8 Campus Novels Set in Grad School

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

The fictional characters in most campus novels are almost always undergraduates between the tender ages of eighteen and twenty-two. (Think of novels such as The Secret History, The Idiot, On Beauty, The Marriage Plot, A Separate Peace, The Incendiaries, Normal People, etc.) These revelatory stories, underscored by a character’s long-awaited independence mixed with terrible homesickness, retain their beauty and their reserved places in our hearts… But where are the campus novels about graduate students? These older academic scholars attain their own moments of discovery and wondrous breakthroughs and crippling finals’ weeks too, yet seem overlooked in the literary canon and sphere of bildungsromans. 

After scouring syllabi, peer recommendations, and my own reading history, I’ve gathered eight stories about Master’s and PhD-seeking academics with characters pursuing advanced degrees in various fields from Biochemistry to Comparative Literature to Neuroscience to Spanish Poetry. These postgrads—who quietly haunt the same libraries, apply for the same scarce resources, and lurk around the same quad as undergrads (although are probably rolling their eyes at yet another freshman’s first tailgate)—often get forsaken, but they take the spotlight here as they tackle life’s biggest questions and find themselves over and over again. The following eight novels promise to immerse you in the esoteric bubble of graduate programs, the “dark academia” mood, and that hazy, never-ending desire for “purpose.” 

Bunny by Mona Awad

Samantha Mackey, an introverted scholarship student, is pursuing an MFA degree in Creative Writing at one of New England’s most elite universities in Mona Awad’s seductively endearing second novel, Bunny. When first beginning the graduate program, Samantha mocks the circle of obnoxiously rich, twee girls who call each other “Bunny,” frequent a café only serving miniature food, dismiss her submissions in class, and supposedly hold ritualistic, exclusive off-campus workshops that sound more like a cult than extra credit. But once she gets the invitation to join the “Smut Salon,” she realizes that first impressions aren’t what they seem, and that reality may not be clearly defined for some as much as others. 

On top of all that, the prose is dazzling and intoxicating enough to make you want a glass of whatever Samantha Mackey is drinking:

“I pour myself and Ava more free champagne in the far corner of the tented green, where I lean against a white Doric pillar bedecked with billowing tulle. September. Warren University. The Narrative Arts department’s annual welcome back Demitasse, because this school is too Ivy and New England to call a party a party.”

— Bunny, Mona Awad

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

On the surface, Wallace is studying Biochemistry at a midwestern university, but truly in Real Life, the postgrad protagonist learns about the chemical compositions and DNA that binds friendship, loneliness, volatile relationships, grief, and coming into one’s own sexuality. This brilliant and evocative novel begins one Friday evening as Wallace attends a get-together with some of the students from his (predominantly white) PhD program. This is a shock to them, and possibly even to Wallace himself, as he’s usually introverted and averse to any group events. But trying to distract his mind from the failing genetic experiment he’s devoted years to, or perhaps from his father’s recent funeral in which he was absent, Wallace shows up, and a series of complications—as well as confrontations—ensues.

Chemistry by Weike Wang

In Chemistry, an unnamed, ambitious, quirky narrator pursuing a PhD in Chemistry at Boston University, faces a life-changing decision when her boyfriend, Eric, proposes to her. She answers ambivalently, to Eric’s confusion and disappointment, who then considers taking a job in Ohio. Throughout this state of limbo, the narrator’s seemingly perfect life begins to fall apart. Amidst a mental breakdown, she throws beakers, quits her PhD program, begins drinking, stays out at night, and reimagines her life. Tracing back to her youth, as the only child of Chinese immigrants, the narrator realizes her upbringing hadn’t trained her to accept love as much as it trained her to look at the world with the lens of the scientific method. And throughout the rest of Chemistry, the aimless narrator crawls back to stability and just maybe learns how to finally let love in, or at the very least, which path to pursue next. 

The Possessed by Elif Batuman

Alright, fine. Technically, this book isn’t a novel. But it is by Elif Batuman—the author who wrote The Idiot, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—and, besides, the narrator in The Possessed seems to maintain the voice of someone who’s been writing novels for years. If you didn’t know that it was based on Batuman’s real experiences studying Comparative Literature at Stanford University, you might even think that this Russian-adventure-filled, stuffy-and-pretentious-academic-character-filled, Tolstoy-obsessed, hilarious-and-eye-opening book couldn’t possibly be true. But the reality of it is what makes this nonfiction debut even more enthralling. 

