Electric Lit’s Best Novels of 2023

Posted on by EL Assistant2

There’s no denying that this year has been an embarrassment of riches when it comes to truly extraordinary, life-changing novels. From books that quietly interrogate the nuances of life among the elite, to stunning panoramic works that imagine a more physically and spatially flexible world, the authors on this list took a classic literary form and reimagined it from the inside out, even bringing us tales from the future—some green lights, some warning signs. The books on this list tell family stories, love stories, stories of ambition and lust and power and greed, and stories of rest, relaxation, and meditation. All of them are important, and we’re grateful to have read and loved them. 

Here are Electric Lit’s top 5 novels of the year, followed by additional favorites below: 

The Top 5 Novels of The Year:

The Guest by Emma Cline

Emma Cline is masterful at subtle tension and heightening anticipation while dropping profound insight seamlessly throughout everything she writes. Her second novel, The Guest, reads like a short story—in its taut, tight, crystalline prose and plot—and Cline has even said that it was inspired by John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” But The Guest manages to do something possibly even more magical and intensifying with that alluring idea of a drifter floating through the pools, parties, and private lives of the wealthy elite. For a summer in the Hamptons, 22-year-old Alex uses her freeloading talents to get by unemployed among the one-percent. But when she slips up, and she’s silently dismissed by her latest target, Simon, she waits out the week—on her own devices—with a plan to confront him once and for all at the annual Labor Day party.

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin

Greta is a 45-year-old transcriber for a New Age sex therapist named Om. Flavia is a 28-year-old patient of said sex therapist. While typing out her sessions, Greta becomes infatuated by Flavia, and to the point of obsession, invested in her life story while learning about all of her past trauma. One day at the dog park, Greta becomes starstruck when she hears Flavia’s voice but manages to introduce herself under a fake name, and their banter and instant chemistry quickly leads to a passionate affair built upon a lie. Set in Hudson, New York, this novel is part character study, part mystery, and entirely riveting. Beagin’s prose is beguiling with an absurd, witty tone that leaves the reader, like the novel’s characters, desperately wanting it never to end. 

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

In a near dystopian future, the most popular form of entertainment is “hard action-sports”—gladiator-style death-matches between incarcerated individuals within America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. If a contestant, known as a Link, survives for three years, a nearly impossible achievement, they are granted freedom. The Links team up in Chains to fight groups from other prisons all while being live streamed to the American public. The novel is layered with chapters from the perspectives not only of Links but also those of viewers, protestors who believe that action-sports are inhumane, and board members who oversee the regulations of matches. As Adjei-Brenyah told Electric Lit: “There’s a lot of suffering going around, and we don’t have the vocabulary or the ability to engage that suffering outside the terms of creating more suffering.” In this breathtaking novel, sprinkled with footnotes that provide facts and statistics on the prison system, Adjei-Brenyah places a critical eye—through a fictional lens—on the very real human costs of entertainment and the humane reasons for abolition today.

Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter

Based on the National Magazine Award winning story, Hilary Leichter’s profound second novel asks how far the mind can travel when it’s looking for something that’s gone. Annie, Edward, and their young daughter Rose live in a cramped city apartment. One night, when their friend Stephanie visits, a beautiful and spacious terrace appears in their closet. When Stephanie leaves, the terrace disappears, only to return when Stephanie returns. But Annie and Edward must learn that every bit of space comes at a hidden cost, setting off a seismic chain of events. Ultimately, Terrace Story is a love story that seeks to mend a broken-hearted world. Read an interview with Leichter here.

Forgive Me Not by Jennifer Baker 

From former Electric Literature contributing editor Jennifer Baker comes a searing indictment of the juvenile justice system. It takes one night, one bad decision, and one drunk driving accident for fifteen year old Violetta Chen-Samuels to cause the accident that kills her little sister. In the juvenile justice system, her future lies in the hands of those she’s wronged—her family. Denied their forgiveness, Violetta is forced to make one of two choices: to remain in detention, or participate in The Trials—no easy feat. But success might bring her freedom, and what she craves most of all: her family’s love. In the quest to win her family’s forgiveness, Violetta must confront her own grief, and consider that it might be more important to forgive herself. 

Electric Literature’s Other Favorite Novels:

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

Bodie Kane, successful film professor and podcast host is invited back to the New England boarding school, where she spent four miserable years, to teach a new course. While she’d prefer to let sleeping dogs lie, Bodie finds herself drawn back into the case of Thalia Keith, her classmate who died, and Omar Evans, the athletic trainer who was convicted for her murder. As the many flaws in the case, and a rush to conviction, become apparent, Kane begins to wonder if something from her past holds the key to solving the case. Read an excerpt of I Have Some Questions For You here. 

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee

When Jonathan Abernathy lands a job with a government loan forgiveness program, one that will absolve him of his debts if he is successful, he jumps at the chance. He can give himself a new life if he proves competent at entering the dreams of middle class workers while they sleep and removes the unsavory detritus from their daily lives. As he settles into his new job, reality and morality begin to collide, forcing him to confront the lines between love and hate, work and life, right and wrong, and even sleep and consciousness. Read an excerpt of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind here.

Land of Milk and Honey by C. Pam Zhang

In a world covered in smog and filled with disappearing food crops, a chef leaves behind her dying career in a dreary city for a mountaintop escape, a colony where the world’s troubles seem more like faraway annoyances. The sky is clear, elusive ingredients are plenty, and she is reminded of the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body. Sensuous, surprising, and alluring, Land of Milk and Honey examines the ethics of seeking pleasure in a world who’s days are numbered. 

Blackouts by Justin Torres

In the desert in a place called The Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul who’s haunted the margins of his life: Juan Gay. Juan has a project to pass along, a book: Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, and its devastating history. Hidden in buried and muted voices are the stories of early twentieth century queer life. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator regale each other with moments of joy and sadness, of love and loss. A book about storytelling, this National Book Award winning novel reminds us that the past is with us, beside us, behind us, and ahead of us. 

Holding Pattern by Jenny Xie

In Jenny Xie’s debut novel, Kathleen moves back to Oakland and back in with her mother, Marissa, after a recent heartbreak. To distract herself and to get out of the house quite frankly, she applies for a job as a professional cuddler at the tactile therapy startup, Midas Touch. Marissa, meanwhile, is recently engaged and in the midst of planning her wedding. Holding Pattern—with its mesmerizing prose and endearingly authentic mother-daughter relationship—is about connection in all its many forms and fashions. Get a taste of the poignant novel by reading this excerpt published in Recommended Reading earlier this year.

People Collide by Isle McElroy

When Eli wakes up alone in the cramped Bulgarian apartment he shares with his wife, Elizabeth, who’s more organized and successful, he discovers that somehow he’s in her body. She, in his body, has vanished. As he searches throughout Europe for his wife, he embarks on an exploration of gender and embodied reality. People Collide is rich, rewarding, and a tender portrayal of ambition, desire, and shared lives and bodies. Check out Electric Lit’s exclusive cover reveal here. 

The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor

Set in Iowa City around a group of acquaintances—some friends, some lovers, some strangers—this mosaic of a novel alternates perspectives each chapter to dissect and discover the complexities as well as tragedies of being human. Eventually leading up to a dramatic weekend in a cabin, the central ensemble of artists, café-workers, poets, dancers, writers, and mathematicians are all haunted by societal expectations, cultural notions of art, Capitalism, their pasts, and perhaps each other. As Taylor probes the tension between individuals, communities, and contemporary America, he surely displays “the rhythms of living in the world” with this lasting, memorable novel. 

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

Yellowface follows two friends, June Hayward and Athena Liu, who are both writers but have had drastically different career outcomes. While Athena has become a bestseller, June’s books continue to go unnoticed. But after June witnesses Athena’s death, she steals her friend’s latest manuscript about Chinese laborers in World War I. June, who is white, changes her name to sound more ethnic and edits, plagiarizes, lies, then publishes Athena’s manuscript under the racially ambiguous “Juniper Song.” Unsurprisingly, June, or Juniper, is haunted by the threat of getting caught. The tension is high, and so are the stakes in this literary thriller, as Kuang develops her characters into ultra-real people and insightful commentaries on today’s publishing industry.

A Quitter’s Paradise by Elysha Chang

What holds a family together when the fallout seems inevitable? After Eleanor’s mother passes, she quits her PhD program, lies to her boyfriend, and continues down a path of questionable choices to distract herself from her own feelings. In hopes of confronting the present, Eleanor looks to the past and soon finds family secrets in every corner. Told through interwoven narratives from varying perspectives, eras, and continents, Elysha Chang’s debut is a sharp, intimate, and poignant investigation of grief, family dynamics, and selfhood. 

Mrs. S by K. Patrick

Mrs. S is an atmospheric slow burn of a novel. Taking place at an all-girls English boarding school, the titular character is the wife of the headmaster and the narrator, an unnamed 22-year-old and new matron hired to supervise the girls, is obsessed. What follows is a story of utmost yearning in the sense of queer desire, the attempt to understand one’s self, and a simple longing to be understood. The prose in this novel makes it stand out immensely—filled with poetry and melancholy around every corner and a hypnotic voice that conveys the intensity of youth and infatuation exquisitely. 

Sea Change by Gina Chung

Ro, having entered her thirties, her mother estranged, and her boyfriend having recently left to join a mission to Mars, is feeling stuck. She spends her days working at the aquarium, where she befriends Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus who is also Ro’s last remaining link to her father, a marine biologist who disappeared on an expedition. When Dolores is sold, Ro is left to wade through her memories and trauma, and finally come to terms with her history while finding her place in the ever-changing world around her. 

Where There Was Fire by John Manuel Arias

When a lethal fire burns evidence of a cover up at the American Fruit Company’s most lucrative banana plantation, a Costa Rican family is forever changed. What unfolds is a story of forgiveness, of a mother and daughter, of trying to cope with family mysteries and forces not fully understood. Brimming with ancestral ghosts and spirits, John Manuel Arias weaves a gorgeous tapestry of love, loss, secrets, and redemption in this debut National Bestseller. 

All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby

When former-FBI agent Titus Crowne returns to his hometown in Virginia as the newly-appointed sheriff, he’s faced with a tragedy and trail of secrets. The town, he finds, is torn apart and coming undone by Confederacy statues and flags on every street. And at the heart of the novel is a school shooting with the serial killer still on the loose—unleashing more tension and drama until it all brims over in this dark, complex story. All the Sinners Bleed asks its readers to reckon with what’s been lost and what’s about to be.

