In Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s revised essay collection Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, we encounter a narrator who is compelled to serve as witness. These varied acts of witnessing are how she builds a vocabulary for herself as a daughter, teacher, friend, and writer. Artists are this narrator’s intimate companions—Prince, Richard Diebenkorn, Kiese Laymon, her father. Place becomes the site for all the orbiting they do together and perhaps no place of deeper significance to this narrator than Detroit, the beloved birthplace of her parents. “For my family,” our narrator professes, “Detroit has always been inevitable. It is the place we have been heading back to my entire life.”
Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit is a collection about the piercing, almost haunting nature of memory. It is also a book in which meditations on Black life and death, teaching, travel, gender, and love are incisively juxtaposed to articulate new questions and curiosities about the contemporary. In Sabatini Sloan’s hands, the essay itself offers a wide aesthetic terrain to tread through such investigations. The form is akin to breathwork throughout these pages in that her prose provides a steadying, capacious rhythm. Her language is precise and exacting but never sterile, never off beat. And the act of return as presented by this revised collection is an opportunity to reconsider the very fragile frame of nonfiction as a category itself. Sabatini Sloan is in a dance with form.
I spoke with Sabatini Sloan over Zoom about the lessons of revision, what it means to learn with and alongside the people we love, and why the question of genre is never really, simply, a question of genre.
Jessica Lynne: In these essays, the narrator wears so many different hats, from daughter and relative, to researcher and teacher, writer and art critic. Visual art and music, in particular, are the pulses of so much in these essays. What opens up for you by training your attention to cultural production in this way?
Aisha Sabatini Sloan: That’s just where the magic happens. There was an interview that Fred Moten gave where he talked about art as an act of survival and the art of survival. It’s an act of constant improvisation to be taking in or noticing where there is danger and where the allies are, and then improvising from there. That reminded me of this quote that I was obsessed with for a long time from Ralph Ellison’s National Book Award speech where he talks about the necessary shape shifting that the Black American artist has to do. I think it’s fascinating to watch how people manage that and how people code their message in different ways. It’s endlessly exciting and exhilarating to look at and to learn from.
JL: You’re the art critic, but you are also the daughter, and that role is a central part of this collection, especially your relationship with your father. It’s a relationship that is never one note. How did you approach writing about your father in this way? Looking back, are there things that you wish you would have withheld, or does it remain the container best suited for talking about this person who shows up for you in many other ways across other projects?
ASS: I think about that especially because I’m in a different moment with my parents as they’re getting older and both doing a lot of thinking about their lives. My dad thinks a lot about his contributions, and it has always been one of the reasons I don’t write as much about my mother. She’s shyer and my dad has always been so responsive and positive when being written about no matter what it is. In some ways, it ends up feeling like a conversation, an extension of a conversation between us. There’s a way in which I feel like he helped me. He really encouraged me to write about him and he loves witnessing people. He’s always tried to interpret and explain people and dynamics and relationships. That’s a way that we connect—in my witnessing of him and our relationship. We find each other through the ways that we overcome things and then find each other afterwards.
We inhabit different perspectives in different moments.
But I’ve definitely wondered if I’ve changed or altered the course of our relationship by writing about him. As he’s gotten older, I’ve been feeling more sensitive about him out in the world. How he’s perceived and how he perceives himself. It’s a tricky road, I think, to wonder if there’s something that I regret in particular on the page. There’s probably things that, for one reason or another, will get kicked up that might haunt me, but I feel like the grace that my father has had over the course of the last decade and a half of me being a writer is the bottom line. We are artists together and part of that is witnessing each other. If people can see that there’s a lot of beauty in our relationship, that’s what matters to me.
JL: Still, your parents are very much present together in how you experience Detroit throughout these pages. This edition also closes with a new essay that is a reflection on Black art, the legacy of the collector Dr. Cledie Collins Taylor, and the Detroit Institute of the Arts. How has your relationship to that city changed, if at all?
ASS: It’s strange because I’m closer to Detroit now than at any point in my life because I live in Michigan, but I’ve spent the least amount of time there because of the pandemic, having a baby, and being kind of homebound. My parents, because they’ve gotten older, are spending less time in their house in Detroit because it’s a lot of work. So through them and through that absence, I feel wistful. I really miss spending time there. It’s the center of our family life and our relationship with my extended family. That house that they have embodies this dream we have about ourselves: the possibility of creating an art space and having exhibitions and artists coming to stay. It is a bit like a stand in for the city in some ways. There’s a sense of a future there that is really rooted in hope and of idealism, so I feel nostalgic about it. Detroit feels like a portal to the world in a way that Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti do not.
JL: In “Gray’s Anatomy,” the narrator wonders about blood lust and thee blood lust on the part of law enforcement specifically. Though this essay comes after “D is for the Dance of the Hours,” in which the narrator spends the day shadowing her cousin who is a police officer in Detroit, there is a shared curiosity. Do you feel as though you have different questions or new questions about blackness, and policing as an infrastructure, and how that shows up in a city like Detroit?
ASS: One of the reasons I like an essay collection is for what you can do in the space between pieces. You can reposition and have a different angle on the “thing” and it’s still you. But we inhabit different perspectives in different moments.
But before even talking about blackness, I feel an undercurrent for the essay about the ride along with my cousin that is maybe absent from the writing is the role of women in the department and the fact that so many of the men that perpetrate crimes against women work in law enforcement. I felt super aware of this while I was writing that and I’m not trying to say that anybody is excused from anything based on gender, but it was really on my mind how people orient toward aggression, depending on how they manifest. In addition to that, in the last several years, we really have gotten a lot of information about actual attempts to infiltrate law enforcement by white supremacist organizations. It’s a studied phenomenon. And the fact that both misogyny and violence against women, and violence against black people are institutionalized in that way was something I was far more viscerally disturbed by, by the time I was writing “Gray’s Anatomy,” whereas in 2014, when I wrote that “D is for the Dance of the Hours,” I didn’t have the same visceral relationship to the way that those kinds of oppression are woven into those institutions. There is a dawning of awareness happening from one essay to the next.
JL: I see the essay, “Black Abundance” as a love note both for Kiese Laymon and for Black folks, broadly. Why was it important for this kind of love note to be included in this revised edition?
ASS: In some ways, I feel like witnessing the trajectory of Kiese Laymon’s work over the last ten, eleven years has been a real point of growth for me. He’s helped me learn how to be a writer and a teacher through witnessing how he constructs a sentence, how he comports himself in an interview, and how he communicates encouragement and appreciation and respect and critique. There are ways in which this collection represents that growth period through different sort of flash points. I like the idea of having that in there as a nod to the role I feel like he played in my growth as a writer, thinker, and a teacher.
JL: What has working on this revised edition taught you about revision?
ASS: I was very inspired again, by, Kiese Laymon and the way he framed his own experience of revising his essay collection. When I got that opportunity, I was a bit uncertain of how I wanted to contend with the fact that they’re these different selves represented in different pieces. Rather than trying to contend with the fact that I might not have written something that way now, I let myself be the same person that I was in those essays and tried to shape the process of revision with my editor, who was helpful in this, to show more of an arc.
This is a life process, art as life.
The thing that I struggled with when I first started writing nonfiction was the idea that when you state something in an essay as truth, you’re fixing something in time that is likely to change. So, one of the reasons I am attracted to fragmentation and leaving space for things to breathe—either between essays and even within essays—has to do with allowing the space for perspective and the understanding that perspective is what it is in a certain moment. That’s what’s being crystallized—not me and what I think and what I believe. To an extent, there are declarations, but I do still feel like it would have been more of a lie for me to pretend that I had been someone then that I might not be any more, than to, just let the reader experience a variety of those selves.
JL: In the written adaptation you gave as the keynote for NonfictionNOW in 2017, you write:
The genre says, “NON’ and then it says “FICTION.” But writing that confuses illustrates a lived experience of conflict and dissonance, of winking, of knowing how good it feels to be winked at, of being at once invisible and hyper visible, of struggling toward multiple forms of fluency. This kind of breakage on the page can get messy, and maybe it’s hard to teach, but it’s coming from an impulse that is all too often seen as somehow adolescent, somehow something to be tamed and redirected. But not all of us are allowed to live in this one dimension where you can’t hear all these other voices. These sometimes screaming voices that are saying: that’s not my truth! Or they are ghosts, mostly.”
You speak to a very specific readership in this speech, a white American readership as you write. In your opinion, what is lost if we’re not able to open ourselves up to the stream influences that you embody in your work but are also rightly call for, in this speech, as a wider mode of or approach to reading and writing?
ASS: I was a little relieved because it was nice to know I still feel that. My first thought is well, it’s always going to be a fight because the problem is power and how power is wielded.
This is also an issue for academia. I’m called upon to name or define creative nonfiction a lot, but I’ve never liked the term creative nonfiction, and I don’t know if there’s any term that does justice to the openness that’s required. So, it ends up being a question of what we are trying to do when we give it this name and whose rules are we following.
For some people, it feels possible to have this be a question of genre. For some people, it’s possible to separate those things because they don’t feel under attack in the same way, but for a lot of us it’s not. I have to go to therapy for this. I have to exercise. I have to teach my child different things. This is a life process, art as life. What do you call having to be on your feet all the time? It’s art but it’s also, going back Fred Moten, it’s survival. This is one of those questions that you answer every time you wake up.
Situationships are underrated—said no one ever. But dare I say, as much as I despised situationships IRL (despite spending much of my teens and early twenties in them), I do love them in fiction, where they indeed might be underrated. Many a novel has been written about marriage, affairs, star-crossed lovers and the one that got away, but a surprising few have hung their mast on undefined relationships born not of fate or even human conniving, but of mere circumstance. Still, situationships make for great stories, especially if you’re not the one in them, because they keep you guessing until the very end.
I should know: I built my entire debut novel, The Band, around a series of seemingly ordinary and unplanned glitches that end up upending everybody’s lives. A boy releases a viral song about a fisherman and his son, but given his geopollitical context, it just so happens to piss off not one, not two, but all three of East Asia’s superpowers. He escapes to America, where he stumbles upon a woman at an grocery store carrying the one dish that reminds him of home. She happens to be a therapist; he happens to be on the verge of a mental health crisis. The situationship that follows drives the both of them—along with everyone else in their orbit—down a rabbithole populated by revenge plots, AI, and a future neither of them see coming.
Of course, I’m not the only one who loves a good situationship gone awry. Here are seven other books that feature the kind of unconventional relationships replete with the kind of sexual tension that makes you wonder: will they or won’t they?
It’s no accident that my own novel starts with a quote from this book—“his desire, when it comes, extinguishes her.” In Second Place, a middle-aged woman with a striking resemblance to the author invites an artists to stay at her house. She is married with children and a career, but no matter—the most distinguishable plot in the book is her consuming desire for this man who, at best, treats like like an appliance—helpful, sure, but not something he’d take to bed. Throughout my own reading of the book, I kept on waiting for him to break and give in to her advances, but alas, in fiction as IRL, changing someone’s mind is harder than it looks.
Some readers went crazy over the fact that at the end of 432 pages, Selin and Ivan (the protagonist and her love interest) seems to have never consummated their relationship. I found it the most relatable thing I read all year because I, too, spent all my college years in the same kind of sexual repression driven by a cocktail of being the good daughter of immigrants meets excessive intellect meets nerd school. Like the elusive Hungarian mathematician that is the (potentially underserved) target of Selin’s desires, the book can come off like a giant tease—the literary equivalent of blue balls—but then again, that might be part of its appeal.
Shortly after I wrote/sold The Band, I started to hear about Esther Yi’s Y/N, the one other literary fiction centered in the world of Kpop—a topic that is apparently usually reserved for YA (likely thanks to the long-standing, albeit outdated, stereotype about Kpop fans being mostly young girls). Yi’s stark portrayal of a Berlin woman who goes to Seoul to search for a Kpop idol named Moon takes on an obsessive but undefineable edge wherein she wants the boy desperately—despite being formally attached to a German boy named Masterson—in an extreme, parasocial kind of way. Multiple detours mark the subsequent breakup with the boyfriend and prolonged surrealistic journey to find the idol, but one the constant throughout is the thoroughly ambiguous nature of the unnamed narrator’s desire for this boy about which she knows nothing and everything at once.
Patel’s obsessive, thoroughly modern novel also has plenty of sex—forget “spicy”; this book will burn the roof of your mouth with the searing, unflinching way it talks about the kind of intercourse that can only be called f*cking and not “love-making.” This makes it all the more ironic—and unusual—that the central relationship of the book is not between the 31-year old narrator and her roster of both official and unofficial lovers, but rather, between her and the woman she is obsessed with, the ex-girlfriend of the man she wants to be with. It’s a situationship—or “delusionship”—unlike any other and I am here for it. By all the critical accolades it’s been getting (here’s to the Women’s Prize), I’m not the only one.
This short story collection has plenty of conventional relationships—of the married, divorced, extramarital, and one-night-stand variety—but the central locus upon which everything else rests is between a tenuously-connected pair of protagonists, Benny Salazar and his assistant, Sasha. Benny, an aging music executive, and Sasha, his young and attractive—albeit kleptomaniac—hireling, both start and end the novel. Under normal circumstances, this might set the reader up to expect something to happen between the two of them, as is often the case when an older man with resources is in the orbit of a younger woman with looks but no money. But Egan takes us on an unexpected ride through multiple situationships where sex is frequently dangled but rarely fulfilled. In one chapter, a woman goes on safari with her boyfriend and his two children but ends up being attracted to the tour guide—a fact that is apparent only to one of the kids. In another, an actress gets to play the role of a lifetime: the real-life girlfriend of an infamous dictator.
The heroine in Brandi Wells’ debut novel, The Cleaner, is an almost deity-like character who sees all and does an enormous amount of meddling, but when it comes to her own relationships with the people in her life, she resort to the kind of ties that defy definition. The cleaning woman at the center of the story doesn’t really have family or traditional friends for that matter—the people she is closest to appear to be a co-worker named L. and a woman whose desk she cleans nicknamed Sad Intern. But every time we are attempted to assume that she wants to be besties with either of these two women, the cleaner reveals something to shatter that: she’ll visualize hitting her colleague so hard she bruises and steal the intern’s laxatives. Her romantic life is no different: whether an invitation to go on a walk with the delivery person is supposed to be a date or a platonic hangout remains an open question, a trademark of every situationship.
Perhaps the weirdest of all the situationships on this list is the relationship Mrs. Caliban has with a sea creature named Larry in Rachel Ingalls’ unforgettable novella that everybody apparently ignored when it first came out years before I was born but now is finally making a much deserved comeback. It has all the hallmarks of a regular affair, complete with a deadend relationship that primes the protagonist to meet someone new and more exciting, except in this case the meet-cute happens in her living room when a nearly seven foot tall escaped frog enters through her screen door. For a cross-species union, their romance does take a quick turn towards the physical. I’m no herpetologist, so I’m not sure if what they do together counts as sex per say—but the point is this: can a situationship get any more conventional than when a married woman has a torrid romance with a fugitive member of a different species?
The film opens with a view of London’s skyline; doused in a deep blue evening sky. Lights of the city blink. The onset of night reveals a man standing behind a window, translucent, looking down. He is shirtless; his arms are crossed; his expression is still and pensive. As he comes into focus, a pale orange glow begins to overwhelm the blue, and the image is washed out. The title appears across the screen, All of Us Strangers, and promises a tension that cannot be resolved: A collective estrangement, connection born by isolation.
All of Us Strangers, directed and written by Andrew Haigh, is a time-bending, supernatural exploration of grief and the darker shades of queer life, which ultimately poses substantive questions about how struggles with queer identity have persisted over time.
The filmfollows Adam, a middle-aged, gay screenwriter played by Andrew Scott. He lives an isolated life, ensconced in a sterile apartment in a high-rise building only inhabited by one other person—Harry, a younger man played by Paul Mescal, who Adam softly rejects when he shows up drunk at his door.
His childhood perceptions and adult experiences intermingle and collide.
Adam is working on a screenplay about his childhood. His parents died in a car crash when he was 12, and when he visits his suburban childhood home for research, they materialize there, the same age they were when they died. He visits and explains his adult life to them—his career, his home, and most painfully and vitally, his queerness. He falls in love with Harry as he reintroduces himself to his spectral parents, opening himself to the vulnerability and care of an intimate relationship for the first time in years.
Time loses its linear thread. His childhood perceptions and adult experiences intermingle and collide, pulling him inexorably toward the injuries of his early adolescence: The loss of his parents and the dawning of his queer sexuality in a hostile world. Adam tells Harry that the lingering pain of these traumas formed a “knot” inside him, an ossified manifestation of his terror of being alone.
The film’s final reveal is that Harry himself is dead: Adam discovers his body in his apartment, but his ghost still appears and speaks. Whether Adam’s parents and Harry are products of Adam’s imagination or spirits with their own consciousness is left open, but the complex interplay between them and Adam suggests ineffable presences: Even if only projections, their own subjective experiences of love and pain emerge. Like Adam, they are there and not there, alone and not alone.
In creating All of Us Strangers, an adaptation of Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, one of Haigh’s aims was to portray the emotional contours and edges of his generation of gay men. As he noted in an interview:
“I’ve wanted to do that for a while, but I could never quite find the right story to do it. And then telling it in the form of this strange ghost story about, essentially, what haunts us felt like the perfect way to explore a certain generation of people and what happened to us in the ’80s and ’90s. Connecting that with a story about grief and about a need to reconnect with parents felt like this perfect osmosis.”
