7 Books to Help You Battle Burnout

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

In my twenties, I was convinced I had a dream job. For five years I worked as a social media manager for a media non-profit that sent me around the world to cover its conferences online. The keg in the office kitchen became the center of my social life, and I regularly worked late as my team tracked PR crises and moderated Facebook comments. I was invested in the organization’s mission, and I truly believed we were changing the world. But the role came with costs: because social media never sleeps, I was always online, even when technically off the clock. The lack of boundaries and my emotional investment in my work meant that over time, stress ravaged my mental and physical health. Despite an emergency room visit, frequent panic attacks, and migraines from constantly clenching my jaw, I could not see that my job had taken over my life. It was only when I quit that I understood I was overworked and dealing with a dangerous case of burnout.

Burnout is a kind of physical and emotional exhaustion caused by being completely overextended, usually by work or caregiving. It can look like fatigue, hopelessness, a lack of motivation, even cynicism and anger. In my case, burnout overlapped with my depression and anxiety and turned me into a cranky, ashamed mess. I was lucky that I could afford to take time off after quitting, but I learned quickly that curing burnout isn’t as easy as bubble baths and hiking. Burnout isn’t an individual failure, it’s the result of how our economy and our workplaces are structured. We need to call burnout what it is: a workplace hazard and a labor issue.

In my novel But How Are You, Really, executive assistant Charlotte Thorne is forced to face her burnout when she attends a college reunion and her friends pick up on her despair. Layoffs and economic strain have pushed her into a job that sounds impressive but is actually exploitative and humiliating. As she reconnects with other alumni and the woman she once thought she would grow up to be, Charlotte wonders what success means to her—and if the burnout is even remotely worth it. 

Here are seven books that helped me understand burnout, from how to avoid it, to the toxic work cultures that cause it. 

Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagoski

Twins Emily and Amelia Nagoski teamed up to write Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, a holistic look at the biological phenomenon of stress and how it lives in women’s bodies. They make the case that unprocessed stress from work and family life compounds on itself and gradually turns into burnout. A key way to prevent burnout is to help your body complete the activated stress response cycle by releasing the adrenaline and cortisol we feel during a difficult workday instead of storing it up. Physical activity like running, dancing, or even tightening your muscles and releasing them can help your body understand that the stressor has passed and it’s safe to let go of all that tension. 

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

In the era of smartphones, it’s nigh impossible to log off. As a result, it’s hard to create boundaries between work time and free time, between our private lives and our public profiles. Rather than encouraging digital detoxes or purging all wifi connectivity, Cal Newport wants us to use technology in ways that better align with our values, our goals and our happiness. In Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, he argues that digital life has stolen our solitude from us, and we need to take back those quiet moments of reflection where we are alone with our thoughts. Newport’s book is a practical guide that focuses on what is within your power as an individual. Creating space in your day free from stimulation and constant notifications is a powerful preventative step against burnout. 

Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey

Self care rooted in buying little treats and expensive vacations will not save us from burnout, but a true commitment to rest can. In Resistance: A Manifesto, Tricia Hersey urges us to nap, daydream and breathe in order to reclaim our bodies as our own, as opposed to machines that must grind and labor. Her Nap Ministry is rooted in black womanist thought and traces the long history of rest and daydreaming as radical resistance to white supremacy and capitalism. This beautiful book resembles a sermon for the overworked and isolated. “We must lighten our loads,” Hersey writes. “Survival is not the end goal for liberation. We must thrive. We must rest.” It is an open and urgent invitation to reject the idea that our value is tied to our productivity, rather than our humanity. 

An Ordinary Age: Finding Your Way In a World That Expects Exceptional by Rainesford Stauffer

One cause of burnout is the pressure we face to perfect our lives as we grow up, from building extraordinary careers to performing our “best lives” for the approval of others. In An Ordinary Age: Finding Your Way In a World That Expects Exceptional, Rainesford Stauffer unpacks the expectation that we will move away from home, build an extraordinary career, find the perfect romantic partner, and other milestones that have become increasingly unattainable for millennials and Generation Z. Rainesford grants us permission to reconsider the myths we have been fed about success, and to re-define what happiness and “being enough” means for us. It’s possible that a brag-worthy career that toasts us to a crisp isn’t in line with the life that truly brings us joy and connection.

Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Anne Helen Petersen’s viral BuzzFeed news article “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” introduced the concept of burnout to millions of readers. Her 2021 nonfiction book Can’t Even picks up the thread of economic precarity and the myth that everything will work out if we just try hard enough. Petersen makes it clear that burnout is the psychological result of overwork. While burnout has always existed, the millennial generation is being crushed by economic forces beyond their control: student debt, low wages and a shift to contract work, soaring housing and childcare costs, and overall downward mobility. A common symptom of burnout is what she jokingly refers to as “errand paralysis,” the dread and exhaustion many folks feel about high-effort, low-gratification tasks that lurk on our to-do lists, like mailing packages and submitting insurance claims. Petersen frames burnout as a societal problem as opposed to an individual crisis. “I can’t fix you when it’s society that’s broken you,” Petersen writes. “Instead, I’ve tried to provide a lens for you to see yourself and the world around you clearly.”

Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Corporate culture urges us to see our companies as a family, and our careers as sources of deep purpose and satisfaction. That pressure to “love” our job is a big contributor to burnout. But that hasn’t always been the case. Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone reveals that the expectation that we love our work is a relatively new phenomenon rooted in neoliberalism. This elevation of work encourages us to put our companies before ourselves and distracts from our own exploitation. “What is burnout but the feeling experienced when one’s labor of love is anything but,” Jaffe asks. Instead she urges the reader to practice love through solidarity with one another. After all, work cannot love you back because it is not a living human being.

The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work by Simone Stolzoff

Building on the work of Sarah Jaffee, Simone Stolzoff asks what a healthy relationship to employment can look like. In The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work Simone Stolzoff traces the narratives that convince us that overwork is the only way to achieve happiness, success, and meaning in life. One pervasive concept is that of the “dream job,” a profession that feels like a personal calling as opposed to labor. This glamorous, even righteous idea of work puts us at risk of disappointment and heartbreak when the dream job doesn’t match our expectations. It can even make it harder to call out systemic issues within the workplace, from low wages to dangerous working conditions. Instead of a dream job, we should pursue the “good enough job.” A good enough job looks different for everyone depending on our needs. It might not offer the same in-office perks as a glamorous job at a tech company, but it won’t offer free dinners to manipulate you into working late either. “The most important thing work has given me—the thing I need it to give to me—is enough money to live,” Stolzoff writes. “A job is an economic contract. It’s an exchange of labor for money. The more clear-eyed we can be about that, the better.”

“Hell Gate Bridge” is a Harrowing Account of a Woman’s Battle With a Broken Maternal and Mental Healthcare System

Posted on by EL Assistant2

I first met Barrie Miskin in the summer of 2023 in Astoria, about a mile away from the titular Hell Gate Bridge. All I knew then was that she was a writer, and she lived in my old neighborhood. We had coffee at Martha’s Country Bakery and talked about our kids, our teaching careers, and the endless struggle to find writing time. I found her endearing and sweet, and I asked her to send me the memoir she was editing.

When I got the PDF of Hell Gate Bridge, I read it in a single night. It was like watching a horror movie that happened to star my new friend. I wrote her an email the next morning: “Jesus Christ. I can’t believe the bright, funny woman I had coffee with is the same woman who endured this crushing ordeal.”

Hell Gate Bridge is the account of Miskin’s years-long experience battling a dissociative disorder that almost claimed her life. It begins with a very pregnant Miskin checking into a psych ward and descends into a nightmarish tour through our carceral mental healthcare system. She describes feeling as though she is “viewing the world through the scratched and filthy film of a glass box I was locked inside,” and no one can seem to help her get out. Instead, she is prescribed drugs that exacerbate her dissociative symptoms, and she starts learning how to game a broken system to secure her own freedom.

In the book, part of Miskin’s trouble is that her unusual symptoms are mysterious and poorly understood. Eventually, with the help of her psychiatrist father, she figures out her rare diagnosis—Depersonalization Derealization (DPDR)—and finds a specialist who helps her recover. This April, I sat down with Barrie to discuss her disorder, her thoughts on the current state of maternal healthcare, and the process of turning this harrowing experience into a book.

Kate Brody: Depersonalization/derealization: what is it? How did you find your way to that diagnosis? 

Barrie Miskin: I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder when I was in my early 20s. I had these brutal panic attacks, and during them I would have the sensation that I was leaving my body and watching everything as if through a dream. I didn’t have a name for it then. It was just part of my panic attacks. 

When I got pregnant, I felt a sense of shame about being on an antidepressant, so I went off the Zoloft I had been taking for fifteen years. Then, my depression and anxiety returned with a vengeance, and I left them untreated for so long that I began to dissociate. Again, I started feeling like I was watching everything through a dream, which I later learned is called derealization. And this time, I went very deep into it. Family and friends became like alien proxies of themselves. Everything was so scary. When I Googled my symptoms, I kept landing on depersonalization/derealization syndrome or DPDR. But there’s no medication or treatment for that diagnosis, so I kept slamming the laptop shut, trying to will it away.

Eventually I had to do a lot of exposure therapy, and what I believe is called radical acceptance. I started thinking of it like Alzheimer’s or MS. Something I’d have to live with forever. But, in the end, since the DPDR occurred within the context of pregnancy, I did end up getting well. I got lucky.

KB: At what point in that process did you start conceiving of this experience as a story that you wanted to write?

BM: Once I was able to find a therapist who treated dissociative disorders, we had a really long road to recovery—about two years. That whole time I wasn’t conceiving of it as a story; I just wanted to get better. 

About a year after I felt like I had fully returned to myself, my psychiatrist suggested that I take a writing class and explore the experience in that way. I enrolled into the Intro to Memoir class at the 92nd Street Y with Sarah Perry, which was life-changing.

I’ve always turned to books to help me feel less so. When I was sick though, I couldn’t find anything to match what I was going through. Once I picked up some momentum in my writing class, I started to get the idea that my story might become a book, and maybe it could be the book someone else suffering from severe maternal mental illness needed.

KB: One thing that comes up in the book is your grief for your younger self. At one point, you ask Patrick, your husband, “do you remember her?” Obviously, it’s specific to your experience, but I think it also resonates with anyone who’s been severely ill or even more broadly women who feel they lose touch with who they were pre-motherhood. Do you still feel that sense of grief? Have you been able to return to that earlier version of yourself or has some new version emerged?

BM: I feel back to myself as far as my ability to experience joy and my sense of humor. When I was trying to get better, I found myself gravitating towards friends who were 15 years younger. I was mourning our old life in Brooklyn, even though it wasn’t there anymore. All our friends had moved on and had kids. Now that more time has passed, I feel settled. I’m a mom and a wife and someone who’s gone through a major change. I have a confidence in myself that I didn’t have before. I’m a writer, which came as a surprise. Once I started writing, I felt like: I have this for me, this is mine. And I was able to become a part of this amazing, supportive writing community. I was also not expecting that at all.

KB: In terms of writing the book, did you rely on notes or diary entries from your time being sick? Was it mostly drawn from memory or other people’s accounts? How did you put the story together?

BM: I was not taking notes. I could barely read when I was deep in my illness. Once the story got some momentum and I could see that it was taking shape as a book, I relied on my husband and my parents and friends and my psychiatrist to help me piece together details and conversations. I was also able to get the notes from each hospital stay as well as my stay at the clinic. Those were pretty detailed. But honestly, I remembered most of it. I could remember a lot of specific conversations and scenes. When I wrote the first draft, I was in this sweet spot where I had enough space to be objective, but also, it was close enough where I remembered what had happened. 

KB: There’s this heartbreaking moment in the book where you talk about seeing those hospital notes. And there’s this character, Dr. Abrams, who for me was almost a tragically villainous character, because at first, he’s so warm. But then when you see his notes later on, he had written that you were manipulative and inappropriate. I can’t imagine what that was like to go back see the way your trusted medical practitioners were writing about you.

BM: It was shocking. He said I was flirtatious and sexual with him. I mean, I was seven months pregnant and in a psych ward. I had already drafted that section before I received the notes, and he was the hero in that first draft. And then when I got the notes, I felt dirty and disgusting. I curled up in bed after and fell asleep in the middle of the day. I couldn’t believe he saw me in that way. I thought he was trying to help me. 

KB: You touch upon how you went into debt and had to borrow money from family to pay for certain treatments. How do you see class and money having played into your experience? 

The maternal and mental healthcare systems are beyond broken and it’s impossible not to notice the severe injustices within them.

BM: My husband and I are middle class. I’m a teacher; he works in the arts. We live in Queens and rent in a middle-class neighborhood. We are white and educated and come from white, educated middle to upper middle-class families.  We know that puts us in a place of privilege as far as receiving medical care.  I will say, we did go into debt for this care and it took us years and years to pay if off. That being said though, as with most systems in our country, the maternal and mental healthcare systems are beyond broken and it’s impossible not to notice the severe injustices within them. Patients in the psych ward who were white-presenting received care the fastest. All the doctors were white. All the doctors and the patients at the private clinic were white. You can’t unsee that, or turn a blind eye to it. That’s the depressing reality of where we are at right now.

KB: As I was reading, I was feeling so much anxiety that you were putting this all on credit cards. At the same time, I’m thinking, thank God Barrie’s dad is a psychiatrist. You had people who were helping you navigate this and find this obscure diagnosis and the right providers and still you came up against so many obstacles. There’s another world, obviously, where you get stopped at any one of those points. It was harrowing to think that this version of events is maybe the system functioning at its best, and it’s still not functioning very well.

BM: And I’m just there like, could someone please help me? One of my best friends just went through a psychiatric emergency that none of us saw coming. She was relying on me to tell her where to go. I said, go to NYU or Weill Cornell. The rest of the hospital systems, even in a major city like New York are awful. You get treated inhumanely. There’s already so much shame wrapped up in being mentally ill, and then the medical establishment, which is supposed to be there to help you, makes you feel like a criminal instead. 

KB: The way inpatient mental healthcare is first pitched you by your psychiatrist, it sounds nice. You’re like, I’m going to go to the hospital, I’m going to rest and get better. But then immediately what you describe is so different from any hospital experience I’ve ever had. To start with, you’re visibly pregnant and they strip you down, they’re barking orders at you. There is an immediate dehumanization. We treat mentally ill people with such disdain and suspicion, even when they are in the right place, voluntarily seeking help. Did you have any apprehension about writing the book given that stigma, given that you’re still teaching and you have a social life? 

BM: Well, first of all, I use a different last name in my teaching career, which will hopefully deter any students from finding the book. Mostly people have been very supportive, especially my principal and the admin at my school. The people affected by the book have already read it and okayed it. It was definitely was something I had to think about, but the response has actually warmer and more positive than I had anticipated, if anything. 

KB: I’m a teacher, and I found the teaching parts of the book is so wild, because you have to return to this high-stress, high-touch job when you’re obviously not well. There’s just no way for you to take more time off. What was that experience like returning to work when you’re still in the throes of this dissociative disorder?

BM: I was just super lucky, because my boss—I’m going to start crying, because he’s amazing—he wanted to keep me and see me get better. We had co-teachers, and he paired me with one of my close friends and colleagues, and she took the reins. They let me ride it out. I was blank for months. And actually, I have a new job in education. My old boss, my mentor, moved to a different school, and I followed him. 

