An excerpt from A Nearby Country Called Love by Salar Abdoh
He couldn’t bear going back to the apartment just yet. The apartment of the dead. When they’d been much younger he had shared the big bedroom with his older brother while their father took the small one in the back for himself. Issa recalled the bouts of barely controlled rage and weeping that ensued each time their old man thought his firstborn was not manly enough. It was a dance of endless humiliation between the two of them, starting in sixth grade for Hashem, when he came home from school one day and asked if he could take violin lessons. The old man, busy making a banana shake for Issa after having just taught an advanced karate class, raised his head and looked at Hashem, dumbstruck. Issa was almost two years younger and even then he understood something was not quite right with this picture. Within minutes they were downstairs at the dojo, where a few of the higher belts were still practicing. Hashem was made to punch the heavy bag until he was out of breath. Then the old man made him do the chicken walk a half dozen times around the dojo before putting him to spar with a teenage purple belt.
Hashem, who had always found excuses to avoid the dojo, stands there with a nervous smile on his face. Their father telling the other boy to attack. Attack what? Issa thinks to himself even then. Attack Hashem’s desire to learn the fucking violin? He is nine years old and has been going to the dojo religiously for about half a year and wants to protect his brother but has no idea where his loyalty lies. He worships the old man and imagines what their father is doing will somehow cure Hashem of something. He does not know what that something is yet, but when he sees the other boy throwing a halfhearted mawashigeri roundhouse kick to the side of Hashem’s face and pulling back at the last moment he wants to go out there and rip the boy’s face apart, even though the other boy is twice his size. Suddenly, the old man’s anger washes over them like wildfire. There are several other students in the dojo, standing mesmerized at this display of wrath by a sensei who has never before shown a lack of control in their presence. No one understands it. No one says a word. And then their father is raising his voice and warning the purple belt to either fight with his eldest son or never come back to the dojo again.
This time the boy attacks with a low maegeri front kick that catches Hashem in the inside thigh. The boy closes the distance and throws a lunge punch just above Hashem’s right eye. He does not follow through with more punches, though. He looks embarrassed. And then Issa is running at him. The moves he has learned in the last half year at the dojo are out the window, and all he knows to do is to try to wrestle the kid by going for his legs.
The teenage boy shoos him off.
“Touch my brother again I’ll kill you,” he hears himself shouting ineffectively.
Hashem is rolled into a ball on the floor, holding his face, crying softly. Their father stands there with glass eyes, surely astounded at the wickedness he has just caused and looking as if he has just woken up from a bad dream. The purple belt bows and retreats.
The image stopped cold for Issa right there. He could not recall what had happened next. There was no talk of violin lessons ever again. Nor did their father ever lose his cool at the dojo like that again. But this was the last time Hashem stepped into that space. Something had been broken. And something had been built—a tall wall between them, for the remainder of the abbreviated lives of these two men, both of whom Issa had adored and who hated each other.
Then came the change in their bedroom arrangements. Issa had to move into the small bedroom by himself, and their father took the big bedroom and made Hashem his roommate. It was, in a way, the absolute worst punishment he could have inflicted on the two boys, taking away Hashem’s privacy and at the same time forcing Issa, the younger brother, to have his. And the next few years turned into a cold war punctuated with bouts of seasonal brutality that ended in Hashem crying in one corner of the apartment and their father feeling remorse in another. At school, Hashem was beloved and, unlike Issa, a perfect student. The more their father heard praise from school about Hashem and his grades, the angrier he seemed to get, and he devised yet more tests of manhood, which Hashem failed at spectacularly. One day, the old man decided Hashem had to learn how to ride a motorcycle; it ended in the bike falling over Hashem and the hot exhaust scalding half his leg. More than once, the three of them had to go hiking in the mountains north of the city and learn to stake tents and shoot bows and arrows. Another failure. If Hashem didn’t like karate, how about learning to box or wrestle or do judo? It was one thing after another, a desperate quicksand of man-making that always ended in disappointment and heartache. As time went by, Issa moved up through the ranks at the dojo and his belt colors changed. During the silent mokuso meditation intervals at the beginning and end of practice, he’d often wonder what their father was thinking. Did he think about Hashem then? Was his mind completely blank? Did he ever think about the men who still thought him an enemy of the revolution?
It was one thing after another, a desperate quicksand of man-making that always ended in disappointment and heartache.
He had loved this man. And sometimes he hadn’t. More than anything, he had wanted his father to love Hashem. Or at the very least cease trying to turn the older son into a version of himself. The wash of bad memories didn’t fade with age but rather lingered and just grew more stale. Like the time after the old man put Hashem in a vicious chokehold up there in the mountains. Back at the apartment Issa had taken the small picture of the old man from his military days and ripped it in half. For days he’d hidden the photograph, ridden with guilt and fear that their father would find it. He did find it, years later. It was taped together but still showed the rip down the middle. The old man put the photo away and didn’t ask about it, no doubt thinking it was Hashem who had wanted to destroy his mug and not the younger son.
What a relief when Hashem finally left home. As if a huge boulder that the three of them had been carrying was at last lifted. From his second year of high school, Hashem had refused to cohabit in the same room with the old man. To make peace, Issa had given him the small bedroom back and took to the sofa in the living room. Many nights he’d just go to the dojo and sleep there, leaving the old man and his brother to their silent revulsions. The stale scent of sweaty gi uniforms would always linger on his skin from those nights at the dojo. He had imagined even back then that the sourness was that of men’s odium of one another. All men. It permeated everything, unwashable.
He walked aimlessly for a long time. The fasting month, Ramadan, would be coming around, and soon it would be summer. The previous summer had been unbearably hot, and tiny, white airborne creatures had invaded the city in swarms. They got into your mouth and hair and eyes, they stuck to car windshields and hung from trees. No one was sure what they were or where they had come from. It was a version of the day of the locusts but lasting an entire season in scorching heat. Sometimes he wondered if Hashem and their old man weren’t better off gone from this world, or at least this city. Some of the old man’s best martial arts students had eventually ended up running their own dojos. A few were famous now. Others notorious. But times had changed; nowadays it was the full-contact competitions that drew crowds. Few were interested in the old discipline of a traditional karateka. And who could blame them?
He sat for a while on the benches at Hasanabad Square until weekend crowds started emerging from the metro. Then he followed them to the junction of 30-Tir Street and Imam Khomeini Boulevard. They had recently cobblestoned this part of the city and set out food kiosks. Street musicians jammed the sidewalks, and a huge i <3 tehran neon sign shone off a wall of the Malek National Library. Hashem had loved going to all sorts of libraries when they were kids. He was also an avid book thief. For a long time the books he read went completely past Issa. One time Hashem’s desk he’d seen a book titled Of Mice and Men. He was still in elementary school, and the title in Persian—Moosh-haa va Adam-haa—had really repulsed him. It seemed sinister to his young mind, even if he did not yet know what sinister was. He questioned the rationality of his brother’s universe on these occasions. But he was also a soldier, there to defend Hashem, even if he did not quite know from whom and why. But as the years passed and Hashem’s library expanded, he began to take a new interest in his brother’s books, and their variety eventually became his own entry point into literature. By now theater had taken over Hashem’s world. He was about to finish high school with dazzling grades, and their father could no longer force him into the dojo to humiliate him for loving an art form, as he had done with the violin. There was one book, Issa recalled, that never left his backpack: Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Issa thinking: I know who Shakespeare is. We read about him in some class. But why “our contemporary”? It seemed Hashem might always be trying to provoke their father with books out of the range of the old military man’s understanding, and frankly Issa’s understanding as well. It would take several years of studying at the university and fully catching up to Hashem’s reading list before he began to get an inkling—a library with a shelf full of thin books by a man with hair like an eraser, Samuel Beckett; a book of poems by W. H. Auden, with the deeply lined face of a man whose gaze was a mixture of defiance and wisdom; and of course Hashem’s film heroes with exotic, sexy, and excessively beautiful European names: Bresson, Pasolini, Fassbinder. “Look after my books,” Hashem had asked him when he was finally leaving home. And he had, religiously, even getting a shelf built for them by hand. These were the very books that their father often thought of as the culprits stirring his firstborn toward that unreachable place where only shame lay.
It seemed Hashem might always be trying to provoke their father with books out of the range of the old military man’s understanding.
One day he’d come home to see the old man boxing all the books.
“Pedar, what are you doing?”
“I’m taking them to the bookshops along the university and selling them or giving them away. Maybe I’ll throw them in the sewer. I don’t know yet.”
“But they’re not yours to do that with.”
The old man had looked up at Issa. “What did you say?”
“Those books are my amanat. They are in my care. A man has a duty not to betray an amanat. You know that.”
“These books turned your brother kooni. You understand, son?”
“Books don’t turn a person into one thing or another. And so what if they did? I’ve read most of those books by now. They’re really mine.”
“Yes, and I can tell you’re turning into a homo like your brother.”
It was the first time, and last, that in so many words he’d told his father to go fuck himself.
They remained there like two combatants. Issa stood his ground. “I’m not betraying my brother like you betrayed your son.”
The old man came at him then. His yokogeri side-thrust kick purposefully missing him by barely an inch but denting the wall with a loud boom. The old man could have crushed him. But Issa still did not budge. And the old man did not pursue the subject again. The books stayed.
Who is responsible for maintaining family lore? In Company, Shannon Sanders introduces—and repeatedly reintroduces—readers to the Collinses, a Black family with roots in D.C. and Atlantic City. Sanders, a master of character, makes every individual distinctive and recognizable even as they clearly belong to a whole, bound by shared history, values, and challenges.
