![]() ![]() ![]() Books on tape were bulky and expensive as I recall, when my father played them in the car, he had to flip them every half hour, trying not to swerve out of his lane in the process. “Transforming myself into those things, and trying to find a truthful way to do that-there’s nothing else like it,” she said.Īt the turn of the millennium, audiobooks were closer to a cottage industry than a mass medium. “If you don’t have fun, it’s your own damn fault.” To narrate, Miles said, is to live the dream of Nick Bottom, the amateur actor in Shakespeare’s “ A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Bottom is cast as Pyramus, “a most lovely gentleman-like man,” but he also wants to play Pyramus’ lover, Thisbe, and a roaring lion to boot. “It’s a bit like having sex with yourself,” Miles joked a few hours later, during her lunch break. “She sounds like Ursula,” Green said, when Miles voiced the novel’s villain. When the book said that someone laughed, Miles offered the engineer a giggle, a chortle, and a cackle when a character steepled their fingers, Miles did, too. “We need tentacle squish sounds here,” she told me, pointing at one spot. On a printed script, Green had marked where sound effects would be added later. On this day, she voiced both sides of a conversation between New York and London. She has been the voice of the Antiguan American novelist Jamaica Kincaid, the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Russian journalist Yelena Khanga, and the Californian Vice-President Kamala Harris. “I keep wondering where I might sound like New Jersey,” she said into the microphone. She imitated Prue and Paul from “The Great British Bake Off,” to remind herself of the difference between a posh British accent and one native to northern England. She made motorboat sounds she bent her voice up an octave and back down again. She greeted the director, Elece Green, and a sound engineer, Michelle Figueroa, in the control room, then took off her plaid rain boots and walked barefoot into a soundproof booth, where she began warming up. On a rainy Monday in August, Miles arrived at a recording studio in the midtown Manhattan offices of Hachette Book Group to narrate the book’s sequel, “ The World We Make.” Miles has sharp cheekbones and the posture of a ballet instructor. Knows how to be diplomatic, deferential.” The audiobook won two industry awards, known as Audies, for best fantasy audiobook and best female narrator. Trust fund baby of possible criminal family dresses preppy. Her notes for the character Bronca read simply “South Bronx.” For Manny, who represents Manhattan, she wrote, “POC. She typed up a dramatis personae to remind her how each character should sound. Miles, for her part, traversed New York by subway and ferry, listening to strangers. Jemisin hired half a dozen sensitivity readers-including one from Brazil, one from Sri Lanka, and another from India-to insure that all her depictions were accurate. Each of the five boroughs is embodied by a character so are other cities, including London, Hong Kong, and São Paulo. Jemisin’s tenth novel, “ The City We Became,” is set not in a fantastical land but in New York City. Listen to the author’s interview with Robin Miles on The New Yorker Radio Hour. “She’s as serious about her art as I am about mine,” Jemisin said. While working on the sequel, she often reminded herself, “I need to think about what this character sounds like.” After Miles narrated “The Fifth Season” and its sequels, Jemisin asked her publisher to hire Miles for her subsequent books. They’re not real!’ ”īut, later, after listening to the finished audiobook, Jemisin recognized that the soundscape was an important part of the world she was building. “I kept just saying, ‘It’s a fantasy novel! It doesn’t matter how they’re pronounced. She usually struggles to read her work after it’s been published she tends to think about what could have been better. There were words in the book, Jemisin admitted, that she had never even said aloud. How do Sanzeds, midlatters, and Eastern Coasters usually speak? How do you pronounce Essun, Damaya, and Tonkee? “She wanted to know exactly what kind of accents to use at certain places, and where characters were from within their countries,” Jemisin told me recently. Miles had just been hired to narrate the audiobook of Jemisin’s new novel, “ The Fifth Season,” about the inhabitants of a continent called the Stillness, and she had some questions. ![]() Jemisin got an e-mail from the voice actor Robin Miles. ![]()
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