Moonrise Over New Jessup by Jamila Minnicks

In 1957, Alice Young steps off the bus in the all-Black town of New Jessup, Alabama, where residents have rejected racial integration as a method of social advancement. When Alice falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose community organizing challenges the status quo, she realizes their love could lead to their expulsion from the town they both so dearly love. Rendered in lush, exquisite prose, Moonrise Over New Jessup revels in the turbulent underbelly of the politics of love. 

Rouge by Mona Awad

To borrow phrasing from Chelsea Davis, who interviewed Awad for Electric Lit in September, “Rouge tenderly explores grief, the psychic damage wrought by Eurocentric beauty standards, and the fierce, fraught love between mothers and daughters.” When Belle’s estranged mother dies suddenly, she returns to California to settle the debts and the mystery behind the cause. Belle has always been addicted to the endless stream of YouTube beauty tutorials and skincare rituals (because who hasn’t been at one point?), but things are taken to the next level when Belle enters La Maison de Méduse—the culty spa her mother was supposedly a part of—and finds possible answers as well as secrets galore. 

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng

Born in a fishing village amid the heat and coastal beauty of Singapore, Ah Boon is a gentle boy not much interested in fishing. He prefers to spend time playing with the neighbor girl, but when he discovers an ability to find beautiful islands that no one else can find, he feels an obligation to impress the girl he loves. Told amidst the backdrop of the Japanese army’s invasion, and the rise of resistance, The Great Reclamation is an aching love, and coming of age story that reckons with colonialism and the wounds of progress.  

We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White

Set in Brooklyn in the 1980s, Key, a charming and tender doula serving the Black women of East New York is enchanted with her world. Like her mother, she lives among the departed, learning to speak to and for them. Her untimely death leaves behind her mother Audrey, and her son, Colly, who soon learns that he, too, has inherited his mother’s gifts. As he moves between the living and the dead, he begins a journey of radical self-realization. Part supernatural family saga, part searing social critique, Tyriek White’s Center for Fiction First Novel Prize winning debut is a lyrical and potent work of art.

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

Isabella Hammad’s second novel follows Sonia Nasir, an actress who leaves London and a ruinous love affair, to spend the summer with her older sister in Haifa—their family’s ancestral city. Sonia gets caught up in a production of Hamlet (in Arabic and premiering on the West Bank) that a friend of her sister’s is organizing. Through the narrator, the complexities, dangers, and haunting realities of contemporary Palestinian existence seep through the tightly-woven plot and beautifully moving prose of Enter Ghost. 

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell

When a young father and son set out on a roadtrip, devastated by the death of their wife and mother, they must confront her terrifying legacy: a family called The Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality. Moving back and forth in time, from London in the 60s to the Argentinian military dictatorship and its aftermath, Our Share of Night is a beautiful, arresting novel of love and longing. 

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey 

As Lauren Groff writes in her introduction to this excerpt published in Recommended Reading, “Biography of X is a ghost story in which the living haunts the dead; it is a doomed and obsessive attempt by Lucca to make contact with X through time and space, coming closer and closer, but—infuriatingly—never being quite able to touch her lost love.” Set in an alternative USA, Biography of X is at its surface a book within a book—a biography of the late enigmatic and shape-shifting artist X, written by her wife, the journalist C.M. Lucca—but it becomes so much more than that as secrets, unknown histories, and questions unravel themselves with an almost equal amount of force as Lacey’s breathtaking sentences.

Writing Desire in Middle Age

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Diana Whitney’s second poetry collection, Dark Beds, is a rich text built of the many narratives that comprise middle age for caregivers: the demands of young children growing into themselves, parents aging away from themselves, a marriage suffering from the stress of relentless obligations.

Through these poems, Whitney explores the ache of desire that is often the backdrop of these caregiving years—the desire to be on the receiving end of tenderness and to be witnessed as a whole being rather than attendant. In the poem “The Long Goodbye” the speaker asks, “How can you savor what you have when it demands so much of your attention?” 

Within these poems, Whitney builds a landscape that is at once realistic and dreamlike, filled with coyotes, frozen rivers, orchards. These poems attend to the natural world with the same care and grace that they bear witness to the unfolding of desire, as in this stanza from “The Same Earth”:  

All I want is April on her back—

ecstatic creatures hatching in the ice pond,

green frog moon waxing like a come-on,

the bulbs busting up through dusty grass.  

Whitney and I spoke over the phone—from opposite sides of the country— just before the official launch of her book, during a quiet moment away from the demands of work and family. 

Jennifer Berney: I wanted to start by acknowledging that you just lost your mom, and so it must be odd to be launching a book. 

Diana Whitney: Yeah, I’m really tired. It was about three weeks that she was dying, so I took a lot of time off to go be there. My mom is a big part of the book, so to have just lost her and to be bringing the book into the world is really weird. 

JB: Are you up for saying a little more about that? 

DW: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’ll say that I’m a late bloomer with book publishing and I consider myself a slow writer, but I’ve come to embrace that and not compare myself to authors who whip out a book every two years. But this book was a long time coming. I’ve been writing these poems over a long period of time, like over the past 10 years. So they range from when my daughters were young to the later stages of their adolescence. And the poems range through the stages of my mom’s Alzheimer’s. So when I think about the title Dark Beds, there are layers of meanings there. The beds are definitely the garden beds because I’m a gardener.  And then also the marital bed and the darkness that can happen there when distance and conflict and estrangement develop within a relationship. And then there’s the darkest bed, which is mortality and death. And the poems witness my daughters as they move into adolescence while my mom was declining with Alzheimer’s. That’s one of the big arcs of the book. 

I’m a late bloomer with book publishing and I consider myself a slow writer, but I’ve come to embrace that and not compare myself.

So now having it come out in the world at this moment—yes—it’s particularly poignant and strange and vulnerable. The poem that I wrote, The Long Goodbye: the long goodbye is another name for Alzheimer’s. I remember reading that somewhere and thinking, I need to fit that into something I write. I didn’t know that when the book came out, that the long goodbye would be over. It was a 10-year goodbye. But I have this feeling that she lives through me and my daughters and my writing even though the mother that I’m remembering now, the one before Alzheimer’s, isn’t quite in these poems. But it’s a weird juxtaposition, the book launch and the grieving happening at the same time, because you have to be external when your book is launching. And you have to be internal to properly grieve.

JB: You described yourself as a late bloomer just now, and I wanted to ask you about writing from the perspective of middle age. And, just to toss this out there, my personal experience of middle age is that it doesn’t feel late to me.

DW: I do use “late bloomer” in quotes because it’s not my word, it’s the culture’s word. Maybe because we live in this youth worshiping culture. My journey with writing has taken the time it needed to take. And the wisdom I’m stepping into is around trusting that my own journey was the right path for me. I’m actually finishing my MFA, and I’ll graduate in January. I had started in my twenties and I had to take medical leave because of a chronic pain condition that was really debilitating. And then I didn’t go back for a variety of reasons, including my father’s death and then having two babies. But it became important to me that I finish what I’d started and I had this deep intuitive knowing that it was something that I needed to do without apology and without a good practical reason. 

I went to my residency as probably the oldest writer there, and actually loved that role. I felt like a wise maternal figure there, like I had a lot of insights and knowledge and depth to offer to younger writers. And I don’t say that in a condescending way, just more like: I just turned 50 and I’m at home with myself right now. The older I get, the more loss I see. Life is short. In terms of writing, we have to celebrate even the smallest accomplishments. We really do! Like, there’s no more waiting around for the poem in the New Yorker or the Pulitzer Prize or the NEA grant—it has to be now! 

JB: I’m curious too about the thread of desire in Dark Beds. Did it come easily, or was it scary to write about desire in middle age? 

DW: The first thing I’ll say is that I had writing friends who thought I should write a novel, that I should fictionalize my story. I’m not a novelist. I had to write it the way it came out of me, which was in poems and a lot of the poems were written a long time ago. So a lot of the hotter, desire-themed poems in the book were written in 2013, which is 10 years of a 20-year marriage. The experiences that I had that shaped the book, they might have ended in a different way. The last couple of poems really wrestle with the questions of: what is fidelity? What is longevity? What are the boundaries that we need within a marriage? What does it mean to fall in love with somebody else? For me that was inextricable from the experience of mothering young children and the kind of abnegation of self that can happen. 

I did the full-time motherhood thing very intensively. I called it the Baby Cave. And a lot of these poems were written right as I was stepping out of the baby cave and this experience of limerence happened to me—which is a word I had to learn, but it definitely applies. And the poems came out of this thrilling intoxication,  an awakening of both creative and sensual energy. It was incredible to both get poems from that and to be able to work things out with my partner. I’m intensely grateful for both things. I said, I’m not going to apologize for the poems. The experience of longing and desire, that was temporary. It was a catalyst for the poems, but the poems exist and I did not ask permission either to write them or to publish them. That’s maybe scary, and maybe people who aren’t writers wouldn’t understand that, but that was really important to me. Actually, one of the ways that I could stay in my marriage was not to apologize and not to ask for permission. 

JB: I feel like the standard cultural narrative is that motherhood depletes our desire, but a thread through the book is that motherhood actually drives this longing. 

I went to my residency as probably the oldest writer there, and actually loved that role.

DW: It did, it did. And some of the trap I felt was the domesticity of being a wife and being a queer woman in a hetero-seeming marriage. And that’s actually something now, in middle age, I’m needing to work on: finding space to express my bisexuality and what does that look like within a committed partnership.  I’m writing poems about that. But at that point, I felt stifled by the institution of marriage, by this notion of wife and the expectations of being a good mother. But desire was this exhilarating freedom—and the place to come back to myself. 

Before getting married, when I was single and dating a lot of people—I used to call it the vixen days. I don’t necessarily write about those in a nostalgic way in this book, but I think that the emotional affair that I write about in Dark Beds was a way of reliving the energy of those younger days. It was actually very adolescent. 

JB: With limerence and desire though, there is something about those emotions that seems adolescent, but I want to second guess that association. Is that just our cultural narrative again? 

DW: It might be. I mean, I know for me, I started listening to the same music I had in high school. Actually there’s a playlist for my book that my wonderful editor and publisher asked for. And it’s: The Cure, The Smiths, Suzanne Vega— these songs that I associate nostalgically as songs of longing and that was the music I wanted to listen to. 

I think maybe we denigrate that period of time, but it’s also a really fertile and generative period of time. I mean, it’s full of tumultuousness and pain and all of that, but it really can be very charged and beautiful and, and creative.