In “The Good, Good Men,” two adult sons try, for better or worse, to fulfill their presumed filial duties; in “La Belle Hottentote,” four nieces fill in for an absentee daughter; and in “Company,” an aunt struggles to live up to family standards of hospitality. By presenting characters across different perspectives, at different ages, and under different circumstances, Sanders forces readers to reckon with them in their full, complicated, beautiful humanity. And though certain characters believe otherwise, we gradually discover that they’re all custodians of their lore, and of each other.
I spoke with Sanders over Zoom, where we discussed the many forms of inheritance, the importance of aunties, and the intense pressures of having—and being—a guest.
Emily Mirengoff: Many of the stories revolve around the Collins family, but not all of them. How did you determine whose stories you wanted to tell outside of the central cast?
Shannon Sanders: Three stories in the collection aren’t explicitly focused on Collins family members, though we do see all their protagonists, if briefly, in other stories. I wish I could say I always had a firm idea of how many stories would branch away from the family, but I didn’t. I wanted to show that some of the pressures facing the Collins family—microaggressions, respectability politics—are things that their broader community would also have to contend with. These aren’t just issues that are carried through the generations of a single family. They exist across the different communities depicted in the book: the Black community of D.C., Black people in academia, Black people in the professional workforce.
EM: You describe characters with such vivid, memorable efficiency. I think my favorite is when a man thinks of his mother as “a woman with air between her ears. Who lived by the word of her daily horoscope and always kept a tambourine handy to punctuate moments of spontaneous group laughter.” How do you come up with these kinds of details? Will your friends and family recognize themselves in your characters’ foibles?
SS: I could talk for hours about family and friends recognizing themselves in fiction! To begin with, none of these characters are real people. As a newer writer, I did start with prototypes of people I knew, people I felt conveyed certain elements of the human experience. For example—and he knows this!—the character of Theo is based on my brother in a specific phase of his life, when he’d recently moved to New York, and was trying to do a Mark Zuckerberg kind of thing.
Even now, as a more confident writer, real people still help provide details that create authenticity and verisimilitude, without corresponding one-to-one with characters. For example, my mom has a tambourine that she loves to play! But she is not that character; I just thought it made a great sensory detail. When characters do correspond more directly to real-life figures, I made them minor characters, who would just peek into the story.
When loved ones read our fiction, they’re looking for themselves, they’re sometimes nervous about how they’ll be portrayed, and they’re quick to recognize themselves where they are not. Writers are often eavesdroppers, people-watchers, and we’re collecting little bits of data to help form a cohesive person. The trick is to plagiarize the people in our lives without them realizing it. But I think it’s a compliment when people are sure that they recognize someone in a character, because that means that they’re seeing a person, as opposed to an assemblage of sentences.
EM: All these stories center around visitors—or company, per the title. We learn a lot about characters from how they prepare for, and receive, guests; the impressions they’re trying to make. What does company mean to you—and how does it overlap with family?
SS: This connective thread throughout the stories actually took me by surprise—someone else pointed it out to me. But I think it’s a literary obsession for me because it overlaps with the ideas of performance, code-switching, respectability politics, and self-presentation. There are so many decisions that go into how we self-present in different spaces, and that’s especially intense when we have guests, or are guests. When I was in my twenties, I did so much guesting and hosting for bridal showers, baby showers, weddings, and church events. Some of the most stressful moments of my life involved this expectation of putting myself on display, or doing my hosting job. I’m an introvert, so I had to pull on real reserves of strength to get through some of these interactions. On top of that, so much conflict comes not just from the event, but its preparations, all the freight attached to the event.
It overlaps deeply with family, because the way someone hosts doesn’t just implicate them, it implicates their upbringing, and I think mothers and grandmothers feel this especially acutely. I was most interested in how different generations of this one family would tackle these issues, particularly because of different generational expectations. Also, aunties are a huge motif in this book. The auntie is a figure in your life who knows what your upbringing looked like, who knows your freight and expectations, but her investment is different. She can bear witness to it, or nudge you in the ribs if your mom’s getting on your nerves. She can even be a maternal stand-in. She can see when your own preparation has failed, or when she thinks you’re absconding from it. I didn’t necessarily plan to set all the stories around these encounters, but they’re such momentous moments for women, and women of color, when we really take stock of who we are, what matters to us, and how we want the world to relate to us.
EM: Speaking of aunties, in the titular story, one of my favorite characters, Fay, complains about “curating the goddamned Collins family museum,” when her niece visits. At the same time, it’s clear that she also cherishes her role in keeping the family memory alive. How did you think about that ambivalence?
Writers are often eavesdroppers, people-watchers, and we’re collecting little bits of data to help form a cohesive person.
SS: It’s such a big responsibility—to feel like you’re the custodian of family history, and to feel responsible for passing it on to the next generation. But when people are challenged on it, they tend to cling to it. Within our families, we are empowered by our understanding of that history; everyone has their own lens on it, and sometimes those different understandings end up competing. In that story, Fay is riled up that her sisters have created a certain impression of their childhood, their parents, and their values to this new generation without consulting her. One of the most interesting aspects of the aunt figure is that she knows your parents in a way that you never will. But you, as the child, know your parent in a way that she never will, and sometimes those come into tension.
EM: The theme of inheritance appears on almost every page of this collection: inheriting money, looks, personality traits, lessons, talent, names, and memories. What do you think is the most important legacy that the Collins grandparents—these much-mythologized figures—leave their descendants?
SS: I agree—inheritance is a good way to sum up one of the major concerns of the book. I’ll also add, in addition to those positive inheritances: hang-ups, self-consciousness, and some real tensions! I think the grandparents’ major legacies are work ethic, concern with education and self-presentation, and self-reliance. What’s fun about writing multigenerational stories is that you build this family tree, and then you see how a legacy gets fractured and reinterpreted across generations. All four of their daughters have a strong work ethic, though how that looks in practice is a bit different for each one. They also engendered a real communal responsibility—asking the daughters to look out for each other, which we see play out in the next two generations.
And they passed along the ability to turn lemons into lemonade—to take a negative circumstance and bring out its most positive aspect. The grandparents owned a nightclub: they took a segregated Atlantic City and turned it into a fertile place to run a business. They took drunk patrons and turned them into friends, in many cases. It’s resilience, but a step beyond as well: the ability to not just survive, but thrive, in difficult circumstances. That’s a legacy that we see in all the youngest generation.
EM: In the stories “Birds of Paradise” and “La Belle Hottentote,” we see the same evening—the same events, the same sartorial choices—through two different sets of characters. Some impressions overlap, and many contradict each other. As a reader, you never get the impression that either narrator is lying or mistaken; they’re just experiencing different truths. As the author, how did you imbue both stories with equal credibility?
SS: That’s another reason I really wanted to write a multi-generational book. I didn’t want to tie the reader to a single protagonist. As millennials, I think we have a little bit of a superpower—and maybe this is a phase that every generation passes through—which is the ability to empathize with our parents, with our generation, and the slightly younger, next generation. As an observer of my mom and my many aunties, I’ve observed a lot of their concerns, the tensions between them and their children, their worries about the next generation’s values. I’ve also observed some of their misunderstandings about the pressures that we face. A basic example is the perpetual question, “When are you going to buy a house?” We’re like, “We would love to! Sell them to us at a price we can afford.” I have so much empathy for them because I’ve listened so closely to them throughout my life. But I also know that we, coming of age now, have a point too, in many cases. I wanted to really explore that intergenerational tension from both sides.
In the two stories about the party, there’s a character who has been built by a certain patriarchal workplace environment, who invested her life and career in it and fully bought into it. But I also wanted to show these young people, on the cusp of entering their own adulthood, reacting to that same environment. When we’re handed the mantle and told, “this is what you’ll have to do to survive a workplace,” many of us just took that mantle and said, “Okay, this doesn’t sound great, but I’ll give it a shot.” Others rejected it wholesale, and that’s why we see such progress in the ways that women and people of color are able to participate in those spaces. Within my own family, I have a corporate job, while my brother is a creator; he’s entirely rejected it. Intergenerational tension is not between one generation that knows what it’s talking about and one that doesn’t. It’s about two generations that both have completely reasonable understandings of the world based on how they were built, and then have to figure out how to deal with each other. All the terrible events of the last twenty years—they’re so much richer if we see them through the eyes of fully formed adults, who came of age in the ’70s, as well as later generations, who are still learning about the world as they experience it.
The Masquerade of the Red Death is the one night every year where we gather in Brooklyn, celebrate with our community, and raise funds to support our work. It is also the night the spirit of our party patron saint Edgar Allan Poe is strongest, and the spooky vibes reach their peak! This year, our friends, readers, writers, and beloved colleagues from the literary sphere showed up and showed out, fabulously decked in horns, feathers, and most thematically, many stunning and creative masks. Themed cocktails were sipped, tail-feathers were shaken, and party-goers ended the night with an armload of free books! Here is a recap of the red-soaked revelry of this most spooky night, captured by photographer Jasmina Tomic.
Our party favor is a Verso tote bag overflowing with free haunted house novels!
Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” EL editors curated a giveaway table of novels and short story collections that feature houses—haunted, alive, or just plain creepy—as characters. The offerings include well-loved classics—The Shining, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Haunting of Hill House—and exciting newer titles—Devil House, In the Dream House, Broken River, Terrace Story, Caul Baby, Out There, and Bluebeard’s Castle.
Bring your own mask, or take one of ours!
Thanks to to our beverage partner Interboro Spirits, the open bar included a Poe-themed cocktail hour: The Gold Bug, The Black Cat, and The Tell-Tale Heart.
It was a full house! And we just love seeing people mingling with books in hand.
This year, our honored guests are authors Morgan Jerkins, author of Caul Baby and Hilary Leichter, author of Terrace Story.
