Welcome to Literary Friction. I'm Carrie Plitt. My beloved co-host, Octavia Bright, sadly can't make it today, so I'm flying solo for our first show of 2021.

This month, I'm very excited to bring you my conversation with Raven Leilani, the author of the

acclaimed and best-selling debut novel, Luster. Luster is the story of Eadie, a young black woman in an

entry-level job in publishing, struggling to pay her bills and to find

time to devote to her passion, painting. When she meets Eric, a white middle-aged man in a sort of

open marriage, she becomes entangled in his home and his family in ways none of them had imagined.

Ravenly Lonnie's work has been published in Granta, McSweeney's, and the Cut, among other

publications.

She received her MFA from NYU and was the Axton Foundation writer in residence there.

Today, you'll hear my extended interview with Raven, and she also stuck around to give some

book recommendations. I really hope you enjoy it. Stay with us on literary friction.

Raven Laylani, thank you so much for coming on literary friction.

Thank you for having me.

So we've asked you to start with a reading. Do you mind setting it up?

Yes. So I was going to just read right from the beginning, because it doesn't require any

preface at all.

So here we go.

The first time we have sex, we are both fully clothed at our desk during working hours, bathed and blue computer light.

He is uptown pressed in a new bundle of my co-fage, and I'm downtown handling corrections from the labrador detected manuscript.

He tells me what he ate for lunch and asked if I command to take off my underwear in my cubicle without anyone noticing. His messages come with impeccable punctuation.

He is fond of words like taste and spread.

The empty text field is full of possibilities.

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