JB: Well, it’s the time before we’re locked in, right? I wish I could take a vacation in my twenties but as my 47-year-old self, I would love to be simultaneously in my twenties and my forties. 

DW: I feel the same way. And sometimes I say, oh, am I just being nostalgic? But I think it’s much more nuanced than that, going back to the experience of adolescence. I remember being 16 or 17 and a friend’s mom saying “Oh, you’re in discovery mode.” She was probably in her forties.  She said “You know, discovery mode doesn’t end when you get older.” And I remember thinking that was so weird, and like, why was this old mom saying that to me? And I think that’s probably what I was longing for in the poems, to be in that state of discovery and possibility. 

JB: I’m curious to what extent desire is about wanting to be seen. So much of raising kids is about who you are to the person who needs you, which is different than being wanted for who you are. 

DW: Absolutely. Being seen was a huge, huge part of it. To be seen, to be recognized, to be desired as a goddess, as a force of nature, as someone who runs wild in the woods or  under the full moon—something totally separate from mundane daily life and the tasks of, say, feeding children. 

JB: It’s an incredible aphrodisiac to be seen. 

DW: That was a big, big part of it. Esther Perel has that book Mating in Captivity, which was so, so formative to me. She says that sex isn’t something you do, it’s someplace you go. And she talks about the unknown that’s in eroticism. It’s difficult to have that thrilling experience of the unknown with someone who’s been your partner for 10 or 20 years. That is what she helps couples figure out both in the books that she writes and in her couples therapy practice. 

JB: It sounds like some of the power in her work is in not shaming the need behind it. 

DW: Yeah, and normalizing it—talking about desires that are often unspeakable outside of a marriage or partnership. There are so many things that she wrote that opened my eyes and helped me also to be forgiving towards myself. 

JB: I want to make sure I ask you about all the wildness and nature and animals that appear in your poems.

DW: I spend a lot of time in the woods and I’m lucky to live in just a beautiful place in the hills of southern Vermont. So inspiration comes from being out in a remote place where no other humans are, and like hiking up a mountain and encountering wild animals or being under the moon or stars. I’ve come to understand that an essential part of my writing process is being out in nature; it’s not some “self-care” thing I have to make time for. I mean, maybe it’s also that. Mary Oliver said that she would get up every morning and walk and she would bring her little journal with her, and most of her poems arose that way. It’s not as direct for me, but my experience of being out in the wild—on the river, in the woods— is part of my writing practice. I’ll come back and jot images in a notebook, and they inevitably find them find their way into poems. 

I actually think that the page is a place that we can be wild and free in a way that we can’t necessarily be in the kitchen with our children or, you know, driving the carpool. 

JB: Yeah, that’s interesting to think of the page as its own wilderness, 

DW: Right? And a place of discovery or possibility. I ended up feeling like the experience of writing for me was more thrilling in the long term than like the experiences of a sexual encounter or the possibility of a sexual encounter. I don’t know if that sounds disingenuous, but the thrill of composition, especially of writing something new and almost channeling it—sometimes you can feel some wild, otherworldly energy moving through you. It’s powerful. So I really am grateful that I have both: I have my long partnership with the father of my children, and I have these poems that came out of that experience that I chronicle in dark beds.

Before 2016 I Dated Republicans Without Much Shame

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

As I watched Donald Trump win the presidency on November 8th, 2016, I didn’t know that it meant my days of sleeping with Republicans were over. Why? For a start, it took me a few days to even accept the election results. Furthermore, I’d never sought out Republicans for intimacy-related reasons—it was one of those things that just happened, from time to time. But if I’m being honest with myself, the real reason is that I didn’t even realize a line in the sand existed until someone else articulated it.

Before 2016, I dated Republicans without much shame. I didn’t agree with them politically, but I subscribed to the mathematically-sound belief that the wider your net, the more likely you are to get a boyfriend. Besides, I thought politics was private; how we vote is anonymous, after all. However, on a date in early 2018, when a man told me his only deal breaker was that he wouldn’t date a Trump voter, I responded with, “well, of course I wouldn’t date a Trump voter.” And I meant it. Which meant that somewhere along the way, something had shifted.

I hadn’t fully understood why until I read Cecilia Rabess’ phenomenal novel Everything’s Fine—the story of Jess, a young, liberal Black woman and Josh, a young, conservative white guy. They meet in college, get to know each other on the trading floor of Goldman Sachs, and begin dating while she works for him at a hedge fund. 

Everything’s Fine was flooded with bad reviews before it came out. Readers found the premise—that a Black woman would date a racist white man—racist. I’m a white woman; it’s not up to me to decide what’s racist, but I don’t condone reviewing a book before reading it. At the same time, I can conceive of a book description so racist that the book itself should be discredited—which is why this controversy made me curious. So curious, in fact, that I bought the book. 

I’m glad I did, because I loved it. The criticism isn’t unfounded; Josh makes insensitive and ignorant comments about race throughout, which qualifies him as a racist. And yet, I’m of the opinion that all white people in this country (myself included) have made insensitive and ignorant comments about race at some point—and in this case, I thought it was fair to leave it up to Jess to choose whether or not to forgive. 

Jess, for her part, isn’t perfect either. She feels guilty walking by Occupy Wall Street protestors on her way to her Goldman Sachs job every day, but she changes nothing. She benefits from Josh’s wealth and tolerates his behavior for years. 

And I related to Jess’ dilemma. Like her, I often find myself torn between an opposition to capitalism and the necessary acknowledgment that it benefits me. And I related to her romantic predicament: existing in a relationship that looks terrible from the outside (Jess’ friends describe Josh as “toxic” and even question if it’s ethical for Jess to date him), while knowing there’s something there my friends can’t see. But as Josh continued to offend, and as her political views developed, tested by the inequities of the so-called real world, I began to wonder: was she ever going to draw the line with him?

Readers found the premise—that a Black woman would date a racist white man—racist.

She reaches the end of her rope in Summer 2016, in a moment that’s very specific to their relationship, and yet so glaringly familiar. Searching for a lost item in their apartment, she discovers Josh owns a MAGA hat. And then, Jess is done.

And as she’s breaking up with him, Josh snaps too. He says aloud what Jess has been fearing for years: that she’s a hypocrite. He claims she’s a beneficiary of the same power structures she theoretically opposes. He’s not wrong, but at the same time, Jess is also a victim of these power structures—she’s the recipient of routine racism and sexism on Wall Street. Rabess asks us not to oversimplify oppression—a person can be on both ends.

More convincingly, Josh says it’s unfair for Jess to hold his Trump support against him, as he’s never hidden who he was. She already knew he was a registered Republican, that he’s always voted for Republicans. He voted for Mitt Romney, he works at a hedge fund, he owns a $4 million apartment, and he’s opposed to most social welfare programs. He hasn’t changed.

He’s once again not wrong; given everything we know about Josh, his support of Trump is expected. Here, I recognized the innate hypocrisy of my own line. Is a Romney voter much better than a Trump voter? They are largely the same people, and I mean that as a statistical truth, not a moral assertion. Most Romney voters voted for Trump, and the ones who didn’t were largely educated wealthy white professionals. Republicans vote for Republican candidates; that’s one of their defining qualities. To this very day, 91 charges later, 70% of registered Republicans are still with Trump.

We all like to think we can influence our partner’s political views, and sometimes we can.

And yet, even if Josh’s support is to be expected, even if it’s in line with everything he’s ever done, and even though I remember exactly what was happening in Summer 2016, I still gasped when Jess found the hat. But why? Why was it different? Why was this Jess’ line? Why is it mine?

On the one hand, it’s obvious. Because it’s Donald Trump. Trump is and was so blatantly racist and misogynistic that no Black woman should have to explain why they dumped their white boyfriend for supporting him. Nor any woman in general. Even though Josh was a Romney voter, Trump is so much worse. 

Furthermore, when Josh voted for Romney, he wasn’t dating Jess. Perhaps Jess wanted to think Josh had adjusted his views merely by osmosis, even though he never caved during any of their arguments. Here, again, I related strongly. We all like to think we can influence our partner’s political views, and sometimes we can. In 2014, I successfully convinced my conservative investment banker boyfriend that his time was too valuable to waste voting. That was the only time, though.

And Jess didn’t dump Josh when he told her he was voting for Trump, she dumped him when she found the red hat. Josh tries to argue it’s “just a hat.” But of course it’s not just the hat, it’s his show of enthusiasm the hat represents. As Rabess writes:

“It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net….and Josh—now it makes her think of Josh.”

It’s not just me and Jess. Politics is a common line to draw in romantic relationships, in theory. I wouldn’t date anyone who I know definitely voted for Trump—and 71% of registered Democrats say the same. And even though I have more firm lines than I used to, it’s still my preference to know less about someone’s politics early on in the relationship. For example, I’m grateful I was already in love with my partner by the time he revealed he voted for Gary Johnson. Relationships are hard enough without adding politics in. 

But Jess’ line was with Trump himself, not Josh’s politics. And so—I had to admit—was mine. Did Trump change what it means to date a Republican? What you’re conceding when you do? 

On the one hand, Trump has said and done so many abhorrent things that it feels like a no-brainer. It would be impossible to date anyone who even tries to defend him. There’s a reason the 2017 Women’s March, the day after his inauguration, was the largest single-day protest in our country’s history. Supporting Trump feels like a hole so deep it would be impossible for a relationship to climb out intact. 

On the other hand, maybe I’m just using Trump’s specifics as an excuse. It often feels like “Never Trump” Republicans just want us to go back to a time when Republicans were polite about their tacit support for income inequality. Maybe I just want absolution for the Republicans I dated pre-2016. Maybe a more progressive person would tell me the same thing Josh told Jess: Republicans vote for Republicans.

Supporting Trump feels like a hole so deep it would be impossible for a relationship to climb out intact.

Everything’s Fine doesn’t end when Jess dumps Josh. He goes to great lengths to win her back—he shows up in her hometown, even though she’s ignored his calls for months, and at one point, he even offers to sacrifice his job to save hers. She remains on the fence. Indeed, she’s as undecided after their breakup as she was during their relationship. 

I don’t hold this indecision against her. I don’t hold it against anyone for breaking their own rules, for crossing their own lines. Whatever we say we care about when it comes to our partners’ politics often goes out the window in the face of attraction. I say I wouldn’t sleep with a Trump voter—and to my knowledge I haven’t—but maybe that’s because an attractive enough Trump voter hasn’t hit on me (it brings me no joy to say this, but some Republicans are hot). Dating may compel us to compromise our political values, but then again, so does politics itself. I could fill a book with abhorrent things Democratic politicians I’ve voted for have said or done; I regret none of those votes. It’s not as though I had infinite choices. 