I had really good union insurance, and we stretched it as far as we could, but we didn’t have enough money. I had to go back to work. I was just lucky to have a really gentle landing and a strong community at the school where I had worked for eight years. It made all the difference.

KB: In the book, the catalyst for this whole episode is that you go off Zoloft when you get pregnant. It’s not medically recommended exactly, but you just feel like it would be best for the baby for whatever reason. And I think everyone who’s been pregnant has had this experience of making choices that are more backed by mommy blogs and peer pressure and vibes than actual science. Is there anything that you like to see emerge in terms of the way we talk about prenatal health care? 

There’s already so much shame wrapped up in being mentally ill, and then the medical establishment, which is supposed to help you, makes you feel like a criminal instead. 

BM: I don’t read mommy blogs anymore. I have not touched a mommy blog. I do not Google a single thing. I am only asking questions of doctors whom I trust. Honestly, I feel like the shame around pharmaceuticals during pregnancy is a way to dehumanize women. I dyed my hair before I knew I was pregnant, and in the hospital, I kept telling people that was the catalyst, even though that’s so ridiculous. I love Emily Oster’s writing around pregnancy. There’s a lot of misinformation out there, but I hope that there is more and more information being brought to light about how pregnant women can take ownership of their bodies. 

KB: Sometimes I feel like we’re making progress, and then other times—

BM: They’re banning abortions. 

KB: Right, as we’re doing this interview, Arizona is reaching back to the 19th century to try to ban abortion. Speaking of, I love the way that Hell Gate Bridge contributes to the conversation around abortion by introducing the idea of a medically, psychologically necessary abortion. The idea that pregnancy doesn’t need to be an imminent physical threat to be endangering your life. It felt very new and necessary.

BM: There is this bizarre notion that your brain and your neurotransmitters and everything going on up there in your head is somehow separate from your body. To me, it’s the same thing. I could die if I were to get pregnant again. And now, there are medications that I’m on that you really can’t take while you’re pregnant. So I’d have to go off my benzodiazepine, and for me, that could mean severe depression or DPDR. I have a daughter, and I have to be a present mom for her. The abortion discourse feels like part of that same misogynistic impulse: don’t dye your hair, don’t eat this, don’t eat that. I have a few friends from the from The Clinic, who were severely depressed and suffering from PPA or bipolar, and they’ve had second children successfully in the intervening years. But that’s a really personal choice. As it should be.

KB: Have you thought about your daughter Nora reading the book in the future? Your love and your desire for her is so powerful and palpable in the book. You talk a little bit about the origin of her name as “light,” and that love does feel like the only glimmer when things are really dark.

BM:  My biggest fear is her reading the book. I am speaking with my psychiatrist about different ways we can approach discussing it with her, but we haven’t really hit on anything yet. It breaks my heart. I didn’t think hard enough about any of this when I was writing the book. I wanted to get the story out, to maybe it could help somebody else. But in my mind, it was always somebody far away. I wasn’t thinking about all my family and friends who are going to read it. 

KB: I wanted to talk about the title a little bit. I lived in Astoria for six years. So immediately, I recognized Hell Gate Bridge. But for people who are unfamiliar, what is it and how did it begin to take on this symbolic power for you? 

I feel like the shame around pharmaceuticals during pregnancy is a way to dehumanize women.

BM: When I was first getting sick, my psychiatrist gave me the sage advice to take walks. So I’d walk to Astoria Park and see the river and have ideation about taking my life. And there was a bridge there with this ominous name, Hell Gate Bridge. It was just always in my mind. I became obsessed with rivers and bridges. And then later in the book, I describe this day I was swimming with my daughter, and I look up and see it there, and I could see that it was just a bridge. You know? And then later, when I was writing the book, I realized that it’s actually from the Dutch hellgat which means “clear passage.” And there was this theme of clarity running through the book. I just want to feel clear. So that stayed with me. 

KB: It reminds me of the end of Darkness Visible, where Styron talks about Dante ascending from Hell: we came forth and once again beheld the stars. Are there books that you feel are like in conversation or related in some way to Hell Gate Bridge? 

BM: Catherine Cho’s Inferno and Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire were the two that I went back to again and again. Also Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms about her recovery from cancer. My mentor Sarah Perry wrote a book called After the Eclipse about discovering her mother murdered when she was twelve. That stayed with me. I don’t know if these are necessarily in conversation with Hell Gate, but they are the books I kept turning to for comfort. I have a special place in my heart for Sarah Gerard, because hers was the first fiction I could read when I started to get better. She explores mental illness in her writing and gets the surreality of it just right. 

I was drawn to books about medical mysteries more than mental health memoirs, because my illness felt really mysterious for so long. There are a lot of mental health memoirs out there, but often I’d get this completely irrational sense of envy reading them, because those writers had diagnoses. I didn’t, and that made me feel even more alone. 

KB: Towards the end of the book, your sister-in-law, Celine, who has suffered from post-partum depression in the past, basically tells you to get off your ass, and you end up coming around to the idea that it’s great advice.

BM: Celine is a terrifying, a gorgeous French woman, and my psychiatrist is also a gorgeous, terrifying European woman. And they both knew exactly what I needed. I couldn’t have whatever the coddling kind of therapy is. I needed exposure therapy. I had to come around to the idea of: you have to do it yourself. That’s the scariest part of mental illness because I wanted to be taken care of, but you just have to take it step by step. Celine’s advice was basically echoed by my psychiatrist. And it’s what ended up working for me. I lived as if, and that healed me.

The Board Will Decide If I’m Qualified to Live in the Basement

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

“The Board” by Elif Batuman

The broker hadn’t arrived yet when I arrived at the address of the listing. A cold, fine rain was falling. Glancing up and down the street, I took in a series of garbage cans and recycling bins. The recycling bins also had garbage in them. Two ailing trees, surrounded by weeds, grew in front of the building, alongside some kind of malformed bush. As I paused to examine the bush, which appeared to be planted directly into the sidewalk, it turned to face me, and I realised with astonishment that it was, in fact, the broker: a young and emaciated man in a textured, shrubbery-colored coat.

“The seller will meet us downstairs,” said the broker in a low voice, and turned to enter the building. I followed him up the front stairs, side-stepping a heap of dirty carpets, which shifted, as we passed, to disclose the figure of a sleeping man who, disturbed by our approach, leapt to his feet and began cursing at the top of his lungs. Something in the broker’s posture, as he brushed past the shouting man, made me suspect that the two were not meeting for the first time.

Abruptly ceasing his shouting, the man turned to me. “You have to help me,” he said in a hoarse, pleading voice. “You have to help me with the board.”

His desperation was so striking that I stopped in my tracks, pausing to face him. But, as I was trying to read the expression in his ravaged face, I heard the broker clear his throat. “The seller,” he said, “is waiting.”

Despite the broker’s youth, I knew him to be one of the most sought-after men in his profession. It was something of a mystery that he had even agreed to meet with me, as I hardly had the wherewithal to make a large purchase, and his commission was unlikely to be a spectacular one. It was possible that, in securing this appointment, I had benefited from the advocacy of some person of influence, whose favour I had found for one reason or another, and who had intervened on my behalf. Whether or not this was the case, he was a figure I could hardly afford to alienate.

“You must forgive me,” I told the man. “I’m not able to help.” As I hurried after the broker into the building, I heard the unfortunate fellow resuming his curses behind me.

Circumnavigating an expensive-looking stroller that had been left in the foyer, the broker began to climb the stairs.

“I thought it was a basement unit,” I said.

“Every building is different,” the broker said. “Especially prewar buildings.”

“Surely the custom of putting the basement on the bottom floor has a venerable, even an ancient history,” I said, attempting a note of levity. But the back of the broker’s head betrayed no sign of amusement, and we resumed our climb in silence.

Finally, taking a key from the pocket of his overcoat—which, in the windowless stairwell, bore more resemblance than ever to a coniferous shrub—the broker unlocked one of two doors on the fourth-floor landing, and we passed into a spacious living room with south-facing windows, wooden ceiling beams, and hardwood floors. I paused to inspect the chimney of what appeared to be a working fireplace. But the broker, with scarce regard for the custom stonework, strode through the room and into the hallway.

Proceeding past a master bedroom, and a home office that could easily have accommodated a twin or perhaps even full-sized bed, we arrived at a newly remodeled bathroom. But the broker showed no interest in either the rain forest shower or the reclaimed bronze fixtures. Instead, he opened the linen closet and began removing stacks of plush towels, placing them with care on the vanity. When he had emptied the shelves, he pressed a panel in the back of the closet, which collapsed to reveal a pitch-dark airshaft. Climbing up the two lower shelves, the broker deftly maneuvered his body into the airshaft.

“This is an original detail,” he said, indicating what I saw to be an iron ladder descending into the gloom.

The way down the ladder felt significantly longer than the four stories we had climbed to reach it, and my hands were soon smarting from gripping the iron bars. I congratulated myself on the decision to wear running shoes, rather than the medium-heel Chelsea boots I had been considering. As I was wondering how much farther we had to go, and how far we had already descended—six floors? seven?—the ladder came to an end, leaving me with no choice but to drop several feet to the polished concrete floor. The broker—he was wearing glossy oxblood loafers—had clearly sustained some slight injury to his ankle, which he was doing his best to conceal.

Looking around, I perceived that we were in a moderately sized studio, with Bosch appliances and an exposed brick wall.

“It’s actually a junior one-bedroom,” said the broker, pulling a sliding door from the wall, blocking off the alcove that contained a Murphy bed. Looking around, I understood how the young broker had earned his reputation.

How many of his colleagues would have failed to identify what I now realized was—despite some slight peculiarities, which were, in any case, hardly shocking, given the price—a charming and centrally located apartment? There were, of course, no windows, but the recessed wall lighting gave the living room a homey glow. As I cast an eye over the low divan heaped with colorful cushions, I felt myself shaking off the mood of anxiety left by the long climb down the airshaft.

One corner of the room remained in shadow, and contained a plush dog bed, on which a cashmere blanket had been elegantly tossed. The five years in my childhood during which my family had had the means to keep a standard poodle have been preserved in my memory as the happiest time of my life, and this evidence of a similarly sized creature in residence struck me as an auspicious omen.

In the next moment, it occurred to me to wonder how the dog customarily entered and left the apartment, since it could hardly be expected to climb a six-story ladder. “So, tell me about this ladder,” I said to the broker. “Is that the only way to get in and out?”

“This building is pretty strict with its fire code,” replied the broker—somewhat cryptically, to my mind.

“But how,” I asked, “do they walk the dog?”

I realized, with a start, that what I had taken to be a cashmere blanket was actually the emaciated figure of an aged man with a long beard.

“The dog?”

I gestured toward the dog bed.

“There is no dog,” said the broker, and I realized, with a start, that what I had taken to be a cashmere blanket was actually the emaciated figure of an aged man with a long beard.

“Here we are,” the broker told the man in the dog bed, raising his voice.

“Ah,” said the man, slightly moving his head.

“This is the seller,” the broker told me.

“How fantastic to meet you!” I said, extending my hand. In my eagerness to hide my discomfiture, I had, perhaps, adopted a tone of excessive heartiness. The man looked at my hand, or near it, and briefly seemed about to speak, but did not, in the end, do so. “I love your apartment,” I continued. “It’s just what I’ve been looking for. I’d really given up hope of finding anything like it.”

At these words, the man, seeming to exert superhuman effort, raised his eyes to meet mine. I was surprised by the keenness of his gaze. The broker, seeming to recognize some signal, stepped forward with alacrity, inclining his body toward the dog bed and positioning his ear close to the seller’s face. Having listened in silence for some moments, the broker stood and faced me, and, when he spoke, it was with a newly belligerent note in his voice. “Listen,” he said. “The seller agreed to this viewing for one reason: because we were told you’re not a tire-kicker.”

“I see,” I said, suddenly adrift in a sea of speculations.

They had been told . . . by whom? So someone powerful had been pulling strings on my behalf.

“Are you a serious buyer, or aren’t you?” barked the broker.

I took a deep breath, recognizing that the crucial moment had arrived, and demanded swift action. It occurred to me, as I considered my options, to ask whether the seller had plans to move out—and, if so, whether his physical strength was adequate to their execution. As I was choosing my words, a series of images flickered before my eyes, most of them concerning the circumstances that had made my property search so imperative. I saw the disappointed faces of my family, should I prove unable to remain in this city, on which so many of our hopes depended. Finally, I saw the face of Eveline, our standard poodle. I saw her customary hopeful expression of ready intelligence; I saw her eyes full of pleading, as they had been at our last encounter. How much worse than even the loss of Eveline, if I were forced now to leave the city.

By comparison, I felt, the seller presented a relatively unobjectionable figure, unlikely to cause any disturbance, for example, through loud noises or sudden actions; it was, moreover, a poignant but inarguable fact that whatever inconvenience might be created by his presence was unlikely to be of a long duration.

“I’m a serious buyer,” I said.

The broker nodded briskly. “The board will consider your application,” he said—and, approaching the bed alcove, he opened a closet I had already admired for the number of suits, shirts, and coats it accommodated. Pushing these garments aside, he revealed a narrow passageway, into which he disappeared. 

The assembled board members were seated around an oak table, in a room with leather panels. By some curious effect, the flickering light from the wall fixtures resembled torchlight. As there were no unoccupied chairs, I remained standing.

“Have you ever been a homeowner?” shouted a man with a weathered face and excessively straight posture.

A murmur passed around the table when I admitted that I had not.

“At your age? You’re hardly young,” remarked a woman with pleasantly unkempt salt-and-pepper hair; she wore wooden earrings and a batik dress. The pointedness of her observation was mitigated by a kindly, soothing tone, which I strove to replicate in my reply.

“The time for a new undertaking may come at any age,” I said, smiling.

The woman continued to look at me, now with an expression of serious concern. “I cannot agree,” she said. “No, I cannot agree at all. One does not start new undertakings at any age. To attempt to do so is not just unrealistic, but tragic—a certain sign of some tragedy in the past, if not the future.”

“At any rate,” put in a clean-shaven man in a suit, with a hint of a Central European accent, “we are hardly looking here for adventurers.”

“I understand your concerns,” I said, “and I assure you—”

“You cannot understand,” pronounced an old man at the head of the table, presumably the director of the board.

“Why not, when the concerns are so natural? But you see—”

“It is not only that you yourself have never served on a board, but that you are so far from having been able to do so that, as you yourself just admitted, you have never owned property anywhere—let alone in our city,” said the man in the suit. “What, then, can you understand?”

I glanced at the broker, who was standing some feet behind me, but his total engrossment with his cell phone made it clear that, whatever his stake in its outcome, I could not rely upon his assistance in the interview.

You’re starting to get that you’re not qualified.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I began. “Friends, if I may.” In truth, I detected no sign of friendliness on any of the faces turned toward me, so that this form of address was dictated more by wishful thinking than by any aim towards accuracy. “It is true that I have not owned property, and that, at my stage of life, this may be viewed as a form of negligence.”

“Hear, hear!” put in a man with ferociously orange hair. At this outburst, the old man at the head of the table directed at him a look of such unconcealed contempt that the orange-haired man fell to coughing.

