#46: Jess Row on "Your Face in Mine" and race in contemporary American fiction

This week, we hear from Jess Row, a Pushcart Prize and PEN/O’Henry award winning author who Granta named a "Best Young American Novelist" in 2007. Row's novel "Your Face in Mine" imagines a world in which racial reassignment surgery is a possibility, even a commonplace. In The New York Times, Dwight Garner writes that "Your Face in Mine" "puts [Row] on another level as an artist. He doesn’t shy away from the hard intellectual and moral questions his story raises, or from grainy philosophical dialogue, but he submerges these things in a narrative that burns with a steady flame. There’s some Jonathan Lethem in Mr. Row’s street-level awareness of culture. There’s some Saul Bellow in his needling intelligence."