Furthermore, it might not be helpful to draw political lines in romance. Sometimes, I feel like my refusal to date a Trump voter is self-indulgent, for the same reason I tend to roll my eyes when the privileged discuss how they’ll move to Canada if Trump is reelected; the people with the resources to move countries are exactly the ones who don’t need to worry. Maybe a white lady swiping left on moderates is false martyrdom; making it about me when it doesn’t need to be. Maybe choosing to let politics affect one’s personal voice is a privilege afforded to those for whom politics don’t bombard their personal lives against their will. 

So maybe there’s absolution for those who date people with abhorrent political views. Jess forgives Josh so many transgressions, but I forgive her for her forgiveness. Josh is funny and sweet and loves her very, very much. And there’s more to him than his politics. My favorite scene comes near the end, at a party thrown by Jess’ friends. Jess is annoyed at Josh for announcing he thinks eviction is fine. Moments later, she finds him out on the balcony, having rescued a stray kitten. Jess is both wholly charmed and deeply annoyed. She wants consistency, but Josh eludes easy labels of “good” or “bad.” 

Maybe a white lady swiping left on moderates is false martyrdom; making it about me when it doesn’t need to be.

The juxtaposition of the cruelty of his politics and the warmth of his affection for a kitten reminds us that everyone has a softness to them, everyone contains multitudes. The book is worth reading for the very reason people tried to cancel it before it came out—because it isn’t afraid to find the humane side of those we vilify, often for good reason. Everything’s Fine argues that it’s worth asking if a racist Trump voter is as worthy of love as anyone else.

Rabess’ choice of Trump as the demarcation, the point of no return, is apt, as he’s unintentionally moved the line many times. After each unspeakable transgression, he gives his old supporters a new chance at redemption; after each massive moral failing, a new crop of “Never Trump” Republicans were born. On the eve of Trump’s third nomination, is it time to ask if there’s redemption for 2016 Trump voters? Are those who voted for him in 2016, but not 2020, now dateable? Those who were with him until Charlottesville? Until the pandemic? Until he told the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by? Until January 6th? And if there is—could you be the one to give it to them?

On its face, Everything’s Fine asks us to consider where to draw the line. Zoom out slightly and the fundamental question broadens: do these lines benefit us? Does the very act of moving the line make you a hypocrite? If so, are we all hypocrites? I can’t reveal what Jess chose, but it’s a mark of Rabess’ phenomenal storytelling skills that I was left guessing until the very last page.

The Best Podcasts Engaged in Literary Activism

Posted on by Jo Lou

A lot of us talk the talk about what’s wrong with book publishing today—but who among us is walking the walk and actually effecting change in the world of literature? On Missing Pages, which I host for The Podglomerate, we look into past and present situations and processes (even scandals and trials!) that have different kinds of outcomes, some powerful and helpful, some scammy and disappointing, in the sometimes-secretive realm of publishing. We hope that learning more about the entire industry helps our audience understand that there are things that do need to change.

I’ve chosen the podcasts on this list not necessarily because they proclaim a mission dedicated to change, but because just by doing what they’re doing, by claiming space for their subjects, they are making changes in which books and authors and ideas we discuss. We’ve learned a great deal from social media in the past couple of decades: Hashtags like #WeNeedDiverseBooks, #OwnVoices, and even my own #FridayReads have helped authors and readers connect and share ideas and form communities that support new kinds of books and media around them.

The idea of “literary citizenship” is a good one—until it becomes something that excludes certain groups, for reasons that can range from class disparity to physical and mental challenges to racism. These podcasts help to break through stale assumptions about reading choices, literary events, and how underrepresented groups are portrayed in many genres.

Well-Read Black Girl hosted by Glory Edim

Anyone who doesn’t already know about Well-Read Black Girl should make this podcast a priority. Glory Edim began to build a community about Black women and literature in 2015, and she’s continued to build community as she’s published books, tried different kinds of publishing events, and oh, had a life, too! Whether her guest is Jacqueline Woodson, Deesha Philyaw, or Tayari Jones, Edim’s interview style is elegant, deeply engaged, and incredibly smart. It feels as if you’re just listening to girlfriends talking, and that’s because Edim actually is friends IRL with these authors – but she’s also read their work closely and carefully. You’ll want to spend more time with her and with these authors, but you’ll also want to pick up their books. The only problem with this podcast? That there aren’t oh, say, 100 more episodes already. Go, Glory, go! 

Ursa Short Fiction hosted by Deesha Philyaw and Dawnie Walton

Speaking of Deesha Philyaw, she and her longtime friend and fellow author Dawnie Walton (they actually went to high school together in Jacksonville, Florida) started the Ursa Short Fiction podcast as part of the Ursa Story Network, which is dedicated to supporting storytelling, especially storytelling from voices that haven’t had extended outlets in the past. With a guest list including authors Maurice Ruffin and Nana Nkweti, illustrators and composers Jiro Yoshioka and Halimah Smith, it’s a podcast that can continue for as long as its hosts can find great voices writing the kinds of relevant, passionate short stories that Philyaw (The Secret Lives of Church Ladies) and Walton (The Final Revival of Opal & Nev) also create. 

The Stacks hosted by Traci Thomas

Traci Thomas is a stone-cold literary celebrity at this point, and she deserves to be. Her last two episodes were with Jason Reynolds and Samantha Irby, and they are both hella fun as listens – but oh, how I wish I could have been onsite with Traci (I do have a photo with her from the 2023 LA Times Book Festival. . . ). One of the things that makes The Stacks especially powerful in its book pushing, especially of BIPOC authors, is that Traci takes time to add dozens, sometimes scores, of links to books, authors, blogs, creators, restaurants, bookstores, you name it, creating little solar systems for people who go to a city/neighborhood (not that anyone is talking any authors, no no Samantha Irby, that’s not me peeking around your Chicago corner with a drained Portillo’s cake shake in my hand). 

Deadline City hosted by Dhonielle Clayton and Zoraida Córdova

Dhonielle Clayton and Zoraida Córdova did not come to play. As authors, they’ve written a combined 40 books; as podcast hosts, they spill the tea on how manuscripts become books. While they focus on the YA process, most of it is applicable to any type of published book; they’ll talk to listeners about everything from whether or not to read your reviews to what happens when you need a new agent. They don’t shy away from big issues like social justice, identity politics, and sexuality. Clayton and Córdova understand that authors are public figures but also people with private lives who have lived for years in the digital space and through the global pandemic. They have regular features—“The Query Quarter,” “Agent Avenue,” —and also standalone episodes on different genres, careers, and forms. 

Big Gay Fiction Podcast hosted by Jeff Adams and Will Knaus

Yes, Big Gay Fiction Podcast is primarily for readers of gay romance fiction—but I believe that in itself is pushing the publishing industry envelope. Co-hosts Jeff Adams and Will Knaus (who are currently working on Episode 450, so there is a lot for new fans to catch up on!) aren’t just podcasters and authors; they’re also husbands who bring the joy, front and center, to queer lit. They also publish a newsletter, the Rainbow Romance Reader Report, for listeners who want more more more. Their guest list reads like a hall of fame for queer romance authors, including Lev A. C. Rosen, V. E. Schwab, and even Paul Rudnick. If that’s not enough content for you? They also have a book club podcast. The success of this podcast is especially meaningful because there once was no such thing as queer romance in publishing, so this podcast’s progress matters.

Books & Boba by Marvin Yueh and Reera Yoo

Marvin Yueh and Reera Yoo know great literature and they know great literature from AAPI authors especially well. They intersperse author interviews with episodes covering the latest books by Asian and Asian American authors. They’ve been around for seven years and are only picking up more and more steam as people in publishing (too slowly) realize the incredible market for stories from Asian authors. Their latest episode is an interview with Malaysian writer Tan Twan Eng, whose new novel “The House of Doors” is so good that it’s already been longlisted for the Booker Prize. 

Reading Women hosted by Kendra Winchester and Autumn Privett

Kendra Winchester and Autumn Privett host a long-running podcast about women authors, of all kinds of backgrounds. The episodes focus on themes such as incarceration, Black joy, and nature writing, as well as include author interviews. Their empire grew to include a team, a newsletter, and an award; I’m sad to say that in 2021, they shut down. However, their archives contain so much worthy material, including episodes on women in translation and working class stories, that I’m including the series here in hopes that it will encourage new and even more expansive podcasts about women authors. We hold up half the sky, after all. Publishing has tons of women working in it, but that doesn’t always equate to tons of books by and for and about women being released.

Lifelines: Books That Bridge the Divide hosted by Ann Braden and Saadia Faruqi

Ann Braden and Saadia Faruqi have a great manifesto on their pod’s launch page, and it includes the lines: “Together we believe… that books with diverse characters and settings can teach readers a lot about the world as well as about themselves… that books have the power to be a bridge across the cultural divide.” As I write, more bridges are necessary than ever, and this podcast focusing on children’s literature can help as many adults as it can their offspring/charges. Each episode includes show notes and book lists; the co-hosts are authors who are also parents; they speak with educators, community organizers, illustrators, and many other people who realize how powerful children’s access to books is, especially in service of helping young people to recognize difference and develop compassion.

The Mental Illness Happy Hour hosted by Paul Gilmartin

Paul Gilmartin is a comedian, actor, and musician whose long-running podcast consists of in-depth interviews with “artists, friends and the occasional doctor” about mental illness and mental health. Many of his guests (full disclosure: I’ve been one of them) are authors and writers who used their work to reach people and to change the publishing industry’s views on stories about depression, addiction, and more. Gilmartin cautions listeners that the podcast is “not a doctor’s office. Think of it more as a waiting room that doesn’t suck”, – in this waiting room, the magazines are never out of date and the person next to you has interesting stories to share. As more and more people willing to be open about neurodiversity enter the workplace, and that includes the literary world’s workplace, The Mental Illness Happy Hour provides a safe place.

The Moon Has Always Been an Alien

Posted on by Wynter Miller

Alien

Once, this stable hosted  
tens of thoroughbreds.

But this ranch has a history 
of lost riders

and now, there is
nothing else to ride.

Set free by forgetfulness 
rather than truth,

I am comfortable 
with my beliefs of the unseen.

