The Decisions Affecting My Body Were Always Made By Someone Else

Posted on by Katie

Altered Remains by Aleina Grace Edwards

For six weeks, every painting on the wall is brown. Pretty, stoic deer stand and stare with wide wet eyes; slick panthers stalk across the frames; and dawn breaks over some craggy mountain tops. Entire galaxies churn, the panels bursting with starfields that could be anywhere, in our corner of the universe or another. So many worlds rendered in sepia.

“He paints with tar from the La Brea Tar Pits,” I explain whenever a visitor asks about the material—and they always ask about the material. They’re intrigued by the thick, sepia paint, all the subtle textures. What is this, what is that? They always want to know how a thing is made. I introduce the Tar Pits over and over. It’s the end of summer, and people are on vacation in Los Angeles, many for the first time. “It’s the only active Ice Age dig site in the world,” I say. “It’s in the middle of the city—if you go right now, it’ll only take you twenty-five minutes to get there.” Most seem surprised to hear this, but dismiss it as a random oddity. A few insist they’ll go as soon as they leave the gallery, where I am the director. 

Explorers and scientists have spent the better part of a century pulling fossils out of the natural asphalt that bubbles up through the grass in Rancho La Brea, now a park where the tar pits are located. You can walk around the grounds and watch the staff work, ten feet, twenty feet deep in the earth, dredging up oil and dirt. This muck is called the matrix—an ancient mixture filled with microfossils, tiny toes and teeth, shreds of ancient leaves. 

Walk into the museum at the park—an outpost of the LA’s Natural History Museum further downtown—and you’ll see the paleontologists working in the Fossil Lab, the fishbowl station where they prepare findings from the pits. They’re all wearing white coats and blue gloves, like doctors who might swab your throat in a different setting. Here, though, they rinse and sort bones. Once I saw a paleontologist with something large and meaty in her hands, maybe a femur. She held the bulge at one end as though it were a baby’s delicate head and used her other hand to swipe a long Q-tip along the length of the bone, probably cleaning off residue, though you couldn’t see any progress. The tar stains are impossible to remove. Her desk was crowded with tools, canisters of brushes and Q-tips, a large white microscope. If a specimen is broken or damaged, the paleontologist will try to reconstruct it with glue, putting all the little bits she can find back together. She set the bone down and shuffled muddy fragments across the desk, touching them carefully with green-gloved fingers. She was looking for something specific. She arranged the pieces, stepped back and considered her work—she saw something there, in the mess. 

We visited the Tar Pits often when I was a kid, my parents eager to show my sister and me the layers of history buried under our city—a place they’d moved from Texas just a month before I was born. The pits were discovered by a Spanish expedition in 1769. A friar who tagged along with the group noted the strange climate and landscape of the area in his diary: “In the afternoon we felt new earthquakes, the continuation of which astonishes us,” he writes. “We judge that in the mountains that run to the west in front of us there are some volcanoes. The explorers saw some large marshes of a certain substance like pitch, they were boiling and bubbling.” He wondered about the relationship between the tar and the earthquakes, unfamiliar with both.

When I was seven and eight, I wanted to be a paleontologist. I drew myself on a dig for a school assignment, crouched in vibrant orange sand, wearing green cargo pants and a boxy red shirt. There was a bone outlined in thick black marker by my dusty knees, drawn the way all cartoon bones are, with big, bubbly ends. My face was obscured by a wide-brim hat, the kind I imagined you would wear for long days in the desert. I conjured myself as part-sleuth, part-storyteller, able to make sense of things that happened thousands of years ago with only the tiniest shards of information. 

I was terrified of human bones, my own especially.

The obsession with this line of work perplexed my parents, even as they tried to feed my curiosity. I was terrified of human bones, my own especially. I sobbed when a pinky finger bent the wrong way when I caught it on a playground slide, sure it was going to fall off. Tears ran down my cheeks at the emergency room; I refused to make eye contact with anyone else waiting to be summoned deeper into the hospital, disturbed by our shared status as sick or injured. 

I was anxious about obscure diseases, too, like Mad Cow, the scraps of information I heard on the radio or at someone else’s house plaguing me. West Nile was on the news at my uncle’s house, on the TV crowned by a stuffed pheasant, its dead wings spread wide across the wall as if in flight. There was an epidemic in Texas, the reporter said. I was there for the summer, bouncing between family members. Mosquitos loved me; I was already covered in red spots the size of quarters. I imagined my infection, my spinal cord stiffening and my brain swelling. I cried and cried on the phone with my mother, begging her to come get me and take me home, certain every second spent away from her was an exponentially greater risk.

There isn’t a clear connection between the pits and earthquake activity, though both are endemic to Los Angeles. The pits formed as crude oil moved up through fissures in the Earth’s crust, and when people began mining the asphalt here in the 1800s, one of the holes they left behind collected rain and groundwater until it became a bubbling pool, dark and pearlescent. Today it is the iconic Lake Pit, where model mammoths are arranged to show visitors exactly how so many animals and plants got stuck there. The tar looks like water but for its slight iridescence, the little methane bubbles, and the unmistakable petroleum smell. Covered in fallen leaves or other debris, the pits would have been perfectly camouflaged. Animals wouldn’t know they were stepping in tar until it was too late, before they stuck and sank, buried for tens of thousands of years. 

The probability that any organism will be completely preserved after it dies is very low, which is why the troves at the Tar Pits are so special—a mecca for students of natural history.  “Natural history” refers to the interdisciplinary study of the natural world, with its roots in Ancient Greece. It encompasses many modern subjects, including biology, paleontology, geology, and philosophy, but unlike contemporary sciences, it was mostly observational, not experimental. In the long lifetime of such study, there have been many points of convergence between science and religion, fact and fiction, as scientists and scholars tried to come up with stories that linked the phenomena they saw into a logical narrative without much concrete evidence to go on. The problem is, the fossil record is sparse. When an animal dies in nature, its flesh is mostly gone a few weeks later. Bacteria, fungi, insects, water, wind, light—all these forces pull it apart, scatter the pieces. But asphalt is an impermeable preservative, keeping things as tiny and fragile as hollow bird bones and broken leaves intact for thousands of years; no water or oxygen ever reaches them. The Tar Pits have preserved specimens so perfectly they still contain original biological minerals, like the apatite from bones and calcite from shells. Using the molecular data from this material, scientists can date the fossils very precisely. They can establish a clear record of the natural world as it once was, and create a detailed narrative of change. 

The summer I turned 10, I saw the inside of my own body for the first time. After school, I bent over in my uniform skort and hospital gown, exposing my back to the new surgeon and my mother. The surgeon, a referral from my usual pediatrician, pointed out the slight hump of my ribcage—I could see him gesturing with a pencil in the air above me, tracing the shape of the curve. I could see the red and black checkers of his starchy shirt, the slick of dark hair on the side of his head, thick and wet with product. His olive skin was sallow in the hospital lighting, almost waxen. 

I was right, my body was not safe. On a structural level, it was unreliable.

My pediatrician had suspected I had scoliosis, a spontaneous, abnormal curve of the spine. The surgeon confirmed it. The curve wasn’t severe then; it was still invisible to the untrained eye and unnoticeable under clothes. But it was there, on the computer screen. The surgeon annotated my X-ray, drawing a line across the top of the thoracic curve and another along the bottom, the lumbar. He traced a third line, an intersection. He measured the angle and typed quick notes. The nature of the condition, sudden and random and persistent, horrified me—but it was also, in a way, a relief. Here was confirmation of what I had often suspected as a small child: I was right, my body was not safe. On a structural level, it was unreliable. 

There was nothing to do but wait for a while. Scoliosis like mine is quite common, especially in girls, and it doesn’t always become a bigger health concern. But the surgeon told my mother what might happen: I would grow, and so would the curve; I would need a back brace, and if that didn’t control the curve, I’d need a spinal fusion for permanent correction. Without surgery, my moving spine could twist my ribcage, forcing it against my heart and lungs. Potential complications were infertility, heart failure, pneumonia. Pain, certainly. Low self-esteem, likely. 

It was a relatively routine surgery, he said, but it had its risks: fusion failure, chronic pain, paralysis, death. My mother held me close and tried to shush him as he rattled off the list of potential outcomes. She didn’t want me to hear those details, but it was too late. I had already stored them away, these new ways my body could betray me.

If my curve progressed past 45 degrees, we would have to move quickly. Once it hit that threshold, a curve would usually keep progressing even after the growth plates closed and the skeleton was fully developed. Plus, better correction is possible when patients are younger, when their bones are still pliable. Surgeons prefer to operate as soon as possible. 

There has been only one human specimen ever shown at the Tar Pits: The La Brea Woman. She is the oldest human found in California, and her display case used to sit between a ground sloth’s and a suite of bird bones. It was almost too dark to see inside, her skeleton just barely illuminated in weak amber light. But every ten seconds or so, a hologram would turn her into an exaggerated woman with a neat hourglass figure—topless, brown eyes, and shiny hair down to her hips. Then the lights would change again, and she would shrink back to bone. When I stood in front of the La Brea Woman as a 10-year-old, we were about the same height, just under five feet; looking in the dark glass, my reflection slipped over her skeleton; I was her. 

The La Brea Woman isn’t on display anymore. Sometime in the early 2000s, museum representatives decided it wasn’t right to display her remains: Her identity was mostly speculative, and she wasn’t actually found in the pits—she had been buried in a nearby grave. Her skull shape meant she may have been ethnically Chumash, and the museum’s director was worried about negative attention and demands for repatriation of the bones. So he put her remains in storage, where no one could see them. As far as I know, she’s still there.

I grew too much, too fast, and the new height twisted into deeper curves in my spine. For all of sixth and seventh grade, I wore a back brace molded to my body for 23 hours a day. At school, I layered t-shirts and sweatshirts to hide the bulk of the brace. Middle school cliques coagulated, but I was insular, and kept my distance from other kids. When a girl playfully poked me in the stomach before first period history, her finger bent back against the plastic under my clothes. Her eyes grew big and confused; I couldn’t explain. I just walked into class and sat down, the shame of it making me mute, skin sweating under the brace until I turned cold and stale. I was sure I would start crying if I tried to tell her what was wrong with me. I didn’t know where to begin.

I had X-rays taken every three months to monitor my spine’s movement. Each time was the same. Clothes off, drafty gown on. Wait in one room, then another. Bend over, then walk a few feet, let’s see how you move. The room is always cold, the doctor barely there. When he is, he notes another few degrees of movement in my spine.

We were waiting for my period. Your period means you’ll stop growing in a year or so, the surgeon told me. By the time it started, just days before my fourteenth birthday, my thoracic curve had already bent to 50 degrees. 

This was the dynamic of treatment: pain now that would supposedly salvage my future.

The scoliosis had become more obvious in the skew of my shoulders and hips, the swing in my gait, but even then, it didn’t hurt much. I struggled with the dissonance of the impending surgery and my daily experience. My body looked bad, I was told, but I felt mostly fine. I got a little stiff after spending hours crunched into the small desks at school or in narrow airplane seats, but that didn’t seem significant. I was fencing competitively, successfully. I wanted to make the US national team. I saw myself as a promising athlete and a sharp student. I loved writing essays, sketching with charcoal. I wanted to be an artist, maybe. I was confused. I couldn’t feel the disease threatening me, though I was told it was. Now I see my mother’s fear was clearest in her willingness to try every treatment option, no matter how questionable. When the back brace didn’t stop my spine, she took me to a massage therapist who tried to move my vertebrae through violent bodywork, pushing muscle directly against bone. I lay on a table in his garage and cried quietly while he worked, tears squeaking a little against the faux-leather face rest. My bones seemed to burn where he pressed hardest, shoving my paraspinals against the curves with the full force of his large body. This was the dynamic of treatment: pain now that would supposedly salvage my future. I was taught every bad thing I felt was the mechanism of a cure.

