Vulture: Ruth Ozeki, Amplifier - Her latest novel teems with voices, most of them belonging to what she might call "nonhuman persons."

“The “emptiness” in the new book’s title is not nihilism or despair. It’s tied to the Buddhist teaching that the isolated, independent self is a fiction. Ozeki, who became a Buddhist after her father died and a priest in 2010, describes Zen ideas of selfhood this way: ‘Imagine the ocean and then this little wave, you know, sort of pops up and looks around and it’s like, Whoa, look at me! I’m a self; I’m a wave; this is fantastic. There’s this ocean around me, but I am a wave. And then suddenly, the next thing you know, the wave is just part of the ocean again.’”
— Helen Shaw

Publishers Weekly: In Ruth Ozeki's Latest, the Kids Are Not Alright

“Benny takes refuge from the voices by spending hours, sometimes entire days, in the public library. This, also, was inspired by Ozeki’s own biography. She spent hours in the library as a child and then worked in her college library. She recalls time spent deep in the stacks, stringing together book titles into ‘found poetry’ and sketching out characters for future novels. ‘I don’t think I was a very efficient worker,’ she says with a laugh. ”
— Brooke Lea Foster, Publishers Weekly

July 23, 2021
Publishers Weekly
In Ruth Ozeki's Latest, the Kids Are Not Alright

The Bookseller: 'As an artist I have relationships with fictional voices all the time'

“‘I’m very interested in the way that psychiatric diagnosis happens and the very narrow bandwidth that we consider to be normal...normal is a social construct. I’m not a voice-hearer, but I have heard voices. As an artist I have relationships with fictional voices all the time, so I’m very grateful that our society has decided that novels are socially acceptable because if they weren’t, I would also be diagnosed.’”
— Ruth Ozeki to Alice O'Keeffe, The Bookseller