Adam, as a gay man in his 40s, came of age in the 1980s and lived through three decades of turmoil, oppression, and progress in queer communities. AIDS ravaged the lives of innumerable queer men in the 80s and 90s and made them the objects of societal scorn and fear, sometimes manifesting in outright government repression (see the U.K.’s Section 28, which outlawed the “promotion of homosexuality” in schools and in local government in 1988). As the film depicts, these dire conditions could leave a child like Adam feeling that to live a gay life would be to live a desolate one.
Yet legal and social changes were to come in the decades ahead: Spurred on by committed queer activism, over the next twenty years effective treatments for HIV/AIDS were developed; public acceptance of gay people increased; and legal rights for queer people, including the right to marry and to serve in the military, were established in numerous countries (primarily in the Global North).
Shifting political tides have created a more equitable world for queer people, but this does not neatly map onto personal experiences of queerness. Haigh expresses the disjuncture between the appearance of a better world and one’s internal relationship with that world. When Adam comes out to his wary mother, who knows nothing of the world beyond 1987, he explains to her that “things are different now,” and asserts he’s content with his life. She doesn’t buy it. She stares at him with a searching concern, and she says it must be a “lonely life.” Adam rebuts this, but his face cracks. “If I’m lonely, it’s not because I’m gay. Not really.” “Not really,” she echoes, her perceptions confirmed. His “not really” marks the schism between outward contentment and inner pain. Progress has not alleviated the pain of coming of age, alone, in a society that deliberately pushed queer people to its margins.
Some critics have noted that All of Us Strangers presents a quandary that is specific, maybe exclusively so, to queer people of Adam’s generation: in Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson writes that “the film may seem awfully foreign to some younger queer people who, while no doubt still suffering the batterings of an often hostile world, can’t quite identify with Adam’s internal wrestling: his fear, his coded shame, his hermetic longing. Older viewers may run headlong toward the film’s despondency, finding solace, even catharsis, in its haunting ache.” Reflecting how Haigh views his film as an exploration of “what haunts us,” not only in the literal appearance of ghosts from but also in the shadowed, stalking presence of the recent past’s injustices, Lawson observes that those too young to have known these ghosts in corporeal form may not identify with Adam’s pain.
Haigh anticipates this critique in the film itself through Harry. Though one could read Harry as a projection of Adam’s own wants and fears, the subtle layers of his characterization and Paul Mescal’s thoughtful, sensual performance suggest a presence with his own past and his own will.
Harry, in his 20s, cuts a different figure than the tightly coiled Adam: He is direct, flirtatious, and relaxed, but drifts in and out of a diffuse melancholy. He is comfortable approaching Adam and honestly discussing queerness, yet it still hangs a shadow over his life.
Those too young to have known these ghosts in corporeal form may not identify with Adam’s pain.
After Adam and Harry have sex for the first time, they lie naked in Adam’s bed, shrouded in a soft darkness. Adam, who has already revealed some of his childhood and his formative pains to Harry, asks Harry about his own personal history. Harry came out to his parents as a teenager, and though they did not react dramatically, he says it “confirmed” the difference he always felt from his family; to name his sexuality was to define his intractable separation. He tells Adam that he has “drifted” from them, and that he feels on the outskirts of their lives compared to his straight siblings. Adam responds that “things are better, of course they are. But it doesn’t take much.” Again, the acknowledgment of life being “better,” followed by the admittance that something is still missing at the core.
Harry is not much better off than Adam. On the surface, his life is undeniably easier, as someone who entered adulthood with more enshrined rights than someone of Adam’s generation, and without the threat of AIDS hanging over him (when Adam confides to Harry he used to be afraid he’d die from having sex, he adds that it must be hard for Harry to understand). He was provided for in his childhood and adolescence, without fear of violence or abandonment because of his sexuality. And yet, he is untethered and solitary, sunk in the same pool of time-stretching isolation as Adam, and for reasons directly related to his queerness. In Harry’s characterization, Haigh expresses that queer people’s separation from the structures of straight life have persisted unabated across generations, engendering the same feelings of isolation and shame for individuals in their 20s and in their 40s.
The heterosexual family is key to All of Us Strangers: A foundational structure that society organizes itself around, which queer people, as their internal sense of difference rises within them, may realize was not built for them.
Adam’s grief for his parents is compounded by the fact that he could not share who he truly was with them—in coming out to their ghosts, he makes up for lost time and sutures wounds left unaddressed by their loss. Though Harry’s comparatively placid childhood and uneventful coming out would seem to leave him on sturdier ground as an adult, his queerness not only marked him as inherently “different,” but severed him from his family. His siblings, who married and had children, deepened their ties to their parents and created a multi-generational bond, while Harry, as a single, queer man, cannot connect in the same way. Adam, though without parents, is left isolated by the same metric: His straight friends eventually married, had children, and moved to the suburbs.
Queer people, of course, are now able to marry and to have children via adoption or surrogacy in many countries, but the fact of one’s ability to assimilate into the dominant culture does not mean one feels at home in it. Adam and Harry are both characters who grew up in conventional nuclear families: with middle-class, white, suburban, heterosexual parents, who presumably expected their children to form families in a similar image when they grow up. Growing up with a burgeoning sense of one’s own queerness in such a configuration can knock a child off their axis. One thinks they belong, and as they develop a sense of self and mature sexually, they realize they do not.
The fact of one’s ability to assimilate into the dominant culture does not mean one feels at home in it.
Even someone in Harry’s generation, growing up with the reasonable hope of a baseline tolerance and certain civil rights, must reconcile their own queerness with the straight world around them. To assimilate fully into the norms of straight culture—to start a family and move to the suburbs—may feel like denying one’s essential difference for the sake of belonging, even with a same-sex partner. And given the recent rise in attempts by right-wing politicians to curtail the rights of queer and trans people, one’s acceptance as a queer family or couple is precarious at best—the future is never guaranteed.
In his review of the film, Michael Koresky cites queer theorist Lee Edelman’s polemic No Future, an argument against “reproductive futurism”: the concept that the preservation of society relies upon prioritizing future children over the concerns of the present. Edelman argues that society is structured around this concept—that the “social order” relies on us projecting our hopes for the future on a symbolic “Child,” a figure unrelated to the actual lives of children (rather, the amorphous “child” that appears in the rhetoric of politicians inveighing us to “build a better world for our children.”) Queer sexuality by this argument, stands in direct opposition to reproductive futurism, instead embodying “the social order’s death drive.”
All of Us Strangers, notes Koresky, embodies the ideas of queer theorists like Edelman, making literal the concept that queerness, in its alienation from dominant forms of social organization, is unbound by conventional perceptions of linear time. The forward march of time is marked by a set of socially determined milestones, essential among them marriage and children. Children endow us with a concept of futurity, of continuance of our lives past our own deaths. When one’s identity grates against these, time can drift, keeping us stagnant or sending us back into the past, rather than propelling us forward into an illusory future. One can feel, even in a “better” world, that they are dancing on the edge of a void.
Andrew Haigh’s 2011 film Weekend, the story of a profoundly intimate 48-hour affair between two gay men, anticipates some of the narrative and thematic concerns of All of Us Strangers: A connection emerges out of deep loneliness, and the changing role of queerness in society is discussed and examined from multiple angles: After too much cocaine, the couple has a heated argument about the value of gay marriage, with one arguing for the radical potential of two men publicly proclaiming their love, the other decrying the assimilation into “the system” that gay marriage entails.
Haigh’s two films, made over a decade apart, illustrate what has changed and what has not. The struggle for some civil rights, marriage chief among them, is settled law in many countries, instead of a debate. Yet for queer people, there is a continued struggle to find support, meaning, and connection. Progress in the form of legal rights and greater public acceptance, which could only occur after years of dedicated activism, has helped queer people achieve some level of equality and safety, yet ironically, Haigh’s screenplay for All of Us Strangers posits that certain difficulties of queer life have become harder to talk about as a result. If it is collectively agreed upon that “things are better,” it can be hard to pin down what is still painful, what has not been resolved.
What ultimately compelled me most about All of Us Strangers is how Haigh examines this challenging tension in queer life: That a sense of separateness from mainstream society persists, in younger generations of queer people and older generations. That one can be physically present in the world, but feel that they are watching it, half in shadow, from behind a pane of thick glass.
On the other side of this central tension, though, is connection and love. Thrashing through his own isolation for the film’s duration, Adam embraces Harry at its end, illusory as this relationship is. Lying under the haunted surface of this narrative is the concept that the pain of isolation and separation is, paradoxically, inevitably, shared by others. The tension established in the title reverberates: What isolates us and what connects us, across time and generations, can spring from the same source.
What happens when the most intimate relationship in nature—mother and child—is perverted and twisted beyond recognition? Nobody has more power to harm than the one entrusted to nurture and protect. So observes Dr. Lily Patel, the strange psychiatrist in You Know What You Did:
“The mother-daughter bond is one of the strongest in nature. When you’re young, it keeps you tethered, protected. Later the same ties can hold you back, strangle you.”
This aptly describes the conflicted relationship between the novel’s main character Annie Shaw, who is an artist, wife, and mother, and her own mom Mẹ, a troubled Vietnam War refugee. After Mẹ, dies, Annie’s obsessive-compulsive disorder, which she thought she’d vanquished years ago, comes roaring back—but this time, the disturbing thoughts swirling around in Annie’s brain might be coming true.
The eight thrillers I’ve gathered below explore the darker side of mother daughter relationships. Though they vary in degrees of dysfunction from “Maybe we’ll skip Thanksgiving” to “Hide the knives,” each book is guaranteed to deliver raw emotion, tension, and complexity.
When does the maternal instinct to protect verge into toxic control? With her signature intricate plotting and whiplash-inducing twists, Sarah Pekkanen explores the question of mother daughter boundaries in Gone Tonight. Twenty-four-year-old Catherine Sterling has never spent more than a few nights away from her mother Ruth. When Catherine finally decides to spread her wings by accepting a job offer in another city, Ruth embarks on a desperate mission to stop her daughter from leaving. Triggered by her mother’s increasingly strange behavior, Catherine begins to ask questions. Why did Ruth insist that the two of them relocate every few years, and why was she always prepared to move at a moment’s notice—even in the middle of the night? As Catherine secretly investigates Ruth’s past, Ruth intensifies her campaign of manipulation and subterfuge. Pekkanen masterfully ratchets up the tension with perspective alternating between Ruth’s old journal entries and Catherine in the present day.
“With Martha, I could never be sure whether her touch would hurt or heal, whether her words would cut or console.” Ellice Littlejohn refers to her abusive, alcoholic mother as “Martha” or “Ma’am” never using any specific maternal reference. Indeed, during Martha’s frequent drunken stupors, it is Ellie, herself, who must keep house and serve as a stand-in mother to her own little brother. With the help of a neighbor, and against Martha’s wishes, teenage Ellie escapes small-town poverty to attend a private boarding school, eventually earning an Ivy League law degree and landing a plum in-house corporate lawyer job. On its surface All Her Little Secrets is a conspiracy thriller with a white-collar backdrop. But what makes the novel truly pulse-pounding is the very real dimension of racism and Ellie’s situation of being the only black woman in a c-suite of white men. With interludes to Ellie’s childhood in Chillicothe, Georgia, Morris examines whether or not we can truly suppress the past and to what extent can we reinvent ourselves.
The Leftover Woman is a poignant family drama with the page-turning engine of a thriller. Jasmine Yang flees her rural village in China and travels to New York City in search of her daughter, given up at birth for adoption by her abusive husband. In debt to the snakeheads who smuggled her into the United States, Jasmine is forced to work as a waitress in a seedy strip club. Just a few miles away—but it might as well be another country—privileged publishing executive Rebecca Whitney struggles to balance a high-powered career, marriage, and caring for her adopted Chinese daughter Fifi, who Rebecca begins to worry has bonded a little too much with the new Chinese-speaking nanny. The dual storylines collide in an emotionally satisfying conclusion to Kwok’s suspenseful study of motherhood, identity, and class.
Loosely inspired by the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case, Darling Rose Gold quickly departs from its real-life source material to create an even more twisted mother-daughter relationship, predicated on coercive control, simmering rage, and the blinding need for validation. The novel opens as Patty Watts is released from prison after serving five years for poisoning and abusing her daughter Rose Gold in a case of Munchausen by proxy syndrome. Patty makes the chilling declaration, “My daughter didn’t have to testify against me. She chose to.” So why is Rose Gold now welcoming her mother back into her life? Wrobel expertly wields dual timelines and head-to-head POVs to craft a taut cat-and-mouse story, only the roles of predator and prey shift constantly between mother and daughter in a delightfully destabilizing turn.
Jackal, a novel that is in varying proportions thriller, horror, small-town suspense, and contemporary fiction, cannot be forced into any one literary genre. This is apt as its main character Liz Rocher has long felt out of place both in the predominantly white rust belt town where she was raised by her single Haitian immigrant mother and in the neighboring African American community. After spending fourteen years away in New York City, Liz reluctantly returns home to attend her best friend’s wedding. Even as an adult, the single and childless millennial struggles to conform to the expectations of her mother, an accomplished physician and perfectionist, who immediately blames Liz’s recent breakup on weight gain. Literally and figuratively, Liz has spent her entire life trying to make herself smaller to fit in. “I cut away parts of myself. I made space for someone—something else…I turned myself into the perfect vessel for a monster.” Enter the titular Jackal. During the wedding reception, the bride’s daughter wanders into the woods and disappears. As Liz investigates, she uncovers a decades-long pattern of missing Black girls overlooked by an apathetic police force and largely unremembered by the local townspeople—except by their mothers and sisters.
Simultaneously bleak and compulsively readable, Ashley Audrain’s horror-tinged psychological thriller lays bare the dark side of motherhood. The first-person narration of Blythe Connor draws us into a nightmare in which every single maternal insecurity, every single fear is realized. It’s like a literary version of those Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbooks (Motherhood Edition).Interspersed throughout Blythe’s account are the stories of her mother Cecilia and her grandmother Etta. Blythe comes from a long line of distant, disturbed mamas. After giving birth to her own daughter Violet, Blythe has trouble bonding with the baby. As Violet grows older, Blythe observes her daughter’s lack of empathy and worries the child might even be capable of violence. Fox, Blythe’s husband, blames her for being a bad mom. Is it a question of nature versus nurture? “The Bad Seed” or an unreliable narrator? Much like motherhood, the answers are not so simple, and Audrain keeps us guessing until the final, gut-wrenching paragraph.
This dual-timeline thriller toggles back and forth from a present-day Hollywood homicide investigation involving an aging comedian and his sugar baby wife to a twenty-five-year-old Canadian murder trial pitting daughter against mother. Three generations of Reyes family women—Ruby Reyes dubbed “The Ice Queen” after she is convicted of killing her married lover; Ruby’s daughter Joey an exotic dancer who dies in a tragic fire; and Lola Celia, Ruby’s immigrant mother who at one point takes in Joey—illustrate the grim cycling of sexual violence through generations of passivity. The novel’s abusive maternal relationships are unabashedly dark. However, Hillier’s characteristically tight pacing and rapidly shifting settings, from seedy Toronto strip club to tony Beverly Hills mansion, keep your eyes glued to the page.
Nina Simon’s captivating debut is a sanguine exploration of mother daughter dysfunction. After a cancer diagnosis upends L.A. real estate mogul Lana Rubicon’s life, she finds herself convalescing 300 miles north of the city in her semi-estranged daughter Beth’s remote coastal cottage. Just as the sexy fifty-seven-year-old begins to ponder whether boredom or cancer will kill her first, Beth’s teenage daughter Jack discovers a murdered man floating in the Elkhorn Slough nature preserve and becomes the prime suspect. Lana, eager to exercise her vitality after months of grueling chemo, leaps to her granddaughter’s defense. But she can’t clear Jack’s name on her own, and the three generations of fiercely independent Rubicon women must work together to solve the case. In the process, they unearth a mare’s nest of lies, betrayal, and unresolved family issues—their own as well as those of the colorful locals. Simon succeeds in crafting both a smart contemporary mystery and an exquisite ecological love letter to Monterey Bay.
There’s a video that made the rounds online a few years ago: in Chechnya, a mother films her son pulling a sheep free from the drainage ditch it wedged itself into. Three glorious seconds of freedom follow for the liberated sheep, at which point it leaps majestically and comically back into the drainage ditch, stuck once more.
A similar moment occurs in the Irish author Caoilinn Hughes’ brilliant new novel The Alternatives when one of the characters comes across a sheep jammed in blackthorn shrub. “The poor thing was worn out from the ridicule of life… Rank stress wafted off the animal,” so she cut “it free from the last batch of thorns,” whereupon it immediately “bucked into another layer of them.”
The sheep—featured on the front cover as a stolid creature atop layers of surging earth—could easily be us humans and our everlasting eejitry. Some group of experts may yank us out a ditch—the white-coated folks at Moderna and Pfizer, let’s say—then, without so much as tossing a thanks their way, we barrel toward the next ditch, lowering our heads to take on momentum.