It’s been a banner year for Electric Literature, after winning the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize in 2022. Executive Director Halimah Marcus announced that this year, Electric Literature had three stories in Best American Short Stories and two stories in Best American Mystery and Suspense, the first online literary magazine ever to do so.
In her speech, Editor-in-Chief Denne Michele Norris said: “Last year we announced the success of the Both/And fundraising campaign, our groundbreaking essay series centering trans and gender nonconforming writers that published this spring. Earlier this year we designed and launched a new creative nonfiction program. I’m really thrilled to announce that we’ll begin to publish these essays, weekly, on Thursdays, in mid-January.” Marcus added: “And as if we didn’t have enough going on this year, we partnered on the launch of Banned Books USA, an initiative to giveaway banned and challenged books to readers in Florida, for only the cost of shipping.”
After remarks, it was time to hit the dancefloor!
The DJ, novelist Ryan Chapman, had us all sweating and screaming on the dancefloor. In other words—he knows his tunes. And did we mention he has a new novel coming out this next spring?
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Some guests did not deign to unearth themselves from beneath their haunted dwellings—they brought them along to party! (Could it be One Story founder Hannah Tinti andmanaging editor Lena Valencia? They’ll never tell.) The deadliest couple of the night for the second year running goes to Catherine LaSota, founder of The Resort, and Karl Jacob.
Can we have a little commotion for the masks??
The turnout was deadly, mysterious, and stylish. (We promise the photographer has not been turned to stone!)
We love a good cape and this fabulous flock of crows, having a murder of a time (crow pun intended!).
We spotted so many book authors getting their grove on at the party. Picture here—from top to bottom, left to right—is Isle McElroy (People Collide), Greg Mania(Born to Be Public), John Manuel Arias (Where There Was Fire), Jennifer Baker (Forgive Me Not), and honoree Morgan Jerkins.
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Say boo for the photobooth!
And that’s a wrap from Electric Literature team. Left to right: Former interns Nzinga Temu and Lauren Hutton, Halimah Marcus, Books Editor Jo Lou, Denne Michele Norris, Recommended Reading reader Maddy Adams.
Thank you to our sponsors for making this gathering of incredible and vibrant book people possible! See you all next year!
Venezuela, my home country, was once one of the richest countries in Latin America due to the discovery of oil at the start of the last century. Today, Venezuela is in political and economic turmoil with a mass exodus of more than 7 million.
As I wrote my new memoir, Motherland about the fragile concept of home and my complicated relationship to my family and to Venezuela, there were several books that took me back on a quest to understand where we came from as a country. The horrific conditions in Venezuela over the last several years sometimes made us forget what happened before Hugo Chávez.
The list that follows includes some of the essential books about Venezuela. These are not only for people who may know little about the country, but also for Venezuelans who are interested in our past and how, after decades of abundance, we got to where we are today, where families are dismantled and millions of people leave the country in search of a better life.
Taking some inspiration from Venezuelan playwright José Ignacio Cabrujas and his analysis of the providential quality of the State and the social impact of the sudden wealth that oil brought to the country, Coronil, an anthropologist, addresses the transformation of the Venezuelan State in the last century as the country became an oil nation. From the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez to democracy, marked by the spectacular first presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez (1974-1979), Coronil explains the relationship of Venezuelans to the State and its presidents. I first read this book when Chávez, thanks to a new oil boom, magnified and personified the notion of a generous and almighty State. It was no longer the State, now it was Chávez. That is why this book, first published in 1997, was also prophetic. Overall, it is key to understanding the Venezuela that preceded Hugo Chávez’s “revolution.”
William Neuman understands Venezuela as few outsiders do and opens a window into the country with this exceptional compilation of stories. Neuman, who arrived in Caracas to work as a correspondent for The New York Times in 2012, shortly before Chávez died, gathers testimonies and anecdotes that allow readers to understand the social complexities of a divided nation. One of this book’s great contributions is that its characters are those who live and suffer in the country, and the wealth of perspectives Neuman presents is only possible thanks to the years he spent traveling throughout Venezuela.
While working as The Guardian’s correspondent in Caracas, Rory Carroll was once the target of one of Hugo Chávez’s typical verbal attacks during his weekly Sunday television program. In this book, Carroll shows the seams of the political project of the man who ruled Venezuela for more than a decade under an eternal promise of utopia that never materialized. In a series of vignettes, Carroll incorporates interviews with people in the presidential entourage and figures who influenced the definition of the so-called “Socialism of the 21st century.”
Simon Bolivar is similar to a founding father for us. We hear about him almost from the time we learn to read, and there is no shortage of literature about him. However, Marie Arana’s biography excels in capturing the intensity of the Liberator’s dramatic life and does it in an almost cinematic portrayal that matches the grandeur of the man who waged countless wars against Spanish rule to liberate what is today the countries of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Panama and Bolivia. Arana also brings in the forces and influences that shaped Bolivar and expands on his ideas about politics, race and government in a narrative that transpires passion, but without caricaturing or mythologizing him, a frequent practice in Venezuelan politics. Bolivar has been quoted by countless regional leaders, but Hugo Chavez, who claimed to be his spiritual heir, took the fanfare to another extreme. Chavez, who drew parallels between himself and the Liberator and nurtured conspiracy theories of assassination attempts, went so far as to order a national broadcast of the exhumation of Bolivar’s remains by a team of professional investigators to determine whether the father of the nation had been assassinated. The conclusion is that he was not, nor would Chávez be.
This book offers a different perspective because it approaches political transformations in Venezuela from an urban and popular point of view. “Over the years, Venezuelans – more and more concentrated in urban spaces – developed an expansive understanding of democracy that combined institutional and noninstitutional, formal and informal, legal and illegal practices in their dealings with the state,” writes Velasco. Barrio Rising reviews the decades leading up to Chávez’s arrival, describes how the concept of democracy was shaped in the working class and how years of exclusion impacted the notion of democracy. It focuses specifically on the changes experienced in the neighborhood 23 de enero, or January 23. Designed as part of the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez’s ideal of modernity, this barrio became a symbol of democracy when the military was overthrown in 1958. Decades later, when democracy was teetering, the neighborhood became a bastion of resistance. Close to the government palace, its symbolism is such that it was in this neighborhood where Hugo Chávez voted in every election. The ballot became a popular televised show, with hundreds of people cheering for the president, who never lived there but was received with devotion as one of their own.
Hugo Chávez by Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka
Much has been written about Hugo Chavez, the charismatic leader who first appeared on the scene in 1992 when he assumed the leadership of a failed coup d’état in Caracas. But one of the first efforts to portray the man behind the myth was this biography written by Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka during Chavez’s first term, just when his popularity continued to rise, and he became a divisive and polarizing figure. Marcano and Barrera Tyszka assembled a personal and intimate portrait of the President by interviewing people who were very close to him during his childhood and early years in the Army and by using Chavez’s valuable personal diary. The biography discusses his influences, his family relationships, and how his political ideals were shaped.
Not many Venezuelan novels have been translated into English, but one of them is Iphigenia, which caused a stir when it was published in 1924 for giving a dissonant voice to a young woman who tries to rebel against the local machista elite into which she was born. It is the most famous work of Teresa de la Parra, a Venezuelan writer who, despite spending most of her life outside the country, focuses part of her work on portraying the Caracas society of the early 20th century. Iphigenia is notable for addressing the non-conformity of a woman and the veiled criticism of the elite.
Considered the quintessential Venezuelan novel and commonly summarized as the struggle between civilization and barbarism, Doña Bárbara narrates the dispute between the feisty protagonist and a landowner who after a time in the city returns to the countryside. Published in 1929 by Gallegos, who years later would become the first president of the Venezuelan democracy, the novel is an ode to the Venezuelan llanos, the region where Hugo Chavez was born. Besides bringing the exuberance of the plains in which fierce llaneros only fear the implacable ‘Doña Barbara’ and the spirits, the novel shows the richness of a region that is rarely discussed in our literature and which Chavez claimed had culturally molded him.
Look straight ahead and contemplate the lousy Kirkus review you’re sure to get.
The Talk Show Host:
Place one hand under your chin and imagine listening to someone else, something you rarely do as a writer.
The Orgasm:
Throw your head back and grin ecstatically after ordering a box of your favorite gel pens.
The West Nile:
Sit at a scenic outdoor table at dusk, notebook open in front of you. If you contract the virus at least your mother will never have to read your memoir.
The James Dean:
Turn up the collar on your leather jacket and give a small smile knowing your arch rival’s book was remaindered.
The Corrections Officer:
Cross your arms while wearing something stark. Remember to showcase your proofreading symbol tattoo.
The Barrette:
Push your hair behind your ear with one finger while considering what it would be like to have a job that’s actually useful, like firefighter, or accountant, or… hair clip.
The Watergate:
Arrange the lighting so your face is bathed in shadow. Maybe you committed a murder like the one described in your novel, maybe you didn’t.
The Curious Dog:
Tilt your head and wonder, how does The Times really compile its best seller list?
The Cat Attractant:
Sit at an indoor table, laptop open in front of you. Stare pensively at the screen as you realize the timeline of your cozy mystery is horribly flawed.
The Load-Bearing Wall:
Lean sideways against a brick wall as if you are needed for support, as if you could actually provide support to anyone on a writer’s income.
The TV Commentator:
Pose in front of your built-in bookshelves after replacing the dog-eared copy of Fifty Shades of Grey with a pristine copy of Proust.
“The world here beats faster than a hummingbird’s wings,” writes Alexandra Chang in her new collection Tomb Sweeping. Chang, the author of Days of Distraction and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 recipient, writes poignantly about tenuous connection.