My Education by Susan Choi

Combining academics with obsession, this novel by Susan Choi ponders what happens when a graduate student/TA falls for her enigmatic, problematic poetry professor. This is the point where most stories would end. But Choi takes it one step further in My Education as the narrator, Regina Gottlieb, finds her sexual attraction widening and encompassing the inner circle of her graduate program, eventually leading to the professor’s wife. However, it doesn’t end there. The surprises and twists of this luminous novel are delightful as much as they are seducing. And, it’s greatly impacted by the way Regina tells her story in reminiscences from a later age, once she is fifteen years older but, perhaps, still not the wiser. 

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, follows a family of Ghanaian immigrants while focusing on Gifty, the narrator in her fifth year of graduate school, studying Neuroscience at the Stanford School of Medicine. Gifty specifically researches the neural patterns of reward-seeking mice with the hopes of unlocking a secret cure to both addiction and depression. After her brother, Nana, passes away from an overdose and her mother retreats to Gifty’s bed in bouts of suicidal thoughts, Gifty retreats into her studies and searches endlessly for answers. This is a novel that can be read, or it can be experienced—through spiritual and religious exploration, scientific explanation, and the overarching goal of transformation, Gyasi outdoes herself yet again with a phenomenal 264 pages of intellectual expansion. 

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Adam Gordon is in his mid-twenties, on a graduate fellowship in Madrid, and an “intellectual” tourist who has a passing gravitation towards Spanish poetry. It is the spring of 2004, and our narrator is most definitely not sober. Preceding the infamous bombing of the Atocha Station, Adam wanders aimlessly around the city, observing landmarks and museum paintings and women—then attending parties in which he makes “meaningless” but thoughtful remarks on the state of his generation. Adam simultaneously meanders through Madrid’s plazas, exhibitions, and bars as much as he runs through thoughts on the lack of his expected transformation derived from art. 

“Although I claimed to be a poet, although my supposed talent as a writer had earned me my fellowship in Spain, I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility.”

— Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner

And then, the tragedy occurs. So, should he write a poem about it, or something with poetic possibility? 

Immigrant, Montana by Amitava Kumar

From Delhi, Kailash moves to New York City to attend graduate school, and there, learns about love and lust as much as philosophy, literature, or politics. Throughout this novel that details a sentimental education and an Indian immigrant’s experience, Kailash adjusts and confronts the mistreatment and prejudice he encounters in the US, but at the same time, tries to find his purpose in life. While pursuing an advanced degree, Kailash also pursues three women, each changing him and teaching him more about himself and the languages of desire than he thought possible. Told retrospectively, Immigrant, Montana ultimately revolves around middle-aged Kailash, who looks back on his first years of living in America to trace the evolution of how he became a writer. 

“For so many years, the idea of writing has meant recognizing and even addressing a division in my life: the gap between India, the land of my birth, and the United States, where I arrived as a young adult… The two places are connected, not only by those histories that cultural organizations celebrate through endlessly dull annual gatherings but by millions of individual yearnings, all those stories of consummated or thwarted desire.”

— Immigrant, Montana, Amitava Kumar

You Get A Barbie Movie! You Get A Barbie Movie! Everyone Gets A Barbie Movie!

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

“What might this be?” had been a question that, in the course of my thirty-five-year career as a clinical psychologist, I’d posed to clients hundreds of times. It was, in fact, the customary prompt used when administering the “Rorschach,” which is a type of personality measure that calls for asking a patient to look at ambiguous images on a set of ten “cards,” each one resembling an inkblot, and then spontaneously offer up what it looks like to them. Considered by many in the field to be useful in gaining access to the unconscious, it is typically used by clinicians as a helpful tool for working toward a diagnosis, using that set of ten cards, each one presenting an image different than the last. As such, diagnosing helps the psychologist zero in on the patient’s emotional state as it relates to past history. 

Since closing my therapy practice in 2019 to build a writing career, I’d given little thought to the “Rorschach.” Until two weeks ago. I was popcorning my way through an afternoon screening of Barbie—this summer’s blockbuster hit—and began to contemplate how I would characterize the film, if asked. The question intrigued me: was it possible that a show ostensibly about the travails of a famous plastic doll created for young girls––first in Barbie Land, and then in the Real World—could be hailed as a movie about something far deeper? Something more than a live-action cartoon? 

I nodded, reading her remark for a deeper level, just as any good psychologist would.