Four such people reaching down and yanking on our ankles are the Flattery sisters, the protagonists of Hughes’ third novel. Hughes is the author of the poetry collection Gathering Evidence and the novels Orchid & the Wasp and The Wild Laughter, all of which took home considerable hardware during their respective award seasons. Those first two novels followed lives thrown into turbulence because of the Celtic Tiger. The Alternatives probes a more gaping, self-inflicted wound: climate change.
“Flattery nostrils are a one and a zero,” one sister tells another. “Only the left sides of our brains get enough oxygen.” Rational and logical they are. Each in their thirties, they are all single, all have doctorates (one received hers honorarily), and all are, in their respective fields, doing work that addresses the conditions of the planet we are desecrating.
Rhona is a well-connected political science professor at Trinity College Dublin with “the conviction of a tennis ball launcher.” Maeve is a social media celebrity chef who is trying to get out of her book contract so she can publish the book her integrity demands of her—one that addresses future food shortages, shortages that Brexit has exacerbated. Nell, the youngest, also can’t be budged from her principled core. A philosophy adjunct professor in the United States, she stitches together the sparsest of livings so she can deliver, by way of example, a seminar on Heidegger’s care structure.
The three sisters are scattered across the English-speaking globe: Maeve in England, Nell in America, and Rhona—never for long—in Ireland. What brings them together is that their oldest sister, Olwen, a geology professor in Galway who can provide the receipts for why we are a doomed species, has gone missing. There is nothing necessarily nefarious about her disappearance. Long tethered and nagged by her “godforsaken undergraduates” and other responsibilities, she cuts herself loose by absconding in the middle of the semester and night when she goes “out to the garden to get rhubarb for her gin and [keeps] walking.”
She replants herself in the Irish countryside, and this is where her sisters eventually track her down. Together again, for the first time in years, the sisters exhume the bones scattered in their shared past, all with an eye on the dire prospects before life on this planet.
Reading The Alternatives, there’s the feeling that we’d all benefit if the sisters could conjoin into one like the Transformers used to at the end of each episode. They are, though, siblings, and siblings know every chink in the armor we wear out in the world. The sisters love each other deeply but also issue lines so cutting they could pierce organs. One or another is usually on the verge of Irish goodbye-ing the rest. Nothing lasts forever (though Olwen points out early on that “nature would have let us have a few millennia yet, if we’d been chill and sound and reasonable”), but for a little while the four sisters are together on the page, and what follows is a funny, intelligent, tenderhearted, and aching portrait—in the form of a play!—of siblings who were orphaned young and are trying their best to save us from ourselves. If they were to figure each other out along the way, that’d be a bonus.
Anyone who has read Hughes’ two previous novels can endorse this next statement: Hughes is one of the greatest writers of dialogue at work today. She is peerless in her ability to develop and communicate complex ideas through witty banter and possesses remarkable range in her ability to write across various points of view. Her sentences are to be relished.
These days, seeing in an author’s bio that they’re Irish is a bit like seeing Napa on a wine bottle’s label or Made in Italy stitched to a suit’s tag—you’re practically promised top-notch quality. Who knows what Ireland does with its mediocre talent. As for what gets out the door, Irish authors are producing some of the most exhilarating and audacious fiction in our times. The Alternatives is a perfect example of this. You never feel the author on the page, but every paragraph confirms this is the work of a dazzling talent, one greatly concerned about where we are and where we’re taking ourselves, but never allowing those weighty concerns to burden the prose or narrative or prevent her characters from having a laugh. During these uncertain and troubling times, we need more writers like Hughes who can, with such joy and resolve, stare down the barrel we’ve pointed at our heads.
Julian Zabalbeascoa:In several interviews for The Wild Laughter (which is one of my favorite novels of the past decade), you spoke about your possible next project centering around four sisters, and how you were resisting telling their story but were becoming convinced that you had to. Where did these four sisters come from? And why that initial resistance to writing what would become The Alternatives?
Caoilinn Hughes: The novel itself arrived first as four sisters, but I knew it would show them in their separate lives. I wondered about the magnets holding them together—besides love—when they’re living such different lives, in different countries, fighting separate battles, with their parents long dead, and while they’re each more invested in the present than the past. I wondered, as well, how those magnets would affect the women individually, in their separate lives. I was drawn to writing about women at work: women who center work in their lives and express themselves through their professions; women attempting to do meaningful or fulfilling work—work that gives them energy and anchorage and purpose. Taboo is too strong a word, but it’s still frowned upon for work to be the center of gravity of a woman’s life. (What counts as work is another question, like caregiving.) But I know so many women for whom this is the case. Also, I loved the idea that a book about sisters could also be a book about a geologist, a philosopher, a political scientist and a chef… walking into a bar! Family doesn’t only exist in a domestic realm.
JZ:Given Olwen’s motivations, I imagine most every interviewer will ask whether you have hope for the future or not. Meaning: do we still have time to solve the climate crisis or is our weight too far past the tipping point. So how, if at all, did the writing of this novel arm you with the hope and resolve you need to take on the direness of our circumstances?
CH: Yeah, wow, that’s a question! A huge one! Getting straight to the meat… or plant-based meat alternative! Let’s see. Writing this novel helped me to contend with being alive right now by spending time with characters who are attempting to the do the same, who are sitting forward, who have not clocked out—better people than me! Though, I’m never writing about heroes. This is the time we happen to be alive, and it’s no less worthy a time to be alive than any other, and therefore, it’s no less worthy of being represented in art. Even if we squirm at it, fearing its ugliness. Maybe what unites us is the way we think about the future—it’s just so different to how our parents thought about the future, and how it was thought of at any point in human history, given the existential crises we face. While our prospects and feelings and our practical plans about the future are far from homogenous, I do think something that carries across the world is a general pessimism about the future. So that’s something that might be new in its omnipresence. I’m interested in the ways that individuals deal with that species-wide phenomenon, which is rooted in environmental collapse, weakening democracies, the dehumanizing and siloing effects of ungoverned capitalism. And there are so many different ways to respond. In this novel, there are four characters, and while they don’t represent a spectrum, they do each respond differently. People might tend toward denial or despondence or despair. Or you can feel angst or guilt or shame. Rage is a common response. Maybe the more engaged you are, the more you realize that you might have to seek social support. Or foster community connections. Or you might be engaging in pro-environmental behaviors in your own life, or you might be engaging in change-making action. Maybe the fact that these sisters grew up without adults in the room primed them to be living in such a moment. They’re already familiar with the stages of grief. And in this case, the last stage can’t be acceptance. Grief is a big part of the novel, but it isn’t a grief that’s located in the past. This isn’t a novel about people dwelling on the past. It’s about the present moment, and so it’s less about what’s been lost and more about what’s being lost. Which I think is another way of talking about what’s not yet lost.
JZ: Sticking with this idea of pessimism. I’ve seen the toll our daunting prospects have had on my students. For the first time, many of them say they don’t have hope for the future. How does one convince them otherwise?
CH: In the last question you asked if I have hope or if we’re too far past the tipping point. What is too far past? I don’t think that’s an answer we’re waiting to get from scientists (though, of course, we’ve been given it) … It’s a question we have to ask ourselves, and to think about how our behavior would change if the answer is yes? Because it is yes! Of course we’ve reaped havoc. But does that mean we should just think: in for a penny in for a pound? Or is that an utterly immoral and inhumane mindset? I’d argue that it is. Your question here about how to convince others to have hope… this question on one level has to do with science communication and getting good information. There are conflicting studies about what galvanizes people, or what pushes them towards despair. The trajectory we’re currently on is a pessimistic trajectory, but that’s not to say there’s not another or many other trajectories we could be on. If you’re asking for my own feelings on this, I believe that we can have a much better world than we do now. I mean, there is and there’s going to be enormous suffering. That’s built into the emissions that are already in the atmosphere. So I think communicating the fact that more emissions equals more suffering is essential to helping people to understand that what we do now does matter. It really does matter because you’re affecting the suffering that will take place. Or you’re helping to pave the way for the better world that is feasible. Informing yourself is key. But I’ll run back into my wheelhouse now and say that to equip yourself emotionally and philosophically for what is to come, and for what is here… I believe that art has a huge part to play.
JZ: There’s a passage from the book: “It’s like with cows… you can taste the pre-slaughter adrenaline in the food if it’s come from a stressy, stratified kitchen.” If we extend the analogy a bit, this is the prevailing mood for the talk surrounding climate change. Understandably, even the best-case scenarios would inspire high stress and anxiety. But that’s not the case for The Alternatives. If I tallied the number of times I wrote “ha” in the margins, I’m sure it’d reach the triple digits. Why is it important to imbue the work with humor and joy?
I was drawn to writing about women who center work in their lives and express themselves through their professions.
CH: I think the best characteristic of the human species is our sense of humor. People might have different priorities. But for me, that’s the trait that makes us interesting and worthy of knowing, and beautiful and sexy and various. I love how much cultural difference there is in humor. And how even when we don’t speak one another’s language, you can find ways of sharing humor—it’s a shortcut, really, for understanding one another’s humanity. Also, as a reader, I just love funny books. Not necessarily comedies. I listen to this podcast every night, because I’m a terrible sleeper. It’s the only thing I can listen to—Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review podcast. Mark Kermode has this test for comedies: the six-laugh test. You need to laugh six times. But, I want that from all works of art, not just comedies. Otherwise, I don’t feel that the artwork is reflecting life as I know it. All day long, even in the bleakest of circumstances, you see people making small gestures towards making another person smile or laugh. I was writing the novel partly during Covid, and partly because of that and because of how challenging I found the novel to write, I wanted there to be some kind of joy on every page. There’s a really strong tradition in Ireland of the blackly comic, of tragicomedy. I grew up reading those works, so it feels quite a natural mode to lean into.
JZ: You mention you were writing during Covid. Did that effect your choice to set the novel in 2023?
CH: I was trying to set the novel in the year that it would be published. But the world is changing so rapidly. So in the process of writing it, I had to constantly anticipate what the coming years would be like, while trying to understand and capture the present moment as I wrote. That process reflected what the novel’s about, which is the attempt to lurch forward in the story as the rug is being pulled from beneath our feet.
JZ: In which ways did the book change – or did it change? – as you continued to incorporate our ever-shifting present?
CH: It changed a lot. I tried not to have too many cultural markers or seemingly temporary items from the news. There’s no Trump in the novel. Covid is maybe mentioned twice.
JZ: Brilliantly, with one of the sisters talking about a romantic drought as “the great abstention of 2020.”
CH: Yes, the realities of our times are in there! And in Rhona’s story—the political scientist character—her chapters were the ones I had to change the most… because UK and Irish politics were doing somersaults, it meant that the specific work I originally had her doing was becoming too chaotic and muddy. And I’m someone who writes in one draft. So for me to have to change anything substantive is a big deal, but it was part of the contract with a novel like this.
JZ:The characters in Orchid & the Wasp and The Wild Laughter try negotiating the turbulence of all that follows the Celtic Tiger. With The Alternatives it is climate change and, to a lesser degree, Brexit. These are right up there as the major self-inflicted wounds of our time. What is it about these structural forces that have greed as a galvanizing mechanism that so interest you as a storyteller?
Even in the bleakest of circumstances, you see people making small gestures towards making another person smile or laugh.
CH: And now I’m seeing the psychoanalytical red flags! It’s true, because Hart in The Wild Laughter sees himself as being a wronged person. But in terms of this book, I guess I’m drawn to writing about characters who are aware of the sword that’s in our belly, even if they don’t know what to do about it. Within their chosen professions, they’re trying to improve the world in some small way. They’re each contending with a different systemic challenge. The geologist is witnessing deep time collapsing—where processes that should be playing out over millennia are playing out over decades. Not to mention contending with a really frightened student cohort. The political scientist, Rhona, is working with weakening democracy. The philosopher is working within this degraded teaching system, and the commercialization of the Academy. And the chef is working within a volatile food system, related to climate change and geopolitics, and also the hot-blooded context of food nationalism. So they’re each on a path that’s being rapidly cut off. It’s important to note that they are all in privileged positions, where they’re able to pursue fulfilling work—work that they consider to be fulfilling—even if they might think differently about what makes for fulfilling work. So none of them think that they can pull out the proverbial sword, but they’re mindful of trying to do work that contributes to the world positively.
JZ: In The Wild Laughter, you illustrate the sort of self-flagellating the Irish were undertaking after the Celtic Tiger. To advocate for the Dark Prince for a moment, when it comes to climate change, our response to it, those of us who are environmentally conscious, might it appear the same? We’ve strayed on account of our excesses and only austerity can return us to a sustainable, natural state.
CH: Austerity is the wrong way to think about what needs to happen, in my view. That belongs to a neoliberal narrative. Take the case of food, since we have a chef character. There are so many new types of food. There are so many plants that we’ve never eaten, that we’ve never had the time or need or curiosity or incentive to pursue, partly because how animal farming is being subsidized. It doesn’t have to be a reduction of options. From a vegetarian perspective, going to a restaurant these days, you tend to have more than one option. So on a very basic level, it’s becoming more interesting to be vegetarian. So what does it mean to quit meat now? Is it just that you lose your choice? Or is it that you now have many more choices to eat well without causing serious injury? To walk outside through trees with birdsong instead of a nitrogen-noxious, bare, barren field. To have air to breathe that’s less polluted? Canals that aren’t rigid with algae? To live in a world where the consequences of what you do are less hurtful to someone else? To get to live well… to get to have mental health? That wouldn’t be austerity!
JZ: How did you arrive at the narrative voice and how did it allow you to tell this story, with four main characters? Most times it feels like a limited third, but it is more a roving subjectivity.
CH: I knew that this would be a polyphonic novel, and that the separate stories and voices would converge at some point. Olwen was my starting point—she’s why I wrote the novel. To me, she’s the central character, even though they’re all weighted equally. I do love the family gathering story. It’s really hard to pull off in fiction, but the challenge is irresistible. If you think of plays like Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County or films like Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen… You get to have all that complexity of the projection that goes on, the assumptions around family being together, and then of knowledge and history and blind spots. It’s much easier, I think, to put that complexity you get into a visual frame. But still, I think that some of the richest, thorniest, funniest works involving family gatherings have been novels. I will say, though, that while there’s that reunion sitting at the heart of the novel, I wanted to accommodate the fact that the sisters don’t define themselves in terms of family. They don’t see themselves as being fatalistically shaped by childhood experiences or parental expectations or guilt or dysfunctional role models or sibling rivalries. Anything like that. First and foremost, we see them in an extra-familial context. I hope that they’re still individuals, then, when they’re together. I tried to show how painful that can be—the struggle to hold onto ourselves around family. Our shared history can bring us together, but it can also trap us… because while that history might be shared, it’s likely to have been experienced very differently. With the point of view, to be true to each character, I tried to imbue the prose with the voice of that character. The word choices, the tempo, the frame, the sense of humor. It felt a little like writing four short stories to begin with—each with a distinctive tone.
I saw Steven Baxter the day before he died. I was ten years old. It was 1983. He was in his middle twenties, and walked toward me on the block where my family lived. His home was not far from ours. His face was heavily made up. This was the 1980s, and I was just a kid. I’d never seen a man in make-up before. My stomach flipped. Despite the make-up, the red cheeks, the lipstick, the eye shadow, I recognized him immediately, and, now I can say his make-up was not only frightening. His face was mysterious, even alluring, unlike anything I’d ever seen in my cloistered life in suburban Richmond Hill, Queens.
As a young Jehovah’s Witness boy I was taught to fear all things and anyone outside of the Witness circle, all referred to as “the world.” Anything “worldly” was considered dangerous, forbidden. Although his Witness family was not “worldy,” Steven was. He was dangerous, and this fascinated me. But on the day I saw him: I waved. He waved back. The following day, he walked in front of a subway car. It was in the papers, and on the tongue of every local Witness. Seeing him that day before made me feel like I was somehow implicated in his death.
Could I have helped?
Might I have spoken with him? Asked him if he was okay?
Until now I’ve never told a soul that I saw him.
Several months before Steven’s suicide, my sister and I were knocking on doors, ringing bells, and selling Watchtower magazines. It just so happened the apartment building the Baxters lived in was on that day’s ministry map. We rang their bell to get into the building. When we reached their floor we decided to say hello. We buzzed and Steven answered. He was not wearing make-up. Behind him were his two brothers, not twins, but only one year apart, and both were cerebrally challenged. They ran around, undressed, with pool-floats around their midsections, repeating: “Don’t look at me. Don’t look at me. We’re naked! We’re naked!” They were laughing.
Steven was not.
He asked if we wanted a glass of water.
Steven Sr., the father, would often yell our way if he saw us in the streets: “Can you wait?”
And our job was to respond: “For what?”
And he would say: “The New System!”
And we would laugh, and he would laugh.
I thought the joke was funny, then, but now, as a grown man, I know a few important things. One, the New System is not coming. It’s never coming. It’s a Witness fantasy that there will be a worldwide paradise, run by Christ, here on Earth, and death will be defeated. Death will be no more, and the sick will be restored, and the deserving dead will be resurrected. I also know that Steven Sr. had more reason than most to wish for it, to have faith in impossible things.
Five years later, in 1988, my good friend Shirley Davis was murdered. She had gone to the store for the Sunday paper and a gallon of milk for her parents, at seven o’clock in the morning. The police found her on the railroad tracks beside a supermarket in Jamaica, Queens. I knew those tracks well. Her skull was completely crushed. She was fifteen, and reportedly had four quarters and a piece of chewing gum in her pocket.