In these stories, a wealthy housewife runs a gambling ring in Zheijiang, a young woman attends the living funeral of a family friend, someone “drinks himself into a dedicated madness,” two friends become further alienated despite attempts to reunite, a brother disappears during Japanese occupation and the Sook Ching. Chang is curious about “the power of angry women” among “men of manageable dreams.” Fathers, fumbling, try especially hard to overcome their blindness; women, taught to behave, speak up and act up, or quit. People create new, impossible lives for themselves despite the risks and resistance, and the oppressive sociopolitical forces against them. There are incidents of misidentification, mistaken identity, doubling, doppelgängers, past selves. Couples uncouple themselves even when they remain together. Work arises as a torture of moral incongruity. Technology is rarely to be trusted. People, bound to one another through obligation, are so mystified by those they’re closest to, they often mislead or fail each other. It is unbearable for many of Chang’s characters to be alone—too often, existential dread overtakes them. The anxiety reverberates through the generations. Yet, undeniably, Chang’s characters harness power from feelings of disquiet. They travel the distance between obedience and the imagination to live a life of one’s choosing despite the weight of history, family, law, and prior selves. In the collection’s first story, aptly titled, “Unknown by Unknown,” a young woman, despite her very real fears, confides that she is “disoriented… in a way that makes me happy to be alive.” We feel that as a great truth of Tomb Sweeping, and of our own lives.
Annie Liontas: Are the characters in Tomb Sweeping lost or wandering souls? What allows them to find themselves or their place in the world?
AC: I do think of a lot of them as lost or in transition or going through some sort of growing pains. Some do find their place in the world, or at least find a sense of peace from that turmoil of feeling lost. For example, Adrienne, the protagonist in “Farewell Hank.” She’s definitely in a long transition: she’s young, she’s cynical, she doesn’t really have much of a connection to people around her. She hasn’t grappled with a central grief in her life. The events of the story allow her to at least face that grief a little bit more, and to find a sense of connection, at least with her mother. That connection gives her, I think, a little bit more stability than she had in the beginning of the story. Other characters are very lost. In the first story, “Unknown by Unknown,” the main character gets laid off from her job. She really has no sense of what she’s supposed to be doing, and then she gets this house sitting gig. That doesn’t give her any sort of long-term stability or a sense of having found a place in the world, but it’s an alluring temporary space where she can imagine herself into another life. But even that gets pretty quickly taken away from her and she’s back in a place of confusion—not the exact same place of confusion, though. And in that story, too, there’s a moment of fleeting connection between her and another character that grounds her.
I’m interested in writing characters who are going through it in some way, and don’t necessarily experience transformation where they transcend into a better being. They move through one phase into another, from transition to transition. If anything, connection with others helps them find themselves and their place in the world, but most of these connections are temporary, too. That’s how I see the world and experience life myself. I don’t think growing pains really ever stop. Transition seems constant, ideal even.
AL: Characters such as the narrator in “Klara” and the father in “Flies” can’t quite get out of their own way. They suffer, as do those closest to them. How would they define happiness? How far out of reach is it?
I wanted to combine the most painful friend breakup I’ve had… and condense them into the story.
AC: The narrator in “Klara” is so consumed by the loss of this friendship that she can’t really think beyond that pain. She’s experiencing it even though that friendship is long gone. Klara isn’t in the narrator’s actual day-to-day life anymore, but she takes up so much space in the narrator’s head because of how important she’d once been to the narrator. She’s in her own way because she can’t let go of this past. That’s true of a lot of my characters. But I do think at the end, she gets a glimpse outside of her pain. She wonders, what would Klara think of me right now? And that’s a tiny step into someone else’s perspective and outside of her own, and she’s able to let go a little bit. Is happiness within reach for her? Happiness for her in that story would likely be a return to their past friendship, which she knows is an impossibility. That’s not to say she’ll never be happy, but what she truly wants is definitely out of reach. Friendship breakups are so hard! It sometimes takes years to get over or let go of the pain of having lost someone who you knew and knew you so intimately.
AL: So that feels very close to your experience?
AC: Yes. In “Klara,” I wanted to combine the most painful friend breakup/friendship loss feelings I’ve had over many years and condense them into the story. I’ve woken up in the middle of the night thinking about conversations that I’ve had with friends who I haven’t been as close with anymore and been overwhelmed with sadness and anxiety, like, what happened? Why were we like this? What could I have done differently? What could they have done differently? That kind of obsessive, often nonproductive thinking is in reaction to grief.
AL: I think about the loss of a friendship as being an open wound, because culturally, we don’t have the language or the framework to define it.
AC: It’s not as simple as those romantic relationship breakups where it’s like, OK, we’re going to talk about it and now we’re over. Obviously it’s not always that clean cut with romantic relationships either, but with a friendship breakup, there really are no guidelines. In “Klara,” these two kind of fizzle apart and there’s no sense of closure for the narrator, which is why, as you say, it feels like an open wound. It’s very hard for her to understand what happened between them, and the narrative of their friendship is always shifting in her head. I’ve been there.
AL: You define culture in these stories as the accumulation of small ubiquitous gestures over time. What are the forces shaping these characters’ lives, whether they realize it or not? What happens when they do realize it?
Sometimes you just really do need to just be in this profound sadness instead of resisting it.
AC: The biggest forces affecting my character’s lives are those that tend to be outside of their control—societal forces like capitalism, class, racism, sexism, xenophobia. A lot of my characters are immigrants or children of immigrants. And a couple stories are set in China, one is set in Singapore. These characters are facing historical forces, the impacts of war, or of governmental policy. And oftentimes they don’t realize that’s what’s making their life difficult, or they’re not always thinking about why it is that they’re running into problems or challenges. They’re often just trying to survive their day to day. A few of them do realize. Like in “To Get Riches Glorious,” I’d say FuFu at some point does understand why she is having such a hard time achieving what she wants in life. She primarily blames it on sexism and the inability for her, as a woman in China, to actually fulfill her ambitions, ambitions that seem more readily available to the men around her. FuFu also comes from a poorer village background, and like a lot of the characters in this book, much of her struggles have to do with the desires for upward mobility. FuFu then has to find a route that’s outside of social norms to get what she wants. And what she does unfortunately lands her in prison.
AL: FuFu is one of my favorite characters! Despite the consequences, she is proud of her independence and the money she made through illegal gambling, and seems to have no regrets. Patricia, in “Persona Development,” likewise turns away from a life of security, in preference for one more aligned with her true self. How do you understand these women’s choices and brazenness?
AC: FuFu and Patricia are such different people, they’re almost on the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of what they want. But both of them have to have the courage to go for something they want, even though they struggle along the way. FuFu became more clear to me as I lived in that story. I knew that I wanted to write a woman who would end up in prison. I had been reading this dissertation about Chinese women in prison, and I wondered, what leads up to this moment? The more I wrote her, line by line, she became this very confident and very defiant character. In a way, she develops these traits because of the very constraints and expectations placed on her. A lot of her choices are about pushing against the constraints, and I think FuFu makes a great effort to throw off what’s placed upon her. She’s compelling to me, too, because she’s not a character who I relate to closely. I wouldn’t be capable of going the lengths that she does to get what she wants. In many ways, I admire her abilities and her sense of self, even if they are misguided at times. She really doesn’t backtrack on her decisions. That story also zooms out and shows many women who are going against societal norms.
Patricia’s defiance in “Persona Development” is more personal. It’s also culturally based, just in a very different world. She’s this successful Director of Marketing at an agency in the States who has embraced these working-woman vibes, girl bossing her way up, but finds herself unsatisfied. So her defiance is more about turning away from that world and trying to figure out what she truly wants.
AL: In “Tomb Sweeping,” a medium meets an unexpected and chilling end, one which haunts the narrator. What questions is this story asking about guilt, inheritance, and the past?
AC: That story is about trying to understand what we owe one another in the aftermath of mistakes and intentional harms that have been committed in the past. The story is told through the perspective of a twelve-year-old girl who’s grandfather lived through the Japanese occupation of Singapore during World War II. Her grandfather’s brother was murdered by Japanese soldiers, and her grandfather is very adamant about her understanding this history. But he does so from a very wounded place and is holding onto a lot of hatred. This comes to a head when they encounter a medium who is half Chinese and half Japanese. The medium represents something very upsetting and disturbing for the grandfather. But this young girl, who has not lived through that pain and who only knows it secondhand through her family, is trying to grapple with what she inherits from this past. What do I do with this legacy? How do I navigate it? Who is at fault and who carries the guilt for what has happened in the past? How can people today right these wrongs? She doesn’t necessarily come to any answers, and neither does the story. I don’t really feel like I have answers either. That’s what draws me to stories, having questions that I don’t have answers to and still don’t have answers to after writing them. It’s more about trying to wade into the questions and see if anything can be uncovered—not an answer so much as a feeling for how to live.
AL: You wrote this collection before the novel, but decided to keep working on the stories. What went into that decision?
AC: Cumulatively, I’ve been working on these stories for nine years and I sold them at the same time as the novel. If the collection had been on schedule, it would have been published a year or so earlier. But at that time in my life, when I should have been working on the stories in order to meet my deadlines, it was deep pandemic and I had just moved to a new city. The state of the world was terrible, I was consumed by the news, consumed by what was happening around me. And then, on a personal level, I was feeling very helpless and distant from loved ones. I was, to be honest, very depressed. I just did not see the importance of these stories. I understood on a logical level that this book was under contract and that it wasn’t a huge deal whether I finished them or not, so why not finish them? But on an emotional level, I just wasn’t in a place where I could do it. I didn’t feel a connection to the stories or to writing fiction at all. I thought, Maybe I’ll never write again. It was pretty devastating. I don’t think I wrote anything for over a year. Sometimes you just really do need to just be in this profound sadness instead of resisting it. I guess that was the way that I was able to come out of it.