Under the night sky, 
scars become spider veins—

like an atom
blurred for naked eyes.

There is migration 
anytime the sun coils 

into its cotton shell 
or when the ground cracks, 

because it thirsts for rain. 

Stalactites hang 
down the roof of a cave 

where shadows 
eclipsed the hieroglyphs.

Before the storm, 
sharks fled their nurseries  

for the abyssopelagic zone, where 
the moon has always been an alien.

Light

—	with a line from Kahf or the Cave
As the sea rises, it absorbs lights 
from the sky in packets.

A spider tents a web bridge 
across the well of oyster shells.

Inside the mirror are reflections 
of cities on water.

The window glasses in this house 
are old as toothed edges of cowries 

on the sea floor. A fisherman returned 
after a storm. In the past, disciples  

of this blue water sat on the beach 
with lungs filled with hot air, 

& thirsty for their wounds to be healed. 
Omi o ni ota, omi ni ìwòsàn ohun gbogbo.

Though we name what we can neither inherit 
nor mourn, man has never been most of anything.

The eye was cave enough to be a museum
for beams of wandering blue lights, 

until they vanished before it rained.  
The storm blew octopuses to the beach.

If the water breaks through, walk
into the fog until you touch the water, 

A smoke from a burnfire
dilates the cave’s entrances, 

hungered with grief, a new moon 
was sighted in a jar of salt water.

Electric Lit’s Best Nonfiction of 2023

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

When it comes to nonfiction, this year featured some truly stellar writing. This was a year in which we’ve seen the expansion of what this genre is, and who writes it. Our truest stories, sometimes molded in the form of poetic lyricism or sensational public spectacle, yielded a larger than life impact. Questions of displacement and longing, and the desire to root oneself in a chosen community, were widespread themes, alongside love, loss, and the practice of creating art—much of it told with humor and acerbic wit. There’s no doubt that some of our most crucial, vital storytellers are not only writing the stories of their lives, but of our lives, too. 

Here are Electric Lit’s top five nonfiction books of the year, followed by additional favorites below.  

The Top 5 Nonfiction Books of The Year

A Living Remedy: A Memoir by Nicole Chung

A searing memoir examining the intricacies of familial bonds, grief and class, A Living Remedy chronicles Nicole Chung’s journey out of her largely white Oregon hometown to middle class stability. However, she is unexpectedly drawn back to her roots by her father’s death from diabetes and kidney disease at the age of sixty-seven and her mother’s cancer diagnosis a year later. Exposing the deep inequalities at the heart of the American healthcare system, A Living Remedy is also a moving meditation on overcoming hardship and the strength of familial love. Read an interview with Chung here.

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer

Claire Dederer tackles the moral complexities of separating the art from the artist, questioning if we can knowingly enjoy the work of problematic or harmful male artists and if female artists can be considered monstrous too. Interrogating her own responses to creators whose difficult behavior disrupts our enjoyment of their work, she prompts her readers to consider these questions for themselves. Ambitious, nuanced and morally considered, Monsters interrogates the ethical implications of loving problematic artists. Read an interview with Dederer here.

Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir by Lamya H

Hijab Butch Blues narrates the story of Lamya, a queer South Asian teenager growing up in a Muslim family who feels displaced in a Middle Eastern country. Following Lamya’s journey as she immigrates to the United States and explores queer dating, the memoir interweaves stories from the Quran with her deeply personal experiences. This is a bold, humorous and unflinching look at one woman’s navigation of her sexuality, faith and relationships while forging a path of her own. Read a conversation with her here.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

Poet and author of “Good Bones” Maggie Smith examines a heartbreak that led to the disintegration of her marriage. Expanding outwards, this memoir confronts labor under the patriarchy and the gendered dynamics of heterosexual marriage that exist even within progressive families head-on. An emotionally honest and searing memoir about one woman’s enduring love for her children and struggle to regain her own voice and identity, You Could Make This Place Beautiful reveals how we move forward in the aftermath of loss. Read an interview with her here.

Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby

Samatha Irby’s hilarious new essay collection takes us on a behind the scenes tour of her dynamic career as a comedian, essayist, blogger, and television writer. Navigating the ins and outs of both Hollywood fame and everyday life, she narrates amusing anecdotes about subjects as wide-ranging as dress codes, dog adoption and emails. Quietly Hostile is an uproarious account of the relatable gory details underlying Irby’s entertaining online presence.

Electric Lit’s Other Favorite Nonfiction Books 

Sink: A Memoir by Joseph Earl Thomas

Growing up in a tumultuous home where his family struggled with hunger and the consequences of crack addiction, Joseph Earl Jones found solace in geek culture. Faced with hostility and indifference at home and at school, he began to escape into the respite of virtual and fantasy worlds. Sink is a heart-wrenching coming-of-age story about Jones’s quest to find salvation on his own terms that is also a celebration of all things nerdy.

The Book of (More) Delights by Ross Gay

This charming follow-up to The Book of Delights is an exquisite, genre-defying catalog of small daily wonders. Gay investigates wide-ranging sources of delight, from hearing his favorite song on the radio to baking cookies to the enduring beauty of the natural world. Searching for connection and meaning yields in this moving and cheerful collection on the power of looking for wonder in everyday life.

The Heartbreak Years: A Memoir by Minda Honey

In 2008, Minda Honey made a cross-country trip from her hometown in Kentucky to begin a new life in California. Navigating the treacherous waters of early adulthood, she confronted breakups, hookups, complicated relationships and a new wave of political change. This unflinching memoir focusing on a Black woman coming of age and falling in and out of relationships in her twenties examines the complex dynamics of gender, sexuality, race and class. Learn about the book’s cover design here.

Pageboy: A Memoir by Elliot Page

This much-anticipated memoir from the acclaimed actor and activist traces the arc of his journey as a queer and transgender person grappling with the perils of fame. The success of his movie Juno launched Elliot to worldwide stardom, but he struggled with the pressure to perform the part of a movie star and endured a barrage of criticism from both Hollywood and wider society. An intimate behind the scenes exploration of love, sex, trauma and fame, Pageboy is the moving story of what it means to overcome societal expectations to embrace who we really are.

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

Ordinary Notes is an inventive collection of 248 brief notes exploring profound questions about loss, beauty, memory, art, and everyday Black existence. Artifacts from the past are interwoven with contemporary realities and distant futures to evoke the presence of the author’s mother Ida Wright Sharpe and explore a new way of seeing. Sharpe’s practice of “beauty as a method” and examination of memorial sites forges a bold and sparkling new literary form underlying her multifaceted constructions of Blackness.

Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation by Camonghne Felix

After the author undergoes a traumatic breakup resulting in a hospital stay, she attempts to grapple with her early childhood trauma and mental health during her healing process. Framing her childhood mathematical learning difficulties, dyscalculia, as a metaphor for her miscalculations in romantic relationships. Dyscalculia explores the consequences of heartbreak and realities of misaligned expectations in an achingly familiar way.

bell hooks: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations by bell hooks

bell hooks was a trailblazing feminist and anti-racist author whose work as an activist, cultural critic and professor laid the foundations for contemporary conversations surrounding race and gender. In this collection of interviews spanning from her early career to just before her death, hooks discusses her views on feminism, masculinity, religion, politics, love, sexuality and cross-cultural communication. This new collection is essential reading for both longtime readers of hooks and new fans seeking to learn more about her groundbreaking contributions to cultural and intellectual movements.

A Man of Two Faces: A Memorial, A History, A Memorial by Viet Thanh Nguyen

In A Man of Two Faces, Viet Thanh Nguyen brilliantly expands the genre of memoir by intertwining his own life story with a critical exploration of colonization, family history and fatherhood. After Nguyen and his family fled Vietnam as refugees and settled in California, he continued to contend with his legacy of family trauma, Vietnamese identity, political convictions and heartbreaking tragedy. A Man of Two Faces mines the power of cultural memory to narrate the exceptional life story of a brilliant and original writer. Read an interview with Nguyen here.

Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice by Cristina Rivera Garza

A finalist for the National Book Award, Cristina Rivera Garza takes a painful journey back in time to seek justice for her sister, who was murdered by an ex-boyfriend thirty years ago. Both a celebration of life and an interrogation of domestic abuse, this memoir honors a woman whose story ended tragically and seeks accountability from perpetrators of violence.

The Loneliness Files by Athena Dixon

Can you build human connection behind a computer screen? In this memoir-in-essays, Athena Dixon examines loneliness under a microscope, revisiting the isolation at the height of the pandemic and exploring the impact of the Internet on our relationship with solitude. Read an EL interview with Dixon on the epidemic of loneliness. 

Black Women Writers at Work by Claudia Tate

This thirty-year-old collection by Claudia Tate encompasses interviews of celebrated Black women writers, including Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and more. Previously out of print, this new edition of Black Women Writers at Work brings the crucial words of icons across Black literature to a new audience. 

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

Upon indirectly meeting her “doppelganger,” who is an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist, Naomi Klein reckons with a loss of identity as she faces notoriety after being mistaken for someone else. A personal and meticulous examination of the Internet post-pandemic, Klein’s memoir tackles AI-generated content, the spread of misinformation, and the permeation of conspiracy theories.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

By now, Palo Alto seems synonymous with Silicon Valley and the “next big idea” from its eager entrepreneurs. But this dive into the history of Palo Alto from Malcolm Harris leaps 150 years into the past, mapping the city’s colonialist origins and examining how it became an epicenter for technology and capitalism. 

The In-Betweens: A Lyrical Memoir by Davon Loeb

A poetic memoir-in-essays, The In-Betweens traces Davon Loeb’s adolescence between two identities: Southern Black, like his mother, and Jewish and white, like his father. Often one’s family and culture is not so easily defined, and this introspective coming-of-age memoir offers a voice to everyone interpreting life in the in-between. Read an EL interview with Loeb on navigating identity and masculinity as a biracial boy in America. 

When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era by Donovan X. Ramsey

Longlisted for the National Book Award, this meticulous analysis of the crack cocaine epidemic of the ‘80s and ‘90s lends a voice to survivors of addiction and brings unflinching insight into the destructive impact of the “War on Drugs.” When Crack Was King, a debut from Donovan X. Ramsey, ignites a conversation about decriminalization, mass incarceration, and the trauma of the crack epidemic on Black and brown communities. Read Fred McKindra’s essay about the book.