“So, what did you think?” I’d asked Ava, my perceptive thirteen-year-old niece, and movie buddy, as we’d moseyed our way home from the local AMC. Not wanting to influence her reaction, I avoided sharing that I’d pegged the story and visuals as a terrific mashup of creative and shrewd, or mentioning any scuttlebutt about the movie being either controversial or without substance. “It was great!” she replied. “Funny—with a good message about just being yourself.” I nodded, reading her remark for a deeper level, just as any good psychologist would. Barbie had resonated with Ava as a flick about identity and belonging. I wasn’t surprised: she was, after all, a young girl part of today’s cultural and physical wave of adolescence, and certainly, the film’s pitch for self-acceptance had been one of its overarching refrains.

A day or two later, however—after neighbors and friends who’d also seen the movie weighed in when I asked in a conversational tone—I had the chance to peruse several of the many “think pieces” that had surfaced online in the wake of the film: they quite often put forth the idea, in layman’s terms, that Barbie was its own kind of inkblot. An inner voice, one that had often brought me insight, now prodded me to consider this question like each of the ten cards drawn from the full Rorschach set: Hadn’t Barbie offered up a kaleidoscope of visual images—all of which illuminated many kinds of ideas—the kind only a film could offer?

Intrigued, I began to mull, in earnest, the questions Barbie posed. The varied responses I’d heard suggested that there were myriad ways of understanding the movie’s “real” message: Was Barbie, espoused by the several women with whom I’d schmoozed, simply a full-bore treatise on feminism in disguise? One that offered a cheeky takedown on the principles and practices of male dominance? As interesting, perhaps, was my observation that while these gals seemed in agreement about what the film had really meant, they were evenly split about whether its message was one to be celebrated or eschewed—and why.

I began listening closely for which images and scenes had been critical in creating their reactions.

An activist pal who was considering a run for our local library board in order to be heard as a voice against censorship, pronounced one afternoon that Barbie’s message was a more subversive one. Instead of mere entertainment, was it instead a poke-in-the-eye polemic aimed at the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on a woman’s right to abortion? I hadn’t given a lot of thought to seeing the movie from that angle, I confessed at that point. She’d looked at me with astonishment—and then with irritation. “How did you not get that?” she’d nearly shouted. “When Barbie protested Ken’s plan to overturn the Constitution in Barbie Land? And lectures him on how intensely the Barbies worked to make the Constitution everything it was? That it couldn’t just be undone in a day?” And then the way Ken answers, ‘Both literally and figuratively—just watch me?’”  

Or, was Barbie essentially “a masterstroke by Mattel” as my cousin who was a civil engineer—and who was twenty years younger than I—suggested in a text? “They managed to be irreverent and funny while (sort of) acknowledging Barbie’s shortcomings—and in the end will probably sell millions more Barbies.” 

The psychologist who still lived in my head grew even more curious: with so many disparate takeaways voiced, and likely, a host of other, different interpretations yet to be heard, I began listening closely for which images and scenes had been critical in creating their reactions.

“Well, I mostly considered it as about mortality and the concept of discovering purpose in one’s life,” said Lanie, a woman I’d met only recently, over iced lattes at Starbucks one late afternoon. We were interrupted then by a woman who was a stranger at the next table; she offered a comment which was unsolicited and which, for a moment, took me in another direction: “That’s wild,” she opined. “For me, it was a total send-up of every cultural stereotype out there. And boy, was it a hoot!” 

Smiling, I turned my attention back to my new friend Lanie then, and asked “What do you mean?” Shaking her head, she laughed. “Are you kidding me? All those repeated references to death and anxiety and Barbie’s ‘existential crisis?’” A moment later, however, slumped down in her seat, Lanie appeared sad. “And the old lady on the bench who Barbie declares beautiful? And the woman happily agrees?” 

Like the stranger in Starbucks, I, too, had originally declared Barbie simply as a high-spirited romp.

I nodded, remembering this scene in which Barbie arrives in the Real World—and encounters, for the first time ever, a person who is old—and how touching the two characters’ exchange had been. “But did you notice how, as Barbie walks away, the woman looks down at her newspaper?” she added with a sigh. “I wanted to cry because she seemed so lonely. Like someone who realized her life was nearing its end.”

I was aware that it was neither my place nor was there enough data to make any sort of clinical observation based on such a brief “share.” Nevertheless, my long-time experience in my practice, and even my training—all this had taught me to pay attention to language, both spoken and expressed through physical cues. “So, was the movie a downer for you?” I asked as I sipped the last of my coffee through the straw. Lanie’s answer came fast. “Oh no!” she insisted, before then slowly adding, “Well, maybe.” I thought then about what I knew to be Lanie’s ongoing worry about her health, as well as her sorrow about not being able to rely on immediate family, with whom she was not on particularly good terms. Imagining that her own life circumstances had made her sad for the character and thus, unconsciously for herself, seemed hardly a clinical stretch.