I had not thought of Shirley for years, until I was watching a crime show on TV and the characters were investigating a cold case that sounded almost exactly like hers. Later that same night, on the local news, the reporter said Shirley’s case had been reopened because of new evidence, and that evidence had inspired the episode.
The news then showed a photo, her annual school picture. It was the very same photo in our old family album, where we kept all my friends’ photos. I can still see her innocent face, and her sloping ruffled shoulders, in front of a sepia curtain. Life is boundlessly cruel.
Since I watched the episode I could not stop thinking of them both.
Steven. Shirley.
They shine out like saints in my memory. I imagine both their faces, made-up, restored, young, and innocent, emblazoned on hagiographic candles.
I used to wonder at the strange psychology of the Jehovah’s Witness until I read a line from a book called The American Religion: “When death becomes the center, religion begins.” The Witnesses have invested heavily in the centrality of death. And on virtually any day before this one, before today, perhaps even in some other week, I would claim the opposite for my own life. I confess, now, I’m not so sure.
Recently, nearly a year after the publication of my first novel—no surprise: “a coming of age” story about a young man growing up in a strict religious home—a graduate school here in New York invited me to give a talk about a topic of my choosing, as long as the talk related to writing, to fiction specifically. Perhaps at a loss for ideas, I told them I would talk about death. Death in fiction.
That talk was today.
I started strong, and said to the students: “All fiction is about the same thing. Death. Who said this?”
No one responded.
I then said: “All fiction is about one thing. Me. Who said that?”
A hand tepidly rose.
“Please, yes,” I said.
“Kerouac?”
“Boom,” I said. “She wins. Albeit the quote is possibly apocryphal. But we think he said it. If you ask me both quotes suggest the same penny wisdom. We are all going to die. It’s what we have in common. And so all writing ultimately is about us, and our headlong sleepwalk toward death. So we better make it count.”
The room was silent.
Because these were young people, not yet interested in death. And I was a bit older, and so I was practically old. And I was alone. What could I say?
I needed to lift them up in their seats, and get their attention. Hold it.
And so I shared with them my recollections of Steven Baxter and Shirley Davis, and of the TV episode.
Afterward, I said: “I’m writing a story about them. A short story.”
An eager hand went up.
I nodded.
The young man asked: “Are we talking? Taking questions?”
He was wearing a Joy Division T-shirt, dark eyeliner, and a near smear of dark lipstick. His nails were painted black.
He was beautiful.
I thought to myself, how brazen, this young man. Who did he think he was? But of course, I was jealous. Not of the make-up, necessarily, but the certainty, the confidence it takes to know who you are at that age.
“Have at it,” I said to the young man.
“I think it’s dicey,” he said.
“Exactly,” I said. “Good word, too. Tell me more.”
“You have to be very careful. Respect them,” the young man said.
“Another good word,” I said. “Dicey. Respect. And nice shirt.”
He looked at his shirt as if he’d forgotten what was there. Others leaned forward to see. I wondered what he thought of me: my blazer, my jeans, my moustache.
I shook myself back to attention.
“What I’m saying is: I can’t say I miss Shirley,” I said. “We were too young. It’s been forty years. But this doesn’t change the fact that when I think of her I shudder. Missing her? Kid stuff. Her memory makes me shudder.”
I then tried to recall if Steven was crying when I saw him. I think he was crying.
Was I making these details up? Writing encourages invention. One tends to invent details, to extrapolate. Nevertheless, I think his makeup was running, from crying, and what did I do? I waved? What is that? I did nothing. If I had said his name, or said hello, said something so he could feel seen and feel less alone…
“This too shakes me: Steven was wearing make-up. Should I be saying this? Sharing this… I don’t know.”
There was a mutter in the room, as if I had said too much.
I took in a deep breath, tried to reassert control.
“Why was he wearing make-up? Was it something he did often, or just that one day? What does doing it imply? Was he gay?”
I looked at the student’s blank faces. Some of them appeared frightened. And some were rapt, as if watching a car crash in slow motion. I wondered if I seemed straight to them.
I continued: “The rumors surrounding Steven were that he suffered literal ruthless demons. Religious nonsense. What it took to be gay back then! Or just to be different! I can’t imagine. And so writing about them,” I said. “Dicey, yes. Respect, yes. But how does one do that? Do we do it with brevity? Simplicity? Like black suits at a funeral? Handshakes with the family? I’m sorry for your loss… Or do we do it with metaphor? Fancy Faulkner style. My mother is a fish… Or is it in the details? The things we see when we close our eyes and we want to include everything possible from that space, so the story grows, lives, is inhabited, and cannot be so readily rid of. The rail tracks. I knew those tracks. I knew the scattered coins flattened from passing cars. The rusted spikes in the dirt. The patches of grass growing in between the rails and the wooden ties. The large, old cars that sit unused. I knew the graffiti. The ladders up the sides of cars. The broken bottles on the ground. What else can we do? We bear witness. To it all. Everything becomes holy. Sacred. Even the tossed cigarettes. And this is the work of the writer writing about death. True death. Not manufactured death. The deaths we hold in memory and use for fiction.”
I talked for an hour and a half, pacing back and forth like a large cat in a cage. The room was warm. I loosened my tie, looked at the class for support.
They were stone-faced despite my exasperated demeanor.
Shortly afterward, I was in the university café having a tea when a young woman approached, the same young woman who answered the Kerouac quote. She was one of the few students that seemed genuinely taken with the lecture.
She asked if she could sit, and then sat without waiting for an answer. No doubt, straight A’s, and full of that ambition only the inexperienced young can afford.
I said, “Of course. Yes. Please.” I moved my books that were on the table. Made room.
“Mr. Barrett,” she said.
“Please,” I said. “Call me Tom.”
“Mr. Barrett. Tom.” She smiled at this. “You’re from Richmond Hill.”
“I am.”
“So am I,” she said. “Little India.”
“Yes,” I said. “I used to live behind the Sikh Temple! You know it?”
“I do!”
We both nodded at this.
“I’m curious about something,” she said.
Patient. I sipped my tea.
“Do you know what a Jain Indian is?” she asked.
“I do!” I said, surprised by my own enthusiasm. “Years ago, when I was still a struggling writer—actually I’m still struggling… I worked as an assistant to a Jain man, an events photographer. We did mostly weddings. The weddings he shot lasted for hours, groom brought in on a horse, floral necklaces, tables of neon food. Anyway, he was Jain. A nice man. And I don’t know your name?”
“Dhara.”
“Dhara. Okay. Lovely.”
“So I’m wondering,” she said. It came tumbling out. “Jehovah’s Witnesses. They knocked on my door.”
“Okay.”
“And, well, big surprise to me, I liked what they had to say.”
I now saw I was an object of fascination for her. Not a teacher. “Yikes,” I said. I cringed. It was not a word I usually used. “Now I’m hoping I didn’t say anything back there to offend you.”
I now saw I was an object of fascination for her. Not a teacher.
“I’m just wondering what a former Jehovah’s Witness, like you, would make of a Jain, like me, starting a Bible study with Jehovah’s Witnesses. I might even convert,” she said half-laughing.
I was uncomfortable. This kind of dynamic had changed with the times: respect a wide distance between student and professor.
“That’s entirely up to you,” I said.
“But you’re not curious.”
I sipped my tea. “It’s not my place to be curious about your doings. My apologies if that disappoints you. I mean that with respect.”
She drummed fingers on the tabletop. “Can I ask, why did you leave?”
I answered quickly, my response, as usual, prepared: “I had lots of reasons, most of which are my business, I’m afraid.” Then I paused and thought of my first boyfriend. I didn’t exactly leave the Witnesses for him. He came after. But I did leave because they made me hate myself.
“But those reasons,” I said, “might be summed up: it was my parents’ religion, not mine.”
She bit her upper lip. “I think you might have just summed up my feelings, too. I’ve been trying to do that, but with no luck.”
I fell back on my inclination toward secular sermonizing, took a breath. This young woman knew so little of her latest rebellion. Dabble in Christianity. Please. I launched back into lecture mode, couldn’t help myself: “The Witnesses, certainly, and some of the other protestant American-born Christian denominations, subscribe heavily to the book of Revelation, which is a deathly orgiastic book. And in that book there is even mention of a ‘Second Death,’ from which one can never be resurrected. This would be the case for those after the Day of Judgment who are found guilty and for those who have been resurrected and become slow to appeal to God. They are not sufficiently faithful, and are thrown into a lake of fire where they die a second time and can never be loosed from death again.”
She looked at me as if my hair was on fire.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying the Witness faith is deeply invested in the centrality of death. Suffused with it. Some might even call it a fetish.”
She said after a time: “How about the first quote? You never attributed the first quote.”
I must have looked lost.
“‘All writing is about death,’ you said. Who said it?”
I laughed. “Well. You got me,” I said. “Me. I said it. I counted on everyone not knowing.”
“You said it.”
“I did. I quoted myself,” I laughed again.
She nodded skeptically, clearly did not approve. “Ok.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Huh.” She crossed her arms. “Well, I plan to teach someday and I think there is probably some weird fucking pedagogical lesson in there somewhere.”
I was taken aback, became slightly alarmed. Tried to laugh it off.
“Do you believe it?” she said, not quite convinced.
“That all writing is about death?” I said.
She waited.
I thought about it and wanted to tell her how naïve she was, how young. “Yes. To some extent, I do.”
She stood and offered her hand. I shook it.
“A pleasure,” she said. The word rang hollow in her mouth.
She left, but after just a few short steps, she turned, and said, “Can I say it seems like you’re lonely. I like that term, death fetish. Maybe you need to decentralize death from your own life, Mr. Barrett.” She made a face of disappointment, and added, “I mean Tom.”
Then she left.
I obsessed over her comments every remaining minute of the day, into that evening’s dinner.
Later that night, I had a date. We matched on a dating app, my first time using one. I thought again of my first boyfriend, Mossimo, as I dressed. We never had a chance. I hadn’t grouped him with Steven and Shirley because it had been another time in my life, another chapter, but still, he died too young. I must be getting old. There has been too much loss. Shake it off. My date’s name was Bert Rodriguez and we lived in the same neighborhood, South Harlem. We agreed to meet at a casual Italian restaurant, not far from either of us. It was spring, and I was happy to avoid the dank subways. So I walked, and couldn’t help but notice how many baby birds, some barely born, were dead and littering the sidewalk. Some with crunched eggs still surrounding them, others with their beaks cracked. Most likely fallen from their nests. I’d seen the phenomenon before. I live way over on the West Side, by the Hudson River, where there is a lot of wind, no matter how light the day. And the winds sometimes knock nests from their perches, or baby birds from their nests.
Bert and I met out front, shook hands and hugged.
The host asked if we wanted to sit inside or out. We looked at each other. Up to you… No, up to you…
We sat outside.
“So, you’re a writer,” he said.
“Yes, but I can’t make a living at that, so I teach. Wait, you teach, too. Right?”
“Right there in my bio.”
I set my napkin in my lap, and said, “We have something else in common.”
The waitress came over and introduced herself as Tirza, a surprising name, and yet I’d heard of it because I’d once read a novel called Tirza. I asked her if maybe she knew it.
“I do! I read it. It was really good!” said Tirza, nodding her head, cool, cool.
We ordered food. Pastas for us both. We ordered wine. White.
“So my mother, her maiden name was Rodriguez. Like yours.”
Bert covered his mouth, scoffing. “No.”
“I know, I know. White as snow.” I showed my hands. “My mother is from Chile. But my father is from Brooklyn, all the way back.”
“My family comes from Mexico. But I was born in the States.”
“I love Mexico.”
“You’ve been?”
“I used to live in Southern California. We would do day trips. With friends. To the border towns. Great food, all along the way.” I thought of my marriage, its embarrassing collapse.
Tirza brought our dishes.
“First life. First wife,” I said.
He paused, fork mid-air. “Yikes. Sorry.”
I laughed. “Not at all. I came out late. And, weird, I used that word today.”
“Which word?”
“Yikes. It’s a good omen.”
“We’ll take what good we can get!” Bert laughed.
I told Bert about the dead birds. The crunching.
“Simple, pleasant dinner talk,” he said and laughed uncomfortably.
“This is why I’m single. I am a boring, single, white guy with nothing to hide and no game.”
We were silent, for a beat.
“Nothing to hide?” he said. “I doubt that.”
“I’m an open book.”
“I got it,” he said. “How about what’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever done?”
I thought of the beautiful young man attending my lecture earlier that day, his painted eyes, nails, his lips.
“I’m not weird by nature,” I said. “Let me think.”
As I was thinking a small group of four young women approached the restaurant. They talked to the host and were sat outside about four tables away.
I immediately recognized Dhara.
I wanted to speak, but I was busy watching Dhara. She was laughing with her group. All of their necks bending back, laughing.
“I had this one friend, an early boyfriend…” I said, watching Dhara.
Bert waited.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that I know that young woman over there. At the table.”
“She’s a friend? Which one?”
“The one taking her coat off, putting it over her chair. I gave a lecture today, on death in fiction. And she was there. We talked afterward. Over tea.”
“So a fan.”
“Definitely not that,” I said. “Really, I’m just struck by the coincidence.”
I ate.
“Speaking of fans. I read your novel.”
“You did? For this?”
He laughed. “No. I’m a big reader and I happened to read your novel. That’s all. But I liked it! And that’s all I want to say for now.”
“Fine by me. I hate talking about that thing.”
“Anyway. Your story.”
“Sorry. Yes. But you really did read it?”
Bert smiled. “A story about a gay boy making his way out of a strict religious upbringing? I was raised Catholic, so bring it on. I’m sure it wasn’t autobiographical at all,” he laughed. “Maybe I wrote it!”
We both laughed.
I said, “So, I don’t know how weird my story is. I’m sure your story will beat mine. My first boyfriend, his name was Mossimo. We lived in the same building. And he owned the bodega below. We met. It was unavoidable. I was in there all the time. Until one day he said I came in the store just to see him. And he was right.” I laughed. “So one day, I was in his store, I was there just saying hello. And someone had forgotten their change. So he ran out of the store to give it to them. Not sure why I followed him, but I did. I’m also not sure why I’m sharing this…”
“You don’t have to. It’s okay. I don’t want to pry.”
“Not at all. I feel like I need to say it. So, Mossimo runs across the street, and a taxi had just then run a red light and hit him.” I stopped. Wiped my mouth. And started again: “It killed him. I didn’t know that then, I only knew that some asshole hurt my boyfriend and totally unlike me I chased after the cab. Because the cab left, hit and run, so I ran too. Until he got stuck behind a car at the next light, where again, totally unlike me, I opened the driver’s door and dragged the driver out and began to hit him. The cops magically appeared and arrested him. When I got back, I saw Mossimo was dead.”
He leaned back. “I’m so sorry. And this was your first boyfriend? I’m so sorry, Tom.”
“I was overcome, possessed. Outside myself. Dissociated when I hit that guy. That’s the weird part.”
We ate timidly, quietly.
I started to tear up, and wiped my eyes.
“Are you ok?” Bert asked, put his hand on mine.
“I’m fine, I promise. Just seems like death is the theme for the day. Which is my fault!” I looked at Dhara.
“Don’t let me stop you from going over to her to say hello,” he said.
“It’s not like that. She said something and it’s still with me,” I said. “Something still in my craw. Is that what they say?”
He laughed. “Not in New York. No. What did she say? Your student.”
“Oh, she’s not my student, it was just a guest lecture. And as far as what she said, it’s a long story. Plus we shouldn’t talk about work. What about you?”
Bert took up a forkful of pasta and studied it. He then lay the forkful down and said, “I got in a fight with a guy on the subway once. He called me a nasty word, a few of them, actually. About me and the man I was with. I told him to go to hell, and he told me to go back to South America. So I hit him. My fist—his eye. He went down with one punch. The whole car clapped. I got off at the next stop even though it wasn’t mine because my heart was beating like crazy, and I didn’t want him getting up while I was still there.”
I leaned back in my seat. “You’re a legit hero.” I pointed, lightly clapped.
He gave me an appreciative smile, bowed in his seat. “Actually mine pales in comparison to yours. I didn’t lose anyone.”
I looked at Dhara.
“You sure you’re ok?” Bert asked.
“Yeah. Sorry.” I took a deep breath. “I lied.”
“What about?”
“The weirdest thing I’ve ever done.”
“Hit me, Mr. Barrett.”
“It’s not that weird by today’s standards, and I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”
“Bring it.”
“But it is, in context, more weird and I feel like for some reason I’m supposed to tell you this and I’m going to do it but it also feels like a kamikaze mission. I’m going to explode this date.”
He put his fork down. Nodded. “Maybe I’m supposed to hear it.”
“Okay,” I said. “So. My wife. My only wife. My ex-wife. We split up when I was in my early twenties.”
Bert nodded. “Young marriage.” He was listening carefully.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud. We were Jehovah’s Witnesses, like in the book.”
“Okay.”
“So my wife finds me one night.” I visibly cringed. “I was all done-up in her makeup. I thought she would be out late with friends. But she wasn’t. Instead she walked in and found me in the bathroom with my face. Fully made-up.”
Bert smiled. “You queen.”
“She figured out I was gay,” I said. “Before I did. We never got over from it. The marriage floundered and died.”
“There is nothing weird about that.