All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive by Rainesford Stauffer

Suffering from burnout, Americans struggle to keep up with ever-looming expectations to succeed, thrive, and endlessly grind. In All the Gold Stars, Rainesford Stauffer offers an alternative: reconnect with yourself and your community and navigate ambition on your own terms (outside of a capitalistic lens designed to overwork and individualize). 

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell

Is it healthy to monetize every minute of every day? (Short answer: no). Rather than living by the whims of a clock, Jenny Odell encourages us to slow down, embrace the natural cycles of the Earth, match the rhythm of our own bodies, and see time as something to be shared with one another. Read an EL essay on Odell’s books Saving Time and How to Do Nothing and viewing time and attention as “collective goods.” 

Tabula Rasa: Volume 1 by John McPhee

Pulitzer Prize winner John McPhee’s Tabula Rasa: Volume 1 engages with fraught ideas and unpublished drafts that span his decades-long career. A prolific icon of literary nonfiction, McPhee provides an honest and clever retrospection on his own work while revisiting projects initially left behind. 

A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again by Joanna Biggs

Joanna Biggs struggles to start over after the unraveling of her marriage and finds solace in the words and unconventional lives of women writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Virginia Woolf, to name a few. A Life of One’s Own is both an interrogation of stifling societal expectations of women and rich biographical accounts of history’s beloved women writers. 

Eyeliner: A Cultural History by Zahra Hankir

The pen rolling around the bottom of a makeup bag is so much more than just eyeliner. Zahra Hankir, editor of Our Women on the Ground, explores the lasting impact of eyeliner across history. From being a cultural and religious custom, to a political statement, to a modern eye-catching look, Eyeliner: A Cultural History reveals the power of this versatile cosmetic.

7 Memoirs About Addiction by Women Writers

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

My most transformative reading experiences have been ones in which I see the worst parts of myself in full display on the page. From the time I was a teenager, I’ve gravitated toward women characters and writers whose behaviors, addictions, and ailments were at odds with their “potential.” Esther in The Bell Jar, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Tove Ditlevsen, to name a few, spoke and continue to speak to me. Because I was the girl who got scholarships and hid empty magnums of Yellowtail in her childhood bedroom. Because I’d sneak into my bedroom at 5 in the morning after destroying my body and drive to school at 7:30 am as if nothing had happened. Substance abuse, secrecy, and masking are salient themes in my first book, a lyric essay I’m still not comfortable calling a memoir, The Hurricane Book: A Lyric History. They are also an important feature of being a woman living with and around addiction and mental illness.

My Catholic inner child considers this attraction to femme addiction narratives perverse. The older, agnostic me considers it somewhat narcissistic. There might be some truth to both. As a writer dealing with shameful topics, there is the risk of character annihilation, alienation from those we want to love and be loved by. So why do we do it? I honestly have no idea.

None of the books on this list have provided a definite answer for me, but they do offer the reader (and writer) a variety of answers to the question of how, if not why, we write candidly about the unfeminine, scandalous upend-your-life decisions our bodies and minds make to help us cope. They also expose the insidious ways in which addiction can unfold in the most unlikely places and at the most inopportune times. They are also full of hard-earned grace and/or humor, two things we all need more of when we look in the mirror.

Smile, Please: An Unfinished Autobiography by Jean Rhys

Best known for penning the woman-in-the-attic-focused prequel to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, English writer Jean Rhys was always a little out of step. She was intimately acquainted with displacement and battled an inner duality since childhood. As a privileged girl from a family of colonists in early 20th-century Dominica, she clashed with her environment, her peers, and her parents. She was neither here nor there, but spent most of her life looking for a place to belong to. In her posthumous (and unfinished) autobiography, Rhys recounts her early years in the Caribbean, her time as a chorus girl in England, her experience as a wealthy man’s mistress, and her chaotic entanglements in bohemian 1920s Paris. We see her fall into the arms of the wrong men, debilitating alcoholism, and, despite all this, writing.

The Chronology of Water: A Memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch

Formally masterful and inventive, The Chronology of Water features poetic, non-linear prose that flows in and out of Yuknavitch’s experiences with parental violence and neglect, child loss, unmet expectations, and drugs and alcohol. The author, once a promising competitive swimmer with a scholarship, leaves behind a dysfunctional home only to fall into known destructive patterns, experimenting with self-destructive forms of escape. Reeling from a bad relationship and the loss of a child, the author enrolls in school and finds herself in a writing workshop that changes the course of her life. More than anything, this is a book about art, how the love of it (and the right people) can bring us back to ourselves.

Whip Smart by Melissa Febos

A brilliant, nuanced study in desire, self-actualization, and recovery, Melissa Febos’s debut focuses on her time as a dominatrix in NYC while studying at The New School and battling a heroin addiction. One of the things I admire most about Febos is her generosity, the palpable love with which she writes about herself, her gentle self-awareness. Here is a beloved daughter from a supportive home, a talented student. With measured curiosity, she challenges the notion that a woman like that can’t abandon herself and others, that she can’t be a sex worker, that she can’t be an addict, that any of these is guaranteed to beget the other.

Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher

“If my life wasn’t funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.” Yes, it’s a celebrity memoir. Yes, maybe it’s one of those things you’d pick up at a Hudson News. But beyond the Princess Leia-Paul Simon-Elizabeth Taylor-Eddie Fisher-Debbie Reynolds of it all, you can’t deny that Carrie Fisher wrote a memoir about painful family dynamics, public life, bipolar disorder, and addiction that can make you laugh (if you have the patience for this kind of thing). It’s voice driven, shiny, and a little indulgent. After years of keeping her battle with substance abuse under wraps, Fisher became an advocate for mental health awareness who spoke openly about her bipolar disorder diagnosis and her addictions, becoming sort of a den mother to unlikely celebrities and a beloved public figure. It’s easy to see why.

Lit by Mary Karr

The third in a memoir trilogy that includes the critically acclaimed The Liars’ Club and Cherry, Lit introduces Mary Karr as a full grown woman, poet, wife, and mother struggling with alcoholism. In her musical, no-nonsense style, she shows us how this disease, passed down from her own gun-toting, charming, erratic artist mother, almost wrecked her own life, following her on a quest for the stability she didn’t know as a kid. We see how through hard spiritual work, brutal self-effacement, hospitalization, community, and grace, she found a way through. This is also one of the first memoirs I ever read that included habitual disclosures about the haziness of memory, which made me feel safe as a reader and writer.

Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls by Nina Renata Aron

In an interview conducted while she was at work on the memoir, Aron said, “There’s this long history of, often women, living alongside this disease. But women’s experiences are seen as this secondary emotional corollary to the much more important story of male alcoholism and all the storminess that it entails.” At the center of her book is this secondary emotional corollary as it pertains to codependency. She had ample experience with it. At a young age, she became both protector and cop to her sister, who was addicted to drugs. After leaving home, marrying, and having a child, she reconnects with a charismatic man from her past, and the two begin an obsessive drug-filled affair that perpetuates a cycle of enabling and mutual destruction. Aron uses this as a springboard to talk about the psychology of codependency and even the roots of the temperance movement.

Drunk Mom by Jowita Bydlowska

Shortly after the birth of her son, Bydlowska relapses after three years of sobriety. She felt like a God, so she thought, why not keep that feeling going. Fast forward a bit and she’s sneaking drinks at the grocery store, waking up in a hotel with no panties on after a blackout. It is harrowing. She gets sober. After the book published, Bydlowska was celebrated for her bravery. She was also criticized for her seeming disregard for her child. In 2022, nine years after the release of the book (and six years after another relapse), she wrote, “Readers still write to tell me that this book helped them—to stop drinking, to stay sober another day, to feel less alone[…] I love every message. But the truth is, whatever the book does for people was never intentional.” Her initial motivation was only to write it. The truth is, that should be enough.

A Childhood That Defies Gravity

Posted on by Wynter Miller

“The Art of Levitation” by Marcus Stewart

Children hopped along the logs arranged as stepping-stones in the playground; Lewis stood next to them and stared at his shoes. Big, black shiny plastic shoes, with big black laces. He was sure the shoes didn’t affect it. He just had to concentrate. He was standing upright, ready to go, with his head tilted sharply downwards, looking at his shoes and the ground beneath them. Tarmac, with hundreds of little stones in it, in between which were little pockets of dirt and over which climbed the occasional ant, fighting its way through a field of boulders, sometimes carrying a small bit of twig as an extra burden. He would often stare at the ants, coming and going. But this was a distraction. He closed his eyes.

“What are you doing, Lewis?”

He looked up, and there was Matthew. He liked Matthew. Lewis lowered his head again. “I’m trying to float.”

Matthew looked at him to learn his technique, and after some consideration commented, “It’s not working.”

“I know” said Lewis, “it does sometimes though.”

And Lewis kept trying, kept staring at his feet, then closing his eyes for extra concentration and hoping—expecting—to open them and to see that his feet were maybe an inch or two above the ground, and then perhaps he could lift a little higher, and move forward, like a hovercraft. But it wasn’t happening this time.

Matthew looked a while longer before getting bored and then turned and ran off at full speed to somewhere not very far away, briefly looking back again at Lewis just in case he’d succeeded. Maybe it was the shoes.

Lewis often dreamed he was floating, because you often do dream of things you like doing. But it wasn’t only in his dreams that he could float, he knew exactly how to do it. There were two ways really—one was by doing what he was doing and concentrating and then you may get a little bit of lift. He remembered on a good day being able to float from log to log while the other children could only jump.

The other way—once you’d had a bit of practice—was like extending a jump. You’d push forwards and up with one foot and when both feet were in the air you’d just hold it; still moving forwards, but not down. Sometimes you could only hold it a little bit before your feet slapped down back to the ground, but if you caught it at the right point you could float forward for quite a while, and that was when you were like a hovercraft. He remembered seeing the stones in the tarmac passing beneath his shoes. You had to look down to do it, otherwise it wouldn’t work.

Lewis often dreamed he was floating, because you often do dream of things you like doing.

He couldn’t remember exactly when he had last done it. It was starting to seem like it might have been a long time ago and he hoped he hadn’t lost the ability. He saw that the last boys had left the logs and now there were only girls jumping around them, but instead of just jumping from log to log they were running around as well and brushing past him. It wouldn’t be possible if other people touched him. Miss Pearse rang the bell.

Lewis realized with horror that his friends were going to classroom nine in the middle hut. He’d completely forgotten this was a Thursday. Lewis could never remember what class he had at what time but it mostly didn’t matter, because they were nearly always in classroom seven anyway and he’d quickly figure out what the subject was. On Thursdays it was different—Mr. Durant came in, and Mr. Durant used classroom nine.