There is a picture of me at 15, a few months before my spinal fusion. For years, the photo has moved with me from home to home, one of many in a box of keepsakes. My family went to a water park to celebrate my sister’s thirteenth birthday, and my mother gave my sister and me disposable waterproof cameras so we could document the day. In the photo, I am sitting on the top of a water slide, facing away, ready to go down. My arms are folded across my chest in preparation for the slide, my wet hair shellacked to my head, my whole back exposed in a string bikini such a pale shade of yellow, you can hardly tell I’m wearing anything. My spine presses against skin, each vertebra clearly articulated, the sequence forming a perfect S-shape down my back. My body appeared like an object I could see and describe, but it wasn’t me anymore. Before my last move, I threw the photo away.

It’s completely unusual for so many specimens in a natural history museum to be dug up on-site. Many of the world’s great collections, like those in the British Museum in London, or the Natural History Museum in New York, are the results of long colonial campaigns.

When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt at the turn of the nineteenth century, a commission of scientists and scholars went with him. They took detailed notes on Egyptian art, culture, and history; they found the Rosetta Stone, and they took that too. As explorers returned with more stolen corpses, Europeans began hosting unwrapping parties, which revolved around literally unrolling and examining mummified remains. At first, these gatherings served a purported medical purpose: Only surgeons were present, ostensibly there to learn more about the effects of mummification on the body and the natural history of certain diseases—mummification via salt preserves soft tissue well enough to stop the degradation of DNA. But surgical operations were often punishments and performances: Public autopsies might be retribution for extreme crimes, and the parties kept growing, hosted by wealthier people for intrigue and entertainment among friends. They started selling tickets to the public. You could pay to see a body excavated right in front of you. 

An immersive King Tut exhibit recently toured the U.S. in honor of the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the child-pharaoh’s tomb—“the King Tut Experience takes you on a mythical journey through the afterlife!” There is something perversely soothing about experiencing death as fictive and fantastical, an experience so separate from your own. The bones I saw at the Tar Pits as a child were never real to me—they belonged to sublime creatures that no longer existed. I found comfort looking into empty eye sockets and between gaping ribs. It’s much easier to grapple with disease and decay when it affects an object, or even an animal, but not a person. But King Tut was hardly more than a boy when he died, only 18 or 19. He was buried with many things, most notably over 100 canes—generations of incest had left him with many medical issues, among them severe scoliosis and a rare bone disease that made it impossible for him to walk without assistance. 

My dad asked me recently what he might’ve handled differently about my scoliosis treatment; I said I only wanted someone to ask me how I felt, how I wanted to approach it. Maybe it’s a parental prerogative to surrender their child’s body to science. The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, where I went to college, is filled with medically anomalous remains donated for research. “The goal of the Museum is to help visitors understand the mysteries and beauty of the human body and appreciate the history of diagnosis and treatment of disease,” their website explains. Many are fetal remains; there are several babies’ skulls. No child, even an older one, can really sanction medical decisions regarding their own body in our current biomedical model. Legally, any patient under 18 cannot consent, or grant permission. They can only assent—they can agree with an opinion already given. But I don’t remember anyone truly asking me mine. It was my body in question, but the decisions affecting it would always be made by someone else.

I don’t have the records from the pediatrician who discovered my curve when I was 10, or the assessments from my original surgeon, who I saw for the first few years after my diagnosis. I don’t have the notes from the orthotist who strapped me to a glass table and created a three-dimensional image of my torso that would become the back brace I wore everyday for two years, until it was clear surgery was inevitable. 

 I do have years of X-rays, email attachments and PDF downloads showing my spectral spine bending between splayed ribs, the angles of each curve marked with red lines and numbers that keep ticking higher. I have 72 pages of password-protected notes from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where my operating surgeon was the head of orthopedic surgery, where I spent six hours on an operating table and a week recovering, hallucinating on oxycodone and learning how to walk again.

I didn’t read the operative report for my surgery until I was nearly 30. It took me a few weeks to get my records from the hospital staff, who had to find my papers in analog storage and scan them for me. 

The patient: a 15-year-old girl of normal height, weight, appetite, and disposition. She presented on July 13, 2010, for a posterior spinal fusion of T-2 to T-11—her entire thoracic spine—to correct her case of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis. Her spine was twisted into an S-shape; surgically straightening the upper curve would pull the lower one along with it.

When the team opened her body on the operating table, conditions were more difficult than they anticipated. Her primary curve was extremely stiff. The vertebrae were wedged so tight, they had to remove more of the patient’s bone than planned. The patient’s right lung was severely impinged. The surgical team estimated it was only at 70 percent capacity. 

It took nearly six hours to dissect the patient’s spine, apply grafts, and implement the hardware that would hold everything together. The surgeon used bone grafts scraped from the patient’s iliac crest and morsels from cadaver donors to close the gaps between her vertebrae. He added steel screws and a thick crossbar for extra support. The patient was an athlete. The extra stability would help her return to competition sooner. 

The patient tolerated the procedure well. 

There are holes in my hospital records. There’s no note about my return to the orthopedic floor, just three days after I’d gone home. The fainting episodes, which began in those days and continued for years after surgery, only get two lines, brief notes of “recurring syncope.” There’s no mention of my weight after surgery, of my concerningly low body fat percentage, of the number shrinking on the scale in my mother’s bathroom. There’s no mention of my intolerance to oxycodone, the hallucinations, my dad trying to strangle me, hands shoving my neck into the mattress. There was no inventory of the bottles of Advil I went through to control the pain without narcotics. 

Recovery was mostly pain. Pain in my back, my chest, running down my legs and arms. The IVs pinching my wrists and ankles. The aching when I lay down, the stabbing when I stood up. I remember thinking, They did this to me, they did this to me.

Technically speaking, if a patient experiences any recurring pain after a spinal fusion, she has failed fusion syndrome. It’s been almost 13 years since my surgery and my back still bothers me. If I sit too long, there is pain; if I’m too active, pain. I’ve been hospitalized several times since for pain management. I’ve had more X-rays taken, seen more physical therapists, swallowed more Tramadol and steroids. There is nothing wrong, all the specialists say. There is nothing wrong.

Also, I didn’t know about the donors. It wasn’t just my vertebrae being fused, but flesh and metal, my bones and another’s. I feel displaced reading this, jolted out of my skin as if I’m on an airplane that’s suddenly losing altitude.  

I understand that there’s a wide spectrum of reasons why a person isn’t allowed to make their own decisions. Maybe they’re too sick or simply insane, their skin the wrong shade, their bodies too big or too small. Maybe they’re just women, or girls with no grip on reality.

Public interest in personal medical narratives is not only about prurient curiosity; it’s also about individuals asserting the truths the medical system fails to acknowledge. That people, patients—women especially—are sharing their experiences, correcting records and insisting on the details that have been left out, is as essential to our cultural record as it is to medical knowledge. A natural history is also that of a disease without treatment, usually defined in four stages: susceptibility, subclinical, clinical, and of course, the final outcome. This last stage varies widely depending on the case. It could be recovery, disability, or death. 

In the Mütter Museum, some of the dead people are disassembled. There are bones and body parts everywhere, spongey lungs soaking in jars of formaldehyde, tarnished skulls stacked along the walls. But hanging in a glass vitrine, Harry Eastlack’s bones look more sculptural than scientific. Harry had fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, or FOP, an extremely rare genetic disorder that turns connective tissue to bone.  It was as though the artist hadn’t finished hewing the shape from stone, leaving tenuous connections between ribs and teeth. Harry’s remains remind me of Michelangelo’s Prisoners, a series of sculptures arranged in the hallway leading up to one of the most famously perfect works in the world, the David. Carved into huge chunks of marble, the Prisoners are unfinished, perpetually in the process of emerging. They’re examples of Michelangelo’s approach to his work, his manner of carving a subject from stone freehand. It’s believed the Prisoners were left like this on purpose to demonstrate man’s ongoing struggle to free himself from his own body. 

“When my time comes, I would like to hang next to Harry,” Carol Ann Orzel told her doctor. A Philadelphian who had FOP too, Carol decided to donate her entire skeleton to the museum after she saw Harry’s there in 1995. She wanted more visibility for their terminal condition. More funding, more research, better chances at longer lives for future patients. 

Carol died at 58, which was old for someone with FOP. There have only been about 900 patients ever diagnosed with the disease, and most don’t make it to 50. The overgrowth of bone itself doesn’t kill them, but the constraints on the rest of the body do. Over time, their mobility decreases. Eventually, their hearts give out, exhausted from lifetimes of pumping against chest cavities that cannot make space. I remember the way the brace wrapped around my ribcage, the intrusion of its foam wedges under my armpits. I remember the weight on my shoulders when I tried to get out of bed for the first time post-op, like a man shoving me down with both hands, refusing to let me stand. My left lung, trapped by twisted ribs for years, ached as it expanded again.

 In a final act of self-determination, Carol requested her costume jewelry be shown alongside her skeleton. Now, under her fused feet, there is a pink rhinestone tiara, a black and white cameo ring, and a brooch made of thickly clustered pearls. From a certain angle, the brooch takes on the abstract shape of a woman, bulbous and shimmering.

I used to look away when my X-rays were up on the screen in exam rooms. I would wait for the surgeon to tell my mother what he saw, for my mother’s reaction to interpret his words. All the hospitals and hallways are mixed up into one spare, white room with vinyl floors and a drop ceiling. I am always sitting on an exam table, wearing a thin gown that gapes no matter how I pull at it. I am always looking down, denying the fact of my body even as it’s submitted to scrutiny. I am not asking any questions. In the hospital’s records, I am described as “tearful,” “agitated,” and “determined,” but my name is never used. I am always “patient,” or “pt,” abbreviated for efficiency.  

I don’t want stories told in bones or blood cells. I’m after another kind of natural history now, one composed of personal reflections, records of sensation and emotion, structured by association, not cause and effect. Rather than list symptoms or attempt to pin down the slipperiness of chronic pain, I want to approach pain as structure: synaptic and expansive.

It’s still easier for me to look away and out, to observe and describe some other object, some other person. But more often now, this looking becomes a reflexive exercise. I talk to the artists at the gallery, ask them what sorts of clay they use, why they work in oil versus acrylic, how they know when a piece is finished. I draft their bios, describe their upbringings and educations and materials. Writing about art, I’m articulating what it means to make an object, to shape a narrative that honors this process. Not everything makes the cut. The ceramicists sometimes break the things they don’t like—it’s called “decommissioning.” One of them shows me a video on her phone: Face obscured by a gas mask, she takes a sledgehammer to a monumental vessel, slamming it and shattering it and stomping on the shrapnel. 

The man who makes the tar paintings, with all his sharp, perfect lines, uses a number 11 Xacto knife to cut his images in relief. If you make the wrong mark, I ask, what do you do?

You can see a mammoth’s skull sitting on the ground in the middle of the Fossil Labs now, his jaws wedged with what looked like pieces of styrofoam and crumpled paper. The preparators decided to leave the matrix inside his skull for support, so that over time, gravity doesn’t pull the teeth out of his fragile mouth. Years before, conservationists had used basic adhesive and Elmer’s glue to keep his teeth consolidated. Over time, little bits of his bones would crumble off, and they’d just keep gluing them back together. Now, the team applies layers of Japanese rice paper and archival adhesive to the outside of his skull for extra stability. The Lab’s manager describes this process as a kind of papier-mache—an art form. 

It only takes a few months, I learn, for bone grafts to grow into solid bone. My body has had years to integrate the cadaver tissue in my spine, to weave around the screws and insertions. Different cells move at different speeds, though. Some cells, like the musculoskeletal, can take decades to grow back. Others, like those in your spinal cord, never do. 

In the gallery’s storage room, there is art everywhere. There’s an old ping pong table stacked with ceramics and sculptures. Rows of paintings lean against an overstuffed bookshelf on one wall; on the other, there are 20-foot-tall wooden bays filled with canvases and stacked with boxes of photographs, both personal and professional—the gallery owner has been here for 31 years. My entire lifetime.

We bring a client back to see some of the tar paintings, back in storage now that the show has ended, and he steps on something—I hear the soft crunch underfoot. It is a sculpture made of thousands of individual ceramic links, together mimicking a malleable pile of patinated chains. The client startles—he hadn’t noticed the piece against the grey carpet. The gallery owner, standing just behind me, sighs. I look back at him, and he shrugs. He knows the precarity of it all.

