*I love all the different spellings of the Author’s name! I’m getting a lot of “Irina” and “Ray,” but the idea that she might be Issa Rae’s long-lost step-cousin is just my favorite.

“I’ve been to Białowieża a few times, the first time with my father in 2004, the most recent in 2021 as I was working on The Extinction, and I have always been deeply fascinated by the forest, which is just so unfathomably rich, so dense and so varied, unlike anywhere I’d ever been before. But where I had been before was a patch of land that included meadows, a lake, and a forest near where I grew up in Oklahoma—I spent part of every summer there, and in my childhood, that space, too, was suffused with magic.

One of the traditional stories of the summer camp was Jane Shaw Ward’s Tajar Tales, about a character who was “something like a tiger, and something like a jaguar, and something like a badger,” and who was always getting into trouble. Children had to be careful not to seek him out—although we were allowed to write him letters, which we deposited into the hollow of a particular tree—because “if you see him once, you would forget what he looked like, but if you should see him twice, you would forget to forget what he looked like, and that would be quite fatal.” I was always amused by that way of putting it, “forget to forget,” and I loved Tajar’s friends, like Madam Witch, who lived in a magic tree, and the Range Ranger, who “ranges the ranges in that region.” I think that is why I decided to include the ancient Slavic mythological figure Leshy, an embodiment of the forest and a trickster himself.

But also, this is a book about books, and especially about transforming books, which does feel like magic to me, even when I’m doing it. I think there’s something in the ceaseless transformations of the forest that coincides perfectly with the action of translation and that makes for a mood of magic and oddities, and maybe horrors, as you so beautifully put it in your question.”

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