No one liked Mr. Durant. If there was a Mrs. Durant everyone was sure that even she wouldn’t like him. Mr. Durant had one role in life and one job in the school, and that was to be horrible. Unlike the other teachers he didn’t run tutor groups, didn’t patrol the playground, didn’t do sports or teach any particular subject, but for two hours every Thursday he would take Lewis’ group in classroom nine. And he would just talk at them. Horribly.

If you were ever going to be told off, it would be by Mr. Durant. If you were ever going to be told off for not even having done anything, it was by Mr. Durant. He just seemed to like doing it. The other teachers even seemed to feel sorry for the children going into Mr. Durant’s class. He definitely wasn’t with the other teachers; Robert had said he always went home straight after his class and a few weeks ago Lewis himself had seen him, getting into his car and driving off, with an hour of school left to go.

Lewis felt sick as he walked into the class, but so far had got away without punishment. Paul was crying after he couldn’t sit down because there were no chairs left and Mr. Durant had shouted at him for it. He had to stand. Everyone else was keeping it together, grim-faced. Mr. Durant had begun to talk. No one knew what he was talking about, he just seemed angry.

“Now, we’ve something different today,” he said. The children hadn’t noticed, but there was a metal roll clipped to the top of the blackboard, out of which Mr. Durant scrolled down a large map of the area and clipped it into position at the bottom of the blackboard.

“Now this,” he said, pointing at the map, “is where we live.”

Lewis knew this, he liked maps. He thought for a moment this might be okay, if they were going to start looking at maps.

“And this, he said, pointing again, “is RAF Chinholt.”

Again, Lewis knew this; you often couldn’t hear the TV when the jet fighters flew over.

“It’s only four miles away, you could walk it. It’s a key Soviet target, and when the Russians bomb us you will all be killed in an instant.”

Everyone was still, and the shock stopped Paul from crying just as it caused a couple of the girls to start. Mr. Durant carried on talking, but no one heard anything else he said. Lewis couldn’t believe how horrible he was. Because Mr. Durant didn’t like the Russians Lewis thought that they must be okay, and he hoped and hoped that the Russians would win.

It had rained a bit, and Lewis had stepped in a puddle by mistake and got his left sock wet. It was cold, but his mum had started lighting the fire and asked Lewis to hold the paper up against it to get it going while she went back to chatting with Uncle Derek in the kitchen. He had no idea who Uncle Derek was.

He held the paper tight against the fireplace to stop the draft getting in and blowing the fire out. Right in front of him, on the paper in coarse black and white print were a big pair of boobs. He couldn’t help looking at them. Before he knew it the growing fire had sucked the paper into the fireplace and set it alight—just a small part in the middle, but spreading, and heading for smiling Samantha and the boobs. He had no choice but to grab the poker and smash the paper into the fire so bits wouldn’t float out and add more burns to the carpet. He hit it and hit it and hit it until all bits of paper were safely in the grate, burning with the other wood and paper. He held the poker in place a while and watched as flake after flake of grey ash floated up the chimney. His mum called him.

“Lew, why don’t you go out and play in the garden for a bit?”

It seemed odd that she was calling him Lew in front of Uncle Derek, she never called him Lew, ever. He was embarrassed by it.

“Go up and climb your tree or something and I’ll call you when your dinner’s ready. We’ve just got some grown up things to do.”

Uncle Derek didn’t look at him but Lewis could see he was smiling. “Okay.” Lewis left them to it.

It was a great tree, easy to climb and taller than the top of the house. They were on the very edge of the town and he could look across most of it from the top. As the sky turned red and the birds flew back home to the trees at the back of the field behind him he noticed wisps of smoke come out the top of a couple chimneys on the next street and the street beyond. Dotted around the town as far as he could see, little strands of smoke began to rise up, more and more and getting thicker and thicker as the fires grew beneath them and the sky got darker—as another day came to an end, as the days before had come to an end.

Lewis’ tummy rumbled as he lay in bed the next morning. He tried to convince himself that discomfort was pain, and that the pain was enough to get him off school. His mum gave him some milk of magnesia—which he liked—and agreed he could stay off, but he would have to walk to the shop to buy her some cigarettes.

Because they lived so much on the edge of the town it was quite a long walk to the nearest shop, but not as far as when he had to walk to school when he couldn’t get a lift. There were five small roads he had to cross and two large roads, only the last of which had traffic lights, but he was a sensible boy and good at crossing roads. It wasn’t very busy anyway. He looked left, looked right and left again and then crossed.

His shoes still hurt. These were the only shoes he had at the moment and his mum said they’d get better the more he wore them, but they seemed to be getting worse. This would be a good time to float. Even if he couldn’t float he could do the next best thing, and he started doing extra-long strides so he’d have less far to walk. With each step he tried to make the stride longer until it was almost a jump; left and then right, his feet slapping down and sliding a little on the tarmac, stretching and pointing his tip toes out to land as far forward as possible. He began to get into a rhythm—one, two, step, one, two, step— and the awkward movement began to feel more natural and flowing.

Maybe, if he stretched really far and concentrated hard one of the little jumps would hold and he could glide forward just a bit. Maybe before his first foot started falling he could pull up the other one quickly and they could glide forward together, holding him just above the ground, perhaps until the next street. But every step landed heavily and awkwardly as before and he never could pull up his back foot quickly enough. He closed his eyes for the next step, trying at least to make it a bit longer. And it worked. Although it felt the same and he landed just as heavily, when he opened his eyes he was sure the step had carried him at least half as far again as the last one. Happy that he had achieved at least this much he continued walking normally again.

“Hello Lewis. Hang on, let me just serve this gentleman first, I know what you’re here for.”

Happy that he had achieved at least this much he continued walking normally again.

Lewis waited. It was a funny little shop, all black where other shops were white, and everything was stacked up high and all around the edge. It was too small to have all the things in it that it had, it was only the size of a room, except it had a counter halfway across in the middle. The old couple who ran it were also too old to be running a shop, Lewis thought it all just looked wrong. But they were friendly, so that was okay.

It wasn’t the old woman who came out of the door at the back with a new crate of tinned soup, but a young woman. Lewis wondered where the old woman was.

“Right Lewis,” said the man, “a packet of fags for your mum and a slice of luncheon meat for you, yes?” The old man sliced some luncheon meat before he could say anything and wrapped it in plastic. Lewis didn’t know if his mum had phoned ahead so he didn’t know if he was supposed to have the luncheon meat or not, but the price ended up the same as it usually was for cigarettes anyway, so he had enough money.

Perhaps cigarettes were cheaper this week. The young woman seemed unhappy though, and was staring at the man. Lewis said thank you, put the cigarettes in his pocket and took the luncheon meat in his left hand. He liked luncheon meat. He rolled the round slice of it into a tube and as he walked home he blew it like a whistle. As his spit made the end of it soft he’d bite that bit off so that the whistle got shorter and shorter until it was all gone.

“The law says no cigarettes to anyone under 16, not 10!” the young woman said to her grandfather.

“Oh, they’re not for him, I know he’s not going to smoke them. I don’t need to worry about the stupid law,” he said.

She carried on stacking while he stood there behind the counter, the shop now empty of customers. He thought he’d lighten the mood—”I went to the zoo the other day. There was just one dog there,” he said.

“Why do you always tell that joke when that boy’s been in?” she asked.

“Do I? Maybe his dad told it me.”

“Well, I’ve heard it anyway,” the young woman said, before stepping back out into the storeroom. He savored the silence and stillness for a moment, then for the sake of completion mumbled to himself, “it was a shih tzu,” while wiping the meat slicer clean.

He thought back to the boy’s dad, times when he’d come in the shop before he got ill, when Lewis was no more than three or four years old. Lewis’s dad was a nice fella and would often chat. He seemed to get on with everyone. He remembered sometimes seeing him and the manageress of the Safeway walking up the street together, chatting and laughing with each other, each holding Lewis’ hand and lifting him into the air as they walked, and Lewis looking at the ground pass beneath his feet without a care in the world.

The Genesis of a Fictional City

Posted on by Jo Lou

Eskor David Johnson’s Pay As You Go is set in an imagined city, Polis, one that takes elements from New York to Chicago to London and magnifies them to grandiose size. Traversing Polis is an intrepid hero of sorts, Slide, whose rare mix of panache, naivety, earnestness, and humor makes him a mesmerizing act to follow through this urban jungle as he searches for a place to live.

Johnson has written a necessary antidote to what is more common of the debuts of young, contemporary writers: books so steeped in solipsism that it is as though man can, in fact, be an island. This is of course not the case. There’s always community to come up against for the good and bad. Witnessing this in full force is one of the great pleasures of Pay As You Go.

I corresponded with Johnson over email, curious about what the novel and its author had to say about notions of home and movement, the genesis of a fictional city, and what fables can teach us of our contemporary life.

DK Nnuro: Labeling the book “a fable” instead of “a novel” is a bold choice for many reasons. I have two questions on this front. The first one is very simple: what is your definition of a fable? 

Eskor David Johnson: I’ll have to revert to those elementary school lessons when you first learn about them. To me, a fable is a universal-leaning story that is very consciously a stand-in for a greater range of narratives. Fables operate closer to the level of symbolism, with characters that can be archetypes and a plot in which many people can see parallels and lessons for their own lives.

DKN: Interesting. Do you remember your first fable? The one you first fell in love with? 

EDJ: First would be hard to say but the one that comes to mind quickest is that of the fox and the bone. He’s walking along with a juicy one between his teeth when suddenly he sees another fox holding an even bigger one, and in an attempt to get it he drops the one he’s holding and it floats away in what turns out to be a river. He had been looking at his reflection in the water. There’s something of that in the novel.

DKN: Polis, the fictional city your main character Slide finds himself navigating successfully and unsuccessfully, is exquisitely imagined. I wanted to liken it to a known major metropolis… wait, it just hit me: is “Polis” taken from the word “metropolis”? Did I miss that in the novel?

EDJ: Ha! Perhaps you did! If it makes you feel better “metropolis” is more of a descendant of the term rather than an ancestor. I was in fact thinking of the word for the Greek city-state, polis, which was their defining unit of civilization, as opposed to the more modern notion of a country. A city-state is both city and country tied into one, and the dominant means by which the people of the time would have seen themselves. Those from Athens were Athenian, from Sparta Spartans. That they all spoke Greek was a matter of geography, they might have argued.

So too with the novel’s Polis, which functions as a world onto its own.