“The artist can fix it,” I assure the client.

Exclusive Cover Reveal of “The Volcano Keeper” by Bradley Sides

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of The Volcano Keeper by Bradley Sides, which will be published on October 20th, 2026 by Regal House Publishing. You can pre-order your copy here.

When a volcano suddenly emerges in the middle of his family’s Alabama cattle pasture, young Charlie Melvin is confronted with a promise his grandfather once made—that something extraordinary would rise from the land.

As Charlie comes of age, he wrestles with the meaning of the volcano and the legacy of his family. His story unfolds through evocative vignettes that explore love, loss, responsibility, and faith.

Graceful, tender, and emotionally resonant, Bradley Sides’ The Volcano Keeper is a moving portrait of a young man navigating grief while discovering the quiet miracles woven into the natural world.

Here is the cover, designed by Chiana Royal:

Bradley Sides: When I write, I almost always begin with an image. These images guide so much of my narratives–and, honestly, I’d be in trouble without them.

Not too long ago, I was in a writing workshop, and we were asked to create a scene from childhood. Here’s what I came up with: “I’m on my Alabama family’s back porch. Covering an algae-stained pond, there’s this big, top-heavy tree, full of all kinds of greenness extending from untamed branches, with its roots angled from the dirt and mud. There are mallard ducks flapping about under the shade, obsessively quacking. Leaves and feathers twirl about, like stray clouds. Cows abound at the periphery, and bringing it together, there’s this strange and soothing mix of sounds. Crickets. Tractors. Wind brushing against hay. Bullfrogs splashing.” As you can see, even with something so short, it began with an image. After I had that porch and, then, the pond, I could open up that memory. I could make it come alive, and I could make it real.

Chiana, the designer for my new book, The Volcano Keeper, which mixes the Rural South with magical realism, asked me a few questions about what I might like to see on the cover. I didn’t think I could offer much help, but I approached the process like I do my writing. I thought of images. Specifically, I began to list images that are heavy within The Volcano Keeper. I came up with several things, and I sent her the list.

Not too long later, I received the beautiful cover. It includes many of the images I suggested. The back jacket even features a cow that looks just like one named Rosie that I used to show at fairs across Alabama when I was younger, which makes the cover extra special. There is such vibrancy, too. It pops with life. The Volcano Keeper is, at the end of the day, about love–about how grief comes from a grand form of love. It’s also about how we find healing and peace, again, from love. The bright colors Chiana uses perfectly showcase the heart of this book. To me, it’s perfect.

Chiana Royal: Working on The Volcano Keeper by Bradley Sides was just as fun as it looks. The bright colors, detailed motifs, and segmented composition all played into the themes of the novel. . . also ensuring it would stand out on the bookshelf!

My design process is a collaborative one. To gain insight into Bradley’s novel, I sent over a questionnaire. Back came his design preferences and a list of motifs—the tractor, cow, firefly, and of course, the volcano. The “aha moment” came to me while flipping through one of my art history books and landing on Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s Soup Cans.

I particularly love the way pop art transforms everyday familiarities into icons. By drawing on the high-contrast palettes and the graphic punch of the mid-century pop art movement, I created a design that evokes The Volcano Keeper’s vibrant setting and magical realism.

The goal was to give a brief glimpse of the story, peeking through at hints of the novel’s world while mirroring the vignette format.

This cover has definitely made it on my list of favorites, and I hope to explore more modern art-inspired designs in the future!

True Love With Three Olives and a Twist

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

The Martini Fairy

Tell me a story, he said. A happy one. Your stories are always so sad. 

It’s what I’m good at. Besides, it’s hard to write a happy story, I said. But I’ll try. What kind of story?

One with fairies, he said, after thinking for a moment. The kind with wings. I already know too many stories about the other kind.

We were in bed, with only our toes touching. We weren’t looking at each other but instead were gazing out the window overlooking the front yard. We had argued earlier and weren’t really mad anymore, but we were still trying to figure out how to make up. 

The fight had started when his sister asked him to take his mother to the doctor, even though his sister doesn’t work and has plenty of free time. I had merely said he shouldn’t always be so willing to help, because he got taken advantage of. I don’t know why we were fighting, but for some reason I thought it was important to get him to admit he couldn’t stop doing it, even though I liked that he was always so giving. And he felt it was important to insist he could always refuse to help if he wanted, even though he never would. Such is the stupid way that even people who love each other communicate sometimes.

Do you know about the martini fairy? I asked.

That sounds more like that other kind of fairy, he said.

The martini fairy is a wonderful fairy. He’s the wittiest fairy. The most charming. Often in a tuxedo or white dinner jacket. He lives in our front garden, between the dogwood and the pink azalea, beneath that floppy lavender. He likes to lean against a mushroom, smoking a blade of grass, chatting with the gin-and-tonic fairy and the Manhattan fairy. And his nights with the champagne fairy are always special, but he thinks the pinot noir fairy is pretentious. He is suspicious of the white burgundy fairy and barely tolerates the beer fairy. And he loves staying up until dawn, swinging in a hammock made of spiderwebs, listening to the whiskey fairy unwind tales of lost love and forgotten empires. 

Sounds like a lot of lushes in fairyland, he said.

Don’t interrupt. One night he was drinking a Pelligrino and looking sad and the Limoncello fairy, the most sensitive of all the fairies, asked what was wrong. And the martini fairy said they had run out of olives. They only had lemon twists and pearl onions. So the other fairies fanned out to search for olives in trash cans and dumpsters but all they found were black and kalamata olives, which clearly wouldn’t do. Some fairies tried to sneak into a pixies’ bar, but pixies are fairy-phobic and refused to share their olives. 

He turned towards me now with a look of concern.

The Limoncello fairy came over and gave the martini fairy a hug. The Vermouth fairy, who understood the martini fairy in ways that no one else could, offered words of consolation, but the martini fairy would not be consoled. He felt suddenly incomplete. And, in truth, his white dinner jacket had started to wrinkle and the air of sophistication that always clung to him was beginning to evaporate.

I stopped there and looked out the window.  

That’s as far as I got, I said. His foot moved away from mine.

That’s not a happy story, he said. The martini fairy needs his olives.

Unfortunately there aren’t any and all the fairy liquor stores are closed, I said. The only way to make it a happy story is for someone to get the martini fairy some olives.

You’re only stopping there to prove a point, he said. I shrugged. 

He looked at me, clearly irritated, and shook his head.

You suck, he said. I shrugged again.

He pulled the blankets off and got up, leaving a small indentation in the mattress. I heard the refrigerator in the kitchen downstairs open and close. Then I looked out the window to see him walking barefoot across the damp grass, shivering in his boxer shorts and ragged t-shirt, holding a toothpick with three green olives speared on it. He squatted and slipped the toothpick gently underneath the lavender. 

It’s a happy story now, he said, when he came upstairs.

Because of you, I said.

8 Quintessentially Québécois Novels Set in Montreal

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Montreal is a surging literary city with its own unique idiosyncrasies and marks of character. Compared with, say, Toronto, Montreal literature sits alongside a wider cultural scene arising from the bilingual locale with many universities, countless cultural festivals, and publishing hotspots, including the legendary indie darling Drawn & Quarterly, which specializes in graphic novels. All that and more feed a body of literature that feels somehow distinctly cool. Simply walking the streets, encountering the varied neighborhoods, landscapes, and architecture, is an inspiring experience for any writer looking to find the form for what it is they want to say.

This list of books by Québécois authors, primarily published first in French, demonstrates the city’s unique identity. Montreal is a hub of cultural contradictions, a home to many thousands of immigrants, an erotic city bursting with sensuality, a queer-friendly atmosphere set alongside deep religious roots, and a place of seasonal extremes: deadly hot in the summer (we read in parks), endlessly frigid in the winter (we read at home). There are characters around every corner, in every fresh bagel shop, independent bookstore, hip cinematheque, and lush green park. In other words, Montreal certainly has a reputation, but it’s one that is so baroque and multifarious that it always comes back around feeling unexpected. The literature of the city, particularly the books that are set within it, frequently, perhaps unavoidably, reflect this.

The list below is an attempt to offer an introduction to the city’s literary tradition. Each book takes place in or around Montreal. Patterns emerge: there are many debuts here, and many semi-autobiographical immigrant tales, and many examinations of the rural/urban divide in Québec. It is also a mixture of noted classics, alongside some less obvious examples. No matter where you start, though, you’ll be brought squarely into what makes Montreal so stubbornly singular.

How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired by Dany Laferrière, translated by David Homel

First published in 1985, Laferrière’s debut remains one of Québec’s most acclaimed and widely-read books. It tells the story of a Haitian immigrant in Montreal, surviving in the city’s poverty-stricken slums. Laferrière, himself, born and raised in Port-au-Prince before coming to Montreal at age 23, puts much of that experience into the book, which is, surprisingly, a comedy. It is also provocative, going into detail about the narrator’s interracial affairs with white women, and the deeply felt racism of the era. The narrator and his friend are also pursuers of cultural and intellectual life, finding a home within the city’s jazz and literary circles. Again, this loosely reflects the author’s own experiences of his first years in Montreal, all while sharply satirizing the city’s prejudices. In short, it’s a classic for a reason.

The Orange Grove by Larry Tremblay, translated by Sheila Fischman

Tremblay, whose primary occupation is as a celebrated playwright, wrote this tragic tale about twins, Amed and Aziz, caught in an unnamed, war-torn country. Their relatively tranquil lives in their family’s orange grove are disrupted by the ravages of an unwanted war and the troubling consequences of revenge. Early passages can be hard to bear, but Tremblay’s prose is confident and devastating in its detail. Later, the story moves to the cold winter of Montreal, as one of the twins is involved in a play about war, and his own story influences the shape that the show takes. While a short read, much is packed into these pages.

Bottle Rocket Hearts by Zoe Whittall

Zoe Whittall’s debut is a stirring Bildungsroman, evocatively placing readers in the run-up to Québec’s 1995 referendum when the province’s citizens voted on whether or not to separate from Canada. 18-year-old Eve is fired up not only about secessional politics but about queer rights and feminist ennui following the mainstreaming of riot grrrl aesthetics. Then she meets an older woman who awakens her sensibilities—sexual, political, cultural—to an even higher degree. Whittall renders this revolutionary spirit and discovery of the self and the other with thrilling directness and intensity. As a result, the city’s own intensities at that moment in history become personal.

Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill

O’Neill, one of Montreal’s most-beloved working writers in English, is an excellent place to start for any reader eager to immerse themselves in the life of the city. You could go with The Lonely Hearts Hotel, about two Montreal orphans in the early 20th-century, or When We Lost Our Heads, about the clash of the classes in 19th century Montreal; but your best bet would be her debut, Lullabies for Little Criminals, a rough and often dark story of a young girl with a junkie father, growing up in squalor and, ultimately, being forced to raise herself. What stands out in each novel is O’Neill’s careful attention to Montreal itself, from the dangerous to the stunningly beautiful and how the two uncomfortably overlap.

Ru by Kim Thúy, translated by Sheila Fischman

Kim Thúy, who fled with her parents from Vietnam at the age of 10 to the Montreal suburbs, hit the bestseller list with her debut, Ru, a tale of a refugee’s journey from Saigon to Montreal. The structural and temporal architecture of the book is a treat for readers, as Thúy demonstrates unbelievable control over the narrative’s back and forth, and the vagaries of memory across decades of excitement and disappointment. The book is written via fragments which accumulate into something cohesive and moving. While there are many literary explorations like this one, subtly taking apart the nuances of the American (or Canadian) dream, the specificity and verve of Thúy’s storytelling puts Ru a step above.

Whore by Nelly Arcan, translated by Bruce Benderson

Another short autobiographical book, Nelly Arcan’s confrontational story of Québec’s religious, sexual, and cultural dysfunction is, to use a cliche, genuinely raw. Like Ru, it is told mostly through vignettes, though with a more unwieldy, angry spirit. The book draws from Arcan’s rural Catholic upbringing, and it is unsparing in detailing the protagonist’s turn to prostitution. The style may not be for everyone, and Arcan’s tragic suicide adds an even heavier register to the book’s contents, but it is nevertheless an essential read for those interested in Québec history, and how it intertwines with personal trauma.