“Nonetheless,” I continued, “I have been proud to call this city my home for eleven years. You will agree that it is not every newcomer who lasts eleven years here. I could hardly have accomplished so much without a keen awareness of the challenges faced by the people of this city, as well as the impossibility of being too scrupulous in choosing one’s neighbors.”

The director fixed me with a gaze of profound weariness. “You say you are aware,” he said, “yet you are no more aware than a blind man is aware of the viper coiled in darkness, silently poised for the strike.”

Somewhat taken aback, I assured him that I did not doubt that this was so, and that, since on this, as on all other points, his knowledge was greater than my own, the most efficient way forward might be for the board to tell me its concerns—insofar, I added humbly, as someone like myself was qualified to address them—so that I might attempt to lay them to rest.

“So you’re starting to get it,” piped a gaunt woman in a designer tracksuit. “You’re starting to get that you’re not qualified.”

“But I haven’t yet presented my qualifications.”

“Qualifications!” snarled the orange-haired man. “Qualifications—when before us we see those shoes!”

“My shoes?”

The director closed his eyes. “These shoes. These sneakers,” he began, but the task was too much for him, and he lapsed into silence.

“This . . . ‘footwear’ indicates not just a lack of concern for formal protocols, but a level of physical activity that we cannot view as favorable,” picked up the man in the suit.

I admitted that I had been apartment-searching for some time—an activity that often involved a great deal of walking.

“Walking, at all hours of the day and night, I suppose—indoors and out!” snapped the woman in the tracksuit. “Without a thought for those around you.”

“I do always wear slippers when I’m at home,” I said.

“Shoes, slippers—pah!” She waved her hand. “It’s the walking. The weight on the floors, the vibration, the potential damage to the internal structures.”

“But, with a basement unit—with the ground floor—”

“How can you know what’s under the ground floor?” demanded the man with the weathered face.

“Ignorant!” shouted the orange-haired man. “A negligent ignorance, typical of the unpropertied.”

I felt a flicker of impatience. “How can I overcome that ignorance, if it’s a ground for my not being able to buy an apartment?”

“This is a place of residence—not an educational institution.”

“A tragedy in the past—a foundational trauma,” the woman in the batik dress said sadly.

A curtain seemed to fall before my eyes, and for some time I heard nothing of what was being spoken.

“In view,” the director was saying, “of your incomplete application . . .”

“My application,” I echoed. On the one hand, I felt that I had hardly had time to submit an application, since I had only just seen the apartment for the first time. On the other hand, I felt that the director was right, that I had submitted an application, and that its faults were all that he said them to be.

“Missing all the most essential elements. What are we to understand of your financial history, your job security, your likelihood of suffering serious illness, requiring, perhaps, round-the-clock medical care, causing inconvenience to the others in the building?” asked the man with the weathered face.

“What you do not seem to understand,” began the director, closing his eyes with effort.

“. . . would take you ten lifetimes to learn!” put in the woman in the tracksuit.

“What you do not seem to understand is our responsibility. The responsibility of the board. The weightiness of the board’s responsibility.” As he spoke, the director’s head drooped forward, as if under the weight of which he spoke. “There is no decision more serious than whom to admit to live here. To live, after all, is a weighty matter. There is none weightier. To live—or not to live.”

“Not to live,” I echoed.

“Precisely. Not to live here. And what is life? Where is life? Where is it sustainable? To allow life where life cannot be sustained is an irresponsibility—and so our responsibility, the responsibility of the board, is not just to the tenants, but to the city itself.”

“Friends,” I said, several hours later, “I must thank you for helping me to understand more clearly the limitations of my knowledge, of my qualifications to live. I will trouble you no further.” As I turned to leave, the broker didn’t look up from his phone screen, on which, I saw, he was manipulating rows of rapidly accumulating, brightly colored jewels.

From the boardroom, I proceeded by means of the passage back to the studio, entering from behind the suits in the closet. The seller, from his place in the dog bed, fixed me with an avaricious gaze. Ignoring him, I made my way to the ladder. It was positioned so close to the ceiling that I had to jump as high as I could to even brush the bottom rung with my hand. Casting my eye around the room, I noticed a footstool under the counter. By dragging it under the ladder and climbing on top of it, I was able to grip the bottom rung with both hands. My feet hung an inch or two above the footstool. I did not, at that point, feel capable of letting go with one hand to reach the next rung. So I simply hung there, for some moments, contemplating my next move.

7 Novels That Give You Hope Before Devastating You

Posted on by Jo Lou

I feel like we look to fiction books to either uplift us and make us feel great about life and the world, or to devastate us and make us feel poopy about it. Personally, I believe that even in the latter instance that poopiness is meant to uplift us in how we go about living our lives afterwards. Has that book elicited a change in us at all? Are we behaving differently due to something in the novel, and acting out a hopeful outcome every day?

I feel sorrow stronger than I feel joy, so I love books that reflect that too, and make me commit to something through that feeling. The books that have affected me deeply have been almost always books with bad endings, where things don’t work out, and where things go from bad to worse, or where everything goes to shit at the end.

My own book, Land of No Regrets, is a book where things may go from bad to worse, but hopefully has something in it for readers to reflect on as a result. Four boys are sent away to a religious boarding school in rural Ontario, Canada, and quietly start rebelling against their new lives. They build up grand machinations for a different life, and dream bigger than their means, snowballing a series of events they have no control over to a cataclysmic result. 

I bristle a little when people say they don’t have an appetite for heart-breaking novels, or books where things don’t work out. People can ultimately choose whatever they want to read obviously, but I really wish they couldn’t. I think people have a responsibility to entertain themselves and feel something when reading, and I think books that make them feel bad can do that just as well as books that make them feel good. I think these seven books do a great job of illustrating that. I would love for people to make themselves sad on purpose through books, and then reflect on how to be happier and better as a result. Small ask, I know. 

Which books leave you feeling moved, books where everything works out in the end, or books where everything goes to hell?

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go is a novel set in a fictional boarding school, where we’re introduced to a sci-fi-y, speculative setting where some humans are bred to simply donate their organs and then die. In this pursuit, these donors are given these really nice lives where they’re healthy, eat well, get exercise, but also build strange social relationships as they slowly learn what their fates are to be. Stunted, awkward and depressed, they mostly lead short lives with loose connections with one another. We are introduced to hope through the rumours of donation exemptions granted to the doomed if they are in love and can prove it. Two characters, who are very much in love, hold onto this hope and start to build up little pieces of evidence of their love, like drawings or artwork they create. Slowly, readers start to learn about small pieces of evidence that support this theory, like older folks who are still alive and matriculated at these institutions, or stories about couples who were shown mercy. They might make it out right? And shut down the boarding school for good? Turns out, exemptions aren’t granted, it was all just that, rumours. Everyone you grow to love and hope for dies and we’re left to reflect on the human cost of development when an identity supersedes the value of a soul.

Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman

Noughts and Crosses is a YA novel set in a world where white people were the slaves all along. Bear with me. It’s a speculative fiction series about racism, told through the eyes of star-crossed lovers who are not meant to be together, because one of them is white and one of them is black. The books are well written, like a modern day Romeo and Juliet, and are set with an interesting premise for teenagers who can still be surprised by thought experiments. At that age, you’re used to books having happy endings, and things working out for protagonists in the end. Sure, once in a while (Bridge to Terabithia, Where the Red Fern Grows, etc.) things don’t work out, but for the most part, you expect love to. This isn’t the case here. Racism grows, both sets of parents on either side are dead-set on separating the two, even trying to force the protagonist into an abortion. In the end, her fated lover is hung at the gallows for ‘raping’ her, and that’s how that book ends.

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, by Donald Keene

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai is an epistolary novel that feels foreboding from the first page to the last. The entire time I read it, I had the feeling that something was off and disturbing, and I loved it. Dazai doesn’t attempt to hide this feeling at all, telling readers exactly how his protagonist feels about himself, others, and the world around him. This dread permeates every page of the book as the self-pitying protagonist’s list of misdeeds grow. Guilt and shame abound as our protagonist Oda destroys marriages, becomes a drunk and a drug addict, finds sobriety and then relapses, completely unable to connect with humanity until finally, he’s taken away to exist in limbo amongst quiet nature. In real life, this is when Dazai killed himself.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

I read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in high school, as I’m sure many people did, and absolutely loved the real-to-life ending, and honest portrayal of pre-colonial Nigeria. As an idiot, I’m always learning, so I loved learning about the harsh-by-my-standards conduct of Okonkwo, a guy caught in standards of patriarchy that would make Andrew Tate pale in comparison. Okonkwo thought it was feminine to owe money to people. Anyways, living like this leads to disaster for him. The book takes place right around the time European missionaries showed up to colonize the land in the late 19th century, and demonstrates what happens when your community is made up of people who don’t think it’s cool to behead white messengers, and you’re also too ‘based’ to influence your community through love or diplomacy, or maybe things are out of your control. Either way, after a loss of face, dishonour, and exile, Okonkwo kills himself and becomes a paltry historical footnote.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Lord of the Flies’ impact on me can’t be understated. When I read it years ago, I loved how brutal and inhumane those children became over the course of events in the novel. I knew that when I wrote Land of No Regrets, I wanted to capture even the barest glimpse of the brutality humans were capable of, through the lens of childhood and young adulthood. That meant stranding them, not on an island, but at a boarding school, the setting for so many coming-of-age tales. In the same way Lord of the Flies is intended for adults, I wanted my own work to be intended for the same group, and to show the disastrous results of what happens when young people receive either no guidance or poor guidance as they indulged in every misdeed they could get away with. Fights, hunting pigs, theft, and finally, killing another kid, as chaos consumes the island.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Books where things end in a painful, awkward, stunted manner are my favorite. They force us to wrestle and sit with a writer’s decision to tell us something we were not expecting. In The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy weaves this masterful narrative of caste discrimination and class conflict, through the eyes of children. Rebellion can barely be afforded, and so one of the protagonists, a single mother, acts out through an affair with an Untouchable, the lowest caste of humanity in southern India. Communism is rising as the middle class family responds to it with alarm and opposition. One of the elder matriarchs of the family, Baby Kochamma, is an absolute piece of shit, a brown Auntie on hate roids, and manipulates events to bring about destruction and see everyone as miserable as her in life. I loved it. More than anything, Roy showed a true-to-life depiction of what happens every day, how people struggle and fail and die despite holding onto sad hope for a better life. I loved it.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

Finally, A Fine Balance was the first book I read after finishing my undergrad, when the love of reading was almost beat out of me by having to read essays by Northrup Frye, and pretending Harold Bloom was an erudite worthy of worship. A Fine Balance left a greater impact on me because of the dire fate shared by all four protagonists. Indeed, it made sense that the book was so aptly named in reference to the middle sections that were a thin, fine respite that balanced the tragedy that would come before and after. In this same way, I wanted to present a story with some joyous balance in the middle as well. You really believe that this was going to be that diaspora literature full of hope, where young brown souls pull themselves out of ruin and poverty by their bootstraps, against the backdrop of Indira Gandhi’s India. An independent woman starting a business venture, sewer rats with dreams, and a young man studying hard. All you have to do is believe in the human spirit and extoll virtue. Instead, what really happened happens. Maim, castration, poverty, imprisonment, pity and suicide.

65 Queer Books You Need To Read In Summer 2024

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

A confession: I very nearly quit putting this list together. 

Throughout the year I keep a running list, adding new names whenever I learn about an upcoming queer book—from Tweets, publicist pitches, endless NetGalley scrolls—and I usually start writing the blurbs for each book a few months before the list is due. Let me also add that, because I am a novelist myself, someone who works very hard to put words on the page in a good-enough order for someone to respond to them, I try and read at least a little of each book featured. And here’s an incredible truth that’s both deeply satisfying and makes my job surprisingly difficult: there are more and more queer books published every year. There was a time when I could complete a list like this in an afternoon; I was lucky to find a dozen explicitly queer titles. Now there’s a pretty solid chance I miss a good number of them. 

In mid-December—at the half-way point, and a couple days after my birthday—I looked at the list, halfway done then, and thought, “There’s no way I can do this. There’s no way I can finish putting together this list in a way that does each book justice.” Partly it was the volume, yes, and partly it was the ambient dread of being alive in 2023. Partly it was also because of the lingering emotional hangover from publishing my debut novel and the approaching completion of my second—experiences that have left me excited, enervated, vulnerable, and protective of my own mental health. Partly I’ve become wary—weary?—of continuing to delineate LGBTQ stories from cis-straight ones, as if our identity is a genre, as if I’m daring hetero readers to overlook these books because of who the protagonists and authors choose to fuck. Partly—maybe superficially—I felt a crippling nihilism at the idea of putting so much time into this list only to have to promote it on the hollowed-out shell of an app whose home screen now serves as a violent reminder of how much we’ve lost at the whims of idiotic wannabe despots. 

Here’s how I finally finished this list: I read all the other ones. I went through most of the “best of” lists from last year, the “anticipated” lists for this one. And while we’re thrown a couple bones every now and then, given some gestures at progressive appeasement, our stories are still routinely passed over. Queer culture—our fashion, our humor, our art—has always moved everyone forward, toward a better, freer, more-fun world; we are and have been the tide that lifts, so our stories deserve not only to be included but centered. 

Here are 65 works of literature that will lift us all this year—bold new books by Danez Smith, Stacey D’Erasmo, Desiree Akhavan, Judith Butler, Lucas Rijneveld, R.O. Kwon, and Miranda July; and auspicious debuts from Santiago Jose Sanchez, Emma Copley Eisenberg, and Ursula Villarreal-Moura.

Blessings By Chukwuebuka Ibeh (June 4)

Ibeh’s graceful and poignant debut, set in a post-military Nigeria on the brink of criminalizing same-sex relationships, follows Obiefuna, who faces ostracism from his family and societal persecution after being discovered in an intimate moment with another boy. Americanah author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls the novel “so wonderfully observant, and so beautiful.”

The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan (June 4)

Everything Patrick Nathan writes is a banger, whether it be a wrenching coming-of-age novel, a work of criticism excoriating our country’s authoritarian obsession with images, or even his incisive Substack. Expect no less from the author’s second novel, which follows a closeted screenwriter in McCarthy-era Hollywood and the big screen starlet who seems to offer a sort of salvation. A monster mash between Sunset Boulevard and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. 

The Other Olympians by Michael Waters (June 4)

In 1934, Zdeněk Koubek, a Czech track star set a record in the women’s 800-meter dash. A year later, he announced that he was living as a man. He became something of a celebrity, so why don’t we know about him? Koubeck is at the center of Michael Waters’s fascinating first book, an important dive in to the archives, pubbing just in time for the summer games in Paris and amidst unprecedented panic over and attacks on trans and intersex athletes. 

Women by Chloe Caldwell (June 4)

Crazy how long ago 2014 feels, maybe even crazier to think that a decade ago it felt as though there were so few queer books being published—especially books about queer women—that we and all our friends and exes and friends-who-are-exes kind of just passed well-worn copies of the same ones around. That’s how Caldwell’s revelatory novella came to me, a copy that I probably left in some other bedroom. As Katie Heany writes in the foreword to the reissue: “For a little while, it wasn’t reliably easy to find Women in the wild. Copies were like shared secrets—you had to fall in love with someone in order to get your hands on it.” Now here we are ten years later, and what a gift it is to be able to reread and re-experience this cult classic, the story of a woman who falls in disastrous and delicious love with a woman for the first time. 