Over time, the stories began to feel new to me again, and I became a little bit more interested in what they were doing, maybe because the stakes felt lower. I told myself, I don’t have to be a writer, I can actually walk off that path. It’s not life or death for me, I can step away from it. Teaching helped with continuing with the stories, too. Going into a classroom where there are young people who are like, “I love books and I love reading!” I was reminded, “Oh yeah, me too. I do love that!” Eventually I got to the point where I thought, I can do this. I want to return to these stories renewed.
AL: Most of these stories resist neat or definitive endings. How is resistance to closure true for you?
AC: I just don’t believe that there are super clear-cut answers in life, or very clear-cut ways to live. Maybe one day I’ll turn a certain age and think, actually, this is the way to live, but I haven’t experienced that yet. A lot of my characters, like me, struggle with what is morally right and wrong in certain situations. They often land in ambivalence, that things are not so black and white. What might seem right thing to do could cause harm… There is nuance in every situation. There are times when I worry I lean a little too much into nuance or into this gray area. Obviously, there are times in life when I feel very strongly about something being evil and clearly harmful in the world. But that’s not really what I’m interested in exploring in fiction. When I’m writing, I want to feel like I could discover something new. I don’t want to have an answer already in my head and then write towards the answer. That’s boring for me as a writer. These stories don’t have neat, tidy endings because I want to leave the door open for possibility.
“It’s brave of us to die!” writes Melissa Broder in Death Valley, a desert survival story. The woman in Broder’s third very funny novel, like Broder’s other characters, is recognizable by her need to “control the uncontrollable,” as well as her wit, occasional panic, deep and unrelenting introspection, and love affair with Best Westerns (“Where the wood can be fake, make it fake. Where linoleum can be used, use linoleum. If a geometric shape can be incorporated into any wall, rug or floor tile, it’s going in”).
The woman’s father has recently come out of a coma after a very close call, and no one can say how much time he has left; her husband is nine years into a debilitating condition that becomes inescapable for both of them. “I love you,” something the woman says multiple times a day, “can mean anything from I’m sorry you’re suffering to Please stop talking.” She escapes to the desert, she believes, to finish her novel. In actuality, she is here to reckon with her own powerlessness and unlikely resilience. On an ill-advised hike through the desert, the woman stumbles upon a strange cactus—a cactus can be a portal and “every door can be a trap door”—and is met both with her father when he was young and her own unexpected feelings about seeing him in such a childish state. Then, when she thinks she is ready to go home, she goes back to the desert and really gets lost. No food, no water, no bars on her cell, not a soul who knows where she is or that she is hurt.
The reader might feel they are wandering the desert with heat stroke before heat stroke actually sets in: rocks talk, rabbits have a party—and then things get weird. There is an obvious metaphor here about how times of grief are days spent wandering a desert—except there is nothing obvious about Broder’s searching, or the tenderness she visits on characters who fail to save those they love from pain and death, not even able to give them hotdogs when they ask for hotdogs. Seek and ye shall seek becomes a refrain in the novel, and a portal that leads to a higher self.
Annie Liontas:How would the protagonist in Death Valley define courage?
Melissa Broder: I think she thinks that courage is something that comes naturally to a person, that it’s an inborn trait rather than something that we need to muster or a resource that can come out of weakness or out of fear. I would say that she does not believe she is courageous, she does not believe that she has strength. She believes those who are not fearful don’t need courage. She doesn’t want to be having to face what she is facing. She doesn’t want her husband to be sick. She doesn’t want her father to be in the ICU. She doesn’t want to be lost in the desert. I think she’s a very fearful person, and yet there’s a will there. On some level, it’s about acceptance and seeing.
AL: So it seems like courage is something she feels is beyond her, at least in the beginning?
MB: She is forced to discover that she has inner resources in order to survive. She’s not a wilderness-y person, but she knows how to do things. I read some desert survival manuals in writing this book, so she actually knows to do things I would have never known to do. For example, looking to see what animals eat. There’s that moment where she’s going to eat one of the wild flowers and is surprised by the thought “Oh, I must really want to live.” And that parallels her father, who always seemed kind of “meh” about life until he’s in the ICU and really wants to live. By the end of the book, courage is a resource that she summoned. And she’s surprised by the will and surprised by her own fortitude.
AL: The novel—and the character—makes sure that she is very quickly stranded in the high desert. Why was this isolation essential for her awakening?
MB: It would have been a totally different book if she’d been stranded with others. But I was actually very conscious of that isolation when I was writing the book. I didn’t want to write a COVID narrative, but my father was in the ICU during COVID and the first couple of months we weren’t allowed to go see him. My dad had been in an accident in December of 2020, and he died in May 2021. We would FaceTime my dad every day, and sometimes he was conscious, and sometimes he wasn’t and the nurse would just put the phone on his pillow. And so, for me, the book could not have been another way. I needed to create that isolation for her. It’s in part about all the ways that we find connection, even in isolation. It can happen with the earth or with the rocks or with the rabbits. In a way, her isolation brings her closer to others.
AL: How is loss as much a portal as the cactus?
Grief brings a depth to life and a connection with the sacred when we face it.
MB: I see loss and grief as very akin to being lost in the desert. It can seem endless. We’re not in control. Nature or the nature of the emotional landscape is in control. We have to keep going, but there’s also a certain degree of surrender to the elements. We can’t fight against it. A desert animal is nocturnal—most of them are nocturnal, right? They’re working with the elements. They’re working with the terrain. And I think of grief in that sense. There are oases, there are these rich, beautiful steppes or springs. I think grief brings a depth to life and a connection with the sacred when we face it. A cactus is thorny. It’s not easy. A cactus is rugged. Grief is a portal to really having to ask oneself, What means something to me? And it can often completely reshape what we value.
AL: Your character, though very much like other Broder protagonists, seems somehow more grounded—if not accepting of her present state and consciousness, she seems open to a higher self. At one point, she asks her husband, “How did you do it? How do you stay kind?” Does grief create this possibility in her?
MB: They say that pain is a touchstone of spiritual progress. We don’t seek those deep resources when everything is going swimmingly and we’re in a state of peace. There can be gratitude, but we don’t always have to marshal that reliance on a higher power. We don’t have to surrender. It’s that balance between the surrender and the fight, which is a hard one to navigate. The marshaling of a higher self in a fictional character is always interesting because it’s often informed by that struggle. Our characters are often wiser than we are. One of the themes of the book is that difference between empathy and compassion. She’s able to have more empathy for her father’s thirst and not take it so personally because she experiences her own thirst in the desert. But compassion is very hard—a difficult trait for a human being—when we don’t identify or we can’t even understand the feelings of someone. Not even the experience, but the feelings. To have that sympathy, that takes muscle. So for her, lost in the desert becomes a bit of a foxhole prayer—“G. O. D., gift of desperation.”
AL: Tell us about Best Westerns.
MB: I love the Best Western! I love celebrating something that’s sort of a little bit low brow, a little bit Americana. I love American Kitsch and I love American desert Kitsch. I always stay at the Best Western in Vegas where my sister lives, and I stayed there a lot while my Dad was in the ICU on the East Coast. Since we couldn’t go see him for long stretches due to Covid, I drove back and forth between my house in LA and Vegas to be with her. Like the protagonist, I was trying to escape a feeling.
AL: What calls to you about the desert?
They say that pain is a touchstone of spiritual progress. We don’t seek those deep resources when we’re in a state of peace.
MB: The light, the foliage, the gorgeous, Joshua trees. That things can grow and survive and that there’s beauty even in the really, really rugged terrain. That to me is amazing. The resourcefulness of the animals and plants that live there. And the concealed nature of things. There’s a lot of life going on, even though it may not appear that way on the surface.
AL: Was there anything that surprised you about writing this book?
MB: I didn’t know she was going to get lost in the desert. And then I was out doing a desert recon trip. I took this hike in Death Valley where nobody gets lost, and I got extremely lost. It was only for thirty minutes, but I panicked. I had thought, “Zabriskie Point’s a very touristy area, I’m just gonna take a walk.” It wasn’t even going to be a hike. I didn’t have water with me—like, I had Coke Zero. And I panicked and climbed up this rock face trying to get back and got all cut up. And when I got back to my car and had finished crying, I realized, Oh, she’s gonna get lost in the desert and it’s gonna be for more than 45 minutes.
AL: What did it mean to dedicate this to your father?
MB: Just tonight, someone who has read the book said to me, “What a beautiful gift you’ve given to your father. You’ve immortalized him.” And I wondered, despite the fact that it is fiction, whether my dad would have liked the father character—who is deeply inspired by him. I wondered too how he would feel about having this part of his life immortalized. There’s never an easy answer to that. But I will always be grateful, and I believe that he would like this too, that I have had the opportunity to immortalize his mustache.
I was married once, at least
we thought about it, it was in
b&w, we were tiny, walking
in a forest, the trees dwarfed
us—the trees had been married
forever, moss hung from their
fallen branches, we had to
step over them. We put on
the costumes—groom, bride—
these are jobs, I realized, that
only last a couple hours. Why
not try it, what could we lose,
we were already deep inside
the forest, we were already lost,
marriage was just where the path
was headed—I thought it would
make us more like the trees,
growing closer every year. I
wanted you to put your hand
out, to pull me closer, I wanted
all the way in. A child would be
the glue. Was it wrong to think of
a child as glue? Too late, we were
already in our costumes, we’d already
had a shower, maybe someone
would give us a red toaster. It was
just another day to get through,
even if it felt like everyone was
talking through long cardboard
tubes. In the distance, the Empire
State Building, no matter where
we were we could find a window
or a roof & it would be lit up red
or blue or green & that would
tell us what month we were in.
We could even climb it (it’s not
impossible) & then look back
at all the windows we had looked
at it through, all over the city,
waking up in strange rooms,
& there it was, waiting. It was
the tallest for a while & then
it wasn’t & then it was again.