Dandelion Daughter by Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay, translated by Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch

Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay, an actress, turned to literature with her debut, Dandelion Daughter, a coming-of-age story about the prejudices of rural Québec and a protagonist who realizes they were assigned the wrong gender at birth. It is a story of transgender discovery told with radical honesty and a deep understanding of character—nothing about the self is ever simple. As the protagonist moves to Québec City and then Montreal, the book excavates poetry from deep emotional wounds and demonstrates what it means to own your identity.

What I Know About You by Éric Chacour, translated by Pablo Strauss

While Chacour’s book largely takes place in 1980s Cairo, the Montreal native pulls from his own family history to tell a remarkable story about queerness and expectations. The structure is daring, as we begin in second-person narration of Tarek, taking over his father’s medical practice in the Egyptian capital, before turning to first-person, and finally to an omniscient narrator. The result, as we track the emergence of an impossible queer love for Tarek and, later on, his melancholy life in Montreal, is a gentle but sophisticated narrative about the calcifying power of secrets, and the constant reminders of how effective perspective can be as a storytelling tool.

Growing Up Shouldn’t Mean Conforming and Forgetting

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

It was hard not to shed a tear or two when Stranger Things came to a close this winter. I was in college when the first season aired—not exactly a kid in a way that might have made the story’s characters relatable. But at 19, I was on the cusp of a symbolic split, straddling youth and adulthood with great expectations for adventures ahead and a good dose of melancholy for what I thought I was leaving behind. Perhaps Stranger Things found me at the right time. Like millions of others, in 2016 I was on the edge of my seat when Will Byers sent signals through the string lights in his living room. Over the years, the story grew with me, and I came to cherish its introspective portrayal of community and imagination.

As is usually the case with television, when oversight intensifies and budgets increase, writing tends to worsen. Previous seasons were already showing signs of decline, so I suspected going into season five that the ending would suffer from the same formulaic-slop-syndrome that now plagues most streaming platforms. Unfortunately, I was not far off. What started out 10 years ago as an insightful, character-driven story about friendship, trauma, and nostalgia devolved into an action-packed wannabe Marvel movie by the end. Writers and producers sacrificed depth for flashiness and wound up with over 10 hours of redundant dialogue and expensive action shots. 

The story was a blueprint to struggle with the monsters of everyday life.

The $500 million budget of the final season is proof that you can’t buy a good story. But, sitting by a pile of bunched up tissues as the final credits rolled on January 1, I could not shake the sense that what I was feeling was not just the disappointed goodbye blues. I felt like something precious had just been gutted, and its carcass made to dance for entertainment. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that the Duffer Brothers had betrayed the heart of their own story, a transgression worse than bad writing. Some days later, my suspicions were confirmed. In an interview with Variety, the Duffers explained that Eleven had to die in the final episode because she represented “the magic of childhood. And we knew for our kids to be able to grow up, the magic had to leave Hawkins.” I was floored. Had not the whole story been about keeping the magic alive? And what does growing up even look like? For the Duffers, it looks like conforming and forgetting. 

I had always admired Stranger Things for its insistence on imagination and nonconformity as keys to seeing the world for what it is, demogorgons and all. For years, we followed along as nightmarish creatures and state agents threatened the town of Hawkins. Characters attuned to this reality were often dismissed for being delusional or infantile, but the story consistently told us that the real heroes were the ones detached enough from social conventions to risk believing what might seem outlandish. Nerds and outcasts, queers and misfits, trailer park kids and single parents were the ones at a vantage point to believe in magic. From the margins, they could see and fight monsters. We are not just talking about demogorgons here. The story was a blueprint to struggle with the monsters of everyday life; the ones we fight alone and the ones we fight together. 

The power of friendship can be an overused trope, but in its early seasons, Stranger Things did it well. Love was the show’s engine—the reason Will’s friends and family went looking for him, that Mike took Eleven into his home and Eleven saved Mike in return, the reason Bob died for Joyce and Eddie for Dustin, that Lucas could pull Max from Vecna’s curse, and that Hopper raised Eleven as his own. It was significant to see attachments on mainstream media premised on friendship not as a noun but as a verb. Friends in our story were rarely able to spare each other suffering—on the contrary, they were at times inadvertently causing it. But they chose to be together through it. And as external and internal forces ripped them away from one another, they refused to let each other go. In insisting that friendship was not an accessory but a potent part of the magic, the writers invited us to think about bonds as necessary rather than bound to dissolve with age. 

In this regard, one of the most meaningful moments of the show for me was when Will destroys Castle Byers. The scene represents the very real pain that comes from change, but it does so without presenting childhood as something we permanently leave behind. Yes, the symbol of Will’s childhood is damaged, but it’s there that his friends come looking for him. Even after the destruction of Castle Byers, the kids know exactly where to find Will; their affection for each other is grounded in their histories, and by way of those histories they continue on their journey together. Things change, but they don’t have to end.

But by the show’s final season, the Duffers had departed drastically from this messaging. In the final shot of the saga, a new generation of kids takes over the Wheeler basement to begin their own D&D campaign, and Mike shuts the door behind him, leaving them with a bittersweet smile. The closed door is the last thing we see before the screen fades to black. We get it, they want us to grow up. Indeed, they beat us over the head with it. And growing up this time is rendered with isolated finality. While the remains of Castle Byers were a place for Will and his friends to embrace their next chapter together, the closed door of season five creates a barrier between childhood and adulthood. The message is clear: There is no going back, and the rest of life, you must do alone. Beyond this door? A set of sad tropes. In antithesis to everything the writers had expressed as important, magic is now a setback, and adulthood is a milestone that cannot be achieved without forgetting the past and conforming to a normative idea of life. 

With the finale, the Duffers’ coming-of-age narrative becomes about manufacturing absorption into an idea of adulthood.

It is a familiar norm our society feeds its children, a tired American dream, and Stranger Things ultimately caved to it. Eleven dies, and the magic dies with her. As for the rest of our heroes, monster hunting ends and real life begins, which entails leaving community, creativity, and nonconformity behind in favor of “real” dreams like college, mortgages, marriage, and promotions. They barely speak of what happened to them and talk, instead, of moving on and not getting stuck in the past. In the end, the only characters who maintain meaningful relationships with each other do so in romantic partnerships, and almost everyone’s happy ending involves becoming a productive member of society and embarking on a solo identity building project: Jonathan, Robin, and Dustin are off to university; Will is finding himself in the city; Nancy is out girlbossing; and Steve is looking to settle down and start a family. 

With the finale, the Duffers’ coming-of-age narrative becomes about manufacturing absorption into an idea of adulthood. I say idea here because, just like childhood, adulthood as a category has come to signal more than just an age range, but a standardized, socially acceptable set of attributes. In early seasons, a grown-up’s proximity to childhood was seen as an asset. Characters like Joyce, Hopper, or Murray had not really grown up yet, by societal standards: Joyce was a chain-smoking single mom, Hopper was a divorcee living in a trailer, and Murray a conspiracy theorist. But their failure (voluntary or not) to be disciplined into adulthood enabled them to believe what other adults dismissed and save Hawkins because of it. 

By the end, even the adults are made to properly “grow up.” This is most obvious in the treatment of Hopper. When Eleven disappears in a storm of debris, I was sure he would never recover. He had, after all, spent the entire show fearing this would happen. Instead, he bounces back faster than I did. In their last heart-to-heart, Hopper encourages Mike to accept Eleven’s choice and move on, lest he make the same mistake Hopper had made after Sarah’s death. While there is nothing healthy about dwelling in the past, and Hopper had dealt with the trauma of Sarah in ways that hurt him and those around him, her memory also enabled him to sympathize with Joyce, help her save Will, and open his heart to Eleven, even at great cost to himself. There is a difference between healing and forgetting. Hopper deserved the former but got the latter. The Duffers wrote him a future at the cost of his past. To move on, he must cut ties with most everything that binds him to his own story—namely his friends, his town, and his cabin in the woods—in favor of an ending that mirrors all the others: marriage, a promotion, and a real house in a different city.

We need more people who are not done imagining better worlds and fighting monsters.

There are many reasons why youth are often at the forefront of struggles for justice—sure, they have more time and energy, but they also dare demand what the adult world has declared impossible. We saw this in the Black liberation and anti-war movements of the ’60s, in the early 2000s Occupy Wall Street, and more recently in efforts to abolish ICE and the movement against the genocide in Gaza. In Solidarity with Children, Madeline Lane-McKinley writes that progressive attributes and liberatory demands are often dismissed as childish in a society that wants to blunt their potential. “Language of infantilization,” she writes, “is consistently employed to demarcate what and who has gone too far, too often for the sake of defending the status quo, if not to moralize reformism.” Qualities like hope, creativity, and communal struggle, at the core of early Stranger Things, were ultimately relegated to kid things by what Lane-McKinley would call the “disciplinary horizon of adulthood.” Was Stranger Things ever telling us to be radical? Maybe not exactly. But it was telling us to be curious and imaginative, to embrace our singularities and use them in service of others, to love in concrete ways, to remember the dead, to play, and to keep the magic alive. These are small seeds for potentially big change if cultivated in earnest. 

Instead, the Duffers presented the traits above as childish pelts to shed. The kids are all grown up now—time to put the toys away and settle down. But the reality is that we need more people who are not done imagining better worlds and fighting monsters. Stranger Things started off in praise of the underdogs who dare to believe their own eyes and take risks accordingly. In the end, it parroted a societal dismissal of what it had originally set out to praise: collective life, the courage to take risks, and the belief that things could be different. In so doing, it joined the catalog of texts that present the ideals of childhood as something to leave behind. This not only made for a poorly crafted ending; it was harmful to its audience. The writers encouraged generations of children and young adults to put their play away and leave their communities behind in favor of an individualist, cookie-cutter life. In the footsteps of our protagonists, we are to desire the ostensibly happy endings of well-adjusted adults—that is, nothing that rocks the boat or that exists beyond the parameters of “normal.” 

This is why the only tragic ending in Stranger Things is also the only honest one: Mike, in love with Eleven, refuses to let go entirely. Their story, of course, should be read literally, as one of two young people learning how to be together. But if we run with the Duffers’ allegory, we also learn something important—that the only character who keeps the memory of childhood alive becomes a writer. Mike is not stuck in the past, he just lives life with continuity. Unlike the others who show no signs of being tethered to what happened, his life remains grounded in his story—he keeps a picture of Eleven on his desk and Will’s painting hangs on his wall. And so he writes, to make memory where the others won’t. It’s not a comfortable ending. But it is the one that shows that it is possible to exist in the world without succumbing to the death of being in awe of everything. Because losing the magic of childhood is not inevitable; we are just made to accept adulthood as life without wonder. The spark should be passed along as much as we should carry it with us. After all, it’s not just up to the kids—it’s up to you too. 

A Debut Novel That Writes Magic Into a Difficult History

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

The first and only time I’ve visited Korea was in November 2019, with my father. Although we are Korean American, neither of us speak the language; he is third-generation American-born, I am fourth. As I spent a week surrounded by people with my shared heritage, I wondered: What was the Korea that my great-grandparents knew? What collective histories did they not experience because they immigrated? Who might I have become if my family had never left the homeland? 

These questions resurfaced as I read Jiyoung Han’s debut novel, Honey in the Wound, which begins in Korea in 1902, the year before my own great-grandparents left Korea for Hawaii. Moving across time, borders, and generations, the novel chronicles one Korean family’s story of survival against the violence of the Japanese empire. The narrative revolves around Song Young-Ja, who is one among thousands of women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during the 1930s (euphemistically known as “comfort women”). Young-Ja, along with her ancestors, and her descendants, are blessed with magical abilities that allow them to persist—and resist. Power is not merely a blunt-force tool of the oppressor, but is found in information-sharing networks that women create through gossip; feeling and expressing rage; and symbiosis with the natural world. 

Blending magical realism and historical fiction throughout the novel, Han illuminates the dark chapter of Japanese occupation in Korea spanning five generations and 90 years. As Han’s novel suggests, the aftermath of Japanese colonial rule during the 20th century continues to ripple into contemporary life. Even during my 2019 trip, many Koreans were boycotting Japanese goods, in part to protest Japan’s wartime atrocities. 