All Friends Are Necessary by Tomas Moniz (June 11)

Chino Flores is less starting over and more learning to put himself back together again. Once a married middle school teacher in Seattle, he’s now temping in San Francisco, dating men and women. There to help is group of new friends, including a red-haired metalhead and a couple with an OnlyFans account. The second novel from Moniz, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award, is, according to author Joseph Han, a “splendind and rejunventing novel [that] will make you feel so full and alive, held and comforted.”

The Sons of El Rey by Alex Espinoza (June 11)

Love and legacy square off in this multi-generational saga following a family of luchardores from Mexico City to Los Angeles. In one corner is Ernesto Vega, a former pig farmer turned famous wrestler; in another corner is Ernesto’s son Freddy, who’s trying to save his father’s gym, while his own son, Julian, navigates the gay dating world as a Mexican-American. 

Cicada Summer by Erica McKeen (June 18)

Canadian writer Erica McKeen, whose previous novel Tear was awarded the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for literary fiction, tells the story of a woman reeling from her mother’s death and quarantining with her grandfather at his lakeside cabin in Ontario. Things get complicated when her ex arrives unannounced and the trio find a strange book written by her late mother. 

More, Please by Emma Specter (June 18)

Specter, a culture writer at Vogue and vital voice in the literary landscape, makes her book-length debut exploring our love-hate relationship with food, how it can be both a source of nourishment and shame. Kelsey McKinney, host of the podcast Normal Gossip, calls the book “a five-course meal of delight. It is an absolutely delicious read, that never shies away from the truth in favor of some tidy, societally approved narrative.”

Hombrecito by Santiago Jose Sanchez (June 25)

In Sanchez’s soulful debut, a mother moves her two sons from Colombia to Miami, where the three of them rebel against and attempt to revel in their new lives. Santiago, the younger of the two boys, begins to explore his sexuality and eventually relocates to New York. But when his mother invites him to tag along on a trip back to their homeland, Santiago goes, forcing a reckoning with his father, his mother, and his motherland. 

Please Stop Trying to Leave Me by Alana Saab (June 25)

We’ve all been there: seeing an ad on Instagram and believing it to be a sign from the divine to make changes in your life. For Norma, the narrator of Saab’s debut novel, this social-media-generated spiritual suggestion tells her to break up with her girlfriend, which her therapist sees as a symptom of deep depression and dissociation. It might, of course, also be related to Norma’s inability to finish her book. Or it could be good old childhood trauma. Saab unfurls the very heady relationship between creativity and mental health. 

Coachella Elegy by Christian Gullette (July 1)

Cue the Frank Ocean and Lana Del Rey. I had the chance to hear some of the poems from Gullette’s forthcoming collection this past summer at Kenyon College and I found myself counting down the days until I could get my hands on the whole book. With the sparkling fluidity of sunshine in poolwater, Gullette acutely captures how California is not just a state but a state of mind, a quintessentially American place of Beginning Again, yet so often it is—like the festival referenced in the title—a mirage. 

Misrecognition By Madison Newbound (July 2)

I had to get my hands on Newbound’s debut as soon as I saw the evocative cover and read what it was about: a young woman reeling from her breakup with a polyamorous couple cyberstalks a straight celebrity who found fame playing gay, and ends up falling for the actor’s androgynous dinner companion. I got to blurb the book, but I’ll let Garth Greenwell’s always-wonderful words sell you on it: “I’ve never read anything that captures so vividly the distinct texture of desire, at once feverish and vacant, engendered by the infinite scroll of online life.”

Anyone’s Ghost by August Thompson (July 9)

A novel that shares its name with a song by The National will always stir my interest. Thompson’s debut, which has received glowing praise from literary heavyweights Jonathan Safran Foer and Junot Diaz, tracks the blurred-lines intimacy of two boys who meet as teenagers and dart in and out of one another’s lives. 

The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry by Stacey D’Erasmo (July 9)

As far as I’m concerned, Stacey D’Erasmo’s The Art of Intimacy is required reading for any and all writers, a masterclass on how to render the electric tension that occurs between characters on the page. Her latest looks just as important: a collection of conversations between artists on what it means to make and sustain a living as a creative person.

Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna (July 16)

Named one of Publisher Weekly’s Writers to Watch, spoken word poet McKenna debuts with this novel following a trio of “desperate, tetchy, and horny” characters across London during the 2019 heatwave. There’s Maggie, a waitress and aspiring artist who chooses to flee the city after she becomes pregnant; Ed, a bike courier and father-to-be who has been secretly hooking up with men, including Phil, Maggie’s best friend. Fellow poet Eileen Myles calls it “A love letter to cities and people and heartbreak.”

The Nude by C. Michelle Lindley (July 23)

A little Cusk, a little Tartt—Lindley’s shrewd and sensual debut centers on an art historian traveling to a Greek island to acquire a recently discovered female sculpture and ends up embroiled in a complicated relationship with a translator and his artist wife (and with her own ambitions). 

The Pairing by Casey McQuiston (Aug. 6)

I mean, Casey McQuiston needs no introduction, right? The author of Red, White and Royal Blue and One Last Stop returns with another hot AF romp, this one a friends-to-lovers-to-rivals story about an aspiring sommelier and a fine-dining pastry chef who, independent of one another, decide to embark on the European food and wine tour they missed out on years ago when they broke up. Together again but still separate, they’ll eat their hearts out, but can anything else—anyone else—satiate their hunger for each other?

The Palace of Eros by Caro de Robertis (Aug. 13)

If you have not yet read Cantoras, de Robertis’s novel about a group of queer women who resist the militaristic dictatoriship of 1970s Uruguay by claiming an isolated cape along the coast as their own, please amend that. It is an utterly transporting and defiantly beautiful novel, a story about communal love and self love that will rend and mend your heart. The author’s latest—a retelling of the Greek myth of Psyche and Eros—promises to be another wondrous tale about queer joy and liberation. 

You’re Embarrassing Yourself by Desiree Akhavan (Aug. 13)

Akhavan is one of the most audacious and important filmmakers working today. Her autobiographical first feature Appropriate Behavior laid bare what it’s like to be the queer American child of Iranian immigrants and in myriad ways fundamentally changed the indie movie landscape, making room for so many diverse and indelible stories. Her BBC television series The Bisexual boldly and honestly and hilariously dared to ask complicated questions about desire and identity. She’s no stranger to mining her life for tragicomic gold, which she does aplenty in her memoir-in-essays, from navigating feelings of inadequacy as a student at Horace Mann to the triumphs and tribulations of fame.

Bluff by Danez Smith (Aug. 24)

A finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Danez Smith has over two—now three—collections tapped into poetry’s powerful playfulness and plangency to capture the complexities of queer Black life. Each book has been a revelation and Bluff is no different. Composed largely in the wake of the COVID crisis and the aftershocks of George Floyd’s murder, the latest from the Minneapolis-based poet reckons with the responsibility of the practitioners of the medium to both accurately represent and challenge inaccurate representations of communities and lives like theirs.

Don’t forget to check out the following titles, published January through May 2024!

You Only Call When You’re In Trouble by Stephen McCauley (Jan. 9)

Tom is an architect in his sixties, constructing what he hopes will be his “masterpiece.” But his longtime boyfriend has recently broken up with him, and both his sister and his niece—the latter of whom is the center of his life—are soliciting his help in solving crises of their own. Less author Andrew Sean Greer says McCauley’s “poignant, joyous, explosive” latest is one to cherish: “A book that loves you back. What more could you want, my gosh? Read it!”

City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter (Jan. 16)

Grieving the dual losses of both her father and the end of her first queer relationship, Shiva Margolin, a student of Jewish folklore, embarks on a sojourn to Poland, her family’s ancestral homeland. Danielle Evans calls Fruchter’s debut “a gorgeous and full-hearted exploration of inheritance, grief, desire, and connection, at once a story about what it means to go looking for the ghosts we always knew were there and what it means to be in the right place to encounter the unexpected things we didn’t know we were waiting for.” 

Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte (Jan. 16)

The newest from French-Canadian cartoonist Delporte is a beautiful, moving look at coming out later in life, a diary-style graphic memoir about the queer liberation of both the body and mind. 

Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn (Jan. 23)

How To Wrestle a Girl, Blackburn’s 2021 story collection, was a revelation, barbed and bold. She writes so well about the weirdness of grief and the grief of being weird. Her new novel centers on a successful speculative fiction author who discovers her brother dead by suicide and carries on pretending he’s still alive, a reality-shattering charade with far-reaching consequences. 

How We Named the Stars by Andrés N. Ordorica (Jan. 30)

Ordorica, a poet, weaves a tapestry of love in loss in his fiction debut, a tenderhearted coming-of-age story about a closeted college student who falls in love with his also-closeted roommate. Fellow poet Eduardo C. Corral calls the novel “majestic.”

Interesting Facts About Space by Emily Austin (Jan. 30)

The bestselling author of BookTok fave Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead returns with a novel about a partially deaf lesbian obsessed with black holes and true crime podcasts struggling to balance new connections—both with her formerly estranged half-sisters and her first serious relationship. 

Antiquity by Hanna Johansson, trans. by Kira Josefsson (Feb. 6)

Imagine a female-fronted version of Call Me by Your Name told from Oliver’s point of view and set on a Greek island and you’ll get something like Johansson’s award-winning novel. Translated from the Swedish, it follows a thirtysomething woman to Ermoupoli as she becomes entangled in a complex relationship between an elegant older artist and her teenage daughter. 

Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner (Feb. 6)

Waidner’s last novel, the Kafkaesque Sterling Karat Gold, won the prestigious Goldsmiths Prize, and their latest surreal romp is about an author who wins a prestigious book prize. The catch? The trophy and monetary award are difficult to obtain, possibly impossible, and the quest for it sends the author back and forth through time. 

Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly (Feb. 6)

The titular siblings of Reilly’s charming debut are lovelorn flatmates in New Zealand, navigating their own queer heartbreaks and learning what their place in the world is—both as individuals and as members of a multiracial family. 

Ways and Means by Daniel Lefferts (Feb. 6)

Alistair McCabe, a young gay college student from the Rust Belt, dreams of a career in high finance, a fantasy turned nightmare when he finds himself entangled with an enigmatic billionaire whose nefarious ambition puts Alistair’s life at risk. Lefferts’s debut, an astute examination the complex intersection of money and intimacy, traces Alistair’s descent alongside the dissolution of the relationship between his paramours, an artistic couple with their own financial and existential woes.

Bugsy & Other Stories by Rafael Frumkin (Feb. 13)

The author of last year’s Highsmithian heist dramedy, Confidence, returns with a delirious, thrilling short fiction collection, including one story about a lonely college dropout who reinvents herself as a boom operator for porn shoots, and another about a Twitch streamer whose life is upended by the odd behavior of her best friend and the reply guy fan who’s come to declare his love. 

I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante (Feb. 13)

Often it’s easier to think and write about others’ lives, easier to dig for the truth in someone else’s story than it is to search for one’s own. Such as it had been for Sante, an acclaimed chronicler of iconoclastic queer life who found it difficult to confront her own identity, a confrontation made even more difficult by society’s discouragement of gender fluidity. Sante’s achingly poignant memoir charts her late-in-life transition, the shock and euphoria of self-recognition. 

Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt by Brontez Purnell (Feb. 13)

100 Boyfriends was a bawdy, brutal, and beautifully raw chronicle of queer Black life, and Purnell’s follow-up, a memoir-in-verse, promises even more of what made that book a must-read. 

The Rain Artist by Claire Rudy Foster (Feb. 24)

When I was an editor at O Magazine, I had the pleasure and privilege of publishing the dizzyingly good short story upon which this novel is based. It centers on a woman named Celine who is one of the sole remaining umbrella makers in a world in which water (and rain) has become a rare commodity only available to the uber-wealthy. For such a short story, the world Foster built already felt expansive, and I’m excited to see it expanded further. 

The American Daughters by Maurice Carlos Ruffin (Feb. 27)

The always-inventive author of the Pen/Faulkner finalist We Cast a Shadow returns with an electrifying work of historical fiction centered on a gutsy former slave girl who joins a clandestine band of female spies working to undermine the Confederacy. 

Green Dot by Madeleine Gray (Feb. 27)

Hera, the droll and extremely self-aware narrator of Gray’s debut, knows falling for a married man twice her age is an ill-fated cliche. And yet. Hera, who has only ever slept with women, works as a news outlet’s comment moderator, and it’s in the chilly, subterranean-seeming office she meets Arthur, a journalist who throws into disarray who she believes she is and who she wants to be. It’s Conversations with Friends meets Several People Are Typing.  

My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld (Mar. 2)

From the author of The Discomfort of Evening, the first Dutch book to win the International Book Prize, comes a queer and profane take on the Lolita archetype, following a pervy veternarian who becomes infatuated with a fourteen-year-old daughter of a local farmer—a girl who dreams of inhabiting a boy’s body. 

Ellipses by Vanessa Lawrence (Mar. 5)

Set amid the squalor and splendor of New York media, Lawrence’s debut follows Lily, a staff writer at a glossy fashion magazine who feels stalled both personally and professionally. Enter Billie, a cosmetics mogul who wants to mentor Lily…mostly from the distance of a phone screen. But what transpires in the digital realm seeps into real life until it’s all but impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. 

Thunder Song by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe (Mar. 5)

LaPointe follows up her award-winning memoir Red Paint with a collection of essays that explore the challenges and triumphs of proudly embracing a queer indigenous identity in the United States today, drawing on both personal experiences and the anthropological work of her great-grandmother. “Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe’s essays in Thunder Song are loud, bold, and startlingly majestic,” says Night of the Living Rez author Morgan Talty.

The Tower by Flora Carr (Mar. 5)

Set in sixteenth century Scotland, Carr’s fascinating work of historical fiction portrays the year-long imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots in a remote loch-surrounded castle, her only company a pair of inconspicuous-seeming chambermaids. Together, these three women—and later, a fourth, Mary’s lady-in-waiting—plot a daring path to freedom. 

Rainbow Black by Maggie Thrash (Mar. 19)

If you haven’t read Honor Girl, Thrash’s heartrending graphic memoir about queer summer camp love, then stop reading this and pick up a copy. Here, the author makes her first foray into prose, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of the 1990s Satanic Panic. 

Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler (Mar. 19)

It’s hard to imagine a more important moment for a new Judith Butler book, though their mountain-moving work has always and forever been significant and necessary. Here, Butler examines how authoritarians tie together and blame ideas like “gender theory” and “critical race theory” for the disorienting fear people have about the future of their ways of life, addressing what has become the cornerstone of conservative politics and culture wars: the notion that the very concept of gender—and the questioning of that concept—is a denial of nature and danger to civilization.

All The World Beside by Garrard Conley (Mar. 26)

Many of you might know Conley as the bestselling memoirist and activist behind Boy Erased, a beautifully written and important book about survival and identity and a complicated family. Get ready now for Conley the novelist. His full-length fiction debut is a lush, epic love story set in Puritan New England. Every one of his sentences is a heaven-sent spectacle. 