DKN: Yes, yes, exactly what I was thinking. Greek city-states and all. Ha! But in all seriousness, the depths of your imagination…mind blowing! The fact that you conceived of an entire map of Polis. Let’s talk about that!

EDJ: The map has to its credit three of the great artists I know in my life. First was a poet, Diamond Sharpe, whom I long ago sent some pages from an old version of the novel to read, and who commented that she couldn’t tell where things were in relation to each other, and suspected I didn’t either, so suggested I map them out. I made a rough, terrible sketch, which still survives in a notebook today, and that became the basis for the layout. Second was a painter, Dougan Khim, who lived in Chicago while I was in Iowa. During one of my visits to him we spent the day walking through Chicago’s sweeping streets and theorizing as to what exactly a city was, its requirements. We would have sounded quite silly to passersby, but the conversation was instrumental in shaping the detailing of Polis’ neighborhoods. And finally there was the actual map maker, Sarah Diamond, whose handiwork appears at the opening of the book. She was the one to actually take all those sketches and notes and theories and turn it into the beautiful image we have today. When she first showed me what she had done I was flabbergasted. Her talent is immense.

DKN: I think most people would want to say that Polis is a fictional New York City, and there’s enough there for that argument. Why create a fictional city? Why not situate Slide in, say, New York?

EDJ: The problem with picking a real place—and in a long ago brainstorming of the novel it was in fact New York—is all the rules and obligations that come with it. Where stores are located. Accurate street names. A preexistent history you’re better off knowing well before vigilant readers come knocking on your door with a list of corrections. Then there is the similarly well-tread ground of all the great New York novels and having to take into account what has or hasn’t been done in those as well. I ventured 3-5 pages down that path and put the whole thing aside for years. There will be more New York novels—someone is writing one as we speak—but it was not where I felt my strengths were at their best.

Having your own city allows for the rules to be your own. Some of these are technical in nature: I had to figure out a system for the naming of the streets, as well as what kind of people lived in what neighborhood. But the real rules were the intangible ones. The logic by which spontaneous crowds so often form, the sometimes hysterical dialogue, the underlying sense of lawlessness, the tendency of certain characters to monologue. These may not feel like a necessary off-shoot of a fictional city, but they did for mine. What the story gets to say by being set in Polis is “This is a world in which these things happen.”

DKN: Yes! And things happen because there are people, as there should be in a big city. So reading this rightly peopled novel made me think of how much contemporary big city novels—yes, contemporary New York novels—are woefully unpeopled. They are so narrowly focused, as if the big city would ever accommodate these characters’ high degrees of solipsism. But we live in a time where, more and more, we are being encouraged to focus on ourselves and to limit our communities to a chosen few. I worry about this sometimes because perhaps there is something to be learned from communities who might disturb our peace. Slide’s peace, by the way, is so often disturbed. 

EDJ: Absolutely. And I happen to hold the view that a city should be where you go in order to have your peace disturbed.

Fables operate closer to the level of symbolism, with characters that can be archetypes and a plot in which many people can see parallels and lessons for their own lives.

New York in particular has undergone a shift that I am hardly the first to put my finger on. It’s very possible to have a more quaint, sanitized experience here than many imagine, provided you have the money. A lot of people find a handful of friends, a rotation of similar neighborhoods and restaurants, and those will constitute the main ingredients of their experience. They’re not entirely to blame. The economics of the city have made it unforgiving for the conditions for enlivening randomness—cheap housing, a healthy population of artists, political engagement—to thrive. I often joke that I missed my era here, and should have been alive and in my 20s for the New York City of the 1970s.

So it’s made its way into fiction, so much of which can feel like staid domestic dramas, despite the many other kinds of drama available in the city. To be sure, many of these are good. But many not. It’s a shame, since there is so much to be gained from trying again and again to capture a metropolis on the page, no matter how incompletely. The truth is that for as much as I’d like to flatter myself about the inventiveness of Polis, thousands more (and more unimaginable) things happen in New York every single day. It’s good exercise for the soul, and for empathy, to try fitting it all into a few hundred pages.

In many regards I admire Slide for his ability to be disturbed, and to incorporate such disturbances into the fabric of his life. He could have simply said no to many of the situations in which he finds himself and ends up complaining about. It’s his willingness to be open that defines him, a heightened version of a quality I hope to cultivate in myself. Though admittedly if I gave into disturbances as often as he does, I would not get a lot of writing done.

DKN: Fair enough. Still, what are your thoughts on allowing our peace to be sometimes disturbed by certain communities?

EDJ: I believe that the ongoing project that is democracy is in some sense centered on this. Democracy asks that you imagine yourself into the place of others and recognize in that imagining both the beautiful differences and essential similarities that place us on even terms. It is why cities are naturally more democratic places, given that its citizens have to more often take into account the lives of others dissimilar to their own. Currently I live in Harlem and I joke that Black people here treat the sidewalk like it’s their living room: there’s always someone on the phone yelling all their private business for everyone to hear. That’s other lives rubbing up against yours. That’s texture.

Those who live in cities can be quite self-satisfied in interpreting this open-mindedness as a sign of greater moral value, but it doesn’t necessarily have to do with them. Some are the same people who would otherwise keep to themselves and not go out of their ways to meet anyone different were they to live in the suburbs. It’s the city, our agreed circumstance, that does the work of disturbing our communities, which would otherwise homogenize if left on their own. I do give people credit for moving here in the first place. The trick is to keep moving, keep being engaged, even when you’re already physically present.

DKN: We are both recent immigrants to the US. This thing about texture, a. About other lives rubbing up against yours;. K keeping moving, keeping being engaged. What might recent immigrants be able to teach other Americans about these things?

EDJ: I sometimes worry for writers who are only of one place, none more so than American ones, who have a kind of glorious insularity. My favorites are the writers who learn other languages, travel the globe, move from one place to another, and return to their page with these incongruous notions of the world vying within them, and so try making sense of it all. 

For me, the novel is what I am trying to say in response to the question of what home means to me.

Yet the thing about American hegemony is that no matter where else you may be growing up in the world, you are also growing up in America, whether you realize it or not. In the West especially. I found that when I came here for good at age 17, I already knew and understood so much of the culture simply from TV and fascination. So almost by default I had two worlds, and two ways of seeing the world, to access. The interplay between those plays out in my fiction not so much on the level of plot, but on that of language. I have remained stubbornly Trinidadian in my outlook on things.

So if there is a lesson we have to impart I think it’s mainly that simple one of the importance of variation. America can be a good part of a balanced diet. It’s not the entire meal.

DKN: That takes me to a few of my curiosities about what the book suggests about finding “home” or making “home.” But first, I’m interested in how you define “home”? Can you share with us your own journey towards “home”? 

EDJ: Another quick anecdote about Dougan, by way of vamping. He really is a phenomenal painter, and at one of his shows he was asked by someone what he was trying to say in making one of the pieces on display. Not knowing what to do, and in a truly genuine sense (he has not a snide instinct in him), he had to point to the painting and reply that that was what he was trying to say. In some sense, for me, the novel is what I am trying to say in response to the question of what home means to me. That said, I will still attempt a more succinct response.

It’s the first and most consistent question the book asks, I think, from that early moment that Slide complains of his first apartment that he can’t quite hear his heart while in it. That notion of being able to hear yourself and of finding a space where your better instincts more often win out against your worst ones, has been essential to what I consider home. For me it’s been somewhere I know I can consistently write, see my friends and family often, make feel beautiful, be inspired to cook and exercise, go for walks, and have animals—those of my own or that I mind for friends. Sunlight and wood floorings definitely help, let me not pretend. But home is where you hear your heart. Sometimes the oldest answers are the best.

DKN: Are you able to hear your heart wherever it is you are laying your head these days? 

EDJ: Yes.

Exclusive Cover Reveal: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s “Catalina”

Posted on by Jo Lou

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the novel Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, which will be published by One World on June 18th 2024. Preorder the book here.

A year in the life of the unforgettable Catalina Ituralde, a wickedly wry and heartbreakingly vulnerable student at an elite college, forced to navigate an opaque past, an uncertain future, tragedies on two continents, and the tantalizing possibilities of love and freedom.

When Catalina is admitted to Harvard, it feels like the fulfilment of destiny: a miracle child escapes death in Latin America, moves to Queens to be raised by her undocumented grandparents, and becomes one of the chosen. But nothing is simple for Catalina, least of all her own complicated, contradictory, ruthlessly probing mind. Now a senior, she faces graduation to a world that has no place for the undocumented; her sense of doom intensifies her curiosities and desires. She infiltrates the school’s elite subcultures—internships and literary journals, posh parties and secret societies—which she observes with the eye of an anthropologist and an interloper’s skepticism: she is both fascinated and repulsed. Craving a great romance, Catalina finds herself drawn to a fellow student, an actual budding anthropologist eager to teach her about the Latin American world she was born into but never knew, even as her life back in Queens begins to unravel. And every day, the clock ticks closer to the abyss of life after graduation. Can she save her family? Can she save herself? What does it mean to be saved? 

Brash and daring, part campus novel, part hagiography, part pop song, Catalina is unlike any coming-of-age novel you’ve ever read—and Catalina, bright and tragic, circled by a nimbus of chaotic energy, driven by a wild heart, is a character you will never forget.

Here is the cover, designed by Grace Han.

Author Karla Cornejo Villavicencio: “I love this cover because it feels timeless and serious and that pairs nicely with the novel which makes a point to be unserious. It also reminds me of the design of old F. Scott Fitzgerald book covers which is terrific because I love him and hope to replace him soon.

The eye represents looking and being looked at, looking at yourself being looked at, the gaze, the tension between being an object and being a subject, desire and longing. Many of the non-fiction pieces I’ve written in the past few years have been accompanied by an unrelated picture of a sad, young brown child with large dark eyes just looking sad. It’s a different child each time and I never know who they are, that’s just the art that accompanies my essays. So I thought, what if the little brown girl in the corner of all the photos of war and such, what if she grew up to write a book that showed she was looking the entire time? Looking, and remembering everything. Remembering names.”

Designer Grace Han: “I was ecstatic to be given the opportunity to create a visual introduction to Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s work. As a child of immigrants, I saw myself in Catalina—in her desperation to distance herself from family and in her desire for self discovery. I wanted the cover to give us a sense of hope in addition to giving us an intimate peek into Catalina’s life as she attempts to find her place in between worlds. I hope this cover captures the poignancy and profoundness of Catalina.“