Over Zoom in January, Han and I discussed her folkloric inspirations, learning about the legacy of comfort women, and the subversive possibilities of magical realism. 

Morgan Ome: I was really moved by the letter of introduction you include in the advanced copies of your novel. You explain that you were compelled to write this story after reading about the nine surviving comfort women in Korea. Can you tell me more about this inspiration?

Jiyoung Han: I started writing this book because I was so upset about comfort women. Part of the reason I’m so angry about comfort women is the contemporary aspect: how they’re treated by the far right and the Japanese government. But you also have to go back and understand the spread of Japanese imperialism in East Asia from before the comfort women system was established in the ’30s. So it ballooned from that initial moment of inspiration and urgency. 

Comfort women have not felt like they’ve gotten a sufficient apology that was meaningful from the Japanese government, and there still are acts of historical erasure happening today. 

Around when I moved to California, San Francisco put up the Comfort Women Memorial in Saint Mary’s Square [in 2017]. It’s this lovely statue that symbolizes comfort women from all different nationalities, including Korean and Chinese. There’s also an older woman looking up at the three girls who’s supposed to be in the image of Kim Hak-Sun, the first Korean comfort woman to come out with [public testimony]. She’s the only real person in my book. Osaka actually ended ties with San Francisco, which was its sister city, because this Comfort Women Memorial went up. 

MO: What drew you to magic and folklore when writing into this history?

JH: Magical realism is one of my absolute favorite genres. I read Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie and Beloved by Toni Morrison, One Hundred Years of Solitude—all of these big works before my prefrontal cortex had even fully developed. I really love the genre and what it’s able to achieve.

What I particularly like for my approach to this novel is that magical realism offered a tonal counterbalance, because the history itself is so brutal. I wanted to be able to fold in elements of magic to not make it more palatable per se but make it something that people could hold on to with elements of hope. The magical realism in the book gives a lot of the female characters, especially, agency in ways that they might not necessarily have always had. So it was very intentional on my part to be this countervailing force with these atrocious truths. I don’t want to say that magic was the only way that they were able to survive and overcome. But it’s a way to amplify the existing agency, strength, and resilience of the people that were in situations like this.

MO: Can you talk about how you came up with the different magical abilities? I particularly loved Young-Ja’s ability to imbue emotions into her food. 

JH: With Young-Ja, I thought it could be really powerful to subvert qualities like being emotional, or domestic duties such as cooking—things that are seen as liabilities or too feminine—and turn them into an asset for her. Her ability allows her to bring comfort to those around her, as a balm for colonial wounds, but also as a literal weapon that she can wield against people that might otherwise wish her harm. 

MO: And Jung-Soon has the ability to force people to tell the truth so she can gather intel. We often see gossip as women chatting in their communities, but gossip ends up being this powerful information sharing network. 

Her ability allows her to bring comfort to those around her, as a balm for colonial wounds, but also as a literal weapon.

JH: With Jung-Soon, I wanted her to be someone that was otherwise set up to be completely underestimated. She had horrific scarring on her face. She was a second child, a daughter, and kind of quiet and shy. Because everyone else underestimates her so much, it allows her to extract truth from people without necessarily bringing attention onto herself, which is a great asset for her, especially as she’s engaging more in resistance against these colonial forces.

MO: I don’t want to spoil too much for readers, but in the beginning of the book, one character, Geum-Ja, turns into a tiger. In Korean folklore, the tiger is a symbol of courage, strength, and national identity. Why was that symbol important for you to include in your novel? 

JH: Tigers have a funny role in Korean folklore. All the things that you said are true. If you look at the Korean peninsula, Koreans will often say it’s in the shape of a tiger. But in folklore, tigers are also a buffoonish villain that’s often tricked by children or the noble farmer, whenever it’s trying to eat people. I love that duality. 

The reason I wanted to specifically have tigers is that it was yet another element in which colonial oppression was wiping out Korean culture. Tigers were essentially hunted to extinction under Japanese colonial rule. A lot of them migrated up north and then eventually out of the peninsula. I wanted to incorporate that historical fact as something that was both poignant but could speak to this natural folkloric magic that was in Korea at the time. 

MO: The novel concludes in the ‘90s with a character named Rinako, who is Young-Ja’s granddaughter. She feels like a bridge between Young-Ja and the reader, as if she’s calling us to continue the work of remembering and memorializing. Did you plan for Rinako to function in this way?

JH: Absolutely. Rinako has the ability to look into others’ dreams, which is a way for her to commune and connect with the past and all of these hidden truths. The huge theme in that section is about people trying to hide their truths. And not just the Japanese government doing historical erasure, but Young-Ja trying to hide her experience as a comfort woman from her family, or Rinako being conditioned from a very young age that she needs to keep quiet in order to preserve the peace. 

Rinako has the ability to look into others’ dreams, which is a way for her to commune and connect with the past and all of these hidden truths.

It was also really important for me to make Rinako Japanese. I want to make sure that people don’t look at [the novel] as condemning all Japanese people. I’m an American. I love Americans, but I don’t always agree with what my government is doing, and in a similar way, I wanted to show that there are tons of Japanese scholars and activists that have been really instrumental in getting some of these stories and histories and research to come out. 

MO: Rinako gave me a lot to think about. I’m Japanese American on my mom’s side, and a lot of the children of incarcerees didn’t talk to their parents about the internment camp history, but the grandchildren were the ones who talked to their grandparents. Maybe in the time that grandchildren come of age, there’s more discussion about resurfacing histories.

JH: I was really moved by what you said about grandchildren in general being better equipped or better able to talk about the trauma that their grandparents face versus the children of the grandparents. That’s absolutely true for Joon [Young-Ja’s son and Rinako’s father]. He’s actually quite a tragic character, because for obvious reasons, Young-Ja had such horrible PTSD that she was just not able to be a good parent at all. That’s the element of intergenerational trauma that affects him. And even though he turned out in this really flawed way, it’s not necessarily his fault, and I have a lot of sympathy for him. He’s perhaps a little too close to the trauma that was inflicted on him by his mother’s PTSD for him to have engaged in good conversation with her, or resolved it. 

MO: What was your research process like?

JH: I immigrated to the U.S. when I was seven and went through the public education system here. I grew up in the Midwest, which probably contributed to the fact that if Asia was ever mentioned in any of my classes, it was around three historical events that were all connected to American imperialism: the Vietnam War, the atomic bombs in Japan, and the Korean War. I actually don’t think I even knew Korea was colonized by the Japanese until I was a teenager or in college. And that’s around when I learned about comfort women. 

It wasn’t until I started writing this book that I started reading academic texts about the different systems at play, the way that women were recruited, the way their day-to-day life was in these comfort stations. I found lots of oral histories and testimonies from comfort women themselves and I ended up watching YouTube videos of comfort women talking about their experiences. That was a wake-up moment for me when I realized just how horrifying it was, in graphic and granular detail. 

It was really important for me to depict moments of joy and even humor or levity.

We talk about this as history, but sexual violence is still happening every day. Perhaps not in this systematized state endorsed kind of way, but in many of the conflict zones that are active now across the world, there’s rampant acts of sexual violence. 

MO: The section where Young-Ja and other women are experiencing sexual slavery is so disturbing. But I also felt like it was important for the reader to actually understand what they had gone through. The comfort women are given Japanese names and many of the names end in “ko.” You highlight that “ko” is the Japanese word for child.

JH: A lot of the comfort women were really young. In Korean, “ja” has the same connotation as “ko” in Japanese names. A lot of young women born in those decades have names ending with “ja.” Young-Ja is a really common Korean name for women born in the 20s and 30s. I chose that name for her simply because I wanted her to be the every woman of that era. 

MO: One part of the book that has stuck with me, especially in the historical moment we’re living through, is where you write: “Their capacity to experience joy, no matter how fleeting, was a sign of the inextinguishable spirit of their people. Something they swore would never be taken from them.” This line seems specific to your book and to Korean identity, but it could also be interpreted universally.

JH: It was really important for me to depict moments of joy and even humor or levity. I wanted to make sure that these women weren’t just getting together to be super serious all the time and engage in acts of resistance. Of course they still felt fear, they still felt panicked, they were anxious. But having the solidarity of that community enabled them to laugh about the fact that they put dog shit in the rice cakes for the cops. 

Joy as an act of resistance may be a little bit more contemporary and could feel potentially anachronistic in the book, but I think that’s just true. People go through atrocities, but in the little folds and corners, you still have people laughing or finding moments of solace or relief, and that’s what we as humans are wired to seek out. 

Our Wee Town’s Violent History Is Having Its Hollywood Moment

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

An excerpt from Prestige Drama by Séamas O’Reilly

We heard about Monica Logue going missing same as everyone else. It was in the Gazette and I’d know the editor, Deirdre, very well since she comes into the shop the odd time buying flowers for her mammy’s grave. It’s all anyone’s been talking about. You’d think having a world-famous celebrity in town would be the biggest news going, but it turns out her not being in town at all trumps it handy. I reckon she’s taking a bit of time out from the stress of it all and you’d imagine those Hollywood types have their own demons with the drink and drugs although sometimes you see them going into rehab and they’re on some chat show going on about how they were drinking a bottle of wine a night and you think they’ve hardly touched the sides of what we get up to. Sure there’s nuns in Derry drink more than these fluthers and no one bats an eyelid. Most of my teachers were half cut in class, I’d swear it, but I guess it’s different everywhere. Maybe she got a look at Waterloo Street on a Friday night and realised she’d landed in Sodom and Gomorrah and fucked off back to the Hollywood Hills in pure shock.

It’ll all work out in the end. I hope it does because I think she’s marvellous. Me and Paul binged Blackfinch when it was on streaming and I couldn’t believe she was going to be in this thing. You’d almost not mind that it was an American and not someone from here if it’s someone of her talent and stature, and sure it’d mean more eyes on it and Paul was happy about it too because he’s had a glad eye for her since the nineties although he’d never say it but I’ve seen him reading every word printed.

Some of the stories you hear, though. I’ve heard the same as everyone else, that she needed to dry out or she was kidnapped by Provos who’d run out of horses to hold hostage. Some saying she was murdered by Diarmuid himself seeing as he’s the last one saw her alive, and isn’t that always what they say in cop shows before they put the screws on the school caretaker or the weirdo uncle. Few days ago, everyone and their mammy had seen her. Eileen says she was out buying buns in the bakery the day before yesterday which would hardly be the behaviour of someone about to skip town, but I’d trust her as soon as I’d trust an MP, I mean, a greater gossip than Eileen Downey never put her arm through a coat, and I don’t think she means to lie but she gets ideas in her head and lets them run away with her and you wouldn’t say a word to her if you were in your right mind, I mean you wouldn’t tell her the time.

You would get to worrying though all the same. There’s a lot of ways people can go, sure there was a wain on our estate God help us was run over by an ambulance, and another a few years before who fell in the river after a frisbee although they said that wee boy was troubled, never so far to say as he was suicidal only that it was worth mentioning just that about him, that he was “troubled” which seemed to be saying the same thing.

There’s a monument for mental health near where he drowned on the Foyle Road, it’s at the start of the bridge with a few steps reaching out into the river. I always liked it and I don’t often like the monuments but I like that one. They had to cordon it off since people were throwing themselves off it which I said was one way to spread suicide awareness anyway. Next thing there’ll be a wee plinth with a length of rope and a bottle of pills, there yous are, lads, help yourselves.

There’s the other one, the Hands Across the Divide, over by where Tillie’s used to be, it’s two lads reaching out for one another. It’s good because it could be about the Troubles or it could be about mental health or the environment or gays. They’re not touching, the hands, but they’re trying to touch and I reckon that’s the point. It’s all about awareness.