Like Happiness by Ursula Villarreal-Moura (Mar. 26)

In this debut novel, Tatum Vega, living a fulfilling life in Chile with her partner Vera, finds her past resurfacing when a reporter contacts her about allegations of abuse against the renowned author M. Domínguez, with whom she had an incredibly complicated relationship. 

Firebugs by Nino Bulling (Apr. 2)

How can it be true that the world we inhabit so often feels both plagued by stasis and altered by constant, irreversible transformation? And what does this mean for individuals hoping to find and understand their own identities? These are the big questions of fiction, questions Bulling illustrates in this graphic novel about a couple navigating intimacy and transition in an environment ablaze from climate change. 

A Good Happy Girl by Marissa Higgins (Apr. 2)

Higgins’s visceral and vivacious debut is about a young, anxiety-ridden, compellingly prickly lawyer who becomes the lover of a married lesbian couple, an arrangement that rearranges her sense of self and her place in the world. I got the chance to blurb this one early, but I’m just going to co-sign Halle Butler’s blurb here: “Sometimes I could not believe how easily this book moved from gross-out sadism into genuine sympathy. Totally surprising, totally compelling.”

Women! In! Peril! by Jessie Ren Marshall (Apr. 2)

An early contender for best title/cover combo. An award-winning playwright makes her prose debut with this collection of short stories, including one in which a lesbian’s wife becomes mysteriously pregnant, and another about an ambitious sexbot. 

The Long Hallway by Richard Scott Larson (Apr. 16)

I first came upon Larson’s work in the queer horror anthology It Came from the Closet, in which he wrote about how John Carpenter’s Halloween—about a boy triggered by heterosexual desire becoming a monstrous masked voyeur—was actually a gay coming out story. I was thrilled, then, to discover the author’s upcoming memoir is a sequel of sorts, exploring how terror on screen sometimes mirrors the terror of queer interiority. 

So Long, Sad Love by Mirion Malle (Apr. 30)

In this graphic novel from the author-illustrator of This is How I Disappear, a French woman who has moved to Montreal to be with her boyfriend begins to uncover dark truths about his past, which forces her to confront who he might be—and who she could become without him. 

First Love by Lilly Dancyger (May 7)

Two summers ago, at the Sewanee Writers Conference, I had the chance to hear Lilly Dancyger read part of an early version of this book, and I was totally stunned. As soon as the reading was over, I started counting down the days until I—and everyone else—could read the whole thing. And now here it is: a soul-stirring compilation of essays about how our earliest intimacies—sisterly, friendly—so often resemble the intensity of romance, how the delineations between different kinds of relationships can blur, how if and when those relationships change or end it can feel like the most devastating heartbreak. 

How It Works Out by Myriam LaCroix (May 7)

An early contender for Best Premise: when Myriam and Alison fall in love at a local punk show, their relationship begins to play out as different hypotheticals in different realities. What if the two of them became bestselling lifestyle celesbians? What if they embraced motherhood upon finding an abandoned baby in alley? What if one was a CEO and the other was her lowly employee? 

All Fours by Miranda July (May 14)

For me, July’s 2007 short story collection No One Belongs Here More than You was a formative reading experience, a book about weirdo women that fundamentally altered my ideas of what kinds of stories were possible—something Sally Rooney and I have in common. In her second novel, July brings her singular brand of sardonic melancholia and wide-eyed wisdom to bear on this tale of a semi-famous middle-aged artist who decides to take a left turn from the left turn she had already planned.

Oye by Melissa Mogollon (May 14)

Told through several one-sided telephone conversations between protagonist Luciana and her sister Mari, Mogollon’s inventive debut novel is a unique coming of age story about uncovering family secrets and the secrets of the self. 

We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons (May 14)

Parsons’s first book, the wonderful story collection Black Light, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and brimmed with world-weary wit, queer yearning, and Hempel-esque sentences so deftly crafted. Her first novel is just as much a marvel, following a horny housewife and young mother who desperately needs time away for and from herself. 

Self-Esteem and the End of the World by Luke Healy (May 14)

Irish cartoonist Luke Healy, who author Rafael Frumkin aptly describes as “a gay millennial Harvey Pekar,” casts a fictionalized version of himself into an increasingly surreal alternative present ravaged by climate change. Sly and cringingly funny, this graphic novel explores how even amidst actual apocalypse our seemingly minor anxieties of the self can feel just as world-ending.

Cactus Country by Zoë Bossiere (May 21)

Like the landscape depicted within, Bossiere’s memoir about growing up genderfluid in a Tucson trailer park and navigating the challenges of identity in the American Southwest promises to be both raw and beautiful. Fairest author Meredith Talusan likens the book to This Boy’s Life, “an indelible portrait of American boyhood that is at once typical and extraordinary.”

Exhibit by R. O. Kwon (May 21)

A few months ago, novelist R.O. Kwon made waves when she read aloud an excerpt from her long-awaited follow-up to The Incendiaries at the Vulture Festival; what better enticement to read something than hearing the author herself warn her own parents against reading it? But if you’ve read The Incendiaries, then you don’t need any further enticement. Kwon’s prose is unlike any other, sensuous and sumptuous and yet razor-sharp. Here, she captures the quick–developing intimacy between a photographer named Jin and a ballerina, to whom Jin spills a family secret—a confession with unforeseen consequences. 

The Guncle Abroad by Steven Rowley (May 21)

Few authors possess the infectious mix of light- and heavy-heartedness that makes every Steven Rowley novel an experience; his gift is to make the reader laugh out loud one minute and clutch their chest the next. Following the success of The Celebrants (a Read with Jenna pick), Rowley returns to the world of the eponymous gay uncle of 2021’s The Guncle, this time sending sitcom star Patrick to Lake Como for his brother’s wedding. 

In Tongues by Thomas Grattan (May 21)

Grattan’s Pen/Hemingway-longlisted first novel, 2021’s The Recent East, was sublime, a book about family and the mundane magic and messiness of everyday life. His second follows a Midwesterner-turned-Brooklynite at the dawn of the new millennium who takes a job as a dog walker for the wealthy, a gig that places him in the orbit of an older couple.  

Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn (May 21)

In the new novel from LA Times Book Prize finalist, a “lightly” canceled mid-list author named Astrid attempts to resurrect her fledgling career when an influencer options her previous novel for TV. What seems like manna from heaven turns into a source of tension, assuaged only by a cocktail of Adderall, alcohol, and cigarettes—the Patricia Highsmith special—that also causes blackouts. On top of all that, Astrid just wants to love and be loved—mostly with Ivy, a grad student she meets on Zoom who’s studying lesbian pulp fiction form the 1950s. 

Shae by Mesha Maren (May 21)

Maren’s debut Sugar Run remains one of my favorite novels of the past five years. She is an astute and indispensable chronicler of Appalachian queerness. Her latest centers on two young women in West Virginia—one a teen mother and the other coming to terms with what it means to be trans in rural America. 

Trust and Safety by Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman (May 21)

Rosie is jonesing for a cottagecore life right out of a meticulously curated Instagram feed, a rural fantasy she hopes to turn into a reality when she and her husband purchase a Hudson Valley fixer-upper. When her husband loses his job, they have to rent out part of the property. Their new tenants? An attractive pair of Home Depot queers whose presence throws the house into disarray—even as they help repair it. 

Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg (May 28)

There’s something about road trip stories that feel inherently queer: the freedom and desire to be someone else and/or somewhere else, maybe, or the exhilaration of being part of the world while being apart from it. Eisenberg, the acclaimed author of The Third Rainbow Girl, delivers a debut novel that’s part The Price of Salt and part Just Kids, in which two friends journey across America in pursuit of art and love. 

The Default World by Naomi Kanakia (May 28)

Come for the mesmerizing cover, stay for the even more mesmerizing story of a trans grocery store worker in San Francisco who hatches a plan to marry a wealthy tech bro—for his company’s health benefits, obviously—and ends up becoming taken by his hedonistic cohort’s lavish lifestyle. Imagine Gatsby set in Silicon Valley. 

My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book Two by Emil Ferris (May 28)

There are books I’ve been anticipating since I first heard/read about them, and then there are books that I have spent years preparing myself for. Emil Ferris’s follow-up to her mountain-moving, medium-altering graphic novel is the latter. Every page of that 2017 doorstop masterwork—a coming-of-age tale of a biracial girl in 1968 Chicago trying to solve her neighbor’s murder—is a marvel, breathtakingly alive, combining the sordid moodiness of pulp fiction and the diaristic sketches of an adolescent processing their outsized emotions on notebook paper. Finally, after a long seven-year wait, we get an equally gargantuan sequel continuing the story of preteen Karen Reyes as she deals with the enormity of grief and her burgeoning self.

9 Books About Haunted Motherhood

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Being a mother, for me, has had the effect of raising the ceiling on most feelings. My children (now eleven and seven years old) have carried me to new heights of hilarity and joy, but in the midst of these feelings I’m aware too of their corollary: the understanding, which arrived suddenly right after each of their births, that I’d made a terribly risky bargain, bringing into my life something whose loss I’m not sure I would be able to bear. There’s an almost supernatural quality to this state, the way it involves living inside two extremes at once. 

And when I set out to capture this feeling in my new novel, The Garden, I found that the supernatural was one of the best tools available to me. My novel is set at an isolated hospital, a former country estate, in the late 1940s, where a husband and wife doctor team is trying out an experimental cure for repeated miscarriage—and where Irene Willard, their desperate but reluctant patient, discovers an abandoned walled garden with its own strange powers. As the doctors’ plans begin to go wrong, Irene finds herself gripped by hauntings that blur the line between external and internal. At its thematic core, The Garden is about pregnancy as a haunted house, an inner and outer ghost story.

The books on this list were my lodestars as I undertook this project—but more importantly as I have undertaken the project of living inside the wonderful, unlivable bargain of motherhood itself.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A motherhood-as-ghost-story urtext, The Yellow Wallpaper is an 1892 short story with a nonfictional seed (and a real-life agenda): Gilman’s desire to bring awareness to the horrors of the rest cure, which she experienced after the birth of her daughter. The story’s narrator, suffering a “nervous depression” after her son’s birth, has been confined by her husband to her room and prevented from using her mind, or doing much of anything, in an effort to cure her and equip her to be a good mother to her “dear baby.” She’s helpless before this plan, though she senses its dangers from the start; she writes in her illicit diary that “John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.” Caged as she is, she becomes obsessed with her room’s wallpaper, which is, yes, yellow—and the longer she looks at it and reads it (prevented, of course, from reading anything else), the more unhinged she becomes. “There are things in the paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will,” she tells us, and soon the shapes she sees in the wallpaper begin to move. The haunting here is a function of her mind’s powers, thwarted in an effort to reshape woman into mother.

The Need by Helen Phillips

In this novel, one of the most terrifying I’ve ever read, a mother is haunted by the worst possibilities of her life with her children: an awareness that no matter the joys or the mundane challenges of her current child-filled moment, in a separate shadow-moment she has lost those children, has lost everything. Home alone with her toddler and baby, trying to find a book her daughter, Viv, is missing, Molly discovers an intruder in a deer mask in the other room: “She gripped her children as though the three of them were poised at the edge of a cliff, wind whipping around them, pebbles giving way between them. She could not move. She did not know how to pass through the next seconds of her life…But Viv was already stepping away from her, was already reaching to retrieve something from the deer’s black-gloved hands: The Why Book.” What if the intruder who’s coming to take our treasure and wreck our lives isn’t a stranger, but someone who knows us as intimately as it’s possible to know another person? This is a novel that bends and multiplies time and selfhood to show us motherhood’s existential threats, and the result is the feeling of the call coming not only from inside the house but from inside one’s own head. 

Beloved by Toni Morrison

This novel is, to me, one of the most powerful ghost stories in literature. Its ghost, Beloved, is the daughter of Sethe, the main character, and their story’s horrors are based on real events: in 1856, Margaret Garner, a mother who had escaped slavery, killed her child rather than allow her to be recaptured. Sethe’s own daughter returns to her years after their own version of this episode—and Beloved has grown in the meantime, as ghosts tend to do, until she is a wondrous and strange mix of ages and times: a grown woman with “new skin, lineless and smooth, including the knuckles of her hands.” Beloved’s arrival announces, and demands, a choice between herself, the precious, angry, and guilt-laden embodiment of Sethe’s past, and Sethe’s present. Sethe whose most central truth has always been, as she expresses in thoughts addressed to Beloved, that “…when I tell you you mine, I also mean I’m yours. I wouldn’t draw breath without my children.” The relationship between Beloved and Sethe ends up dramatizing in one of the most extreme and devastating ways imaginable the pull between self and child.

Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin

This gorgeous novel is set in a mysterious, remote mountain village that seems to exist outside of time, where life is in many ways idyllic—quiet, orderly, safe, full of various kinds of predictable pleasure—except that sometimes the mothers of the village simply disappear. Their left-behind children and husbands and friends then descend on their houses to dispose of their photographs and belongings, and the memory of the woman herself is allowed to (or made to) dissolve. Motherhood itself therefore becomes, definitionally, a state of risk, because it opens a woman up to the most total loss, random in whom it afflicts except in retrospect: “What connected these mothers? Their clues pointed in different directions, indicating recklessness and vigilance, insufficiencies and excesses of love. Love sublimated, love coarsened, love sweetened to rot…once a mother went, we saw it, something out of balance in the nature of her love for her children that set her apart.” The external and internal scrutiny of motherhood, its effects on both mother and child, is itself a haunting—as perhaps most mothers know.

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Part memoir, part translation, and part literary obsession so intense it becomes a form of possession. During her own early motherhood, Doireann Ní Ghríofa sets out to translate the lament of eighteenth-century Irish poet Eiblín Dubh Ní Chonaill, a poem about Dubh’s discovery of the corpse of her murdered husband and her grief-spurred drinking of his blood. Struck by how difficult it proves to find real traces of the poet’s self, Ní Ghríofa makes of her own self a conduit: she wills herself inside the poet’s life, inviting the poet into her own. “Of all that I desired in my own small life, the discovery of another woman’s days had become what I wanted more than anything else…I hoovered and scrubbed and read stories and wrestled duvets into coverlets, and all the while, inside me, she was beginning to feel more and more real.” Ní Ghríofa is so successful in this venture because the events of her own motherhood have thinned the veil between her life and other lives. “Who is haunting who?” she comes to wonder, and makes us wonder too.

Hao: Stories by Ye Chun

This extraordinary story collection follows Chinese and Chinese-American women, many of them mothers, through their efforts to find a language to convey their experiences. These are women haunted by the impossibility of expressing the fullness of themselves: the story “Stars” follows a mother who has experienced a stroke that’s robbed her of language; the story “Wenchuan” is told in the collective first-person of the mothers of children buried in an earthquake that collapses their school, mothers who are haunted by all they failed to say to their children. In the final story, “Signs,” the record-keeper who invents written language for his emperor finds that the shape of his own long-dead mother makes a perfect sign for the word “hao”: “a woman holding a child—his kneeling mother holding him on the roadside begging for food. This sign connotes so much to him that he cannot pin it down to one or two definitions. It can be a verb, a noun, an adjective, an adverb. It’s an image he continues to see when he closes his eyes.” Chun ties a beautiful ghost-tether between motherhood and language.

