Q&A with R. F. Kuang, Author of September Indie Next List Top Pick “Katabasis”
Independent booksellers across the country have chosen R. F. Kuang’s Katabasis (Harper Voyager) as their top pick for the September 2025 Indie Next List.
“I’d follow R. F. Kuang anywhere — and that includes hell! Deep, dark, and atmospheric, Katabasis balances academia and danger perfectly, solidifying Kuang as an expert in the genre,” said Kassie King of The Novel Neighbor in Webster Groves, MO.
Here, Kuang discusses her work with Bookselling This Week.
This book is, in part, a critique of the academic system. Hell is a campus, and through Alice and Peter’s journey we see some of the pressures and abuses of power that can happen in higher education. Do you want to talk a little more about this?
Babel does a big socio-historical critique of the university, while Katabasis is interested in the interpersonal dynamics within academia. What are the potentials for abuse in the student-teacher relationship and what happens when it goes wrong? I was inspired by Amia Srinivasan’s essays in The Right to Sex, as well as Damien Chazelle’s film Whiplash. Why are people drawn to abusive mentors, and why do they buy into their cult status?
I’d love to talk a little about your magic systems. In Babel we saw magic in the space between translations, and here we see it in paradoxes.
Logic paradoxes are so fun. Here they function as a metaphor for self-deception and delusion, as Alice and Peter keep failing at rational decision-making. I learned a lot from Roy Sorensen’s history of the paradox, as well as my husband’s departmental colleagues.
Alice and Peter both bring books with them, to read during their downtime in Hell. And I fear many of our readers would do the same. What books are you currently reading?
I’m currently reading Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh, Caroline Fraser’s Murderland, and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero.
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