It was only while driving home afterward, however, that the small voice so often present in my mind finally chimed in: So, what about you? it wanted to know. You seemed to get pretty teary-eyed during those scenes between the Real World mom and her sullen tween daughter. Like the stranger in Starbucks, I, too, had originally declared Barbie simply as a high-spirited romp, but now I saw that my conversation with Lanie had stirred something more in me. I had, in fact, actually been moved by what I recognized as the movie’s “Challenges of Motherhood” theme. 

She’d sensed my need to be recognized as a different kind of mother than the one that I had had as an adolescent.

This is what spoke to me then. An image rose in my mind of a scene in the movie when the “Real World” mom reaches past the driver’s seat to hug, Sasha, her tween daughter as she drops her off at school and is quickly rebuffed. How easy it had been to identify with the sadness exhibited by Sasha’s mom as she stumbled in her efforts to connect with her girl. And easier still, to recall the many false steps I’d made with my daughter, Grace, and the real-world tango we had danced—one which required me to understand my own ability to know when to lean in and when to let go. 

By sophomore year in high school, Grace had demonstrated all the attributes I’d always hoped to see. She was an independent thinker, a good friend to her peers, motivated in her studies, and committed to her violin. And not only did she have a good ear for music, she also had an equal proficiency for understanding the underbelly of what people were really saying. Yet, on the home front, a new Grace had simultaneously made herself known. Suddenly, I had an adolescent antagonist under my roof. A daughter who challenged my understanding of all she was going through at every turn.

At the time, I remembered thinking that her rebellion seemed misplaced, despite how much I prided myself on my abilities to listen to her, to interpret and respond in ways that would enrich our relationship. I’d hoped our interactions would be very different than the ones I’d experienced with my own mother, whose frequent rages, followed by long hours when she would disappear from our home, had terrified me when I was a girl. Wishfully, I’d thought that Grace and I could escape so much of this contentious behavior because I cared so deeply for her and believed I understood her so well.

Now I had compassion for the anxious mother I’d once been.

“Grace is off-the-charts smart,” Roxanne—my business partner, friend, and one of the best child and adolescent therapists with whom I’d ever worked—had said, and laughed. “Besides which, she’s a teenager, Terry! You should want her to push back in ways that are safe.” I’d known even then that Roxie was correct––but such knowledge hadn’t made it any easier to deal with my daughter’s strong emotions. Even with my friend’s counsel, I’d wrestled with my frustration. 

With a gaze like a tractor beam, Grace had challenged me, focusing on my “listening” skills: surely on some level, she’d sensed my need to be recognized as a different kind of mother than the one that I had had as an adolescent. Real Mom’s monologue about it being “literally impossible to be a woman,” came back to me then, and the phrase “never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line” echoed loud in my mind. 

I had resolved to be a mother who paid attention to her daughter’s needs and wants. And thus, Grace’s capacity to read me was artful—just as was Sasha’s capacity to read her mother—the apt judgments of canny teenagers. 

During that year when she’d turned fifteen, I didn’t see Grace’s ability to tune in to people—especially me—as a gift. I wanted a daughter who did not give me a tough time. Unconsciously, I’d been pulling for a girl who would demonstrate some of the personality traits—the better ones—that I had possessed at her age. A teenager who worked hard; who was generous and kind, at least part of the time. 

So, when Grace got sassy or threatened to explode––neither of which she ever did in public––I chose to believe, despite all my experience in working with adolescents, that the problem was not with my ears, but with her mouth. I hated having to parent an insubordinate teenager. Especially one who could be so emotionally intense. I didn’t want an unhappy, edgy daughter who might oppose me at every turn—or even slide off the rails. A daughter whose temper might escalate into a rage, as had my mother’s. Or, I was dismayed to see, my own.

Not surprisingly, a rapprochement in Grace’s and my real-life dance took far longer to achieve than it did for Sasha and her mother. I reminded myself that the film was just a movie. Nevertheless, how surprising it was to recognize now the easy way I’d been sucked down into the characters’ fraught relationship—and in so doing, managed to project my own thoughts, feelings, and meanings onto theirs. This had shaped my perspective on the movie as a whole. I steered my Honda into the driveway, grateful that I could look back now on those years when the difficulties I had understanding Grace’s attitude had dominated so much of my life; yet now I had compassion for the anxious mother I’d once been––a mother who’d had no healthy model for knowing how to raise a girl; for knowing when to step in and when to step back.

