Hong: A Little Devil in America is a phenomenal distillation of history, politics, culture, biography, music, memoir—and more. How did you gather the extensive critical elements and compose this marvelous book?
Abdurraqib: I’m a very eager researcher and compiler of notes, of half-ideas, of stumbles towards the hope that everything I’m dreaming is somehow interconnected (even if it isn’t!). This is something, I should add, that I picked up through my earliest days of library-wandering, having the ability to just grab anything that seemed remotely interesting, make a pile, and go through it. And so, I think the origins of this book were a kind of going back to my roots, compiling the broader ideas, excitements, and obsessions that were populating the cloud hovering over what the book could become,…