The Upstairs House by Julia Fine

Here, a new mother’s postpartum psychosis takes the form of a haunting by the ghost of Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon, Little Fur Family, and other deliciously strange children’s books. Megan’s dissertation on children’s literature has been languishing during her first pregnancy, but when her daughter is born, a new realm—literally another floor of her building—opens up to her. “And there it was, halfway down the stairs. An unusual door…intricately carved, its paint a peeling turquoise. I’d never seen it before…What was behind it? I couldn’t help myself. I knocked…I heard, ‘Come in.’” A treacherous invitation, Megan finds, once she accepts it. In this new world, which only Megan can enter, Margaret and her partner are very much alive, and full of desires, having taken new energy from the confluence of Megan’s mind and her body, her selfhood and her selflessness, her love for her daughter and her love for herself.

Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

The nameless (at first) mother-protagonist of this novel is, when we meet her, haunted by her life
itself: she’s an artist who stays at home with her two-year-old son, her husband is gone for the
whole of every workweek, and she hasn’t made or felt capable of making art since her child’s
arrival. She’s trying to disavow this part of herself entirely, her ambitions to have a life as an
artist or a life apart from her child at all. Yet the loss aches and churns and enrages: “How many
generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely?
How many women had run out of time while the men didn’t know what to do with theirs?”
Because this novel is also a marvelous fable, this mother’s haunting begins to take on a physical
insistence in the form of a gradual change into a dog—she grows more hair than she should have
in new places, a tail-like appendage, and newly sharp edges on her teeth—through, it seems, the
sheer pressure of her thwarted desire. Wonderfully, her child becomes complicit in this change,
happily playing “doggy games” with his mother. (I would argue that it’s really never exactly the
children themselves that haunt the mothers in these texts). At last the mother becomes
Nightbitch, a dog who runs free and feral at night: “She was hair and blood and bone. She was
instinct and anger. She knew nothing but the weight of her body and the pull of the earth against
it, the particular wetness of the night air…” The force of this mother’s desire to inhabit two
seemingly contradictory identities has forged her a new one, and the novel reckons with what
place she can find in the world for this new self.

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

Frida, this novel’s main character, must atone for a “very bad day” of parenting at the School for Good Mothers, where she practices mothering on a robot child who looks like her daughter Harriet (a robot child I came to love deeply over the course of the novel). The mother-students are forced to play an unwinnable game, their every step surveilled by a rigid, sinister system that’s full of impossible standards. “A mother’s love can cure most common illnesses,” they are told, and “Your voice should be as light and lovely as a cloud”; the warmth of their hugs, the quality of their vocalizations, the rapidity of their soothing are all measured by their dolls, evaluated by their instructors, and inevitably found wanting. What’s most powerful to me about this novel is the way Frida takes the school’s punitive system inside herself, monitoring her own reactions according to its rules—a kind of monitoring I think many mothers would recognize—out of her desperation to reunite with the child whose absence haunts her, even though she knows that reunion is entirely outside her control. The pain of their separation suffuses the book and Frida’s whole self. She thinks, “…Harriet should also have a doll that looks like her. Harriet should have a mother doll, sleep with it and tell it secrets, take it everywhere.” At the heart of this book is a beautiful, aching truth: it’s impossible not to want to be a good mother, even if we know that complete, irreproachable goodness in this realm is impossible too.  

Serkan Görkemli on Turkey’s Queer Past and Present

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Serkan Görkemli’s Sweet Tooth, a sweeping collection of connected stories about queer characters in Turkey, is his debut work of fiction—but he’s no newcomer to the subject matter. Aside from his own background growing up in a small, industrial town in northwestern Turkey, he’s been a scholar of queer life in Turkey for years. An English professor at the University of Connecticut, he wrote his first book about his research into online lesbian and gay activism in Turkey. 

Görkemli’s deep contextual knowledge permeates every story in this new collection—but it’s far from an academic treatment. The stories remain loyally focused on the intimate lives of their characters, particularly our recurring protagonist, Gökhan. Through impressionistic, precise prose worthy of being called Chekhovian, Görkemli sketches moments of ordinary struggle and recognition as his characters find their footing in a changing Turkey. 

In the titular story, Gökhan reflects: “How easy and difficult it is to be one thing on the inside and another on the outside.” Other recurring characters further illustrate this in-between way of being. From sweet Hasan with his webbed fingers to Rolex-wearing Cenk and his closeted mother, the book shuffles through many permutations of what one character describes as “simultaneously hiding and seeking.” 

Despite balancing several perspectives, the chronologically arranged collection unfolds with natural cohesion. It’s worth approaching like a satisfying novel or well-balanced album—in order, from start to finish—to appreciate the progression of these characters’ journeys through time.   

I was grateful to spend an afternoon chatting with Görkemli about queer advocacy in Turkey and the U.S., how vulnerability allows connection, and the hard choices his characters make while hiding and seeking.  

Roohi Choudhry: I’m so intrigued by how you approach place in this book—the collection almost feels like a bittersweet love letter to a very specific Turkey. I’ve only explored Turkey more superficially, as a tourist, so I was really drawn to this specific place you take us. Why was this specificity of place important to you?

Serkan Görkemli: In Turkey, I’m sure you observed the intermingling and mixture of the West and the East, you know, the Western culture and the Muslim culture. And specifically, when it comes to LGBTQ identity, it’s one of the great examples of the East and the West sort of mixing together. Of course, the country had a queer past; same-sex contact has been practiced in the imperial context in Turkey for a long time. The contemporary names came later—maybe in the last 30-40 years—but queer people have always been around. When people have a conversation about a queer neighbor in one of my stories, they may disapprove, but they have names for it. That in itself shows that there have always been queer Turkish people, even though they may not have identified with the Euro-American LGBTQ identities. In the book, what I try to do is show that shift. 

RC: Which shift are you specifically referring to?

Turkey had a queer past; same-sex contact has been practiced in the imperial context for a long time.

SG: I’m talking about the personal shift—how does a person come to call themselves as queer or gay or LGBTQ? That identity already exists in different parts of the world. But how does somebody come to be that in Turkey? How do you make that identity take root? How do you exist with that publicly, if you choose to? My characters are going through that struggle. 

And it usually begins with family, right? Coming out to the family, whether the family is going to accept or not. If they don’t, what happens? So, I’m interested in that shift, and how that happens in a Turkish context.

RC: And in the book, there’s also a shift more broadly in the culture too, right? The book takes place over several decades. You could say that there’s a kind of evolution happening in Turkey over the course of the book in terms of queer life, but it’s not really that simple either, right? Because it’s not a linear process and you’re also showing the rise of conservatism there.

SG: The book’s time period is roughly my life so far—from the 1980s to the 2010s. But I’m also very aware of this time period in terms of LGBTQ rights in the U.S. context. I think we forget in this country that it took two generations for LGBTQ rights to happen. From 1950s all the way to early 2000s. What happens in Turkey doesn’t have to follow, but so far it seems to be following what happened in the U.S. The first LGBTQ advocacy organizations were established in Turkey in early 1990s, only in Istanbul and Ankara. But with the arrival of the Internet, and Turkey’s integration into the global economy, Euro-American representations arrived. And now we have such organizations all over the country. So, all these things are interconnected. 

There’s the question of which way LGBTQ rights are going to go in Turkey. It doesn’t have to replicate what happened in the US, but the expectation seems to be the same. And I think the fears are the same, too. Remember before same-sex marriage was first legalized in Massachusetts, this country enacted the Defense of Marriage Act. There’s exactly the same fear in Turkey—that the conservatives will not give in to LGBTQ rights because they’re afraid that there’s going to be same-sex marriage. 

Whether you are for it or against it, the mindset seems to be somewhat parallel in terms of the general trajectory. But of course, you know, it’s hard to predict which way it’s going to go in Turkey. 

RC: In both places, there’s this coinciding acceptance and conservatism backlash. It’s pretty interesting how often social norms in the U.S. is more similar to Muslim countries than European countries.

As adults, we still think that there are certain ways to be, whether it’s about being married, being a citizen.

SG: Think about the backlash that happens, for example, when the AIDS crisis happened in the ’80s. And then think about the backlash happening right now, you know, as white supremacy and transphobia are through the roof at the moment. 

RC: In the collection, is there an arc or bend that’s emerging over the decades? The collection does seem to have this optimistic trajectory in terms of queer acceptance. 

SG: I think the generational knowledge of non-heterosexual identities—exposure to other queer people —is really important. So in my book, I show how parents who are not familiar with those things are unable to accept their children. When they meet a fellow parent who has a queer child, that’s the moment a lot of people accept or open up. 

Again, this is something that happens in the US, too, right? 40% of homeless kids in the U.S. are LGBTQ. Why? The consequences of homophobia, including often because their parents disowned them. We can’t even claim that all parents are educated about these things in the U.S. This has to do with level of education and class, because exposure is determined by those things. Parental or generational lack of knowledge is maybe a wider gap in Turkey at the moment. Because allies are really important for LGBTQ people to be out and proud. And allyship is one of the themes in the book. 

It’s really hard to generalize, but I would say on the whole, in the Turkish context, these are really sort of new issues. But you know, the nationalist discourse always aligns with heterosexuality, reproduction. Turkish nationalist history is kind of similar to any other, in the sense that heterosexuality is prioritized whether it’s bio-politics or moral values. The main difference is that homosexuality technically has never been illegal in Turkey. There are no colonial laws that it’s forbidden. It was illegal in the U.S., I think, related to the colonial context. Turkey doesn’t have hate crime laws or anti-discrimination laws because LGBTQ are not recognized as a minority. But the flip side of that is there’s no law that criminalizes it.

RC: You also pay so much attention to class and socioeconomics in this book— like the contrast between the working class Bağcılar and the fancy Etiler neighborhoods. I loved the detail that one neighborhood switches off their pop music for the call to prayer and the other doesn’t. Little details like that capture the distance these characters are traveling and code-switching between worlds. Why was that important to you to explore alongside queerness?

SG: All that begins with the intersectionality of our identities. Our gender and sexuality have a lot to do with other aspects of identity. And sometimes they are like blinkers. Other times, we see things that other people may not see. I was interested in some of the clashes of differences in those perspectives.

Some of the upper-class characters—they have financial opportunities to travel, to see different people. That provides them with many opportunities or at least some flexibility when it comes to strict mores of the Turkish society. Characters who are working class, like Gökhan, the main character—they tend to stay in the same context. Maybe they see LGBTQ identities on the media, but then, how to translate what you see into action in your daily life? 

In the case of LGBTQ people, that almost always requires migration. In my book, too, the main character goes to Istanbul. Several characters move around in the country. It’s kind of similar in this country, in the U.S., geographical mobility is seen as the escape from the nuclear family so you can be who you want to be. Although of course, that is a utopian narrative, because you still have to figure out a roof over your head, livelihood and so on.

RC: Even your one really wealthy character, Cenk, migrates. He goes to a smaller town, right? 

SG: In the case of that character, the circumstances were different. The tension and the conflict between a parent who is closeted and the child who wants to be out played out in a different way in that dynamic. 

RC: That particular story—“Pride”—was fascinating. Because you’re showing this closeted parent. Earlier you were talking about parental education being a big part of everything evolving—this story is quite a different take on that. This parent does have that information. So I wonder, what do you think about her? Is it fear that she’s coming from?

SG: I think there’s a bit of an irony with that character, but we have to remember, she’s an older generation. The idea of being out and proud is really scary and foreign to her in some ways. In that character, I was trying to show an older, queer person who might be exposed haphazardly to some current knowledge, or language, or identities—but in many ways, she does not really identify with those. And she still thinks about those identities in kind of like an old-fashioned way, some of it perhaps internalized homophobia. 

But the other part of it is not wanting to let go of the privilege. Because this is a woman who is in control. Who is basically the matriarch. For her to come out publicly as lesbian is giving up that power in the Turkish context. She has a lot to lose. But I also sympathize a lot with that character, because she seems to have established some sort of a status quo, where she could at least be happy as much as possible in that environment. I personally understand all the choices she makes, because it is a matter of survival.

RC: One of my favorite lines in the book was in the story “Vulcan”—“we continued playing saklambaç, simultaneously hiding and seeking.” Once I saw that line, I began seeing all these stories through that lens. In so many of the conversations, the characters are hiding something about themselves and also suss-ing each other out. Not only in terms of sexuality. But also, are you going to be an ally to me? Are you going to be an enemy to me? That simultaneous hiding and also seeking out is so constant. Like in “Runway,” the stolen looks between Hasan and the models. Or Cenk and Nazlı “straightening up” in the mirror before they meet. Was this something you were consciously thinking about as a theme?

SG: Yeah, definitely. One part of it is coming out. The word “coming out” means different things, right? Coming out is a repeated act, it never ends. I tell this to my students—unless I’m walking around with “gay” written on my forehead, there are many places and environments where there’s always a question of whether you tell people you’re gay or not, whether it’s important to say that or not. There’s no end to it, as long as people assume that everybody is heterosexual or should be heterosexual. 

But in the case of the younger characters, I think, hide and seek is literally about the danger, first and foremost—will the people who love you stop loving you? Will you be disowned? Those are the first questions when someone is coming out. And then after that, in the case of the Hasan character, he runs away, he has to take care of himself. Hide and seek happens because there’s a lot at stake for them, from emotional hurt to other traumas. 

But you know, when you get to the story “Runway.” At that point, I think Hasan is in his thirties, the perspective is a little different. At that point, it’s more: how do we live as adults? Maybe the distance between how adults think they should act and live versus what they might feel deep down. Like, what are the public appearances we have, versus the internal conflicts? 

So I guess vulnerability is a theme. As adults, we still think that there are certain ways to be, whether it’s about being married, being a citizen. The hide and seek is sort of the vulnerability that emerges between what we think we should do, ideally, versus what we are really feeling. Being open about that is essentially being vulnerable. I don’t think that many people or, I personally am able to do that with everybody. In the case of some characters, it is only an internal conversation.

RC: Like Nazlı, I guess. Even her son doesn’t seem to know about her queerness. 

Coming out is a repeated act. There’s no end to it, as long as people assume that everybody is heterosexual or should be heterosexual.

SG: I mean, Nazlı is the result of the struggles that she had to fight. But the tragedy of that is: even though they are so close as mother and child, this tears them apart. And the alienation that results is the tragedy of that.

RC: So then, this hide and seek, on the emotional level of your book, is preventing real connection and real joy between these characters. Even if it’s necessary.

SG: Yes, I think so. Because, going back to coming out, the narrative is that you come out, you’re authentic and live happily ever after. But that’s just the utopian narrative. Sometimes the response is outright rejection. But other times, it’s not 100% acceptance, either. It is acceptance with conditions. The outcomes are not necessarily that rosy. There are still emotional complications, interpersonal complications. 

So acceptance and love sort of turn out to be conditional. That also becomes fertile ground for hide and seek. Because if you know that somebody is disapproving, for whatever reason, then inevitably, you start censoring aspects of yourself. And then eventually you realize that you can’t be who you are fully with that person. And that in itself starts creating a distance. 

RC: So then there are all these fissures between people and in relationships. And of course, in this book, it is specifically around queerness. But I think there are many other fissures that the book is hinting at, too, that are preventing unconditional love. In a way, that’s a central sadness of the book. Though it is optimistic, too. 