“I haven’t told you the context. Which is the long story about today. And what makes the make-up weird. In the lecture today, I talked about death. In fiction. I didn’t mention my make-up to the students, obviously. Specifically I talked about the death of two people I knew in real life—not Mossimo, though—and I was explaining how I was trying to use these two deaths in a short story, but I was having trouble. I was kind of using the students to think it through, I think. To help me.”
“And how did that work out for you?”
“Can I tell you the anecdotes?”
“Probably better me than your students, right.”
I shared the recollections, and the airing of the TV episode.
He said, “If you’re expecting me to leave, I’m not.” He slapped my hand on the table.
Then he finished his pasta, every last bite. I liked that.
“What’s weird for me isn’t the make-up. I know I did it maybe to purposely implode the marriage. It’s the connection with the suicide. This is what weirds me out,” I said. “I think I put it on because I wanted to feel what Steven felt. In some way. To feel what it is to want to end everything. Back then, I mean.”
Bert folded his napkin.
“Well, I lied before, too,” he said. “About the weirdest thing I’ve ever done. The weirdest thing I’ve ever done is the last thing I would usually mention on a date, much less a first date.”
The weirdest thing I’ve ever done is the last thing I would usually mention on a date, much less a first date.
“Go for it.”
He inhaled deeply. Put his napkin on the table. “I hurt a man. Five years ago. Killed him. With a bat.”
“Wait. What?”
“Someone was chasing me. He tried to assault me. Followed me into my building, and then to my door, and so I tried to unlock my door before he could catch up. I opened the door and tried to close it, to lock it, but he kicked it in. The next thing I did, like you said with the cab, I dissociated, and grabbed the bat I kept by the door, and I swung once, hit him on his head. Once. Hard as I could.”
“My god.” Bert hummed before me like an angel.
“He fell, spasmed, and then he totally stopped moving.”
“My god.”
“I called the police. They just said good job. That he had done this several times before. Sexual assault. I expected jokes from the cops about men chasing men, about me being Hispanic, whatever. But they didn’t. They were very supportive. Regardless, the one hit killed him. And they said he deserved it. No problem. No charges. Just go with them to the station to make a statement. I did. And I was back home for dinner. All very fast and clean. But it still upsets me. I feel like it wasn’t even me.”
“What do you remember most?”
“About killing him?”
“Yes.”
He paused. “Why would you ask that?”
“I don’t know. I find myself interested in that sort of thing. What stays.”
He looked at me, mute. Then: “I remember how the bat didn’t bounce.” He said, “You would think it would bounce off his head. But it didn’t. It felt like the bat would split him in two.”
I was jealous. What did that say about me?
I looked over at Dhara.
Bert turned and looked at Dhara. Turned back and said, “She offended you, didn’t she?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “Okay. No more mystery. She said I was death obsessed. That it was my ‘fetish.’ And that I seemed lonely. I think she meant problematically lonely.”
He looked shocked. “What does she know?” He was taking an unexpected protective position. I liked it. “How long was the talk?”
“Ninety minutes, give or take.”
“Well, now I know you almost as long as she does, and I think you’re fine. I mean you talk about death a lot. I mean a lot. But you’ve charmed me! You’re fine.”
I thought about this.
Bert asked, “Did you use their real names? In the anecdotes?”
“I changed the names,” I said.
“Well, there you go.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Are you afraid less of death after having, well, killed accidentally—is that the right word?—killing someone?”
“In a word, no. I’m not.” He shook his head.
I was disappointed.
“You’re protective of me.”
He laughed. “Honey, you’re fragile. I can tell.”
“Are you one of those guys who always wants to fix their man?” I was half-joking.
“First of all, you are not my man,” he laughed.
“I know! I mean in general.”
“And no. And this is just real life conversation. Get used to it.”
Dhara finally saw me. We looked at each other.
“Tom,” said Bert. “What’s her name?”
I acted like I had trouble remembering. “Dhara.”
“Wave to Dhara, Tom.”
I waved. Dhara waved back.
“You have anything to teach her? A kid her age, about death?”
I thought about this, and whispered: “No.”
Tirza appeared, and took our dishes: “Coffee? Desert?”
“How about more wine?” said Bert. “We’re gonna need it.”
“I’m in,” I said.
Tirza left.
He fully turned and looked at Dhara. “I’ll be right back.”
“Wait,” I said. “Stop!” But he was already gone, and heading for Dhara.
He seemed to speak with her for a solid minute or two. They shook hands, and Bert returned right as the wine came.
“What was that about?” I said. “What did you say to her?”
“I said I was your boyfriend. And that you had mentioned what a promising young talent she was, and to please leave the psychoanalysis to experts like me.”
“You did not! Wait. But you teach English.”
“I know!” he laughed.
He folded his arms.
I said, “I like you, Bert.”
“I like you, too. Cheers.” We clinked glasses. “If you were to write about the end of this date, how would it go? Does anybody die?”
I laughed. “Not this time.”
“Thank god. You know, I wore my mother’s clothes from the hamper when she wasn’t looking. As far as the make-up, you were just looking for a connection. That’s not weird at all. It’s normal.”
I nodded, sipped.
It was a relief, almost too much to take in at once.
He laughed. “And isn’t that the true great secret of us teachers, by the way, and I know you know what I’m talking about. We have nothing really, nothing important to teach. Lessons, yes. Grammar. Math. Blah, blah, blah. But what is all that? Do we know what the meaning is, what real, true meaning there is in life? In death? In the death of your friends? Family? Do we teach anybody about life? Love? Sex? The real and frightening truth, that there might not be one? No. Do we teach anyone how to die? No. And to live well is to learn how to die well. Or so Socrates says. I think. Anyway, now I’m blabbing again.”
He sipped more wine, his cheeks a bit flushed. He was so handsome.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“I don’t know what else to say. But wine always helps. I’m just one man!”
We finished our wine, split the bill, and said goodnight to Tirza. We then shook hands, Bert and I, and hugged—closer and for longer than when we met—and decided we would be in touch. And as I arrived home, in the cool night air, I looked for the dead birds on the sidewalk. But they were gone. I passed by my building, and kept on walking, and soon I found myself on Riverside Drive, standing before the grand Church, there, which reminded me, of all things, of The New System. The Witness’ safe and simple way to think about death. To claim true knowledge of death. To unknowingly obsess. And this had been my inheritance: obsession, displacing life as it truly is. Messy, honest, fleeting.
Dhara was right. I thought I could know death, that I could conquer it in my mind. I suddenly wanted more wine, lots more wine. I was giddy. Bert was right, too. Decentralize! Decentralize! Decentralize! I looked up. And then standing there before the Church, I thought, if there is a God, and more particularly a Jehovah God, and, following that, if there is a New System, then Shirley would definitely be there. Would Steven be there, too? Both of them restored, resurrected. And would I be there to greet them? To ask Shirley what happened? To tell her about my life? My divorce? And what would I ask of Steven? Or would the good Lord keep him from entering paradise? And Mossimo! Poor Mossimo! The gates of the garden would remain locked to him forever. And as for me, who am I kidding. I’m no Witness. None of us will see each other again. Any time we had together has already passed. And then I suddenly said aloud: “I am who I am. I was that I was.” Old Testament-speak. And yet it spoke for me. I took God’s name and made it my own, and walked off into the night.
I have always loved the versatility of the short story, how it can so easily take on the forms of other things. There are playlist short stories, recipe short stories, diary and epistolary-style short stories. There are flash fiction stories, short short stories, and long short stories that invite you to argue for them as novellas. There are linked short stories that allow you the swift closure of the form while keeping you tethered to characters or place.
My short story collection, A Kind of Madness, is deeply rooted in place—I like to think that these stories would not quite exist as they are if they were set anywhere besides Nigeria. In trying to figure out what was possible for me as a writer, and one for whom the short story has held the most fascination, I often found myself looking to short story writers who write from or about Nigeria, with all its grimness and beauty.
In that spirit, I present seven short story collections—published before 2024—for you to dive into. Some of these collections are old enough for me to feel nostalgic about, while others are more recent releases. But each of them will invite you to see Nigeria in a new light.
Published in 2020, the interlinked stories in this collection are mostly set in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Each story in this collection is named after a song, with artists ranging from Adam Levine to U2 to Nina Simone. In “Lost Stars,” a woman mourns the loss of her soul mate, just as they overcome obstacles to begin a life together. “Music” tells the story of an aspiring DJ who confronts the reality of his father’s transgressions and infidelities through the power of music and his skills on a turntable. In “I Put a Spell on You,” an unfaithful man worries that his wife has “jazzed” him after his penis refuses to work with other women. A Broken People’s Playlist made me nostalgic for my University of Port Harcourt days, for boli and fish, and for the musical lingo of Port Harcourt pidgin English. Evocative and energetic, the rhythm of these stories is hard to forget.
One thing that struck me about this collection, published in 2008, is that all of its stories feature child protagonists. The five stories in this collection are set in cities across Africa—I might be cheating a little here, but Akpan is Nigerian, and two out of the five stories are set in Nigeria—and they show how interconnected human lives are, across countries and cultures. In “An Ex-mas Feast,” Jigana contemplates life without his older sister as she, aged 12, decides to leave for Nairobi to go into full-time sex work. In “What Language is That?” two girls find a way, through a private language, to sustain their friendship even as their different religions push them apart. In “Luxurious Hearses,” Jubril, a teenager, commences a perilous journey from northern to southern Nigeria, disguised as a Christian to be safe during the religious conflict he is fleeing. The stories in this collection are heartbreaking and unflinching in their intensity, and Uwem Akpan writes children with a tenderness and regard that I find aspirational.
It must come as no surprise to find Adichie on this list. The Thing Around Your Neck, published in 2009, was an early favorite of mine and remains a delight to read. In “Cell One,” a young girl watches her spoiled brother go through a transformation after a police raid at a bar gets him locked up in an Enugu jail. “The Arrangers of Marriage” tells the story of Chinaza, a Nigerian woman who arrives the US to find that the husband, and the country, that had been arranged for her was not quite as advertised. In “The American Embassy,” a woman waits in line at the US Embassy in Lagos for a chance at a new life in America after her husband’s anti-government newspaper article puts their family in danger and results in the death of her son. Powerful and profound, the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck prove that Adichie is an expert storyteller.
Okparanta always delivers, whether she’s writing novels—Under the Udala Trees (2015), Harry Sylvester Bird (2022)—or short stories. Another collection that is mostly set in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Happiness, Like Water, published in 2013, tells the lives of Nigerian women with empathy, humor, and wisdom. In “On Ohaeto Street,” a woman evaluates her life and marriage after her husband puts both their lives at risk during a robbery. After murdering her pregnant friend, the lonely and loveless protagonist in “Story, Story!” seeks out pregnant women to befriend and murder in the hopes of possessing their children for herself. In “Runs Girl” a young woman desperate for money to pay for her mother’s treatment, becomes a runs girl (sex worker) for one night. In “Fairness,” a young girl, having absorbed throughout her life the message that light skin is more desirable, embarks on an experiment to lighten dark skin with bleach. Gripping and unforgettable, Happiness, Like Water will earn its place on your reading (or re-reading) list.
The stories in this collection, published in 2022, paint the lives of queer men in Nigeria, a country that calls their existence a crime, with such grace, beauty, and tenderness. In “The Dreamer’s Litany,” a petty trader, husband, and father, contemplates the attentions of a wealthy, powerful chief. In “Where the Heart Sleeps,” a woman mourns the sudden passing of her father and deals with accepting the man for whom her father’s marriage to her mother ended. In “Mother’s Love,” Chikelu is going through a breakup with Uchenna when his mother comes to visit. Tensions erupt as Chikelu’s mother finally grasps the nature of his relationship with Uchenna. A storytelling triumph, this collection pulses with power, love, and resistance.
Brimming with raw energy, Barrett’s Love Is Power, or Something Like That, published in 2013, feels like an untamed, beautiful beast. In “Dream Chaser,” it is the early days of the internet in Nigeria and Samu’ila, a young, ambitious teenager, makes connections all around the world as he commences his online scamming career. In “The Worst Thing That Happened,” Ma Bille is old, widowed, and lonely in Port Harcourt, despite having given birth to five children, now grown. In her loneliness and need, she is moved to connect with the woman across the street, with whom she had been silent enemies for decades. In “Love Is Power, or Something Like That,” a policeman learns that he cannot leave his anger and disillusionment with the system he brutally partakes in at the door when he comes home to his wife and sons. In “My Smelling Mouth Problem,” a Lagos man’s halitosis forces him into silence as he navigates the frustrations of public transportation in the city. In this thrilling collection, Barrett demonstrates his sharp humor and keen eye for the most minute and deliciously memorable details.
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, published in 2017, is one of my favorite short story collections. Arimah’s prose is tight and elegant; there are no flabby bits, no saggy parts. In “War Stories,” a pre-teen girl takes part in the viciousness of schoolgirls and experiences the shifts in power that come with it. In “Wild,” Ada is sent to Nigeria by her mother to spend the summer break before college with her aunty and cousin. Ada learns that her cousin is not quite the “good girl” her mother makes her out to be, and that there are things about her family that she does not know. In a world where women make their own babies out of tangible material, the aspiring mother in “Who Will Greet You at Home” learns to let go of her desires for softness. In “Windfalls,” which might be my favorite story in the collection, Amara and her mother move from city to city in America, staging falls in grocery stores to collect settlement money. While the falls are often fake, the real injuries, mental, physical, and psychological, add up and leave permanent damage. A mix of both realist and speculative fiction, the stories in this collection will stay with you long after you turn the last page.
For weeks I throw up every day. I can’t smell the diaper bin or the dishwasher without heaving. I can’t exercise without churning my nausea. I go to sleep at 7:30 pm. In the mornings, I log in to meetings where my male colleagues don’t know that just off-screen, I’m beginning to show.
They don’t know, either, what it feels like to be in a body like this: to ache and retch and long to collapse, and still to show up for work; to manage a household, with its tedious chores and consuming mental labor; to welcome a toddler from his grandparents’ at sunset, fatigued by the force of his energy and curiosity but straining to stay gracious and cool. They’ll never praise me for this work. They’ll never pay me for it.
The work of the mother and the work of the artist are undervalued and undercompensated. Creative work, after all, is “nonessential,” as the pandemic has made explicit. And while most everyone would affirm that the work of the mother is essential, her work is still largely taken for granted. Most communities lack substantial structures to compensate, validate, or buttress her in her labor. It is challenging to persevere in either vocation and especially challenging to persevere in both. Just as arts budgets are cut when resources are strained, creative practice may be the first thing to go in a new mother’s life. Amid the thankless labor of caregiving, why would a woman take on still more work that might go unseen? How could she justify hiring childcare to do work that might not pay? Why would she abide in her craft, and how?
Madeleine L’Engle’s writing career was already underway when, during the years she was raising her children, she received only rejection letters from publishers for an entire decade. The author best known for her fantastical novel A Wrinkle in Time had been writing since she was a child in the 1920s. After college, as an actress living in Greenwich Village, she wrote between scenes in the theater wings, piecing together her first novel. Titled The Small Rain, her debut was published in 1945, when she was twenty-seven. The New York Times called it “evidence of a fresh new talent,” and it sold well, paving the way for her to publish a second novel 14 months later. That same year, she married an actor she met on the set of a Chekhov play. In 1947, their daughter Josephine was born.
Amid the thankless labor of caregiving, why would a woman take on still more work that might go unseen?
L’Engle kept writing through the first years of motherhood, publishing a third novel the year of her second pregnancy. But after that book, her literary agent was unable to sell any of her manuscripts. As her family grew, editors’ interest in her work withered. She gave birth to a son, Bion, in 1952 and adopted a daughter, Maria, in 1956. By then her family had moved from Greenwich Village to the dairy farm village of Goshen, Connecticut, where she and her husband bought an old farmhouse and the town’s general store. He took the lead managing the market while L’Engle split time between caregiving, writing, and tending the store. She persisted in sending out work. But by 1958, nearing forty, she was so worn by editors’ indifference that she vowed to give up writing altogether.
A rejection slip on the day of her fortieth birthday appeared to seal her fate. “This seemed an obvious sign from heaven,” she remembers in her memoir A Circle of Quiet. “I should stop trying to write.” She blamed her literary ambition for her deficient domestic skills, comparing herself to the other Connecticut mothers with their polished floors and country pies. “And with all the hours I spent writing,” she went on, “I was still not pulling my own weight financially.” Why keep writing when no one is reading? Why paint when no one sees? Why work when it doesn’t pay?
The summer I first conceived, I began writing letters to literary agents, seeking representation for a collection of essays written after the deaths of my father and brother. The book was a meditation on grief and beauty, and writing it had trained my eyes to see light even in the midnights of human experience. It would meet readers, I hoped, as a companion in the dark. But first, I’d need an agent to get my work on editors’ desks. Before the baby was born, I sent inquiries to over fifty agencies, and I received as many rejections.
Two years pass. The boy is growing. I continue to send letters.
Finally, in the winter of my second pregnancy, a literary agent invites me to sign with her agency. I am so glad that I pour an illicit glass of champagne. Together, we develop a proposal for the book, and she presents it to editors at eighteen publishing houses. It’s January, and the bright field behind our home after a snowfall sprawls like a future. But one by one, the editors send their regrets.