Anemones
My daughter puts her face
beside a photo of her infant
self, tries to make the same
face. All of this is a simulacrum,
she whispers. The anemones
on the white table need
water, even though
they are, technically, dead. I
tell her the story of the guillotine, how
the head, as it rolls away,
looks back at its own body,
how the heart keeps beating
ten minutes after it is
pulled from the chest. How
if you sit before anything
long enough, it will
become something else—
that maple, say, bare
when you find it, then it brightens
to that green shimmer,
which becomes a deeper green,
& even that turns yellow, then
orange, then red.
“The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover”—Mary Shelley
I skipped the day we discussed Frankenstein in my Romantics Literature seminar in my sophomore year of college. It was the late 90s, a time when email existed but was only used for the most urgent and timely emergencies, text messaging was charged per send, and a professor could still reasonably request that you make up for a missed class by visiting them during office hours.
I wish I could remember what I believed Frankensteinto be before that lecture, but those impressions escape me. Like Frankenstein itself, and what would continue to be true throughout my many love affairs with the indelible text, Frankenstein brought joyous and affirming worlds into my life, just as it brought troubling ones. I suppose it wouldn’t be Frankenstein without it.
I sat in my professor’s cramped office as he gestured dramatically in his oversized blazer—TBH he was the exact image one might have of the absent-minded professor—and I tried to make myself as small as possible, something I did often in those days. To give myself credit, I was at least self-actualized enough to have arranged for my twin and me to escape the house of my father—my first Frankenstein—the year before, knowing I needed more than to fight for crumbs, to be bigger than a crumb under his foot.
I tried to stay present to the lecture my professor was giving as he held some worn crinkly yellow legal sheets with blue handwritten notes in one hand, and almost hit my face with his interlocution in the other. This professor would become a disconcerting presence in my life. I was looking for a father to love me with tenderness anywhere I could find.
I couldn’t tell you how we suddenly found ourselves having four-hour breakfasts monthly for many years, but I had to ultimately divorce myself from him when he kept mentioning all the ways he’d taken note of my appearance over the years we’d known one another, which eerily coincided with my friend telling me about a student he’d had a long-running affair with, who also happened to be biracial and Asian. I never saw him again.
But, before that would take place (Frankensteins, Frankensteins everywhere, and not a drop to drink), he would utter one sentence theorizing about Mary Shelley and her Creature I couldn’t let go of.
Like I said, this was the 90s, before we archived every moment we experienced. I kept a tiny audio cassette recorder in my backpack, but my friends and I tended to use those for serious interviews or getting drunk and bolting silly songs or conversations just so we could play them back and laugh at the versions of each other we loved. So, needless to say, I didn’t record this lecture, so I could never know for sure whose version stands.
But what I remember is that he said that Mary Shelley refers to the Creature as Creature until the world shuns him for his hideousness, at which point Shelley refers to him as the Ogre, the Daemon, the Wretch, etc. It was the moment I realized I needed to offer Frankenstein more of my time and focus. Years after the fact, that professor would insist he’d never said that, although he found the idea intriguing. He would not be the first person to tell me I’d internalized something that wasn’t quite accurate, but I’ll keep this revisionist history. In fact, we will return to this behavior of mine—of remembering something that was never quite there—in due time.
I returned home and decided to reread the novel less as a means of finishing it in order to messily make it through a college class, and more for what it had to offer me. I was 19, the same age Shelley was herself when she first penned the novel, and I wonder what it is about that age that can tether a person to the ideas of creation and narcissistic (ir)responsibility.
I was looking for a father to love me with tenderness anywhere I could find.
How can I describe my sensations on beholding it? I’ll say it again. This was the 90s. Filled to the brim with white, neurotypical, well-adjusted teens proliferating in young adult novels. White cis people on television. Don’t get me started on the ways The Joy Luck Club didn’t represent my experience (nor would I want it to). I adored Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but what could it say about my biracial hybridized American life? About living as a mixed-race identical twin? About being incubated by my violent father who immersed us in a language we were never given access to? What stories could you find about the Asian children being left by wild, unreachable sparkling white mothers?
And yet, here was this very white, assumedly cis, 19th-century novel that seemed to connect to so many of my anomalies I had never been able to voice before. When Frankenstein and his Creation began to circle one another, using the same language to describe their plight which acted as a kind of mirror, it felt like Shelley was speaking to the complicated relationship I held (and continue to hold) with my mirror twin, compelled towards and repelled from one another in equal measure. When the Creature was relegated to eavesdropping and surreptitiously borrowing books from the De Laceys in order to learn language, it reminded me of my childhood during which I spent so many hours in a corner in an abandoned police station or various Chinese restaurants while my father rehearsed and performed Chinese plays, or spent time with his friends. I would read the facial expressions and gestures that accompanied the phrases and exclamations in Mandarin I had never been taught, never been welcomed to learn. When the Creature began to learn of the monstrosity of mankind, and how they viewed their fellow man, how they viewed the ugliness in human life, I thought about what life had been as a half-breed, a mongrel, a slant-eyed ogre, a chink, or a banana.
I thought about the time my mother called me Oriental, just a couple of years before, on the telephone, and when I asked her not to call me that anymore, scoffed: I had three of them. I’ll call them whatever I want. When the Creature begged to their mother who had long since banished them, to be left with someone, anyone, I wondered, what would it take for my mother to want me? When my father hurled insults while striking us with his hands and told us it hurt him more than it hurt us, I felt the disgusting beast lurking inside me.
Shortly after I received my MFA in Poetry, during which I wrote these small, very controlled narrative and imagist poems about the complicated familial relationships I navigated—largely with my twin and my father—I found myself returning to Frankenstein. The Frankenstein poems ribboned out of my early days in therapy, and so did the space I began to take up on the page. I initially came to poetry to make sense of my chaotic emotional life, my clinical depression. But once I started the healing process, those rigid lineated structures now made me feel boxed in. These early prose poems were the earliest measure of reclaiming space that had been taken from me for so long. It was also through therapy I had finally acknowledged what I’d hidden from myself my entire life, but in plain sight. That my mother had abandoned me over the course of my life, in insidious, subtle, dramatic, ways throughout my entire childhood. I began to write prose poems, largely dramatic monologues, that helped me come to terms with all the parts of myself that resonated as I read and reread the novel again and again—as an abandoned and unwanted child, as a biracial person of color, as a twin at odds with their sibling. It was the first time I’d actively made work around Frankenstein in order to come to terms with my own wounds, but it wouldn’t be the last.
But, as they say, it takes a hundred times to learn the same lesson.
A Frank Love Affair
I first met the Frankenstein who would take the longest recovery, a painter I’ll call D, at a launch for a literary magazine housed at my alma mater, for whom I’d been the first official intern in the late 90s. I met him at the same time I’d begun taking up more space for myself, but was, for all intents and purposes, very new in the healing process around childhood trauma and the hold narcissism had on my emotional life.
I thought about the time my mother called me Oriental, just a couple of years before, on the telephone.
I’d seen his work three years before, at an exhibit that had a profound effect on me, centering Black conceptual artists. It was where I first encountered W.E.B. Dubois’s notion of double consciousness, which led me, in one way or another, to so many artists who remain hugely influential: Adrian Piper, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and so many others. His work was interesting but impressed me the least. A writer I knew well in the community and the managing editor introduced us. Within a few minutes of meeting, he expressed an interest in collaborating with me on a project centering Don Quixote. We traded phone numbers.
He called three times. I wish I had understood why I’d refused to take his calls, that there was an intuition within me that knew to keep myself from the danger of his machinations.
Even though it was I who asked to be introduced, there was something about him that frightened me. I wanted what he possessed, something I also recognized in my father. It was around this time I told my therapist, “I know I need to be with a narcissist, since I imagine only an artist could handle what I come with, I just need to find a nice one.” Of course, I had no true idea what I meant by that, what it could mean.
A short while after the initial ignored calls, I took my students to see a talk of his given at the university, which happened to be his alma mater.
Again, he called three times. Again, I didn’t answer. On the fourth call, he promised he wasn’t a serial rapist. I called him back, although now I can see his call for the warning that it was.
He wanted to work on a project about love. He was interested in Derek Walcott’s Love After Love, and he wanted to include writing, perhaps poems I would write, alongside the paintings. The more he spoke, the more he reminded me of Frankenstein. In a therapy session, my therapist asked me how I was Frankenstein. I redirected: “I’m Shelley.” She retorted, “That’s too obvious. We have to talk about the ways you’re Victor. The ways you, too, might be the narcissist.” Isn’t the most insufferable quality of Victor is that he never addresses what’s right in front of him?
There was something about him that frightened me.
The more we spoke, in cafes and wine bars, and the more he spouted off all his random ideas around love he wanted to include—the more Frankenstein whispered its name into my ear. Just like the number of times he ignored me, so, too, did he ignore the idea that we should consider Frankenstein, until I let him read my poems.
He was interested in the recurring title I used, taken from my favorite sentence in the text, from when the scientist first looks upon his hideous creation: The beauty of the dream vanished, and in its place—. Only, when I returned to the text to find it, I only found that first phrase, and the one that was my favorite, “and in its place,” nowhere to be found.
I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.
Remember what I said about revisionist history?
We began to work on a show together about Frankenstein. As collaborators, and, shortly thereafter, as lovers.
I became his muse. I taught him the psychic underpinnings of this painting or that one. I stood patiently as he pontificated about his work, or about our developing show on Frankenstein, taking notes in my little black notebook with a blue pen. He stared at me with fondness—or something else I have no word for—as I took bubble baths on the second floor of his studio. We had tenderless sex. We talked about the future, but did we ever speak of love? The memory escapes me.