SG: In that last story, there’s an actual documentary that I reference —My Child, by Can Candan—  about this organization, the Families of LGBTQ in Istanbul (LISTAG). It is basically about parents’ process of coming out as a parent of an LGBTQ person. As they met other straight parents with queer kids, that’s how they sort of came to accept themselves and their kids and not blame themselves for their kids’ queerness. 

In the story, Gökhan talks about the documentary and says it took one parent 10 years to actually be comfortable and tell other people that their kid is queer. So, this is a perfect example of the emotional upheavals and complications that happen, even in the case of parents who might be today fully accepting. But how many people actually had that journey? Hopefully, some people are able—sooner— to take that journey, but there also are many more people who are not able to. One of the main characters in this closing story does eventually take action in the right direction. His journey at the end of the book shows that it’s possible to do the right thing.

The 30 Steps of Reporting A Rape as A Transgender Anarchist

Posted on by Jo Lou
  1. Think about whether it was rape for a long time. When people tell you they are pretty sure you were raped, say, “But I took the drugs.” (See: “A Brief History of Assault”)
  2. Wonder if the lies he tells you about yourself that you know are not true are, in fact, true.
  3. Wonder if he knows how severely you have been gaslit most of your life from your abusive family. Did you tell him? You don’t remember. You remember he has been abused. Maybe he can make a reasonable assumption. (See: “The Color of the Cast”)
  4. Be angry at everyone who knows you both.
  5. Be angrier.
  6. When people finally back you up, when they finally make statements and take your side, listen as a friend tells you all that your rapist worked in the university’s law school as a graduate student and has lawyer friends. Watch as people take down their statements. Say you don’t blame them.
  7. When women come forward, several women, telling you that he assaulted them or a friend, decide you have to do something.
  8. Think about it some more: you are an anarchist. You don’t believe in solving problems in communities with the police. You do not want the police coming to the doors of your friends, who are mostly minorities. But, you think, this might be the only way to protect them and you, and to make sure it doesn’t keep happening.
  9. Take an Uber to the police station. Stand in the waiting room because of COVID-19. Say, in front of everyone else there, “I was raped, and I want to make a report.”
  10. Get referred to a detective at the justice center downtown.
  11. Get a little pamphlet that tells you what to expect. Read it. Throw it away. Retain nothing.
  12. Have nightmares. Wake up into panic attacks. (See: “Waking Up in the Night”)
  13. Ride your Vespa down to the justice center. Wander around the floors, asking the way. Get lost. Get lost again. Finally find the detective’s office. Speak to the victim advocate. Take the Capri Sun she offers you. “It helps,” she says. Then: “Just tell him the truth. Tell him what happened. And you don’t have to worry about the rest.”
  14. Worry about the rest as she shows you the steps of what will come next.
  15. Speak to the detective. Tell him you were bleeding and when he asks from where, use the word “rectum,” although you don’t remember ever using that word before in your life. Tell him you kept sleeping with him. Tell him about how your C-PTSD makes you hide the truth from yourself, sometimes. Tell him that is how you survived for so long. (See: “It Was Rape”)
  16. Cry back in the hallway.
  17. Go home and have nightmares that your rapist blows his brains out. You do not want this. Wake up from them and write poems. (See: “The Night My Rapist Dies in a Dream”)
  18. Wake up to panic attacks. (See: “Waking Up in the Night”)
  19. Get Valium from a friend for when you wake up from panic attacks but take all twenty-five of them at once when you are drinking whiskey because, really, you still want to die.
  20. Sign away your protections from talking to a therapist you spoke to after the rape.
  21. Wait to hear back from the detective.
  22. Wait more.
  23. Call your rapist’s mother and tell her that her son is a rapist one day when you are in a shitty hotel in Youngstown, Ohio. Hear her gasp. Keep talking, not realizing she has hung up on you. (See: “Waking Up in the Night”)
  24. Hear from a new victim advocate. The police have been doing training and the case is still being investigated.
  25. Hear from the victim advocate again. The detective has adamantly pushed the case through to prosecution. She says, “We love to hear news like this.”
  26. Get a call from a 216 number one day at work. Step outside. Hear the detective tell you that he spoke to everyone you told him was involved. That the rapist’s best friend verified your story. Then hear him say that, despite this, prosecution has declined to take the case and the criminal investigation is over.
  27. Have nightmares. Wake up into panic attacks.
  28. Repeat.
  29. Repeat.
  30. Repeat.

Excerpted from Breaking the Curse by Alex DiFrancesco, published by Seven Stories.

R.O. Kwon on Writing About the Desire for Queer, Kinky Sex and the Cost of Being an Artist

Posted on by Jo Lou

How much are you willing to sacrifice for your desire? This is a central question of R.O. Kwon’s recent novel, Exhibit.

Written in urgent and lyrical prose, Exhibit follows two Korean American women—Jin, a photographer, and Lidija, a ballerina—as they push towards artistic ambition. When they are introduced, Jin has been in a long-term relationship with her husband, Philip, and both have agreed that children were not something they wanted, but Philip’s newfound desire to have a child has disrupted the life they’ve built, causing Jin to wonder how much of one’s core self and desires can be compromised for a relationship. As this question lingers in Jin’s mind, her relationship with Lidija deepens, and what starts out as a friendship between highly ambitious women, grows into a canvas for artistic and sexual exploration that will thrust Jin and her art to new edges.

I spoke with R.O. Kwon via zoom about sacrifice, the artistic drive, and choosing to be child-free. 

Shelby Hinte: Exhibit felt so authentic in its depiction of art and artists wanting so badly to be artists. I really loved the way you describe female characters being willing to go to any lengths necessary for their art. What drew you to writing about the artistic drive in that way?

R.O. Kwon: One way I’ve been describing it to people when asked for the one-sentence summary has been that Exhibit explores what you’d risk to pursue your core desires. What I was thinking as I wrote this was the way so many people are made to hide and suppress and kill and push to the sides what they truly want. Whether that has to do with sex or ambition or artistic ambition or food or even just a day to ourselves, it often seems like something that has to be defended.

I wanted to bring together three Korean women and see what happens when they ran after what they desired. I was especially interested in the ways in which so many of my writer and artist friends are very ambitious in terms of what they want to do with their work, yet it continues to feel, even in 2024, that it’s dangerous to say something like, I am an ambitious woman. I was fascinated by that. Even that phrase, ambitious woman, carries more than a tinge of unlikability or selfishness. I’m fascinated by that, and I’m infuriated, too.

SH: It’s interesting, too, because the women’s dynamic with each other is so different from what is usually depicted. Lidija expresses that as a ballerina, so much of her experience and career was about being in competition with other women, and yet her relation ship with Jin is unique because they’re not in competition with one another. At least not as artists, so they get to be really honest about wanting things that maybe would be frowned upon wanting, whether it’s ambition or art, in another space. It can be scary to say, I want to be an artist, which these women are doing, and they’re making a lot of sacrifices to be artists and achieve making art at a very high level. Why do you think that it can be so intimidating for people to want to own that?

Exhibit explores what you’d risk to pursue your core desires.

ROK: I think there continues to be a belief that the desire to be an artist is selfish. And I just so strongly believe that it’s not. I feel very lucky to get to be a writer, to get to be an artist. And I don’t think there’s anything selfish about it. I know people will disagree with me, but books have saved my life. There are points when I have felt so desperately lonely in various ways that I wasn’t sure how to go on, honestly. In those times, books provided fellowship, a really lifesaving fellowship. I don’t at all believe that wanting to have a life of making art is in any way a selfish impulse. Of course, especially in America, there is a very real practical economic difficulty of how to be an artist where health insurance is often dependent on your job and you want to have a sustainable life.

SH: Your characters all have to sacrifice things that sometimes put them in precarious positions. This feels amplified because they’re both women and they’re both Korean, and so it feels like that precarity is even more intense for them. And I’m wondering what you think it is that makes it more precarious to set out to become an artist as either a woman or a woman of color?

ROK: Jin is a photographer and Lidija is in ballet. This wasn’t quite on purpose, but at some point, I realized that both fields favor men. And ballet, if you think about ballet, people tend to think first of ballerinas, but aside from who exactly is on the stage, most choreographers are men. Most directors of the ballet are men. The discipline itself is incredibly hard on women’s bodies. Dancing on pointe is so physically difficult on the body. I remember talking to a friend who’s a doctor who loves to watch dance, but he cannot watch ballet because even though he finds it to be incredibly beautiful, he just says that, as a doctor, he sees what they’re doing to their bodies, and he’s just like, the body is not built for this. You’re really not supposed to put all your weight on that tiny surface area. It’s not uncommon for a ballerina to have to retire in their early thirties.

As a Korean woman, I’m an immigrant. My parents are immigrants. When I went to college, I majored in economics, even though I took writing classes on the side the whole time, and I really wanted to be a writer, I couldn’t see how to do it. My parents have had serious financial difficulties. There really weren’t that many models that I knew of for what it meant to be a Korean writer in America, what it meant to be a Korean American writer. I think that paucity of models, initially, kept me from believing that I could do it too. 

SH: I was just listening to this podcast about Olympic athletes and how so many of them put all their energy into sport with no guarantee of what happens afterwards. Ballet in your book feels like this too, and I was so moved by the way Lidija orients her whole life around this unpredictable art form. She is willing to devote so much of her life, really her entire life, to this thing that is, on the grand scheme of an entire life, quite small. What do you think compels certain people to be able to orient their lives around a goal like that? Specifically art?

ROK: I think it’s true of every, maybe every is a strong word, but at least the artists I’m close to, the writers I’m close to, and for me, it does feel closer to being a calling or a vocation than it does to being any kind of choice. I know that if I’m not writing regularly I very quickly start feeling dead inside. Not necessarily like fully dead [laughs], but the longer I’m away from it, the more dead I feel. 

I grew up really religious, and my life goal until I lost my faith at seventeen, was to be a pastor or maybe even a religious recluse. I thought I could live in a cave and just commune with the divine. That was my hope. But that, too, of course is a calling. I think it can be very hard for an artist to not be able to do what they feel called to do. 

SH: So much of this book is also about Jin having lost her faith to some degree. But art itself, at least the way I interpreted the way you wrote it, does feel spiritual in some ways. Like, it seems like each of them are ambitious, but they’re seeking something more than what the external world can give them through their art. I was curious about your own personal experience with art. What is it that you feel you’re seeking? Or what do you imagine writing gives you other than just not feeling dead inside? Obviously, that’s a big one.

I wanted to bring together three Korean women and see what happens when they ran after what they desired.

ROK: It’s definitely preferable to not feel dead inside. Other people said this to me, and I didn’t believe them, but I say this to my students all the time, and I always at least hope that some of them will be wiser than I was, and perhaps believe me. But it’s true that external basics once you publish a book can make it easier to get teaching jobs and speaking gigs that can help support you. This is important. We live in America. We live under capitalism. All of this is true. It’s also true that there’s no external validation that has ever begun to equal what it can feel like when the writing’s going really well. It’s not often available, but when the writing is going really well, when I’m deep in a sentence and it’s all I’m thinking about and I’m just trying to get it to be the most truthful version of itself, the most like itself it can possibly be, when I’m doing that, I feel as though I lose the ego. I forget that I have a body and that dissolution feels ecstatic in a way that approximates what I used to feel with religion. It’s one of the deepest joys I know of. It’s a great blessing to be able to have access to that. I’m always afraid it’ll leave one day, you know? Jin is grappling with that because she hasn’t been able to take a photo that she can tolerate having around for a year, which is a very long time. I’m always afraid that the words will leave the way my faith left. I can’t go through that. I get so superstitious about anything writing related. What does it feel like for you?

SH: I think you described it pretty beautifully. I think I feel the same way. That’s the reason I come to writing. It’s one of the two things I do, writing and long-distance running, where I feel I can focus wholly on the moment, where I’m not thinking about anything else. I’m the kind of person where my mind is normally reeling. I really agree with you that to write is as close to a spiritual experience as I can have, which to me just feels like not being stuck in a self-centered physical form.

ROK: I love that you find that in running too. 

SH: Jin is such an interesting character to me because she really is focused on the process, but she is such a perfectionist. And I love that she keeps repeating to Lidija, some version of, “nothing might come of this,” when she’s taking these photos of Lidija, yet she seems to have such faith, or maybe it’s an obsession, I don’t know how you saw it when you were writing her, but to me it felt like faith that if she just keeps taking these photos, if she just keeps going through these actions, then something will materialize. How important do you think just being in process or collecting material is in making art?

ROK: I’m such an inefficient writer. I don’t even believe in that word quite as it applies to art, but Incendiaries took me ten years to write. Exhibit took me nine. There was some overlapping because I was starting to write to agents about Incendiaries and I was just waiting, so I started Exhibit while I was waiting to hear back. I do believe that each book is a palimpsest. All of it gets in somehow. Everything I removed, all the storylines that didn’t end up making it in, all the research, even just reading a book of poetry that may or may not speak to the book that you’re working on, it is in there somehow. Up until something like nine months before I finished editing Exhibit, it was more than twice as long as it is now. It was something like 90,000 plus words long. And it’s not that I had any preconceived notions for how long the book had to be. I strongly believe in following what the book itself seems to want to be, and asking the characters what they want. But at some point, about nine months before the end, I started seeing things that I didn’t feel belonged in the book, or redundancies that didn’t feel necessary, so I took so much out. But I can still feel what I took out sort of pulsing beneath what’s there. 

SH: I didn’t realize you’d been working on this book for so long. I think that can be scary and intimidating for an artist to be in it and not know where it’s going to go. How do you keep faith in the work?

So many people are made to hide and suppress and kill and push to the sides what they truly want.

ROK: People often ask: Who do you write for? And I used to think that my answer was almost overly straightforward, which is really, I’m writing for myself. I really can’t really think very much about who might be reading it or what’s going to happen to it out in the world. But if I’m writing for myself, then I’m writing for an audience where the first row is a Korean American woman, and that’s not a body that has been centered very often in American letters. So, there’s that. And I think a lot about losing my faith when I was seventeen. It was a devastating loss for me. It was really just like a pivotal loss that has divided my life into a before and after. And it was a time of truly desperate loneliness. I lost so much with that faith. I lost my community. I lost this God that I really planned to devote my life to serving. I think in some ways I’m always trying to write for that girl who felt alone in the world, and to say, you’re not that alone, and you never were. That’s often been very useful in terms of reminding myself what on earth I’m doing six years into a book.

SH: It’s interesting hearing you talk so much about the fracturing of having lost faith because there is this sense that Jin is experiencing a split self. She has this side of herself she is hiding from her husband, and I kept thinking about how painful it is to have two conflicting desires in the same body. She wants this relationship with her husband, but she also wants her relationship with Lidija, but the two can’t coexist. What do you think is most interesting in exploring the territory of a character who wants two conflicting things? 

ROK: One of the questions I was fascinated by in this novel was exploring the various ways we’re supposed to adjust our desires but how we can’t change something so core to who we are. There’s really no killing them. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t feel right to kill them. That of course comes up with sexual desire, but it also comes up very much with the question of children. Philip and Jin have been together a long time, and they’d agreed from the start that they were never going to have kids. And then Philip wakes up one day he’s just like, I want kids. The desire has come upon him, and Jin very much doesn’t have that desire. It’s something that you really can’t quite compromise on. There’s no such thing as half a child. I’m fascinated by that question of to what extent can we change when we want to change? And to what extent does change even make sense. The heartbreak that Jin feels is partly that she can’t help Philip with what he wants. In some ways Jin feels abandoned. I’m not sure that her relationship with Lidija would’ve played out the way it did if it weren’t for this initial split with Philip.

