like, "Has this become a confessional?" People are like, "God, he's an awful person. He even hits cars and pulls away." Yeah, I mean- Just slamming into cars like... Right. Oh my God. I should just shut up. I'm so interested in terms of your writing, 'cause you talked about you, you started working on this. How many projects do you, do you as a writer have going at one time?

Téa Obreht 23:53

I have, like, 10 in my head. Like, like in, in my head there's, there's, there's always a bunch, and then something, usually a deadline, forces one to sort of pull ahead of the others. I've, I've often wondered what it would be like, like if I had no deadlines, if I didn't owe my, my, my publisher a book, or if I didn't owe someone a short story that I said that I'd write, you know? I'd be like, "Oh yeah, I'd love to contribute to that anthology," or whatever. And then I've often wondered whether I'd still be on book one, you know? Um, because, because it, it, it so much comes in, um, and it takes a lot for something to, to pull ahead, and that thing is usually the mitigating factor is obsession, right? Like, you become so obsessed with something that your interior life and your interior function can no longer contain it, and, and it has to be on the page where it can start to live some other life away from you. And, and then my job becomes to figure out why that was the chosen one, why that, that ended up emerging, and then also what connects it, you know, to other things that I'm thinking about. 'Cause there's usually a few that belong together. Um, it's just a matter of trying to figure out which ones they are.

Brett Benner 25:03

Yeah. No, and that's so interesting if, if, uh, how much of it happens on a conscious level and how much just unconsciously you start to think, "Oh, these, these things could kind of thread themselves together." That's fascinating. Totally I know you, you, you teach a lot. If you had one bit of advice you'd give to a new writer, what would you say?

Téa Obreht 25:25

Hold on to all of it, like discard nothing. Even if you don't put something down on paper, the spark of an idea, some scene that you witnessed between two people on a train, you know, and, and became fascinated by and, and thought, "Oh, how would I write that?" Or like, "What happens next when this other person gets off the train? Like, where are they going? You know, how are they gonna carry this conversation with them?" I'm revealing what I'm thinking about right now. The- She's writing about a train, everyone I'm writing a book about a train. It's actually a, it was an encounter that, that I witnessed last year between a mother and daughter-in-law that was the most uncomfortable thing I've ever seen in my life, and like I can't stop thinking about it. It's been a year now- Mm and I'm still thinking about it. Um, but, but, but those kinds of things, they, they, they seem, they can start to seem fleeting, right? And after a time, if you haven't written anything about it, um, if you haven't developed it in some way beyond, you know, the, the room that it occupies in your brain, it can feel like, okay, well, that idea's over, but it's really not. Like it's sitting there and like just- Mm building the layers of, of, um, you know, ground you're standing on, and, and something might come out of it down the line or you might finally draw it, you know, from the, from the jumble bag in your head or, or whatever. Like it- all of, any of it could come back at any time. And, and after writing this book, I really, really believe it. Like I thought that I had finished, that I, that I was never going to finish the Vargas story. I, I thought that it would never see the light of day in any form because I just couldn't figure out how to integrate it into the world. And then years later, it just happened like a thunderclap. And so I'm a believer now in, in that, in that, you know, in that system. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brett Benner 27:08

Before we go, is there anything you've read that you've loved lately that you wanna recommend?

Téa Obreht 27:12

Oh, well Lucas Schaefer's The Slip. I, I, I, I just think it's, I think it's one of the best books probably of the last, like 15 years. It's just a mag- it's, it's such a book book, you know? It does all the things that a book is meant to do. Um, it, it, it, it operates on so many levels, like, and the s- the way he spins a narrative, you could only do it in novel form. Like it's, it's a perfect marriage of, of, of subject and medium, you know? Like you couldn't, you couldn't do it in any other form. And, and I don't know, I just found it very extraordinary.

Brett Benner 27:50

No, I loved it so much too, and it's so, I remember, uh, it, it surprised me so much because I had no idea what I was getting into 'cause at first thought I was like, and, and I had known Greg beforehand, but I was like, "Am I really gonna read a book about a boxer?" And- Right but it, it's funny 'cause there's almost parallels with this to me in the same way that you're creating these narratives that all kind of are going to converge together. You just don't know. You can't see the forest for the trees yet. That's kind of what it is. But, um- Yeah, I agree with you. It's a, it's a, it's an exceptional, exceptional novel, and it's so startling to me that it's a debut, 'cause it's just like, are you kidding me? It's so self-assured. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Well, uh, this has been fantastic and, uh, I've loved picking your brain. I can't wait for people to discover Sunrise and the town and these people. It's really beautiful. It's really exciting, and I just need more people to read it so we can all have a conversation about it. So Thank you so much. Anyway, congratulations. Congratulations. Thank you. It's, it's really wonderful.

Téa Obreht 28:54

Thank you so much.

Brett Benner 28:57

If you like this episode or other episodes of Behind The Stack, please consider liking and subscribing so that you never miss an episode. Also, what would be really helpful to me is if you can give the show five stars on your podcast platform of choice, and if you have the time, leave a review. All of this is incredibly helpful for the podcast to get in front of more listeners to help me to continue to bring conversations like this one to you. I'll be back next week with another episode, and until then, you can always find me at YouTube, Instagram, and on Substack at Brett's Book Stack. And as always, thanks for listening