Before I knew it, I had entered into a pattern of narcissist and narcissist object. I would be brought up and up and up until I had been elevated to the ceiling, and then I would express a frustration, I would challenge one of his thoughtless assumptions, or I would get upset if he brazenly sexualized another woman in front of me, and I would be kicked out of his studio and perhaps his life, until he called and needed me again.
The first moment I knew I needed to free myself of this Frankenstein was the moment of the dress. We were going to see Bill T. Jones, who he’d met before, and who he hoped to convince to collaborate with us. I stepped into a red dress with silk floral cut-outs, a Spanish-inspired frill up the leg in a diagonal. As I walked towards his car, I saw the look on his face: patronizing, disapproving, infantilizing. He demanded I change my dress. “Don’t you understand that you represent me?” he screamed, even though I hadn’t been unwilling to acquiesce. It was that sentence I couldn’t overcome, and neither could group therapy when I told them what had happened. I felt like I was drowning, and I didn’t know how to find my own air.
I would be kicked out of his studio and perhaps his life, until he called and needed me again.
The second moment I knew I needed to free myself of this Frankenstein was the moment of the baked potato. He’d been painting all day, and called me to come over for a break, for us to have dinner. We were going to order takeout, from a barbecue place down the street. I said, “Oh, I’ll have a chopped beef potato,” not thinking anything of it, but feeling increasingly unsafe for reasons I couldn’t discern, as he looked over me with a strange, creeping glare. “No, you won’t,” he said, still staring. “You’ll eat what I tell you to eat!” I didn’t know if he was joking or serious, but I’d learned not to rock the boat. Besides, I’d become a pro at holding steady with a father with an unpredictable raging temper, an emotionally wild mother. I turned my face to the side, and I released the anger out of my mouth in a slow exhale. I turned back. “Can’t you take a fucking joke!” he screamed. I ran out of the studio. His apology came as it always did—“Can you tell me why I did that?”—but I was growing disinterested in expending emotional labor to explain to the Maker what made him.
The final moment was the moment of the painting. I’d allowed him to photograph me for a painting in the show that was intending to “subvert” the idea of “the beautiful woman as monster.” He would call it killer’s kiss. I posed nude, hip cocked, chopsticks holding up my then-long dark hair (vomit) and my feet in strappy bright blue heels. Next to my body rested a sculpture of his, a pregnant African figure—a goddess of fertility. I was nearing the end of my period, but I’d later learn I was already pregnant.
I didn’t remember what I tried to embody when I posed for the photographs that he would use to make the painting. That I had attempted to embody what it was I saw in my twin sister. D told me that seeing the painting would be intense for me. That he would wait to show it to anyone until I felt comfortable. When he showed me the painting, I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how I was feeling. I saw the person I wanted never to become. Before I could even come to terms with all that I had witnessed, all that mirrored within me, he had kicked me out of the studio and stopped speaking to me.
The next day, I went to my favorite breakfast place with a friend, hoping I was having cramps. It was my favorite, my Friday morning ritual: breakfast tacos, fried potatoes, organic coffee. I could barely stomach it, because my belly was wrecked with nausea. I complained about periods, and my friend said, well, that’s better than being pregnant. It was the first moment the possibility occurred to me.
I bought two home pregnancy tests. They turned positive so fast I didn’t have time to wonder.
I didn’t have the kind of mother I could call for this. My therapist was out of town. I called his mother. By the time he got on the phone, he wasn’t happy. “This is not good news. I will send you checks in the mail. We will no longer have a relationship. If you keep this child. Don’t think you’ll automatically be a Mary Poppins.”
The Maker tried to convince me to have an abortion. He used every means imaginable. In the end, I chose to terminate the pregnancy because I could see living beneath the skin the dark heart of my father, who I had tried so hard to run from.
“Your mother abandoned you. I’m your mother, and she abandoned you,” my therapist said when I first told her in session that I was pregnant, when I curled into her soft white chair where so many of my tears remained embedded in the fibers, so many Frankensteins, so many of my monsters.
When I want to remember a time in which I was integrated, felt truly loved, I think of my therapist. I went to group therapy, but I was scared to fall apart. I didn’t know if I could tell them that I would have an abortion the next day. I hadn’t had a chance to tell them I was pregnant. One woman in Group had a newborn, the other eight months pregnant after a long journey. She shined. My therapist was connected to my pain then, her eyes quivering as mine did, while I wore D’s oversized shirt he told me to wear to conceal myself. My therapist and I both began to cry. It was a sign of tenderness I’d never witnessed before. I thought to myself, this what it must be like to have a mother not abandon you, to hold you in your pain.
D had already insisted he wouldn’t come with me to the abortion. He didn’t want anyone to recognize him. My therapist and my entire Group offered to come. It was this fact I used to guilt him into coming. His mother also came. I delivered messages to him through her as the proxy.
The nurse asked me if I wanted to know if I was having twins. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to proceed if I would have the opportunity to be there for a birth experience that I’d had. I answered yes. They weren’t twins. While the doctor suctioned out the pregnancy, I talked to him about Frankenstein.
I tried to recover at his mother’s house. He called with every possible thought or projection, believing we would return from this. I knew better, but I had my own healing to do first. When he learned I’d sought out another friend for comfort, he withdrew the privilege of staying at his mother’s house. His mother, refusing to endure the aspect of the being he created, blamed me for letting him “browbeat me into an abortion.” I rushed out of the room.
While the doctor suctioned out the pregnancy, I talked to him about Frankenstein.
A few days after the abortion, he left a check for his half. Under the memo, he wrote: ART. Shortly after he called letting me know he had made the decision to exhibit the painting in the largest collection in Houston. I decided to write a piece about what it had meant to be a muse, a partner, a collaborator, a monster, an object. I typed ten pages without stopping. I placed my hands on the desk. Another call: he decided not to put the painting in the show.
One year after the abortion, D sent me an email with an image of a painting called Frank, a rip-off of Louise Bourgeois’s Nature Study. The painting included a young girl’s crying eyes streaking mascara, and just above them, a dead-end sign in the snow. The amoebic sculpture is golden, and D’s interpretation holds a shovel in one of its gooey holes, a face on the backside of it.
Four years after the abortion, D exhibited a series of paintings, including the painting I posed for, but also one involving a trampled bridal bouquet, the same African goddess of fertility holding a shotgun in her arm, called Puzzle for Pregnant Girls.
The last email D sent me:
still working on the paintings
please forgive me
Somewhere along the healing process from the abortion, from my loss of innocence, I decided I needed to learn what caused me to enmesh so deeply with narcissists. I initially sheltered myself from the world, with baths and tears, counting down the hours until therapy, who generously saw me twice a week in the early days after. Eventually, I was ready to uncover what led me to this monster, this maker. I returned to the text that continued to open out for me, Frankenstein, which I began to read as a self-help text. I woke at 6 every morning and drove to my favorite café and read and read and read. I began to uncover the thematic underpinnings of male hysteria in the text. It was then I started reading everything I could get my hands on: about Mary Shelley, her marriage with Percy Shelley and how it related to her father, the ideas of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft. If I could come to terms with how I had gotten here, then maybe I would never return again.
I wanted to turn this pain into art, and I felt this story would make a compelling dance theater work. I wasn’t a choreographer, but had loved dance since I was a child, and I pitched the idea of a dance theater adaptation to a queer contemporary ballet choreographer whose work I admired. I’d already seen him produce dance theater adaptations of Titus Andronicus, Romeo & Juliet, and on Mozart, so I knew he was interested in how dance could offer a new embodiment for a literary text. I’d seen him choreograph complicated, psychologically-driven male-male duets, which seemed befitting for a story of this magnitude. It took a year of regurgitating everything I’d studied about Frankenstein monthly in cafes, but soon the choreographer said yes. I gave all the feelings that whirled in me to this production.
I naively assumed the life I had dreamed for was finally within reach.
I brought in ideas around the score, costumes, lighting, staging. All of those days I’d spent early in my youth watching my father produce Chinese plays, all of that watching where I couldn’t understand the language being spoken around me, came out of me into this new work. The choreographer and I came together to create this work outside of my own relationship with narcissism. I’d begun to understand my own queerness, and I’d finally started to detox from the role I’d taken on as a narcissistic support. I started writing a play about all the women within the Frankenstein universe, The Shelley Monologues, bringing them back to life, and I suppose, also me.
What I learned when the curtain rose on our Frankenstein: I would never leave behind what I created, and nothing I created would become monstrous in my own eyes.
I would continue to make work featuring Frankenstein. So many Frankensteins! I wouldn’t finish The Shelley Monologues, but I would write a nonfiction manuscript, titled the same as my unpublished poetry manuscript where the Frankenstein poems lived, after the phrase I believed had been written into the creation scene, but that only existed in my own imagination: and in its place—. In the memoir, I merged Shelley’s story, the stories of Frankenstein, and the text of Frankenstein itself with other texts regarding Shelley into the lines of my own story.
I read from this memoir in 2018, and was asked about the role of whiteness, twinning, being a biracial Asian, and a queer person factored into my understanding of Frankenstein. Although I clearly knew how those aspects of my subjecthood brought Frankenstein to me, I found myself at a loss of how to answer, having spent so much of my time investigating Frankenstein from the lens of my relationships with cis white men. I put this ambivalence in my pocket.
In 2019, retellings cast from the bodies of queer and underrepresented experiences were rising. Georgia was starting to ban early term abortions. I was in love and believed I would start creating a new life of my own, using IVF technologies. As I began to do more research into reproductive technologies, and as more organizing began to develop to advocate for birthing bodies, I returned, yet again, to Frankenstein, realizing I could bring new life to this text, once again. I foolishly believed I’d finally met someone who wasn’t a narcissist. I naively assumed the life I had dreamed for was finally within reach.