More people have died from suicide since the Good Friday Agreement than were killed in all the fighting before it, I hear people saying that a lot. Father McLaughlin used to say it in mass before collection. Now the details of how fixing the church’s roof was going to help teen suicides was never made clear to me but, that aside, everyone would nod at this fact like it was wile wise. I always wondered how it was that everyone’s killing themselves now when things are better, when no one was back in the day. I read a pamphlet that says a thousand more people died by suicide than murder even during the Troubles, so is that better or worse than now? If it’s better, then it seems a weird thing to go on about, and if it’s worse, then maybe the Troubles were better for people’s mental health than everyone lets on, gave them something else to worry about. But you can’t say things like that these days. Everyone just wants to move past it.

The whole place has gone mad with Hollywood arriving, talking about our wee town having its moment in the spotlight and how it’ll give a boost to the economy like Thrones did for Belfast, as if they needed it anyway. In my own personal view it’s a great thing altogether. Very good for getting the story out there—and if there’s jobs in it, all the better.

The whole place has gone mad with Hollywood arriving, talking about our wee town having its moment in the spotlight.

That’s one thing I think about a lot is jobs, it’s terrible the amount of unemployment that’s around and then you look at some of the people who do have jobs and you wonder how it even happened. Our Patricia’s Turlough minds the cars in the leisure centre up in Pennyburn and I always think how did he even get the job. He’s too good for it, you see, the great struggling actor! And now he’s given Patricia the bug, but sure it’s good to have a passion. It would just be nice to see some passion in the job he actually has, is all I’m saying, face like thunder while he’s raising the barriers and you’d feel bad even parking your car, like you’re taking food from his mouth. Before they started courting, I used to think he must have been born in the centre, swaddled in a kitbag, raised by the lifeguards and handed a work pass. He doesn’t even sweep the floors or hand out swimming caps or anything, I’ve never even seen him indoors, and I always used to joke he probably has a wee pullout bed and a stove to make his tea ’cos he just sits in his wee booth minding the cars all day and the face on him you’d think he was before a firing squad. That to me is a shame to be honest because there’s plenty would do that job and do it with a smile on their face.

But then I suppose my big thing, and as long as I live I will always return to it, is the handicapped, who I think have a terrible time of it already, and could do with a leg-up—or a wheel-up as the case may be. It’s every day I see some eejit collecting trolleys or serving drinks and looking like the world’s not done them any favours and when I see people like that I think: do you know what, that’d be a great job for a wee handicapped person. There are degrees of handicapped but I think it’s something we need to look into if the powers-that-be would give it a moment’s thought. When you do see wee handicaps in jobs they seem happy with it, they’re thankful for the opportunity, and sure if there’s a bit of a fuss learning them the ropes well it can’t be worse than some of the gombeens I see washing cars and doing dishes and not knowing how lucky they are. There was one used to work in Duffy’s making the teas and he was a credit to his disability, always smiling, and if he made a wee mistake he apologised and everything was fine. Except one time I was in there with Eileen Downey and she had a face on her the whole time like she was being served by a chimpanzee and I had to have a word with her and tell her she was being unkind even if he did get a few things wrong. She was put out to put it mildly because he gave her the wrong drink and me the wrong sandwich but I wasn’t complaining and I don’t need Eileen Downey to do that on my behalf, I’m loud enough on my own thank you very much, but the final straw for her was when he touched her biscuit when it nearly fell off her saucer as he was handing it to her and she picked it up with the tiniest tips of her two fingers as if it was polluted, as if he’d pulled it out of his arse in front of her, and what does she do but ask for another one. He was wile confused so I had to step in and tell him, slowly and at loud volume, that everything was fine and I nearly kicked her under the chair, I tell you she went down in my estimation there and then. She said the biscuit was half broke and I said it’ll all end up in the same place once it’s down ye and in any case a kind word never broke anyone’s mouth, Eileen Downey and then she said her Joe was after getting into gambling debts and she wouldn’t have minded if it was the football or the dogs but it was a wee mobile game that had girls with their tits out which I thought was strange that it made the difference to her but I did feel bad then because sometimes people are going through things and you don’t even know and it’s all about having empathy at the end of the day. We got that meal for free anyway because the wee fella forgot to come back with the cheque so it all worked out.

As for the telly, our Patricia thinks she’s hired already. If there’s one good thing about her and Turlough, and I’ll be honest, he’s a nice young man when he smiles a bit, God knows she could do a lot worse, it’s that they raise each other up when it comes to the acting. She’s in with the drama troupe and already sees her name in lights, and with Hollywood coming to town it’s very exciting altogether. Paul says I’m convinced she’s going to get Monica’s part and would I steal the poor woman’s grave as quick, but I paid him no mind because there’s going to be hundreds of parts for young girls even in the crowd scenes, and optimism is a choice, I tell him, why not support your child to the hilt, there’s enough disappointments in life without presuming them in advance. For the big parts I’d find myself a bit more realistic on that score since part of me thinks sure they’ll probably just get wee English girls in and make them do accents like they always do, but I don’t say that except to our Paul and he says the same. I just tell him to make sure he doesn’t say it out loud because then we’d never hear the end of it from Patricia, who’s very sensitive about these things.

Honest to God, you can hardly breathe around her. Twice last week he dropped the ball complimenting her friends, and in fairness he can be useless about these things but she laid the whole trap out for him, you’d forget how devious teenagers are if you didn’t have one under your roof, it’s demons they are. The whole lot of them are convinced they’re made for showbiz, so it was all Kylie wants to be a model and Anna wants to be on TV and he just said yeah they’d be good at it all right and I knew then he’d suffer for that, it was as if he’d scalded her with acid, Jesus Christ, it was like he’d killed her dead. The competition between those girls! Good luck ever working out who’s friends with who and what does be going on with any of them. When they were wains it was all about dance moves and hairstyles and now it’s about who’s got the best arse and the biggest lips and this from girls of seventeen years of age. I pity poor Paul for it because he can’t put a foot right. In my view Patricia is as gorgeous as any of her friends—certainly Kylie, God love the girl but she hasn’t a feature. I said to Paul that Kylie would have better luck as a crash-test dummy than a supermodel and we had a good laugh at that, God forgive us, but then I told him don’t you be saying that to Patricia either, for the love of Jesus, we’d never hear the end of it.

What’s true and I don’t care one jot if I’m biased is that if the casting people are on the lookout for local talent they couldn’t do better than Patricia. She played Aladdin—the boy part—in the panto last year and even without the makeup, which they rightly banned for sensitivity reasons after that whole to-do last year, I swear you’d have thought she was a wee Arab boy. She even got the part over Terri Harkin’s youngest, Alex, who’s a wee they-them, so I was particularly pleased, even though I fully support her visibility and God love them they need awareness too, sure it’s the modern day and you need to be kind, but Patricia just has the goods, and I know I’m her mother but that girl has the goods.

The latest now is they’re casting, and the producers were very pleased with her tape and want to see her for a whole host of parts. The house is elated to say the least and the only sad part, I thought, was that she and Kylie got a look-in but Anna didn’t, but it turns out Patricia has taken against Anna for some reason so it hasn’t made a dent in her happiness, to be honest she might even be happier that Anna didn’t get her dream which is nice for her in a way. I’ve given up worrying about anything else, sure they’ll be thick as thieves again by tomorrow and anything you say, for or against any one of them, can and will be used against you in the court of Patricia McDaid.

All of a sudden I’m flavour of the month because I’m so ancient she thinks I can give her all the information she wants.

Of course, now she’s decided her best bet is to know all about what it was like in the bad old days and particularly how it was for young girls, and all of a sudden I’m flavour of the month because I’m so ancient she thinks I can give her all the information she wants. She talks to me like I’m the last survivor of the Titanic, like she’s only just realised that she was living this whole time with a relic from the Ulster Museum, like anything I’ve ever done has actually mattered. And the things she’s asking, my God do they teach these kids anything at all. I mean this morning she was asking me how we got to school, as if we were dodging bullets the whole trip, and Paul couldn’t help himself then telling her we went to bed on a heap of sandbags and wrapped our Christmas presents with barbed wire and she writing it all down like a thick, we had to laugh. But then she takes me aside and says it’s all about recording history through drama and using art to tell stories and you’d think she was on the couch with Paddy Kielty talking about the struggle of her craft. So there we were in the front room for an hour going over the whole thing and she with the pencil in her hand taking notes, asking me if I’d ever been bombed or shot and me having to tell her my life story stuck without anything to say because I couldn’t believe she was interested in any of it.

And there’s me trying to explain what the army checkpoints looked like or how a bomb site smelled, almost as if I was telling her what the world was like before mobile phones or those times when she was a wain when she and her brother would ask us if we lived around the dinosaurs or when exactly it was that the world stopped being in black and white. And then she’s asking about the killings and what happened to this one and that one and thon, and by the end of it I have her pencil in my hand drawing protest routes and the whole time she’s at me about atrocities and massacres and I don’t know why but the way she’s saying it like she’s someone on the news, or an English person, like she’s a tourist or some fella from the UN on a fact-finding mission, and it all had me grabbing the tissues wondering how it could be she didn’t know, how my whole life I’ve tried to stop her from hearing any of it as if I was trying to protect her and not be like some of the other people round here who’d boil the ear off you never giving over about every last thing that happened, as if they and they alone were God’s one true perfect martyr and we didn’t every one of us go through the same thing.

And wouldn’t you know it, eventually she had me talking about Jamie Devenney, both of us blubbering on the couch and me stroking her hair and remembering when she was just a funny bold wee girl fretting about monsters under her bed and now it’s me worrying about the monsters out there she’ll be set free to encounter.

I wouldn’t say I get emotional about any of it at all nowadays, I’d say my philosophy is I leave the past in the past and there were people who had it worse, God knows, but there was something about remembering what happened to Jamie and the way she didn’t even know his name, she read it from her notes like she’s seen it in a book, and she says is he one of the fellas on the wall and I say aye, one of the fellas on the wall and I say but he was a beautiful boy, you know and tell her all about how the whole neighbourhood were mad after him and she says you wouldn’t know it from the picture. I told her sure that was a whole story on its own. Sad as everyone was when he got shot, I said, there was more uproar when that mural came up and everyone saw Jamie who was our wee pop star, our wee dreamboat, looking like a bank manager or a bus driver, not that there’s anything wrong with people in those professions but he was movie-star good-looking so he was.

And I meant all this to be funny because by this point my tears needed drying, but it came out angry and I found the whole thing wrong somehow, like this wasn’t a story or a page in a book or a scene for some innocent child to be play-acting, this was a thing that had happened, these were people. Patricia God love her was studying all this and wondering what to make of her lovesick heart-broke mammy snotting into a bog roll and trying to get my words out, and I wondered there and then if awareness is all it’s cracked up to be if you can’t tell the whole story, but there’s no way the whole story could ever be told, and every film I ever seen about any place or any war was probably filled with stuff the people from there would hate, things they couldn’t stand, and is this what we’re making for ourselves, a rod for our own backs, a great big heap of shite to raise a bit of awareness of what, of my life of my people.

The thought of that boy and that I’d seen him at a dance two nights before and always felt that maybe there was something there to keep an eye on between me and him, not some deep spiritual connection don’t get me wrong but a wee throw of the eye, a sense that we had a story to tell between us sometime if the time ever came, but all that was thrown away and forgotten about because some cunt soldier shot him in the head in front of the whole street, and now I see him up on that wall every day, just another fading mural like that one down the road of Sinead Bradley’s brother and a couple others but I never knew them quite so well, and there’s one wee fella who has one on the far side of the estate whose name I always forget and I feel the worst for him because it’s been too long now and I can hardly go round asking.

7 Books About the Messy Politics of Indian Meals

Posted on by EL Assistant2

We were at Carter Road, fingers still sticky from the Belgian waffles we’d just demolished, when Bani admitted she’d been forbidden from drinking water at my house. “Because you’re a Muslim and eat meat,” she added guilelessly. Bani and I went to school together in Mumbai, and had been friends for nearly seven years at that point. When my parents couldn’t pick me up from a birthday party a few years earlier, hers had offered to take me in until I got a ride home. At lunch, when Bani needed someone to accompany her to the school gate, where she’d collect her lunch box from the dabbawala, she’d tilt her head at me, wiggle her fingers in a walking motion, and mouth, ‘Coming?’ It was Bani who introduced me to Retrica, the vintage-inspired camera app that was all the rage in middle school, and appeared in almost every selfie of mine thereafter.