SH: I love the way you write about being a woman who is child-free. I feel like we’re still lacking so much of that in literature, and it’s really exciting to see a book that deeply explores what it means to make that choice without it necessarily being distilled to just a positive or just negative choice. There’s this scene where you describe the dilemma of either being an artist or a mother, and Lidija’s describing the choice as a threat. She says:

“It’s still, as a life path, distinct. Implied is the fact that I’m picking this, not that. People start asking, So, what else might this bitch think of doing? Jin, imagine if I had a child, but kept dancing. The jerks, they’d still be pissed. I’d be called unfit, a bad parent. Or if I did give birth, then quit ballet, I’d be judged for staying home.” 

Reading that, I just felt like, there really is no winning as a woman. Do you think this expectation and judgment of women in relation to the choices they make about whether or not to have children is still as prominent as it once was? How does that show up in the spaces that you inhabit?

Loneliness kills; shame can be a terrible, life-warping poison. I have to do what I can to offer that kind of loneliness-antidote to others.

ROK: That means a lot to me that that part resonated with you. I don’t have kids. The majority of my friends don’t have kids. But I have very dear friends who have kids as well. And it feels like in my circles of friends, we love each other and we support each other, and we’re so behind each other’s choices, and we really view it that each person should get to live the life that feels like the fullest possible life to them in terms of whether or not they’re going to have kids. But I think there’s still so much pressure. I feel it all the time still. I’ve written about being child-free and about the ways in which it used to bewilder me that not wanting children is considered selfish. It’s difficult to think of many other instances where not wanting something is considered to be selfish. It is confusing to think specifically not wanting something that does not even yet exist is selfish. Like, this hypothetical child does not exist. To not want this hypothetical child, and for it to considered selfish, is bewildering. The Pope, who is famously a lifelong celibate, considers that to be selfish. I think there’s still so much pressure. 

SH: Can you talk more about the challenges about writing about sexual desire?  

ROK: I’ve tried so hard, and for so long, to shake off the anxieties I have around writing about sexual desire. But I’m Korean, ex-Catholic, and ex-Evangelical—these are all shame-, and guilt-riddled cultures. For these reasons, and more, it can seem as though I’ll never be able to shake off the shame I feel if I even talk about sex in public, let alone write and publish a whole novel centering desire of various kinds, including ambition, physical desires, and sexual appetite. Especially, as is true in Exhibit, a desire for queer, kinky sex. It’s also true, though, that books and other art forms have provided salvific fellowship when I’ve felt most alone in the world. Loneliness kills; shame can be a terrible, life-warping poison. I feel strongly that I have to do what I can to offer that kind of loneliness-antidote to others.

SH: Since so much of the book is about sacrifice, I wanted to ask, do you think that sacrifice or suffering are necessary for art? And, if so, what would you say is the biggest sacrifice you’ve made for your own art?

ROK: I wouldn’t necessarily say that sacrifice and suffering are necessary for art. I believe in fear as a guiding sign for what I want to write. I also want to push up against the limits of what I’m capable of with every word that I write in a novel if at all possible. And so, my experience of writing this book has involved what sometimes amounted to daily panic attacks and anxiety attacks. I generally have some insomnia, but there were periods with writing this book when I wasn’t sleeping. I remember there was a point when I was so exhausted because I was sleeping so little and driving so hard toward a deadline that I was lightly hallucinating most of the time. I didn’t know how else to write this. I felt physically compelled to write it in a certain way and to try to get it right. It was physically very arduous. So much so that I think I’m still recovering from that. So, no, I don’t believe that art requires suffering. But my experience of writing this book is that it did physically take a lot out of me.

12 Brilliant Short Stories by Asian Americans to Read For Free Online

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

As Asian American Pacific Islander Month comes to end, it’s important to remind ourselves that the Asian American identity is more than just race or shared affinity. Born out of political activism and the anti-war movement to protest and rally against injustice, warfare, imperialism, and colonization, it’s a call for unity, for liberation, and for solidarity. After all, none of us are free until we are all free.

These 12 stories by Asian American writers below are a small selection of the works of fiction published in our weekly literary magazines, Recommended Reading and The Commuter. They range in form, subject, and location, but they all represent the very best of storytelling.

“My Worst Experiences Haunt Me From the Memory Cloud” by Gina Chung

“Presence,” from Korean American writer Gina Chung’s story collection Green Frog, embroiders a gritty emotional reality with elements of the fantastical to tell the story of Amy Hwang, a preternaturally talented scientist who has fallen from grace and is suffering the demons of her own innovation. A technology she helped build that allows people to organize and manage their memories like the desktop of their computers had more extreme and adverse side effects than Amy, who was in a toxic relationship with the company’s founder, let on. The story picks up with Amy hiding out in her apartment, avoiding the world along with her own guilts and painful childhood memories–they’ve all been deleted from her mind and uploaded onto a computer. But what she cannot escape is the very real presence that has shadowed her and pulled at the edge of her consciousness ever since her memories went away. “Sometimes, it tugged at my attention like a recalcitrant dog at its leash, distracted me, made my head throb.” On a friends recommendation, Amy drives to a remote spa where she can reset and begin to connect with the parts of her life that she has been avoiding.

“The Ugliest Babies in the World” by Vanessa Chan

Written in Malaysian English, the titular story from Vanessa Chan’s forthcoming collection, The Ugliest Babies in the World, captures a microcosm of the tangled, loving relationships between children and their elders. Ah San visits her grandmother at her home in hospice care each afternoon, consciously replaying their favorite moments together. Surrounded by the detritus of her childhood in the sweltering house, she listens to her grandmother’s legends about how she and cousins were born–tales Ah San knows by heart. Each baby is uglier than the next, born jaundiced, one-eyed, blue, and onwards into delirious exaggeration. “My grandma says Ah Leng was so hideous when she was born that her mother screamed ‘I want a new baby!’” As disfigurements mount, it’s love, not beauty or the lack thereof, that shines through the grandmother’s stories.

“The Body is Not a Natural Home” by Chaya Bhuvaneswar

In “Jagatishwaran,” the trapped and isolated titular character aims to find his place in his body, his family, and his life in India. Jagat struggled with tuberculosis and still struggles with an unnamed mental illness. As a result, he is unemployed, much to his father’s disappointment. Behind four wood screens, Jagat shelters himself from the outside world to escape into his own world. He passes time painting murals, smoking tobacco, writing in his diary, listening to the radio, and reading newspapers, all in secret. While his mother rarely speaks with him anymore and his father frequently expresses his disappointment and disapproval, Jagat’s niece and sister continue to reach out to him. He longs for the opportunities and freedom that the women in his family enjoy. Still, he finds peace in solitude, and by observing the exterior world, he finds beauty in outside life and searches for his own beauty, similar to the beauty in his paintings.

“A Doomed Romance is the Deadliest Tragedy” by S.J. Sindu

From Sri Lankan American writer S.J. Sindu’s collection The Goth House Experiment, “Patriots’ Day” begins and ends with tragedy. Set in the Boston area on April 15, 2013, the Boston Marathon bombing serves as a backdrop to the narrative—but “Patriot’s Day” primarily focuses on smaller-scale events. The reader learns from the start that Pamela Robinson will push Amit Srinivasan in front of a train, ending his life. Then, the story follows Amit throughout his day, as he thinks about the divorce he initiated and the girlfriend he prioritized, Hannah. The story also follows Pamela, Hannah’s mother, illustrated as an everyday woman struggling to maintain a positive relationship with her daughter. In many ways, they lead similar lives: They spend their day at mundane jobs, they want to move to bigger homes, and they both find comfort in Boston’s trains. Neither of them are perfect. Amit cheated on his wife with Hannah, and Pamela doles out casually-mentioned racism, unsure if she can “carry around pictures of mixed grandchildren in her purse.” When they meet, they clash, largely over their ties with Hannah. “Patriot’s Day” reminds the reader that all people are human: carrying deep flaws, navigating various struggles, trying to maintain family relationships, holding various needs and wants that seem out of reach, starkly similar, starkly different, and all villains in someone else’s story. 

“Teaching My Son to Swim While I Drown” by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto

“Madwomen,” by Hawaiian author Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, is from her collection Every Drop is a Man’s Nightmare. A single mother to an almost seven-year-old son tells the story of the Madwoman of the Sea, who has twelve eyes, a barbed tail, and a taste for men and young boys who don’t listen to their mothers. This story tells of the complexities of motherhood, the feelings of failure, the coexistence of love and resentment—where frustration and fear collide with the desire to protect, to teach, and to understand. As a Hawaiian mother to a son who is half-white and resembles his absent father, she does not want to lose him to whiteness and to a masculinity founded in violence. The mother takes her son to the ocean to teach him to swim, and when he succumbs to his fear, she says “I feel the bruises bloom along my neck without witnessing the injury firsthand, which is the best way I can describe being a mother.” The mother relates to the Madwoman, the rage, the ways she instills fear in the men and boys, and the want for reclamation of power and autonomy.

“Mom Is in Love with Randy Travis” by Souvankham Thammavongsa

In “Randy Travis,” a short story by Laotian Canadian writer Souvankham Thammavongsa, from her collection How To Pronounce Knife, the narrator tells of their mother’s obsession with country music star Randy Travis. Their mother’s love of American country music came with the radio that was gifted to them from the refugee settlement program, and then when the narrator’s father got his first paycheck, he bought a record player. The narrator’s mother watched country music award shows and recorded Randy Travis’ music videos in order to watch and rewatch them whenever she wanted. Their mother begins sending letters to Randy Travis, but because she can’t write in English, she has the narrator—seven-years-old at the time—write the messages. Because the narrator is afraid of what might become of their father if Randy Travis responds, they write messages like you’re ugly and I do not like you. There is humor in this piece, but it is also fitting into larger conversations of addiction and obsession, of the representations of emotionality and masculinity in music, of language and language barriers, of home, of culture, of family, of what we do for those we love, and of what we sacrifice. The narrator’s father begins to dress like Randy Travis to appease his wife, and takes her to see Randy Travis in concert because these are the things she wants, and, as the narrator says, “he was only trying to be what [their] mother wanted.” This story is heartbreaking in that those efforts of compromise, those sacrifices, are not reciprocated. It is a mourning of Laos, as well as the loss of a mother and a wife to her perception of the Western  ideal.

“An Obsessive Unpacks a Bewildering Insult” by Eric Ozawa

This experimental story, told, as promised, in thirteen sections, is called “Fish (in 13 sections),” written by Eric Ozawa. In it, a man is called fish as his lover leaves him, and this story is a close-read as to why a fish. Somewhere between a critical analysis and the scientific method, our narrator interrogates the different possible meanings of you fish, including it being from a literary quote, of it being meant as verb, as it being said to reflect the absurdity of their relationship, or, if he had simply misheard her on her way out. For each possible meaning, he proposes an answer, a reason, and a remedy, from writing a country song to plotting her murder (under the guise of having watched The Godfather, of course). This story is odd, and it reflects the strangeness of a break-up, of insults hurled during times of high emotion. This story is funny, unique in both structure and style, and it understands the absurd ways that the confused human brain thinks.

“The Rise and Fall of the Luxury Baby Farm” by Mai Nardone

In “Ourselves, A Little Better,” Thai American writer Mai Nardone questions the ethics of the genetic modification of the human embryo. Dr. Susan Sims, a reserved scientist, develops a new, efficient, and highly successful way to treat infertility that includes an extremely specific and selective donor process and ethically controversial experimentation on genes in what is coined the Build-A-Baby process. Dr. Sims set out “to perfect the human race,” and claims that “what was important was improvement, each generation producing a better specimen than the last.” She is charged with violating the Nuremberg Standards, after an undercover journalist enrolls in Dr. Sims’ program for surrogate mothers, who are treated more as prisoners being experimented on, held in chambers that emulate the panopticon. This story is a fascinating look into the horrors of eugenics, and how these experiments on human embryos are logicized as having a pragmatic and beneficial impact on the future of the human race.

“Never Marry a Man with a Human Mother” by K-Ming Chang

“Xifù,” a short story from Taiwanese American writer K-Ming Chang’s collection Gods of Want, is a funny, biting story about a woman’s strained relationship with her mother-in-law. With rousing wit and daring candor, she recounts her mother-in-law’s six failed suicide attempts, which she describes as times she “pretended to die,” from trying to hang herself without lifting her feet from the ground to sticking her head in the oven without turning it on. Chang’s voice carries the story: She speaks to the reader like a friend, and her storytelling—rich with clever, shocking, hilarious similes—is riveting and authentically raw. Despite the story’s blunt attitude, Chang writes with brilliant emotional depth that unlocks unconventional insight into womanhood, motherhood, and complicated family dynamics. Honest pain, struggle, and conflicted feelings about her mother-in-law permeate her sharp remarks about her experience as a woman and wife.

“Navigating New Orleans in Vietnamese” by Eric Nguyen

Excerpted from Nguyen’s prize winning debut novel Things We Lost to the Water, this standalone piece follows a Vietnamese mother and her two sons who, having escaped from the communist regime to an anonymous refugee camp, are now freshly arrived in New Orleans. Hương longs to reconnect with the husband she left behind in Vietnam while trying to begin a new life for her two sons and keep a fragile peace with the dysfunctional Vietnamese-American family they’re forced to live with. Fruitless days are spent seeking work and being rejected. “‘No,’ she said again, this time more forceful, like the word was a pebble and she was flicking it toward what must have been a strange Vietnamese woman.” Through Hương’s eyes, America is an indecipherable world, full of secrets, hidden clues, and violence.

“The City Can’t Replace Her Best Friend” by Ada Zhang

In Ada Zhang’s “Julia,” from her collection The Sorrows of Others, Esther, who had “moved so many times in New York, across different boroughs, that the effect of leaving had all but worn off,” relives a failed college friendship with the titular character, her idol, while tracing her history in the city she’s about to leave. Passing old apartments and favored smoothie shops, Esther struggles to separate herself, even eight years since their last conversation, from Julia’s influence–she can’t shake the feeling that whenever she impresses or intimidates other women, it’s Julia they see in her, “Julia they [respect and fear].” As an anatomy of the long ago friendship develops—from its inception over a long college summer through the friends they mutually alienated and arrogances they indulged in—hidden imbalances, dependencies, and manipulations appear. Esther’s memory of the relationship becomes its own act of pulling up roots, moving, and starting life anew.

“Even the Smartest Phone Can’t Find Water in a Desert” by Jessie Ren Marshall

This work of flash fiction is written as a series of Siri-like responses and internet search results. We never hear directly from the man, but from his increasingly desperate queries to his phone, we learn that he’s stuck in the California desert because his car is out of gas and he’s very thirsty. His smartphone, dangerously low on battery, is his only hope, but things aren’t going too well:

“The temperature in this location is 116 degrees Fahrenheit, and your body temperature is 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Tonight it will be clear and dry. Tomorrow it will be clear and dry. It will be clear and dry all week in the Central Valley.

Okay. I found 512,000,000 results for ‘HOW DO YOU GET A CAR WITH NO GAS TO START.’ Should I read the first result?

…WARNING: LOW BATTERY.”