Magic Realism, Intertextuality, & Making it Beautiful w/ William Ping

In this interview, we chat with William Ping about historical fiction, hauntology, Animal Crossing, and so much more.

William Ping is a novelist and journalist, born and raised in St. John’s. His debut novel Hollow Bamboo was published by HarperCollins in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the BMO Winterset Award, and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award as well as being longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. He has previously been published in ‘Us, Now,’ Hard Ticket and Riddle Fence. William is also known for his contributions to CBC News, where he can most often be heard reading the news. 

Books mentioned in this episode:

• Waiting for Godot; Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
• Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
• Death on the Ice: The Great Newfoundland Sealing Disaster of 1914 – Cassie Brown and Harold Horwood
• The King in Yellow – Robert W. Chambers
• The Wapshot Chronicle – John Cheever 
• Trust Exercise – Susan Choi
• A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
• Less Than Zero; American Psycho; Imperial Bedrooms – Bret Easton Ellis
• The Beautiful and Damned; The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald 
• Open – Lisa Moore
• Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
• Animal Farm – George Orwell
• Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different – Chuck Palahniuk
• Son of a Trickster – Eden Robinson 
• The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
• Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio – Pu Songling