So really, it should’ve stung—should’ve smarted—that someone I’d grown up with could even bear to nurse a thought so acrid, so casually cruel. But at thirteen, in the greenness of teenagehood, I took great pride instead in being the Muslim that could stomach an insult, proffer a critical remark with no hint of defensiveness, brag about never having kept a fast during Ramadan—so I merely shrugged and nodded in acquiescence. By the time we’d left the waffle shop and stepped into the mugginess of Mumbai, the sky was tinged with magenta and Bani’s remark had already faded from consciousness. This was in 2014, shortly after the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party rose to power in India in a landslide victory, ushering in a new era of Hindu nationalism which sought to sweep religious minorities to the sidelines. 

Twelve years on, Bani’s remark seems to have foreshadowed a chain of events unfurling in the political landscape of India: reports of cow vigilantes lynching Muslims on suspicion of eating beef, non-vegetarian renters being denied housing in major Indian cities, beef being banned in twenty out of twenty-eight states. What is it about food, I wonder, that can drive one to murder, to be entirely stripped of remorse? Why does the aroma of a certain meal feel like an insult so personal, so scathing, that the only acceptable response is hot, vicious rage? 

The answer lies in the fact that food and politics are immersed in a strange dance, of sorts, where one not only informs but also augments the other—a fact reinforced by political scientist Gopal Guru, who argued that food is a “site of humiliation” for Dalits in a caste-based system like ours. In 2011, the India Human Development Survey found that women in about a quarter of Indian households eat last, stoically gleaning the remnants once the men had eaten their fill. For those hovering at the margins—women, Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis—these facts underscore a jarring truth: food isn’t merely fuel, it determines if they get to survive at all. 

The seven books below encapsulate this sentiment by asking questions that are as jarring as they are necessary: what is acceptable to eat, who is handed the leftovers, whose meals are considered dirty, who toils in the kitchen. And somewhere in between stories of vengeful women, debates about inter-dining, and ethnographic accounts of the beef ban, we stumble upon the realisation that food can be both life-affirming and life-destroying, all at once. 

Chhaunk by Abhijit Banerjee

How are roadside chowmein and foreign policy related? What does a disappointing New Year’s Eve have in common with Universal Basic Income? Few authors can extrapolate the dreary slog of everyday life to economic theories without being overly didactic, but Banerjee suffers from no such predicament. Every chapter begins with a juicy anecdote about food—in one, a sanyasi suckles lasciviously at a ripe mango on a crowded train, putting on a show for his scandalised audience; in another, a group of friends skip lunch to make their evening meal of sutli kebabs feel more rewarding, only to find that hunger has fettered every ounce of their mental energy.

Then, almost as if by chance, Banerjee begins to drift away—drawing unexpected parallels to Xi Jinping’s domestic policy, India’s malnutrition problem, the erosion of democracy, undertrial prisoners. Nothing is too frivolous, everything is related, and it almost always circles back to food. But while Chhaunk is a sobering reminder that the personal has always been political, Banerjee’s writing is laced with levity, making it an easily digestible read in spite of its heft. 

Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada by Shahu Patole

Amidst an ever-swelling pile of desi cookbooks, Shahu Patole’s memoir stands out, not only for the age-old recipes etched into its pages, but because its very existence is an act of subversion. It is true, after all, that Dalit recipes never wriggle their way into the mainstream, into the glossy cookbooks that sit smugly on front-facing displays in bookstores; that has long been a feat reserved only for the upper-caste. “Even my own siblings didn’t like my writing this book in such great detail,” Patole admits in the preface. “But this is the story of the food my parents ate and their parents ate—an acquired taste, one acquired through centuries of discrimination.”

Through a series of vignettes, we learn how Dalit communities—often driven by paucity—use every part of the animal in their cooking, how non-vegetarianism is weaponised to uphold caste hierarchies in India, how some ingredients have historically only been available to the upper caste. And upon reaching the raw, tender marrow of the book, we find ourselves stumped by a more rudimentary question: why has nobody even noticed that Dalit recipes are missing from mainstream media?

Eating Women, Telling Tales by Bulbul Sharma

If Patole’s work has a grim undercurrent, this cheeky collection of short stories pivots sharply, with plotlines that are as piquant as Indian cooking. At first, the characters seem run-of-the-mill, unassuming. But a sardonic tone runs through the book, coaxing a self-conscious giggle out of the oblivious reader, and eventually, giving way to a sticky, viscous malaise that lingers for days after. Perhaps it’s the realization that the mother trying to ‘earn’ her son’s love by cooking for him feels oddly familiar, as does the wife attempting to clog her good-for-nothing husband’s arteries by glutting him with rich, greasy food. 

After all, the women in this book are women we recognise—mothers, daughters, aunts—who spend their lives toiling in the kitchen, their worth forever hinging on how aromatic their tadka is, how thinly they can slice a radish, how swiftly they can plump up a too-thin husband. It is through food that these women are controlled, tyrannised, shown their place. But it’s also through food that they find solace, validation, and sometimes even revenge. 

Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian by James Staples

Emerging out of two decades of ethnographic research in South India, Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian takes a long, hard look at what it means to consume beef in a country where cows have historically been considered sacred. Within the first thirty pages, Staples gently tosses aside the cut-and-dried way in which we usually speak of the beef issue—as a clash between the cow-slaughtering Muslims, Dalits, and Christians and the cow-worshipping Hindus.

While there is, of course, some truth to this notion, Staples brings in a more nuanced view, acquainting us with cow slaughterers who refuse to eat beef, Dalit cattle herders who feel a sense of kinship with their animals, upper caste Hindus who devour beef in secret, and those that wilfully turn a blind eye to the exploitative practices of the meat industry. It is through these encounters that he makes a case for the messy complexity of beef-eating. Especially now, at a time when gau rakshaks are lynching religious minorities on suspicion of eating beef, a book as nuanced as this one feels like a welcome respite, an oasis in drought.

Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai

In the initial segment of this book, we meet Uma, a spinster who spends her days at the beck and call of her parents, only to be met with vitriolic remarks in return. Despite feeding those around her, Uma’s life in India is one of fasting—starved of freedom, education, new experiences. The latter half follows Uma’s brother, Arun, who moves in with an American family, the Pattons, after he enrolls in a college in the United States. The Pattons lead a life of excess—they buy an obscene amount of groceries, have a freezer crammed with meat, and their daughter Melanie obsessively snacks on candy bars only to vomit everything back up.

While their circumstances are unalike, Uma and Melanie are similar in that they’re both unhappy with their lives, which has the effect of thwarting their appetite, both literal and symbolic. There is, after all, a sense of aliveness to hunger—a reaching outwards, a wish for nourishment, the sign of a body functioning as it should. What can be understood of a hunger that is quashed, diminished like theirs? Does it point to a barren inner world? A belief that one’s needs will forever remain unmet? A quashing of desire itself? 

The Flavours Of Nationalism by Nandita Haksar

The urge to pen this book came to Haksar as early as the 1980s, while attending a human rights conference in Amritsar, Punjab. There, a South Indian delegate asked for rasam (a dish typically only prepared further South) despite the conference having a lavish spread of local Punjabi food. This interaction first annoyed and then amused Haksar—who’d grown up with “the Nehruvian idea that we must appreciate the cultures and cuisines of others”—and eventually inspired her to work on a book she imagined would be titled ‘Rasam in Amritsar’.

Only, what set out to be a light-hearted work grew progressively more dismal once the culinary tastes and recipes of India revealed themselves to be mired in socio-political strife. It is with this understanding that Haksar unpacks the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate on inter-dining, the impact of privatisation on the Goan food industry, and the ban on eating beef. But while it unfolds as a narrative, The Flavours of Nationalism is, at its heart, an act of questioning: where do our meals come from? Who is permitted at the table? What food provokes violence? What doesn’t? And more importantly, perhaps, what does that mean for us as a people?

Khabaar by Madhushree Ghosh

Whether it’s buying meat and fish at Chittaranjan Park in New Delhi or watching her mother fry rohu in mustard oil, Ghosh, the daughter of Bengali refugees, nurses her memories of India with utmost fondness after immigrating to the United States for graduate school. In the decades after, she finds herself oscillating between past and present, rootedness and adriftness, belonging and alienation—as is a rite of passage for most immigrants.

It’s only in the aftermath of her baba’s death, and eventually ma’s, as well, that she tries to keep alive her Indian heritage and the memory of her parents, through Bengali food: preparing goat curry in remembrance of her childhood meals, making a “bastardised version” of raita with kefir instead of yogurt, haggling with a local fisherman while buying fresh fish the way her father had taught her to. (“We absorb the fish’s life. We live because they did… Never forget, Puchkey, fresh fish. For fresh life. Always.”) As much as Khabaar is a tale of grief and cultural identity, it is also one of vitality, of recognizing that there is presence even in absence, and that memory—of those departed, of homes left behind—does not have to destroy us. 

Queer Bookstores Across America to Support This Independent Bookstore Day

Posted on by EL Assistant2

April 26 is Independent Bookstore Day, and to celebrate, Electric Lit is once again sharing a round-up of some of our favorite independent bookstores, including a few that are new to the literary landscape. In a time when it seems as if the very earth is moving beneath our feet, we remember that books and bookstores help to ground us. 

This year, we’re highlighting indie bookstores that focus on intersectional LGBTQ+ literature. Save a queer, read a book!

Giovanni’s Room (Philadelphia, PA)

Giovanni’s Room has the bragging rights to being the oldest LGBTQ+ bookstore in the US. A Philly favorite selling both new and used books, it’s part of the queer family that is Philadelphia AIDS Thrift, a gem whose mission is “to sell lovely, useful, interesting, amusing, and sometimes mysterious stuff.” A federally recognized 501(c)(3), they’ve distributed over $5 million to local organizations committed to the fight against HIV/AIDS. Don’t miss Philly Queer Book Club, hosted monthly by the charming and stylish self-proclaimed Book Club Kid, Danny Maloney! You’ll read classics like Sula, Zami, and Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, as well as hot new titles.

Firestorm Books (Asheville, NC)

This queer, radical activist co-op has been a feminist collective and social movement since 2008, and they need your help! Like many small businesses in Asheville, the worker-owned, non-hierarchal, self-managed business was hit hard by Hurricane Helene. Sales are down, costs are up, capitalism is the worst. The bookstore, which provides critical community space and serves as a hub of mutual aid, has been enlisting community support to bridge their gap in revenue and expenses. Even so, they’re continuing to facilitate civic programming like “Your Book Club Has Been Designated a Terrorist Threat,” which disseminates essential knowledge about the landmark Dallas-Fort Worth case after activists were convicted of “material support for terrorism.” Join this beloved indie, become a Firestorm Sustainer today! 

Pocket Books (Lancaster, PA)

Owned by three best friends (who we all want to be our best friends), Pocket Books is an independent, queer, feminist indie committed to “the idea that bookstores are places for communities to share knowledge, wisdom, resources, and connections.” If you’re looking for a hot new title (Horror? Sexy? Sexy Horror?), their book recs are fantastic! They curate an “intentional and eclectic” stock of books, including titles by local writers and small presses; their monthly subscription, Pocket Picks, features early career writers and prioritizes women, queer writers, and writers of color. Pocket Books is so popular and beloved, they recently doubled in size and love, opening their second location in Lancaster, PA. They ship nationwide and offer 15% on all pre-orders! 

Loyalty Bookstores (Washington, DC)

Founded by Hannah Oliver Depp, a Black and Queer bookseller, and now co-owned by Christine Bollow, a Queer, disabled, and biracial Filipina bookseller, Loyalty highlights diverse voices to reflect Washington, DC’s intersectional community. Their motto is, “We Like Books, We Like You, Welcome.” There are many book clubs to choose from: Meet Cute, which reads across sub-genres within Romancelandia; In the Margins, which focuses on marginalized authors; the Big Ass Book Club for ambitious books; and Agatha Christie & Sherry, which pairs Christie with sherry and tea. Loyalty Bookstores is located in Petworth, DC, in the Pop Up at Walter Reed. 