As Madeleine L’Engle’s family grew, editors’ interest in her work withered.
Now the white field is just an empty page. I thought that an agent would open the door where I’ve been knocking; in this case it means only more disappointment, channeled now through a benevolent proxy.
Soon I’ll have a newborn again. Life with two children will not amble to the slow cadence of that first summer with my son; it will be arrhythmic and bewildering. I am not yet at a stage in my career when anyone depends on me to keep making art. As the poet Kate Baer says in Sara Fredman’s interview series Write Like a Mother, “No one cares if you’re a writer, except you.” Now would be a reasonable time to quit.
“I was born with the itch for writing in me, and oh, I couldn’t stop it if I tried,” L’Engle wrote in her journal as a teenager. Rather than quit on her fortieth birthday, she kept going. Her agent found a home for her 1960 novel Meet the Austins, and with that success, L’Engle returned to her typewriter. There, she began to work out an idea about a courageous girl named Meg Murry and her quest through space and time to save her physicist father from the forces of evil. As she resumed her practice, she established patterns that would last a lifetime. Her granddaughter remembers that she turned in at nine each night so that she’d be fresh for the next day’s work. Whether in her country house or at the library of Manhattan’s Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where beginning in 1966 she was writer-in-residence, she wrote every day. She did so not because she was inspired every day but so that the tools of her craft would be sharp when a rare moment of vision struck. As she writes in the memoir The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, “Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.”
I don’t write every day as L’Engle models, but I do keep writing. In the final months of my pregnancy, to my great satisfaction, I place articles in a few magazines. I pitch new articles to magazine editors with a six-month lead time so that after a twelve-week maternity leave, I’ll have something to work on. And my agent urges me—after the baby comes, when I’m ready—to prepare a proposal for a new project.
My second child is born in early June, a boy as golden and fair as the month of his birth. He nurses vigorously and sleeps deeply. He’s a quiet baby, and his brother approaches him reverently. At first.
Why keep writing when no one is reading? Why work when it doesn’t pay?
Within a week, our calm splinters into ceaseless cries of need, all of them directed toward my body. The baby cries to eat. The toddler protests sleep unless I lie down beside him. He will not bathe unless I bathe him. All he says to his daddy now is, “not you.” A new question of perseverance comes to the fore: How will I abide in the chaos of early parenthood, chaos that with two children is not doubled but squared?
Picture this scene: The newborn wakes in the violet light as the sun is beginning to rise. I scoop his body, limber as a kitten, from the bassinet at my bedside and carry him to the kitchen, where I put water on the stove for coffee. Then I open the back door to let the air in, and we walk to a plush chair in the living room. I cradle this new boy with one arm, tuck three different pillows on my right and left and lap, and single-handedly roll up a swaddling cloth to place beneath the baby’s cheek, elevating his head so it meets my breast. How strange it is to care for a person so frail, so fresh, that he hasn’t the strength even to put his face where he needs it to be. He begins to eat.
Down the hall, a doorknob. His brother is awake. Now two years old, he has graduated from crib to bed, and I’m still startled he can open his own door. I brace myself, preparing to speak sweetly. Footsteps down the hall. A drowsy figure in the doorframe. Then he climbs onto the chair’s arms, suddenly lively. Now he is sitting on my shoulders. Now he is hugging my face. “Lovey, Lovey, Mama needs some space.” Now my hair is in my eyes, and my neck is bending sideways, and the baby is so new he doesn’t notice and so he’s still nursing, draining me, draining me. And the water is boiling.
Austin is sleeping. I’m angry that I’m alone with these two needy creatures. My first impulse is to shout help to the other side of the house like a real drama queen. Instead, I huff audibly to let it be known that I have been inconvenienced. Then I clutch the baby carefully, squirm out of the toddler’s hold, stand up, and feel the pillows tumble to the floor. I turn off the boiling water. I do not make my coffee. My oldest is sitting in the chair where we were, and I pull up a TV tray and a laptop. He gets a show. He gets pancakes defrosted in the microwave. He gets grapes, served whole because I have weighed the risk of his choking against the risk of slicing fruit while holding a newborn and have selected not the safest option but the option that requires less effort.
Within a week, our calm splinters into ceaseless cries of need, all of them directed toward my body.
In the bedroom, I pat Austin’s shoulder and say, in a tone that is both a whisper and a bark, “I could use a little help.” Then I return to a chair beside the toddler, recreate the pillow rig, and resume nursing the baby.
Here is trouble so subtle it seems barely worth telling about. But it frays and inflames me. How to abide in this chaos?
I don’t wonder whether I will persevere in motherhood; I know I will not leave my children. But I do wonder how I will persevere. What will be the quality of my presence? Will I begrudge this thankless labor?
Will I be tired all the time? Will I be short-tempered, escaping into housework while the boys toddle at my feet because laundry demands less of me than the children’s desires? Or will I wake up to the humor of this time—its slapstick antics? Will I notice its magic? Will I have joy with which to be generous?
The spark that lit A Wrinkle in Time came to L’Engle by starlight. Her children were seven, ten, and twelve when she and her husband made plans to move from their rural home back to Manhattan. The summer before the move, they took their kids on a ten-week camping trip. They wanted to see the stars. L’Engle, once an English major without any interest in the sciences, had recently read about quantum physics and the theory of relativity. More than the theologians esteemed at her country church or in the Anglicanism of her childhood, Albert Einstein and Max Planck seemed to her an opening between the mundane and the metaphysical.
On their road trip, beneath her feet in the passenger seat, she stowed a crate of books about the making of the universe. At night while the children slept, she sat outside her tent reading and gazing heavenward, feeling at once small and magnificent. In her reading of cosmology, human beings were part of a fantastical system, one in which time could wrinkle and love was magic enough to defeat evil. From these meditations, L’Engle began to draft a novel to tell this story.
Feeling new resolve after her agent succeeded in selling Meet the Austins, L’Engle persisted as 26 editors passed on this new manuscript. Finally, after two years of effort, L’Engle handed the pages directly to John Farrar at Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, who accepted it enthusiastically. A Wrinkle in Time was finally published in 1962. It was instantly beloved by children and adults alike, and won the Newbery Medal the following year. By the time it was turned into a major motion picture in 2018, it had sold more than ten million copies.
Maybe this is all I need—not the satisfaction of my literary ambition but simply to be still awhile with this child. This could be enough.
Over the course of L’Engle’s career, she published more than sixty novels, memoirs, poetry collections, and plays. Though in her thirties her efforts to reach readers were thwarted, she continued to write. “It didn’t matter how small or inadequate my talent,” she reflects in A Circle of Quiet. “If I never had another book published, and it was very clear to me that this was a real possibility, I still had to go on writing.” She wrote in such volumes that I suspect it wasn’t merely a drive for acclaim that motivated her; something deeper called her again and again to her writing desk.
“Why does anybody tell a story?” she asks in The Rock That Is Higher, a nonfiction meditation on myth. “It does indeed have something to do with faith, faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”
That’s why L’Engle kept writing. Because she believed that our little human lives matter cosmically. Like Amy March, who insisted that her sister Jo write her story even if it was “just about our little life”; and like Della Miles, who saw Jack Boughton as “a holy human soul”; L’Engle was lit with awe for the human person, small as we are in the cosmic drama.
She never could distinguish her novels as either for grown-ups or for children. When I read L’Engle as an adult, I believe again in magic. She writes in Walking on Water, “The artist, if he is not to forget how to listen, must retain the vision which includes angels and dragons and unicorns and all the lovely creatures which our world would put in a box marked Children Only.”
While I don’t see dragons, I do, after hours in L’Engle’s authorial mind, start to see stardust. There’s the glimmering surface of my children’s skin, the light in their eyes, the sacred nature of their wonder, and the uncanny fact that they exist at all and are entrusted to my care. This is a powerful elixir against the tedium of motherhood, a shot in the arm for the adventure before me.
The new baby is sleeping. When his brother wakes from his own nap in the late afternoon, we recline in a chair, and I read to him. The Happy Lion. Owl Moon. Books where children encounter jovial beasts and mystical birds, where the scrim of the ordinary opens into the otherworldly. I wedge him between my hips and the chair’s arm, and he rests his neck on my elbow. He wears a muslin gown and drinks a bottle of warm milk, his neck and cheeks hot from sleep. “Read more books, Mama,” he says. Maybe this is all I need—not the satisfaction of my literary ambition but simply to be still awhile with this child. This could be enough. On the other hand, how powerful will it be to show my son that I, too, write books, and to impart a legacy of courage to pursue a career—artistic or otherwise—that pays not in money but in meaning?
When I finish reading, my oldest stays with me, not wired as he usually is but docile. I dip my cheek onto his fine hair and stare at his hands, bigger now but still plush like a baby’s. His little brother wakes, and we go together to my bedroom. The toddler climbs into the bassinet and curls his body around the newborn’s. I guide his movements to protect the baby while encouraging tenderness between them, carefully watching every limb.
Our vision of the world is shaped by what we see. What an artist sees, therefore, shapes the world that she shows to others in her work. Again and again, I look at these frail, magnificent bodies. I look at them to be sure they’re safe. I look at them because they demand it of me: “Mama, look at me.” “Mama, come find me.” And I look at them because they are so beautiful that I can’t stop looking.
When I’m with them, I catch myself staring. When I leave them, I study their photographs. In all this looking, my view of the world is reframed by maternal humanism, composed of awe, curiosity, and adoration for the vulnerable ones of this world—which is to say, all of us.
Why persevere in making art? Because our communities need art made by those who can’t take their eyes off of the vulnerable ones of this world. We need a visual culture, a literary culture, a culture of performance that wakes us up to the dignity of every person. A mother artist brings certain virtues to the creative life—gifts that she gives to her audience.
We need artists who have tamed their egos enough to care for others, then revived their ambitions to be generous with their talents.
An artist who’s been transfigured in pregnancy gives us the body in all its strange beauty. An artist who has lost a child refuses to explain away tragedy, and companions all who grieve. An artist who’s been through the calamity of childbirth shows us women’s vulnerability and strength. We need artists who have tamed their egos enough to take time to care for others, then revived their ambitions to be generous with their talents. We need artists who reimagine women’s desire in all its complexity. We need artists who rightly balance self-emptying with self-possession, and artists who stand up for others’ dignity, and artists who give themselves in interdependence to their communities. If art has the power to change minds, if art has the power to shift public opinion, if art has the power to shape new worlds, then imagine with me a world lit by this constellation of maternal virtues. It’s luminous.
This is not to say that every mother is as virtuous as the vision I’ve laid out, or that any mother is virtuous all the time. Motherhood has introduced me to the worst version of myself—a woman often embittered, impatient, and bored by the bodily imposition and tedium of this endeavor. But as I interact with artwork made by mothers, virtue comes more easily, as I become alert to the magic and humor shared between me and these tiny bodies. Carmen Winant, in an essay in Frieze, puts it this way: “As I tend to my own children and reach for the fortitude to be a parent, I am struck by the ways in which—now more than ever—I need art, across books and visual exhibitions, to feel assured of my own daily capacity for resilience, patience and affection.” The more mothers persevere in making art, the more we draw out the best in one another, thus inviting our audiences to imagine and work for a world humanized by the love of a mother for herself, her family, and her communities.
I wrote the majority of my book while caring for both an infant and a toddler, and I still wonder whether this was the right time for an ambitious creative project. I’ve been so tired. Consumed at every moment by the book, or these bodies, or both. What enrichment for my children might I have dreamt up if my mind weren’t crowded with insight and worry for this book? If I weren’t writing, might I have slept better? Been more patient? Felt more joy? Every day I wonder.
I have not yet resolved many of the tensions. Except for this one: whether an artist comes back to her art practice three weeks or thirty years after her child is born, her audience is better for her departure, and for her return.
This spring has been a glorious and bountiful season for books. To find out which new and forthcoming releases we should be reading, we reached out to indie booksellers across America. Their recommendations cover a broad range of genres, countries, and subject matters. Whether it’s a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn, a cyberpunk space thriller, a story collection for and about the internet generation, or a queer romantasy based on Asian mythology, we have a book for every reader.
Here are the 68 new titles that bookstores across America are raving about this season.
Editor’s note: If you’re a bookseller interested in participating in a future edition of this feature, please email books@electricliterature.com
“Which spaces, narrow and wide, are inhabited by the friends that shape us in our youth? Simply: who are we to each other? Everything and ghosts, answers Ko. Three women rotate in and out of one another’s lives in this compelling novel, which begins with their 1980s childhoods and ends in a dark, surveilled iteration of 2040. Each of the three main characters pursues her ambitions relentlessly while the echoes of her friends pulse, again and again, into her present. Anyone who read Lisa Ko’s first book, The Leavers, knows that Ko has a penchant to draw out the unutterable in relationships. Though Memory Piece expands on the author’s deep anxieties, I found reassurance in that each of the main characters keeps the others—somehow—alive.”—Julia Paganelli Marín, Pearl’s Books in Fayetteville, Arkansas
“I loved reading James and finally getting to know him. Thanks to Everett’s genius, you can now revisit the wild times of Huckleberry Finn alongside a fully-realized partner for the adventure. A deft commentary on the 19th-century era, this is a wonderful retake on the American classic that puts the story in the hands of the man who deserves the right to tell it. It’s brilliant storytelling and I couldn’t put it down!” —Maggie Robe, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“It’s the 1950s, we’re in Reno, and we’re getting a divorce. Or rather, Lois is, along with all the women starting their stay at the ranch while they wait out divorce proceedings. This is where Lois meets the mysterious Greer, a woman unlike anyone she’s met before. If you like stories of complex friendship, distrust of men, and a lot of rule-breaking, this one is for you.”—Alex Reinhart, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“Annie Bot is a mind trip that may give you an existential crisis—but in a hot way, like Oscar Isaac in Ex-Machina. Pondering philosophical questions that come with human-created sentience, Sierra Greer examines what control, choice, and ethics look like in the budding AI generation. Equally delightful and enraging, Greer’s acute writing and social commentary, made my circuits whirl like R2-D2’s weeeeeee. A fantastic choice for any book club and English or Philosophy professor’s curriculum.”—RC Collman, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“Is it nature? Nurture? Unacknowledged familial trauma? Kabbalah? God? Does it matter? Toby Lloyd’s stunning novel debut feels like a long-lost dream, rippling with uncertainty for the best kind of unsettled reading experience—just after finishing, I wanted to read it all again. In a London, modern Ashkenazi Jewish home, our intersecting narrators offer multiple realities, inviting us to hold them amidst tradition, power, memory with heart-wrenching beauty. Impressively succinct writing that unfolds in the mind like a flower in bloom—the rest of 2024’s reads are up against a powerhouse.”—RC Collman, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Woman, Life, Freedom created Marjane Satrapi, translated by Una Dimitrijevic, March 19th
“In September 2022, in Tehran, Mahsa Amini was arrested and beaten to death by the morality police for not wearing her hijab properly. Women, men, and schoolchildren rose up in protest all over the country. This is a powerful and important reminder not to forget the people of Iran who continue to suffer under the brutal regime of their own government.”—Tony Peltier, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“Daniel de Vise has a way of writing a biography that reads like a novel—I was fascinated by the backstory of Belushi, Aykroyd, and the iconic movie. It delves into the rise of their careers and the tragic fall of Belushi’s, as well as fun movie trivia and background lore. Loved it!”—Andi Richardson, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“It’s queer, it’s hauntingly beautiful, it’s soaked in lust and blood, The Woods All Black is Lee Mandelo taking Southern lit to a new level. An Appalachian based historical horror novella including but not limited to missing fingers, an erratic preacher, a monster that hunts at night, t4t romance, and above all revenge. Always sexy, always suspenseful, and always Southern, Mandelo once again pushes the boundaries of contempory horror and it’s perfect.”—Grace Sullivan, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“A queer romantasy spanning lifetimes! A tragic but spicy tale of soulmates, weaved together by fate. Asian folklore, myth and magic help to create a sorrowful but beautiful story of two men in love throughout time. There isn’t enough time or character spaces to say how much I love this book and can’t wait to see what else Huang writes next!”—Jaime, Astoria Bookshop in Astoria, New York
The Red Handler by Johan Harstad, translated by David Smith, March 26th
“Perhaps the strangest detective story I’ve ever read this fictional annotated novel is, yes, about how we narrate crime & the limits of language & other very literary ideas, but, ultimately, I think it’s mostly about how important creating is to being human, even when you only create for yourself.”—Josh Cook, Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts
