Welcome to Literary Friction on NTS. I'm Carrie Plitt, here as always with my co-host Octavia Bright.

Hello, Octavia. Hi, Carrie. Lovely to see you standing across from me here today.

And you. As always. It's a joy. Yeah, it really is. I sound like I'm being sarcastic.

I mean, you sound that you're being incredibly sarcastic. I'm being intensely sincere. Anyway,

moving on. Today, we are discussing a theme that I have been wanting to do for a long time.

It's migration in literature.

In a world increasingly dominated by xenophobia and wall building, on this show we will instead look to the books that cross borders, from the novels of John Steinbeck to Zadie Smith.

I'm really glad that we've held out on this theme because we really do have

the perfect author guest here today for it. Her name is Valeria Louis Selly, and her latest novel,

Lost Children Archive, is about both a road trip one family takes across America and, you know,

peripherally also about child migration at the U. US-Mexico border. It's a really

beautiful novel full of voices and texts and ideas and we're really, really excited to talk to

her. So, Octavia, could you tell our listeners a little bit more about Valeria? I absolutely can. Valeria

Louis-Seli is a novelist and also a non-fiction writer. She was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. She's the author of the essay collection sidewalks, the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth and Tell Me How It Ends, an essay in 40 questions. She's the winner of two Los Angeles Times book prizes and an American book award.

It's twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize.

Much decorated is Valeria.

Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Granta and McSweeney's, among other publications.

It's been translated into more than 20 languages and she lives in New York City.

And we're so pleased that

she was able to come in and come onto the show because the book is just phenomenal. Yeah, it really is.

And it's just been long listed for the women's price. I should also mention. That's really exciting.

So anyway, today we will be talking to Valeria about Lost Children Archive, more generally about migration and literature, and finally, we will give our usual book recommendations.

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