Asbury Book Cooperative (Asbury Park, NJ)

Asbury Book Cooperative is a community-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit bookstore, supported and run by members and volunteers who are always delighted to offer their take on a great book. Selling both new and used books (including a pretty solid poetry section for a store of its size), and located downtown in gay Asbury Park, ABC is an excellent stop on your way to the 5th Avenue Beach. Not only are there readings, workshops, and book clubs—such as an excellent Racial & Social Justice Reading Group—but Friday nights at ABC are usually a great time to catch live music!

Inkwood Books (Haddonfield, NJ)

Located in walkable downtown Haddonfield, not far from a beloved water ice shop, Inkwood Books serves as a community hub, holding story times, book clubs, and walk-ins. They carry more than 18,000 books, including a dedicated children’s section and independent authors and presses. A lively, charming, and welcoming indie, it’s beloved by locals for being a South Jersey “gem.” Pride Book Club runs monthly on Tuesdays! 

Rainy Day Books (Kansas City, KS)

A fan favorite and a highlight at 2024 AWP-Kansas City, Rainy Day Books is one of the oldest independent bookstores in the region. It began in the 1970s as a used bookstore with a unique paperback exchange, enabling customers to trade books for credit. Now, Rainy Day Books is deeply involved in the local community, hosts hundreds of author events each year, and promotes literacy as a cultural hub for readers of Kansas City. They partnered with Lead to Read KC to host the “Story by Story: KC Book Fair,” celebrated queer AWP at Missie B’s, and recently hosted a “Potions & Devotions Tour.” 

Under the Umbrella (Salt Lake City, UT)

Under the Umbrella is a proud safe space for queer folks of all ages to congregate: queer authors, queer stories, queer perspectives. “No other bookstore in the area specifically caters to the queer community,” writes owner Katlyn Mahoney. The indie, which includes a café, also features small presses and self-published writers. Under the Umbrella, prioritizes, “the stories of Black queers—especially Black transgender women—Indigenous queers, and other queers of color, disabled queers, fat queers, two-spirit people, intersex people, asexual and aromatic people, incarcerated queer people, queer sex workers, and other identities within the queer community that experience further marginalization, even within the queer community.” They offer HRT support meetings, skill building workshops, pop-up markets for local artisans, and Queer Speed Date events. For their contributions, they received the ACLU Torch of Freedom Award in 2024 and the 2026 University of Utah Pinnacle of Pride Award.

Women & Children First (Chicago, IL)

Women & Children First celebrates over 45 years of inclusive feminist bookselling in Chicago. They carry 20,000 books that center marginalized voices, facilitating programming and in-kind donations to offer safe, inclusive spaces for the Windy City. They have ongoing partnerships with Chicago Books to Women in Prison, Liberation Library, and Chicago Abortion Fund. Favorite community events include Weekly Morning Storytime, Banned Books Book Club, and a regular array of visiting author events. They’ve even hosted Hot Potato Hearts, a speed dating event that pairs people randomly (some would say “adventurously”) regardless of gender or sexual orientation. Find your personalized reading list for talking to teens, abolishing ICE, or freeing Palestine.

BookWoman (Austin, TX) 

This historic institution is one of the oldest feminist bookstores in the United States. BookWoman was founded in 1975 and is celebrating 50 years of continued community outreach. Originally launched as a women’s collective (The Common Woman Bookstore), it focuses on feminist and LGBTQ+ literature with an emphasis on intersectionality. There are regularly scheduled readings, open mics, poetry evenings, and speakers. BookWoman creates a community space for learning, discussion, and activism. In 2026, this indie is often described as a safe haven and sanctuary bookstore in a red state.

The Nonbinarian Bookstore (Brooklyn, NY)

The Nonbinarian hot pink book bike can often be spotted throughout Brookly, distributing free books to readers in “book deserts” throughout the city. Part of the post-2020 explosion of queer indie bookstores in NYC, The Nonbinarian centers trans, enby, and queer voices with a focus on visibility and community-building. Established in 2022 as a mobile mutual-aid initiative, it has evolved into a queer social hub and community space in Crown Heights. The Nonbinarian is a trans, disabled, Asian-owned collective that is volunteer powered, exclusively queer, and carries new, used, and free books, as well as gifts, and resources. Upcoming events include: Quiet Queers (Silent!) Reading Hour, a T4T Clothing Swap, and bike pop-ups at the Brooklyn Public Library.

Always Here Bookstore (Portland, OR) 

This community-rooted, queer bookstore is a recent addition to the indie landscape. Thanks to community support, the pop-up recently moved into a physical storefront in Portland’s North Williams area and has been creating space for queer gathering. The indie features books with intersectional social justice themes and curates for a diverse readership, including queer and trans people, Latinx communities, and neurodivergent readers. Always Here Bookstore identifies as a living queer community, and they host community gatherings, queer book swaps, and member social hours. 

All She Wrote Books (Somerville, MA) 

Another newer addition, All She Wrote Books is an inclusive queer feminist bookstore that centers socially conscious nonfiction and fiction. Its mission as “an intersectional, inclusive feminist and queer bookstore” is to “support, celebrate, and amplify underrepresented voices through a thoughtfully curated selection of books spanning across all genres.” All She Wrote Books hosts queer-friendly book clubs and community gatherings, facilitates trans and nonbinary voices programming, and offers “Friends of Ruby” memberships for local readers. Upcoming events include a Bookworm Comedy Show, Gentle Yoga for Booklovers, and Queer Literary Speed Dating. After starting as a three-shelf Ikea cart, they’re now at their new brick-and-mortar location in Somerville! 

Emma Copley Eisenberg Is Tired of the Plot Police

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

I first encountered Emma Copley Eisenberg’s work through this wonderful essay from EL contributor Elizabeth Endicott. In it, Endicott chronicles her experience delving into Eisenberg’s Housemates as a plus-size reader; she moves from apprehension to relief to recognition, highlighting Eisenberg’s ability to render fatness without the shadow of authorial judgment. Deeply imagined and embodied, Eisenberg’s work captures a nuanced reality; she doesn’t shy away from the systemic biases and discrimination that her protagonist Leah faces, but at its core, Housemates is also a love story; she reminds us that joy and connection are universal, fundamentally human experiences, and that they’re made possible by the very complex bodies we occupy. 

Eisenberg’s newest story collection, Fat Swim, carries forth this ethos across 10 luminous, visceral stories. Within its pages, the body acts as a setting where desire, hunger, and loss can transform. 

I was honored to get to speak with Eisenberg about pushing through writer’s block, bad film adaptations, and the joys of trampolining from one sentence to the next.

— Lennie Roeber-Tsiongas
Editorial Intern

1. Describe your publication week in a six-word story.

Emma Copley Eisenberg: Getting lost on I-95 on my way to Philly bookstores.

2. What book should everyone read growing up?

ECE: Fairytales. Specifically, Princess Furball. It’s a lesser known retelling of a Grimm’s story. Also In the Night Kitchen, and the Alanna books by Tamora Pierce. And Anne of Green Gables. Oh, and Tuck Everlasting. I just reread and it mostly holds up except for the weird age gap dynamic.

3. Write alone or in community?

ECE: Both, I have to say. It’s very bisexual of me. I need to be alone for the generative parts and the focus, but one can’t really write alone. You need people to walk the path with you.

4. How do you start from scratch?

ECE: I have been getting up early to write, which doesn’t come naturally to me. But there’s something about that dawn hour, where night brain and daytime brain are both online at the same time, that helps me. It makes sense because dawn and dusk are when people pray, too. Also playing, reading, swimming, and not being too precious about anything is important in the scratch phrase. And sometimes writing longhand with a fun pen.

5. Three presses you’ll read anything from:

ECE: Graywolf. Dutton if they’re edited by Pilar Garcia Brown. McSweeney’s.

6. If you were a novel what novel would you be?

ECE: It feels aspirational, but I’d be The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers because it has so many different points of view and weird risks and it’s sad but also funny.

7. Describe your ideal writing day.

ECE: Similar to Ursula Le Guin’s ideal writing day. Wake up early for dawn brain, coffee, breakfast (lots of it), more writing, a walk, lunch, a movie or doing something out in the world, reading, then dinner, then bed early with the cats. 

8. What’s a piece of writing advice you never want to hear again?

ECE: I never want to hear that something “doesn’t have a plot” or to “give it more plot” because I don’t think people really know what that means. A lot of books that feel really propulsive have a plot, they just aren’t incident-based. I had a student at Temple say “I think what people mean when they say something doesn’t have a plot is that they don’t care about it.” Or they don’t care about the character. And I think that’s true. If you care about the character or what’s going on then the incident becomes sort of extraneous.

9. What’s a piece of writing advice you think everyone needs to hear?

ECE: Writing gets done sentence by sentence. 

10. Realism or surrealism?

ECE: Impossible bind. I’m more comfortable in realism. That’s the tradition I was raised reading. But realism is also surreal and weird and strange. Kelly Link and Hilary Leichter are writers who show us that all the time. There’s one story in Fat Swim that has non-realist elements and it was hard but we did our best.

11. Favorite and least favorite film adaptation of a book:

ECE: Well speaking of, I hate the Tuck Everlasting adaptation with Rory Gilmore. Makes it so boring when it’s really an open, soulful book. The Sophie’s Choice movie is also really bad. For best adaptation . . . maybe The Devil Wears Prada? I’ve never read the book and I don’t want to, but I will watch The Devil Wear Prada when I’m sick 4,000 times.

12. Edit as you go or shitty first draft?

ECE: Shitty first draft. I don’t understand the edit as you go people. That would break me.

13. Best advice for pushing through writer’s block?

ECE: This is stolen from Alexander Chee so credit him. He says there’s no such thing as writer’s block, there’s only unmade decisions and shame, which I think is basically true. When you’re blocked you’re avoiding making a decision about the draft, or you’re feeling shame that you haven’t written. Easier said than done.

14. What’s your relationship to being edited?

ECE: Into it. Very into it. Good editors are such a gift, and they help you see what you’re doing more clearly. The editor for my first book also changed the structure of the book in a way that helped me understand what I was trying to do. I wish that editors had more time and space to edit in today’s landscape. Huge appreciation to editors, they’re doing the Lord’s work.

15. Write every day or write when inspired?

ECE: Everyone’s life is different, and I think either can work. I sometimes do the latter, but I would say I’m most productive when I’m doing the former. Conditioning your brain to be creative is like a muscle, it does strengthen and start to come online more consistently if you can be consistent with it. Maybe a better way to say that is write around the same time and around the same place as much as you can.

16. What other art forms and literary genres inspire you?

ECE: Collage, ceramics, and film. Films have helped me figure out the shape of what I want to write more than once. For Housemates, the quest was to make it as good as Thelma and Louise.

17. The writer who made you want to write:

ECE: Carson McCullers and Raymond Carver when I was in high school. And James Baldwin.

18. How do you know when you’ve reached the end?

ECE: I think there’s an intuitive body sense where I’m just like, this is the furthest I can take this thing. There’s this concept in sociology called saturation where you ask the same question of different people and you start to get the same answer over and over again. That’s how I feel when I’m asking my characters a question. My first book was nonfiction, and I was asking real people questions, and you start to hear what you’ve already guessed or imagined over and over.

19. Describe your writing space.

ECE: I’m very lucky to have my own little room now. All my books in one place. I do have my little woo-woo objects (tarot cards, James Baldwin candle, some little rocks). And I also have a really big fat pink chair now.

20. How do you keep your favorite writers close to you?

ECE: I have a tattoo of Grace Paley’s face on my arm. I’ll leave it at that.

21. What’s the last indie bookstore you went to?

ECE: There’s a little used bookstore that just opened in my neighborhood in Philly called Little Yenta Books. And then in Baltimore, I went to Greedy Reads when I was there for AWP. 

22. What does evolving as a writer mean to you?

ECE: It’s seeing what I want to do more clearly and then knowing if I’m doing it or not.

23. Outside of literature, what are you obsessed with?

ECE: I got really into the Winter Olympics figure skating. Alysa Liu and also the evil French ice dancing team. I used to be pretty obsessed with making my own ice cream. I’m pretty into knitting and making babushka triangle scarves for my friends now. And seltzer, my favorite brand is Polar.