“A searing debut that deftly explores the effects of an unhealthy relationship between a predatory male writer and a young woman on the cusp of adulthood—I couldn’t stop reading it! The characters in this story are all too real, and post #MeToo we see Tatum grappling to understand her story and the abuse she suffered from the toxic man she viewed as her superior for far too long.”—Maggie Robe, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“A rollicking tale that’s set in a land far away, a long, long time ago. The characters are so fresh, and the setting is so richly detailed, that it completely drew me in and took me along for the ride! It’s an entertaining yet heartfelt story about the power of friendship and how art can be transformative and life-saving.”—Maggie Robe, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“Austin Frerick yanks back the curtain on a truly astonishing collection of violations, legal and moral in the American food system. Portraying seven corporate giants and their journeys to dominance, he details the lack of supervision by regulators in all administrations in the last forty years and the consequences to our national economy, the health of our citizens, and the extensive damage to our environment. Labor violations, animal abuse, bribery of public officials: nothing seems past these people. Despite the dire subject matter, Frerick is able to inject moments of humor and ends the book with sincere hope for change in the future if we are willing to work together to make a difference.”—Kelly Justice, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“Lydia Millet channels a lifetime of environmental advocacy into her first nonfiction book, a furious, wondrous elegy for the shrinking wilderness. In fragmented essays, she tells the story of humanity through the eyes of our fellow animals, connecting the personal and the political, science and myth, capitalism and colonialism, the past and the future. It’s a heartbreaking yet perfect spring read; you’ll be sure to treasure every blade of grass that pushes through the earth.”—Amy Woolsey, Bards Alley in Vienna, Virginia
“What would you do if your attic kept offering up different husbands to try? Don’t like this one’s open-mouth chewing, footwear, hobbies or face? Send him back up! Wouldn’t that be fun…or maybe not? Original, entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny.”—Maggie Robe, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“The minimalist lifestyle had its moment, but I think we have now transition into the next phase where the girl-mathing, daily little treat buying, collectors of dopamine raising trinkets have taken center stage. Through mesmerizing essays of media commentary, literary criticism and personal reflection, Becca Rothfield shines a light on the cultural and emotional cost of minimalism, and how the things that are over the top, and even unnecessary, are the things that may matter the most.”—Emma, Porter Square Books: Boston Edition in Boston, Massachusetts
“Cinnamon crunch cereal on ice cream, one night in Vegas, and a list of rules meant to be broken, The Rule Bookwill have even the biggest pessimist believing in second chances. I found myself in the middle of Nora and Derek’s work relationship, rooting raucously for both teams.”—Kenzie Hampton, The Bookshop in Nashville, Tennessee
“Jessie Ren Marshall is a remarkable storyteller! The women in these twelve stories each struggle against their own peril, be it the loss of love, loss of freedom, loss of power, or loss of life. The stories range from absolutely absurd to merely heartbreaking; each one unique and inventive and full of bittersweet magic.”—Tony Peltier, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“Once again, Alison Cochrun made me sad cry and happy cry within just a few chapters and I loved it! This book tells us how Logan and Rosemary went from childhood besties to enemies to adversarial colleagues when they returned to their hometown to teach at their former high school. They share a mentor who has terminal cancer and when he insists that the three take a road trip to fulfill a few bucket list items, they’re thrown together once again. As they travel across the country, every detour brings them closer together despite their past. A touching tale of mental health, grief, and coming into one’s own, this will have you feeling all the feelings.” —Andi Richardson, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“Creep-tastic and dreadful (in the best possible way!), I couldn’t stop reading this story of pregnant women trapped in a Hill House/Mexican Gothic-style nightmare. As they work to wrest control of their bodies from an increasingly desperate doctor, the true horror of their deal-making reveals itself.”—Maggie Robe, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“Imagine if Ann Patchett, fresh off a Bolaño re-read and a feverish plowing through ’70s political thrillers, sat down to write a saga in which a government’s secrets and a family’s secrets were the same secrets, and then, first draft completed, streamed Enemy of the State on a loop for a week. Reader, that’s not your imagination. That’s Short War, Lily Meyer’s knockout debut. Please read.”—Gregory Kornbluh, Downbound Books in Cincinnati, Ohio
“A beautifully written tribute, documentation and exploration of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro, North Caroline (and environs) indie music scene in the decade leading up to Y2K. The scope of what Maxwell covers is impressive: musical personalities- musicians and bands, yes but also the producers, promotors, WXYC DJs and station managers, the labels big and small- Merge, Mammoth, and others. The migrations and importance of clubs like Cat’s Cradle and Local 506, recording studios (The Yellow House!), the rise of the internet and streaming radio, Maxwell illustrates the importance of the local ecosystem- the ‘zines and copy shops (Kinkos, Copytron) and then, ultimately, the internet and the changing of music distribution. A fantastic read on many levels, whether you want to revisit the bands (Superchunk, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Pipe, The Veldt, Ben Folds Five, The Pressure Boys, Sex Police) or just understand how a small community turned out some kick ass music. An illustration of how indie music created a magical third place, coined by sociologist Ray Oldenberg as ‘a place where people meet, exchange ideas, have a good time and build relationships.’ An eloquent honoring of a place and time where indie rock was paramount and the community was passionate for it.”—Jamie Fiocco, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo, April 9th
“New Leigh Bardugo? Yes, please! Her Grishaverse series made me a fan for life, and The Familiar has me ready to dive into the Spanish Golden Age. This one is not to be missed!”—Rachel Ford, The Bookshop in Nashville, Tennessee
“The best romances indulge parts of ourselves that really want every meet to be freaking cute—making us ask ‘if I’m not making the sappiest part of me happy, what am I really doing?’ When I bet on loving Mazey Eddings’ romances, I always win—this time delivering a relatable, sweet, and gooey queer romance that will make your tenderest parts blush. This is a deliriously sapphic, endearingly punny, neurodivergent love letter to taking time in letting love root, grow, and bloom (sorry).”—RC Collman, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“What I hope is the beginning of a Leila Mottley renaissance, woke up no light is a poetry collection that solidifies Mottley’s status as one of our time’s best new young writers. Split into four sections defined as girlhood, neighborhood, falsehood, and womanhood, Mottley’s poetry reads as tender yet raw, her musings especially on womanhood and coming into your own are glittering pieces of writing that any reader can acknowledge are full of both heart, hardships, and truth. A remarkable collection for people looking to get into poetry, or for the established readers of the genre!”—G Sullivan, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
Tenderloin by Joy Sorman, translated by Lara Vergnaud, April 16th
“We love our animals and we also eat them. This is the central conceit of Joy Sorman’s Tenderloin, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud. Tenderloin examines the meat packing and processing industry through the eyes of Pim, an unnaturally lanky apprentice butcher with graceful hands and a penchant for crying uncontrollably. With prose that oozes and drips and spurts like blood from an open wound, Sorman probes the intersection of beauty and disgust, explores the power dynamic inherent in carnivorism, and reminds us that, in the end, we’re all just meat.”—Charlie Marks, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“A novel perspective on ‘the war to end all wars.’ Korda examines World War I through the lives of the soldier poets that fought and died, whose poetry provided the most open, honest interpretation of the atrocities committed for the sake of patriotism. Korda narrows his focus to the lives of six individuals, who stand both in stark contrast to and in concert with the 25,000,000 human beings that lost their lives in the war. A combination of both literary analysis and historical scholarship, Muse of Fire is a poignant and powerful read.” —Charlie Marks, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“As someone who’s recently put many, many hours into Cyberpunk 2077, the tone of this debut, futuristic space novel hit the spot. We follow ace pilot and sharpshooter Ocean, a disgraced member of a governing organization called the Alliance; her best friend and heir to a tech empire, Teo; a new med bay recruit from a planet that specializes in death and funerary rites; and two sets of tightly-knit, found-family space crews––one under the Alliance, the other a group of rogues led by a charismatic captain––as they find themselves wrapped up in an intergalactic political conspiracy that asks questions about capitalism and colonialism. If you love Han Solo as a character, you’ll dig Ocean’s Godori.”—Destenie Fafard, Timbre Books in Ventura, California
“The Backyard Bird Chronicles celebrates life on the porch. Amy Tan remarkably observes and draws the vibrant bird life that graces her backyard in this published form of her journal. A must read for all birders and porch sitters!”—Ashley Kilcullen, The Bookshop in Nashville, Tennessee
“Daphne’s love story was one fit for the books, but then again so is the scandalous story of her break up that leads to her splitting rent on an apartment with the ex-boyfriend of her ex-fiance’s childhood-friend-turned-new-girlfriend. Yeah, if you thought that sentence was rough, imagine living it. Daphne is now stranded in a small town in Michigan that she never intended to move to, without family or friends, but at least she has a job she loves as the local children’s librarian.
Emily Henry’s tales always remind me of a ’90s rom com in the best ways. Spring is absolutely the time to dive into this sweet little romance that will guide you right through summer and hit all of the great tropes: opposites attract, fake dating, found family, the works. It’s not so easy though, Daphne has some things to work through when it comes to accepting love of all kinds and learning to trust others.”—Randi Null, Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas
“A book hasn’t made me cry in a long time. But this one? It tore me open and shone a light on all my most shameful thoughts. Seeing my feelings so clearly reflected back at me was hard. But it made me really proud of my (and Olive’s) progress. I’m not ashamed of who I am, or what I’ve overcome. I hope that this book can be a flashlight for someone else too.”—Jamie Kovacs, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“This powerful book about land loss and the destruction of the historically rich and abundant landscapes of southeastern Louisiana is a stunning call to action. Alongside what are often haunting anything-but-still-life images of built landscapes by Hanusik are moving essays, poems, vignettes, and histories of the region, many by and about the indigenous protectors and cultivators of the land, and the descendants of formerly enslaved Black Americans who’ve worked the disappearing marshes for centuries. After Hanusik foregrounds Into the Quiet and the Light with a background of the history of exploitation of natural resources by colonial powers in Louisiana dating back to the seventeenth century, her book soars into the present with the juxtaposed beauty of a land and its peoples against the omnipresent force of destruction and greed from the petrochemical industry and its forebears of global capitalism, racism, and all else that fuels climate catastrophe.”—Charlie Jones, A Room of One’s Own in Madison, Wisconsin
“I love this book, which is a surprise to absolutely no one. Alyssa Cole’s thrillers remain some of my very favorites and this is no exception. It has the biting commentary I loved from When No One Is Watching and adds ghosts! Ken deals with Dissociative Identity Disorder (‘multiple personalities’) and she is shocked to awaken on her way to a new job on a very creepy island as the caretaker of a near-abandoned castle. Having missed the entire world’s events since 2016 (we should all be so lucky) she struggles to find out what is going on in the world and on this Hudson River island. Equal parts witty and scary, this will keep you turning pages late into the night. Another stunner from the twistery queen!”—Andi Richardson, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“Gia is lost in her world, she’s aimlessly going through life trying to find something that’ll ground her, so when she stumbles across the story of Marta Becket she becomes enthralled. Becket was a Broadway dancer who while traveling through the Mojave Desert stumbles across a dilapidated theater she makes into her own personal opera house. After crafting a letter to the deceased Becket, the woman appears at her doorstep the next day. An addicting debut novella with sentences that come to life and dance on the page like the main women in this book, Bitter Water Opera is a dreamlike journey that delves into art, faith, loneliness, and the creative spirit all in one neat bow-adorned package.”—G Sullivan, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“In The Dead Don’t Need Reminding, Julian Randall deftly weaves pop culture references with deeply internal examinations of self, queerness and lineage in an attempt to better understand the racist event that drove his family out of the south generations prior. It’s a book for Black folks, for Black queer folks, that allows equal space for our grief and our joy—for our niche interests, our obsessions, and our celebrations—which is as beautiful as it is devastating. Trust me when I say Julian Randall’s nonfiction debut should be next up on your TBR.”—Leah Johnson, Loudmouth Books in Indianapolis, Indiana
“After the deaths of her husband and son, the elderly Helen Cartwright comes home after 60 years to the English village where she grew up. She is merely marking time awaiting her own death by filling the days with meaningless routines. On a freezing cold winter’s night, she encounters a mouse in her apartment. At first intent on dispatching it, she has second thoughts. What follows this simple encounter is a spring blossom of a story! No matter how old we get, how set in our ways, our personal tragedies: there is always hope. That is what Sipsworth’s pages spoke to me. I never leave a Simon Van Booy book without being deeply changed. That is the highest compliment I can give any writer.”—Kelly Justice, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“The Novices of Lerna is a dazzling short story collection introducing Angel Bonomini—a mid-century Argentinian writer and contemporary of Jorge Luis Borges—English readers for the first time. Touching on ideas of shared consciousness, isolation, and identity, Bonomini’s absurd and fantastical prose holds a mirror up to the reader and urges them to look inward. The Novices of Lerna is a profound examination of the relationship between authority and individualism that has only grown more relevant since its original publication.”—Charlie Marks, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“The Ministry of Time is a fun, sexy, action-packed yet emotional novel that had me absolutely hooked from the first page. Time travel! Spies! Romance! Mystery! Plus some good ol’ bureaucracy and workplace comedy with some of the most charmingly endearing characters you’ll ever meet. Trust me, this book will be your newest obsession but be forewarned—you will develop a massive crush on a certain Victorian polar explorer. Kaliane Bradley has created something truly extraordinary and fresh in this speculative novel that explores biracial identities, generational and inherited trauma, and so much more, all while being a twisty page turning tour de force. Buckle up and enjoy the ride and the beautiful writing. This is one of the books of the year that everyone will be talking about!”—Christine Bollow, Loyalty Bookstores in Washington, DC and Silver Spring, Maryland
“Back in her hometown after graduation, Isabel spends the summer housesitting, dipping her toes into the murky pool of independent adulthood. While she grapples with the vast expanse of future before her (how to find purpose? who to kiss? how to fill the interminable hours? is it possible to hold on to your favorite parts of your younger self and still become something new?), a trio of young skunks plod across the borrowed home’s backyard, eating beetles and finding their own way. A meditative, funny, hopeful little story that lodged its tiny claws directly into my heart.”—Talia Smart, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“Four siblings must confront each other and the past to move on from trauma in their teens, so that they can live honest lives with a chance at celebrating the future together.”—Maggie Robe, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“Some books are polite when they invite you in: they hold the door, offer refreshments, let you poke around as you please for a few pleasant afternoons and then bid you farewell as you head back out into the big bright world. Woodworm doesn’t do this. It draws you in and then slams the door behind you, sealing you inside a madhouse labyrinth of chattering shadows. This is fitting, as Woodworm is a novel about traps: generations of women trapped in a house beset with ghosts and insectoid angels; a village trapped by poverty; far too many girls trapped inside the purgatory of disempowerment and violence against their bodies; and the final trap: that little worm of uncontrollable rage that burrows its way inside your guts and never lets you sleep while your enemies live… I literally gripped this book so tightly that I bent its cover. Part of me will remain within its pages for a long, long time.”—Charlie Monroe, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“Hari Kunzru is one of my favorite writers. His alchemical style produces novels that are somehow page-turners and deep ruminations on the political and philosophical mores of the contemporary world. In Blue Ruin, Kunzru takes on both the art world of London in the ’90s and the bizarre time/still days that were the summer of 2020. Confronted with their past selves, three art school friends must reckon with the meaning & purpose of making art ; how it intersects with authenticity, success, vision, money, survival, and truth. A joy to read.”—Elese Stutts, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“All Fours is a wild (really wild), unexpected ride told with all of the quirk, intelligence, and irreverence July’s readers have come to expect (and relish).”—Joelle Herr, The Bookshop in Nashville, Tennessee
“If I didn’t already trust Taylor Brown’s talent and heart as a writer, I doubt I would have picked up a book with the title Rednecks with an open mind. And there is the lesson in this powerful, eye-opening book. Based on the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1920s, real-life and invented characters portray a shameful moment in American history where 10,000 coal miners of different races, speaking different languages, having different faiths stood against their oppressive bosses in the largest labor protest in U.S. history. The coal barons pressured lawmakers to send troops to drop bombs on and shoot at these adults and children essentially in bondage. The origin of the term ‘redneck’ is detailed here… and it’s not what you think.”—Kelly Justice, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“Where to begin with Honor Levy’s aptly named debut, My First Book. A story collection for the passive Reddit scroller, your local barista who lives three different lives between making your iced oat milk chai, that one friend who can’t hang out because their Depop is blowing up, and everyone in between. A premier voice of a new generation of writers, Levy doesn’t hold back any punches or niche internet moments with this one. There’s an art to this style of writing, through the many memes, <3’s, and Twitter cultural touchstones that make up these stories, Levy’s vulnerability and insightful reflections on growing up online are what made this for me and shine through.”—G Sullivan, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“Cactus Country is all about landscape: of Arizona and the hot desert, of childhood and its constant developments, of gender and its fluidity. Zoe Bossier is sharing a much needed story of a childhood outside of the gender binary in a world built to misunderstand that. Bossier astutely and tenderly dives into hard to talk about topics—masculinity, assault, mental health, poverty, transphobia, and so much more. You’ll fall so easily into Bossier’s writing and you won’t turn away when things get hard—Zoe is there to gently guide you through the path forward.”—Frances Metzger, Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, Montana
“The brutally engineered class divisions of Snowpiercer meets Rivers Solomon’s The Deep in this high-octane post-climate disaster novella written by Nommo Award-winning author Suyi Davies Okungbowa. This action-packed novella takes place across one day, with beautifully engaging writing and vivid world building.