I started Unwieldy Creatures, my queer biracial Asian nonbinary Frankenstein, in the heart of the redwoods outside of Santa Cruz, at a residency called Mary Shelley Month: A Laboratory of Fiction. I wanted to see what would happen if I cast Frankenstein as a queer woman of color intent on creating the perfect specimen for herself and other queer people, Elizabeth as a man, Ezra, who left behind the softer parts of himself when his white abusive father silenced them. I wanted to see how IVF would portend darker futures. I wanted to cast white masculinity as the villain.
I wanted to use this new and terrifying political and technological landscape—that in which reproductive technologies were building in ways that brought about a whole new world of ethical implications while at the same time fighting against restriction of bodies—to set a modern story of a creation gone wrong.
Unwieldy Creatures was both of its own fictional experiment and also deeply personal, as I wrote it preparing and testing my body for my own creation that was never to become. By the time I came home, Caroline, Ezra’s wife, had been hanged, innocently framed for the death of her child, caused by the Creature Ezra was responsible for creating, with sabotage. My own love would also sabotage our unborn, bailing on our first appointment the night before, and blaming it on my writing career, on the masterpiece I was created with this new Frankenstein.
A few days later, I would learn everything he had told me was a lie. I’d spent so much time exorcizing the monster within my own body, from the narcissists that I was born from, that raised me. I’d never seen the true wretch all along, right in front of me.
I wanted to see how IVF would portend darker futures. I wanted to cast white masculinity as the villain.
When I left my marriage, the Frankenstein I was making remained unfinished. I didn’t know if I could ever return to it. A few months later, still in despair, COVID blew through the planet. What did this Frankenstein matter when we would all be eradicated from the earth? How could I write through such darkness when even getting through the day felt an ominous miracle? Somehow, somewhere, within me, I barreled through it.
Dr. Frank, a queer biracial Indonesian scientist, determined to find a way to create life without the need for cis men, uses in vitro gametogenesis, a process that uses stem cell technology to create both egg and sperm, and implants the embryo in her first love, a Spanish Japanese woman. When Ezra tampers with her experiment, Dr. Frank makes the most Frankensteinian choice, to withhold the information from the partner who willingly offers her body to carry her life’s ambition. In trying to evade men’s presence in her life, she becomes more like the toxic white father who had caused her so much damage. By the time they learn that the fetus is growing with a genetic condition, one that could be dangerous for both the child and Hana, it’s too late to acquire an abortion, as late-term abortions are illegal in the part of the South where they live. Unwieldy Creatures was informed by and exploring abortion bans in Georgia in 2019. In June 2022, Roe v. Wade would overturn. Six weeks later, what is now the only time period one can easily attain an abortion in many states, and the length of the pregnancy I terminated, Unwieldy Creatures would come to life.
I’m 44 now. And Frankenstein has carried me through every major upheaval in my childhood and adult life for over twenty years. I won’t ask what will come next, but I know when and if it does, that Shelley’s Frankenstein will carry me through, and Shelley, just like she did when I created poems, monologues, memoir, dance theater, and fiction, will be there to guide me, to help me find my own self, to cradle the creatures within me, and let the monsters be damned.
For me, it all started with Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Then came the tales of Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson, Ursula LeGuin. Storytelling that takes vivid imagination combined with some devastating reality to add up to something that is unsettling and disturbing.
You can get your socks spooked off by the supernatural, the ghostly, the otherworldly. But a story can also be really freaky even by just nudging at the thin veil between reality and fantasy. As stories like “The Lottery,” “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” show, sometimes the most alarming threat is coming from inside the house (like, literally in “The Tell-Tale Heart”). Sometimes, human nature is the creepiest thing imaginable. It’s us, hi, we’re the problem, it’s us.
The Latina writers on this list represent a range of cultures and creative sensibilities. Five are contemporary, but two are classics that are still worth reading today. As Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of the new novel Silver Nitrate, described in “Saying Goodbye to Magical Realism,” they and other writers are pushing the boundaries of genre beyond the default descriptions for Latinx writers. Is it magical realism? Is it horror? Is it fantasy? Yes, and then some.
The books on this list are all collections of short stories. As short stories, each one has a fraction of the word count to pull the reader in, give them goosebumps, and leave them checking under their beds at night or sleeping with the light on. Or both.
Some of these tales are about ghouls and creatures. Some of them blur the line between reality and magic. Others find their creepiness in exploring the logical conclusions of some of humanity’s worst qualities: the tendency to fear the other, the desperate need to preserve the self at all costs, or the ability to be cruel at random. The horror!
The chilling stories of Things We Lost in the Fire by Argentinean author Enriquez tell of a bleak and sinister world where everything is imbued with a sense of isolation and loneliness. Add to this a menacing backdrop of the danger of living in an uncertain political climate. Otherworldly terrors walk among people, as in “Adela’s House,” in which the narrator recalls the grim circumstances that led to the death of her friend and her brother, and the macabre house at the center of all that transpires.
Enriquez deftly blends bizarre reality with even more bizarre unreality, such as the ghostly encounter that terrifies two girls (“The Inn”). Stories like “End of Term,” in which a girl’s strange behavior freaks out her classmates, further blur the lines between this world and an unearthly one.
The sharp details of these carefully crafted stories linger in the mind long after reading the final pages. Peynado drops readers into tensely realistic worlds where individuals and communities grapple with all-too-familiar uncomfortable issues coupled with strange happenings, as in “Thoughts and Prayers,” in which a community struggles with the aftermath of violence, while strange, mute angels reside on the rooftops of their homes, seemingly oblivious to the chaos that they cause.
But into the middle of these already fraught dynamics enters an unexpected element, often with dramatic results: kite-flying aliens, a girl with translucently pale skin, expats who can fly. In “The Stones of Sorrow Lake,” a woman visits her fiance’s hometown, where residents’ sorrows grow from their bodies as literal stones, which they pile up by a local lake. In “True Love Game,” while tensions mount at school with the white kids who bully them, the characters also contend with the strange ghosts who live in the basement.
The stories of Maria, Maria inhabit a world that is firmly rooted in magic. These are not characters who wonder if something otherworldly is happening, they know it is. And in some cases, they are making it happen, such as the lonely young girl who unearths and resurrects the skeleton of a saber-toothed tiger (“The Burial”). “His roar is the song I didn’t know I could sing,” she says. Rubio’s stories are vivid renderings of the ebb and flow of the tension and harmony as humanity, the natural world, and the supernatural realm intersect. For characters who are stuck in place, colliding with this intersection gives them the momentum they need to move forward. In “Tijuca,” a woman travels to the jungle to fulfill her promise to her deceased husband that she will return his body to the earth and bury his head there. In “Carlos Across Space and Time,” two women take advantage of a mirror’s ability to show them alternate timelines to try and make sense of their friend’s death—and perhaps give him a better ending.
Before she wrote In the Dream House, in which she dissected the chronology of an abusive relationship in painful detail, Machado awed with this collection of stories that provoke cringes, gasps, outrage, grief—rinse and repeat. The characters navigate the ravaging impact relationships can have—on themselves, on their partners, as in one story that explores a long marriage marred the husband inability to accept that he can never know the meaning of the mysterious green ribbon around his wife’s neck (“The Husband Stitch”).
The stories play out in settings as quiet as the space between two married people or as large as a nation swept by a mysterious pandemic. But the results are often bleak. In “Real Women Have Bodies,” the narrator embarks on a new relationship while a mysterious illness is making women fade away until they are practically invisible. “Inventory” isn’t at all what it seems at first—the listing off of the narrator’s lovers turns out to be a way to tell a grimmer story that is happening at a much larger scale.
Images of dolls appear in several stories in this collection by Puerto Rican author Ferré, and it’s an apt metaphor for characters who chafe powerlessly against the gilded cages they live in, desperate to find meaning and purpose in their lives. There’s the title story, about a woman who makes strange, lifelike dolls for her nieces, which sets the tone for the collection, at turns both mournful and menacing. Then there’s “Marina and the Lion” starts with the main character Marina appearing at a party set in a box covered in cellphone as though she’s a doll—a 20th-century Puerto Rican Barbie. The stories are set against a backdrop of Puerto Rican politics, as the characters face the inescapable realities of their island’s occupation by the United States.
In the foreword to Forgotten Journey, there is a quote from Argentinian author Ocampo talking about why she wrote short stories: “I think the short story is music,” she said. And in fact, each of the 28 stories in this collection are like songs, capturing in brief, poetic flashes disturbing glimpses into tragic moments. Ocampo writes matter-of-factly about death and dying, as in “Skylight,” when a bedtime battle between a girl and her caregiver quickly takes a tragic turn. Or as in “The Two Houses of Olivos,” when two girls exchange places and go to stay at the other’s home, but they forget to swap guardian angels. Reading these slight snapshots are like watching a car crash, as in “The Poorly Made Portrait,” in which a mother who has ignored her son’s attempts to distract her from her fashion magazine finds when she finally goes to search for him that she may have missed her last chance.
This collection, which was published before Moreno-Garcia’s creeptastic novel Mexican Gothic, plays on many of the same themes: mysterious things that go bump in the night, fearsome folklore, and strange people with sinister motives. Whether it’s the vampire a journalist runs into at a late-night diner (“Stories With Happy Endings”—a very different twist to Interview with a Vampire) or the man who hires people to spend time with him and his boss, an octopus-like alien (“Driving With Aliens in Tijuana”), it’s often the people who cannot be trusted more than the strange creatures.
Nature and fantasy are braided together in ways that are weird and wonderful, none more so than “Scales as Pale as Moonlight,” in which the narrator, grieving the loss of her unborn child, finds escape in a supernatural encounter. But for the characters in these stories, drawn an underworld of mystery and magic from which there is often no escape.
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