My absolute favorite part of the book is the way it treasures storytelling, the weight stories hold, and the freedom that awaits if we are willing to remember and believe them. It reminds us that the people who should hold respect in our societies are those who keep our stories and pass them down to preserve the truth and history of how we came to be. Without storytelling, so many of us would not know who we are, who we were, or who we are destined to be. This novella is an absolute must-read for 2024!”—Su Kim, Old Town Books in Alexandria, Virginia
“A stellar short story collection that blew me away when I read it earlier this season. It is cliché to say that ‘I can’t stop thinking about this book,’ but I truly cannot stop thinking about all the expertly interwoven themes of relationships, communities, and shaping of personal narratives that flow through each piece (especially the story ‘My Diary’, one that I have gone back to numerous times since finishing the collection).”—Taylor Carlton, Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas
“What a gorgeous gut punch of a book! Maren has outdone herself with her third novel; I was in love from the first page. In an almost epistolary style, Shae takes us through her history with Cam—from friend to lover to something else—in small-town Appalachia. Hints drop to show us that things go south fast even as Cam and Shae experience the rush of first love. I could tell things wouldn’t end well from the start but I couldn’t put it down until I knew what happened to Shae, Cam, and Eva. Maren’s prose will break your heart even while you stop to soak in its beauty. Readers of Karen Tucker’s Bewilderness will love this story of being young, queer, and addicted with no way out. Do not miss this book.”—Andi Richardson, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“What a stunner of a book! This is the story of Jolene, a disgruntled office admin employee for Supershops, Inc. Disliked at the office and under pressure from her Persian mother to settle down, she takes out her frustrations in hidden email text that her coworkers can’t see—until they can. When a mistake grants her access to the entire staff’s emails and DMs, she makes a desperate plan to save her job. This has so many layers of emotions! I went from laughing out loud to tearing up, to heart swells of happiness. Sue’s debut is fresh and original and I can’t wait to see what she does next.”—Andi Richardson, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“I will read as many books about the Guncle as Rowley will write! The second installment in the tale of Patrick and his family brings just as much joy and love as the first one! Set five years after The Guncle, Patrick and his beloved niece and nephew are now touring Europe on the way to their father’s wedding to a rich Italian woman. Maisie and Grant aren’t too sure about the match and ask Patrick to talk some sense into his brother. As he tries to teach the kids about the many forms of love, he’s also battling with his sex-crazed sister and the new Launt (you can guess) trying to usurp the kids’ love. Another stunner that will make you smile and cry at the same time.”—Andi Richardson, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“Villada’s short stories in I’m a Fool to Want You blew me away. Nine stories contain entire lives and mythologies in the span of a few pages. Her writing surrounding trans women and sex work is unflinching and so real. These tales of violence and queer love and life are an essential contribution to trans Latine literature.” —Charlie Jones, A Room of One’s Own in Madison, Wisconsin
A Good Life by Virginie Grimaldi, translated by Hildegarde Serle, May 28th
“Emma and Agathe, two sisters in France spend the summers with their Mima and Papi in the Basque Country on the sea. Chapters rock back and forth like the waves of the ocean: between timelines past and present and from each sister’s point of view. Emma is older, strong, and responsible. Agathe is fragile, wild, and careless. Life at home promises no safety or comfort. They rely on each other during the summers. Siblings fight and sometimes it takes a long time to make things right. Lovers of Europa Editions’ other titles My Brilliant Friend and Fresh Water for Flowers will fall hard for this beautiful, heartbreaking, and healing story. Grab a box of tissues!”—Kelly Justice, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“If you are looking for a new epic fantasy, but don’t have time for a 500+ page tome, try The Fireborne Blade, the first in a new series of fantasy novellas by author Charlotte Bond. This is an action-packed story following Maddileh, an uncommon woman knight, on her quest to retrieve the titular sword from a dragon’s lair. Bond packs so much worldbuilding into this little novella, supplementing readers with the world’s folklore and history surrounding dragon-slaying knights in unique interspersed chapters, which only makes the story feel more full and all-encompassing than it already is.
Fans of Nicola Griffith and Marie Brennan will love this one with its renowned magic system and chilling characters. The second book in the series will be releasing in October, so not long to wait!”—Mallory Sutton, Bards Alley in Vienna, Virginia
“David Aristarkhov is cursed, a demon on his heels and in his mind. A gifted psychic in his own right, he comes from a long line of mediums and magic wielders, which may also be the origin of his curse. His only allies happen to be his estranged ex, Rhys, and Rhys’ wife Moira, who have every reason not to help him. Evocation was a breathless character study in vulnerability and resilience, in finding aid in others, and magic bonds worth savoring. I adored it.”—Jordan April, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“A compulsive literary crime thriller in the vein ofRebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You. The seedy college-setting seethes both in the past and the present, and the cold-case murder of an It Girl highlights the haunting loss of youth, faith, potential and identity through a memorable cast of characters.”—Maggie Robe, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“This is a book to be devoured, not read. Charles Lamosway, a white Maine resident who grew up on the Penobscot Reservation, knows more than anyone the importance of blood. He’s spent his life questioning his identity and his place in the world—never knowing his biological father, emotionally removed from his severely depressed mother, and closest to his Native stepfather. A secret pregnancy with a childhood friend further cements his estrangement from the communities around him, leaving him isolated and adrift. Now at a crossroads at the midpoint of his life, he can no longer avoid confronting the traumas of his past if he wants to move forward. Through a brilliantly crafted story about family, legacy, and love, Morgan Talty examines the complexity of identity with incredible insight and depth.”—Melissa Sagendorph, Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts
“New imprint Hell’s Haunted is starting off strong with one of their flagship titles! A dark, sardonic look at the beauty industry, youthjuice tells the tale of Sophia, a new employee at wellness giant HEBE. Their new product is producing amazing results but the process behind the miracle formula of youthjuice is unclear—and possibly darker than anyone realizes. As Sophie gets drawn deeper into the world of HEBE, she’s willing to throw away anything to stay youthful and happy forever. Will she be able to get out before it’s too late, or will her desire for eternal beauty be hew downfall?”—Andi Richardson, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“It’s pretty much guaranteed that I am going to love anything TJ Alexander writes. Their latest is the sweet and sexy story of Mel, a New York bartender that doesn’t fall in love. Enter Bebe, free-spirited lawyer. The two hit it off immediately and as Mel is reconsidering her no-falling-in-love rule, she learns about Bebe’s spouse Kade. Their open relationship allows Mel and Bebe to start dating, even though Kade and Mel don’t really seem to mesh—or do they? We need more poly rep in books! This sheds light and understanding on a little-talked-about concept and shows that joy and love exist in so many forms.”—Andi Richardson, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“Influencer Muenter writes an it-could-happen-here tale of what happens when a young woman who grew up on social media comes of age. Evie has been online for as long as she can remember, growing from a cute kid who lost her dad early in life to a beautiful young woman with a huge social media following. When she disappears during a live video, her older sister Hazel is frantic. Old family secrets come out as family and police search for Evie—can they find her before tis too late? I loved this sharp commentary on what is too much to put online and what happens when you cross the line.”—Andi Richardson, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“I love Annalee Newitz’s mind. They write clearly and accessibly about incredibly complex topics. This book ties together historical threads from the past 250 years, showing how the American government and its people fight proxy battles through competing narratives. This has played out in wars and the international stage as much as Twitter and Reddit. Newitz reveals how we’ve arrived in this uniquely terrifying moment, and where we can go from here.”—Nino Cipri, Astoria Bookshop, Astoria in New York
“Out of the Sierra will undo and challenge all of your expectations of nonfiction. A story collected through oral history and first hand encounters, this book captures a history of a people who have long withstood being catalogued by western history standards. Though it makes no direct reference to these things, simply by existing and sharing this story, Out of the Sierra stands in opposition to colonialism, capitalism, climate change, patriarchy, and white supremacy. This book exudes the beauty that is indigenous way of life, and the horrors that occur when the violence of whiteness forces its way into the narrative.”—Frances Metzger, Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, Montana
“I adored this glittering jewel of a book—multifaceted like the tackiest, most gorgeous Vegas rhinestone, twinkling with heart and light. It’s funny as hell, delightfully crass (we’re talking professional wrestling and Arby’s here, folks), with all the swoony scenes and real friendships and thorny family dynamics of a great beach read *but also* a clever metaplay on narrative structure in fiction. MFA stuff baby!
Margo is a total gem—is she 20 years old, showing her titties on the internet to pay her rent and take care of her new baby? Yes, and we love her for it. Her dad, Jinx, former professional wrestler and current personal quagmire, is a delight. I could go on and on. It’s a damn treat.”—Stef Kiper Schmidt, Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, New Hampshire
“This is my second Hazelwood read and I am as charmed as I thought I’d be. Rue and Eli are on opposite sides of a brutal corporate battle for Rue’s employer. Tension builds as they try to fight their deep attraction while remaining professional in public and the results are explosive! I’m officially a card-carrying Hazelwood fan now.”—Andi Richardson, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
“Rakesfall is a heady and cerebral tale of love, loss, colonialism, entanglement, ghosts, and time. As Earth orbits the Sun, Annelid and Leveret orbit each other in an eternal dance of love and teeth, skin and violence. Chandrasekera’s world has the bite of a blade and the fluid intangibility of a spirit, leaving an ache that thrums through the centuries. From a vicious drama detailing the conquest of Sri Lanka, to a ghost moldering in the walls of a dead city, to a murdered planet’s staggering rebirth, to a demon in the plantation-haunted woods; the saga that unfolds in these pages is as unique as it is mesmerizing.”—Jordan April, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
“Thompson knocks it out of the park again (see what I did there?) with this adorable new baseball romance! Daphne is having a particularly bad day when she audibly heckles Chris during a game. Not understanding that her silly insult hit deep on a personal level, she apologizes via DM after the video of Chris crying goes viral. The only trouble is—she forgets to tell him why she’s sorry. I was so tense while I read this, knowing the truth would come to light at some point and when it did it hit me hard right along with Daphne and Chris. This is going to be a delight of a summer read!”—Andi Richardson, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
Horror has always been deeply personal to me. Our obsessions can often come to structure and shape our inner lives while at the same time rendering the most intimate parts of ourselves illegible to those who don’t share them, and my love of horror as a child was a kind of closet where I could hide before I understood that I was already living in one as a queer boy who wanted nothing more than to the conceal desires I believed marked me as a monster. My memoir, The Long Hallway, uses the language of horror to construct a critical frame around my coming-of-age and family story. The familiarity of the genre becomes a narrative scaffolding that brings with it a universal vocabulary to describe experiences of isolation, fear, hopelessness, and shame, which to a closeted kid are the ingredients of a daily life in which survival is the only imperative.
I watched John Carpenter’s Halloween relentlessly as a child during the years in which my family broke apart while father succumbed to alcoholism and I faced my own demons in front of the television screen, and I realized later that I inadvertently allowed the film’s characters and events to become a guide for how to understand the world, as well as what my own place in it would ultimately be. The memoir that emerges from my misguided queer education—through my identification with a masked, knife-wielding villain chasing down hyper-sexualized teenagers—grafts scenes of personal experience onto the structure of Halloween, and thus allows the genre conventions of horror to say out loud and more clearly what I couldn’t when I was learning and reckoning with these unwanted truths about myself.
I’ve encountered various other personal stories told through the lens of horror, either before or during the construction of my own, and I now understand more deeply how the genre can both inflect and infect our experiences of the world, especially as queer and marginalized writers attempting to universalize an experience that we once believed only we could ever understand. Horror gives us a lineage of tropes and terminology with which to describe the things that haunt and frighten us—the things we dread the most—which so often reflect elements of our personal histories back to us, metaphorically or otherwise. And these are some of the books that helped me understand how writing about horror can be a way of writing about ourselves.
Night Mother offers exactly what its subtitle suggests, as this memoir-in-essays serves up a blend of memoir, criticism, and reported history regarding the original production and reception of The Exorcist in popular culture as Marlena Williams explores complex ideas regarding faith, family, sexuality, womanhood, and grief. “The Exorcist, when you really get down to it,” Williams writes, “is just a story about a mother and a daughter.” The personal obsession at the book’s core is her relationship with her own mother before and after the latter’s death from cancer, as well as how the two women’s powerful responses to William Friedkin’s iconic film connected and bonded them forever. Horror works here as a shared experience and collective memory giving voice to distinct fears and preoccupations, and the film functions now for Williams as a family heirloom of sorts, a site of reckoning with the past as she forges a future without her mother to guide her.
As a young writer raised on the iconography of genre films and having formed a worldview based on imaginary worlds that reflect our own in sometimes frightening or shocking ways, Charlie Fox’s essays diagnose a history of queerness and monstrosity: “Being bad in art, stimulating outrage or horror, is just another way of behaving monstrously (cathartic? Oh yes!) and a role to live up to when society proclaims your desires to be ‘sinful.’” Fox’s voice is mostly critical and intellectual until it suddenly isn’t, and the way he portrays his younger self learning about the world through popular culture is striking evidence for his broader claims. “Self-Portrait of a Werewolf” takes the form of a letter written to the titular monstrous shape-shifter and interrogates Fox’s early obsession with the archetype, directly asking probing questions about its expansive influence on the world beyond the screen: “I’m through with thinking of the monster as a wholly negative role, which is your curse, since you live in wait for a love that will probably never arrive.” There’s a restless and brilliant mind at work in these pages that brings the world of the popular imagination alive in completely new ways.
Gina Nutt’s Night Rooms is an exquisite essay collection that centers the idea of escape as a presiding principle, not just in form—as these essays break from conventional expectations in provocative ways—but also in content. In these pages, the grounding conventions of horror films serve as handholds as the narratives circle around themes of the body and grief and survival. All the while, something sinister lurks in the white space between the paragraphs, an unnamed threat that’s felt rather than seen. Nutt orbits traumatic personal experiences, including family deaths by suicide, with a poetic reliance on imagery and suggestion to convey the reality of her life’s shocks and their reverberations. Horror becomes a telling touchstone to link these essays together, because what is horror if not the deliberate recasting of our greatest fears and traumas into entertainment, making something meaningful from what is otherwise just darkness?
Film and literature of the ghostly and supernatural can evoke other reckonings beyond those based on identity and belonging, as Edward Parnell demonstrates in Ghostland, a deeply moving meditation on grief and loss. In the context of revisiting the horror stories that had once perhaps incongruously provided him with a kind of comfort in his youth, he now asks them to do the same for his haunted adulthood. Deceptively a survey of canonical horror stories that have been meaningful to him over time, the book’s autobiographical elements ultimately provide a deeper and incredibly heartbreaking relationship with what the ghost story really is: a visitation from the past that can never again be made flesh, and in this case also a reminder of devastating personal losses that can come to define us for as long as we remain among the living.
“The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection,” writes Machado in the opening pages of In the Dream House, an innovative account of her experience of domestic abuse that embeds her personal story within an extensive cultural history. The book is structured as a series of brief sections titled after various tropes—many of them from horror film iconography, such as “Dream House as Creature Feature,” “Dream House as Haunted Mansion,” “Dream House as Demonic Possession,” “Dream House as Apocalypse,” and “Dream House as Nightmare on Elm Street”—expressing elements of her time in a house in Indiana where her girlfriend lived during most of the duration of their relationship while Machado was a graduate student in Iowa. Her story is punctuated by harrowing moments of conflict that feel, because of their specificity, almost uncannily familiar. Readers come to inhabit her mind so wholly that the claustrophobia of her relationship with this other woman is made present first in the mind and then in the body, a cancer spreading quietly beneath the skin.
Much is made of the “poet’s novel,” a genre in which prominent poets bring their careful lyricism to book-length fictional prose and inevitably reach a broader audience while also attending faithfully and fervently to the rigor of their craft. But there should perhaps be more attention given to the poet’s essay(s) as well. Justin Phillip Reed has been widely celebrated for his experimental body of poetry that centers its speaker’s urgency and frequent rage about white supremacy, the suppression of queer sexuality, the trap of masculinity, and the politics of Blackness in America, and the essays collected here orbit similar concerns in the context of popular horror films. “What is it I want from horror?” Reed asks. “What does it want with me? What is it?” And he proceeds to both answer and deepen these questions by interrogating images from popular horror films against their cultural origins—Drew Barrymore’s lynched body dangling from a tree is one striking example—and ultimately concludes with another question: “What if horror is not yet for Black people?”
Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis
Hear me out: I know this is a novel, but the fact that Ellis superimposes a horror narrative onto a mock memoir—in which the author channels his own real-life career and hedonistic excess into a (non-auto)fictional exploration of his earlier body of work literally coming back to haunt him as he enters middle age—speaks volumes about the genre’s capacity to reframe lived experience into a terrifying odyssey toward self-recognition, and perhaps a kind of peace. In the novel, the character of Bret Easton Ellis attempts to reconnect with a former lover and the son they share together, and in doing so launches himself into a bizarre and frightening world that is perhaps, in the end, one of his own making, as his fictional creations seem to come to life. Ellis is an expert in the language of violence, especially when it crosses the line between the real and the unreal, the remembered or the dreamed—even as it’s always somehow personal.
My essay on John Carpenter’s Halloween that first explored ideas later developed in my memoir (and which originally appeared here in Electric Literature) is anthologized in this wide-ranging collection of essays that feature queer writers reflecting on canonical horror films and how they informed or expanded their understandings of variously defined identities. The formula of juxtaposing personal narrative with non-scholarly film analysis offers readers new perspectives on popular subgenres that we might have thought we already understood, the queer experience being one that necessarily refracts and reshapes our conceptions of the world. As editor Joe Vallese writes in his introduction, “These essays don’t draw easy lines between horror and queerness but rather convey a rich reciprocity, complicating and questioning as much as they clarify.” Carmen Maria Machado on Jennifer’s Body is essential reading, but the collection as a whole gathers strength as it moves through the canon and shows us all the possibilities of identification and longing that we may have missed on those first viewings in the dark basements of our childhoods, always looking for something of ourselves in what we saw on screen.
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