This past Sunday, I had picked up the phone. The call was from my millennial daughter, who said without preamble: “Okay, Mom, I went to that movie this afternoon, and I told myself the whole way through, ‘For God’s sake, Grace, you just cannot cry through a movie about a stupid Barbie.’ The truth is, though, that I nearly lost it.” Beyond curious now, particularly because Grace and I had not discussed it previously, I couldn’t wait to hear what she had to say. 

Hoping not to influence her reaction, I only asked, “What about it touched you?” “Oh my God, Mom,” she replied, “the whole mother-daughter thing!” Then, quietly, she explained. “That scene where Barbie asks her creator for permission to become human and Ruth tells her that she doesn’t need her permission? Well, that whole thing got to me, but especially when she tells Barbie, ‘We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back to see how far they’ve come.’”

Staying silent, I listened as Grace continued, her tone soft now: “For me, that showed such a real reverence for the sacrifices women still have to make; as providers for their daughters; from generation to generation, how strong women lift one another up. And then the cycle begins again.” Was this a reflection that called for an interpretation? Not for this old-school clinician and mother, who, as might be expected, was too busy wiping a grateful tear from her eye. How far we both had come. The Barbie filmmakers have dubbed it “a movie for everyone,” and on this point, I’m inclined to believe their assessment is correct. Like a symmetrically rendered ink splotch, there’s just enough shape for it to be whatever kind of story any one of us wants it—or, more importantly, needs it—to be. In the meantime, I’m anticipating my next opportunity to kibbitz about “stupid Barbie,” where I imagine that for starters, I’ll be asking: “So, tell me, which Barbie movie did you see?”

9 Graphic Poetry Collections That Reimagine Text and Image

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Sure, graphic novels and memoirs are the latest literary rage, but have you heard about graphic poetry? Many contemporary women poets are reimagining the relationship between text and image, offering new ways of representing women’s bodies, and cutting and erasing found texts like they’re slicing up the patriarchy itself. And in many ways, they are. Their graphic poems often reconstitute source texts by men, which they delight in erasing and rewriting. Each visual and textual utterance is a powerful reclamation of self, voice, body, and history.

In my introduction to the Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature, which I co-edited with Tom Hart, I chart a longer-than-might-be-expected history of graphic literature that is, alas, just as male-dominated as one might expect. Beginning in ancient Egypt, I suggest a literary lineage that includes medieval Japanese Emaki, Mayan codices, William Blake’s late 18th-century “illuminated printing,” and the early 20th-century concrete poems of Guillaume Apollinaire. In other words, mostly men. 

Perhaps that’s why the work of these 8 graphic poets speaks to me so powerfully. They are speaking for generations of silenced women—and they are angry. 

Silent Anatomies by Monica Ong

This powerful collection includes digital collages of anatomical drawings, X-rays, photos, and ultrasounds, but I especially love the vintage medicine bottles on which Ong created labels with various riffs on “instructions for use,” each cheekily labeled “Ancient Chinese Secret.” 

The first poem, “The Glass Larynx,” conjures the power of voice with its opening lines, “lips part/disrupt” adjacent to an anatomical illustration of a larynx. The next poem, “Bo Kusho,” which translates to “without luck,” refers to the speaker’s grandfather’s shame at “the fact of five daughters.” On the facing page is a photo of Ong’s mother with her siblings: her mother is disguised as one of the brothers: “The terror of asymmetry. This shortage of sons.” 

Her Read by Jennifer Sperry Steinorth  

In 1931, English art critic Herbert Read published the first edition of The Meaning of Art, described on its jacket as “a compact survey of the world’s art.” What was notable to contemporary poet Jennifer Sperry Steinorth was that Read didn’t include a single woman artist in his survey. “P    l   e  a       s  e,” says the speaker who transforms Herbert Read’s text into Her Read: “let/us!/re/fashion/the  story.” Steinorth does just that by taking ink, paint, knife, and sewing needle to Read’s original text, creating a triumphant response, not only for the current generation but for all women. Over a reproduction of Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory, the speaker invites us to “dig deep and sing our great great/great great great great great great/great great/Grand Mothers’ blues.” 

Hotel Almighty by S. Jane Sloat 

More in the spirit of play than protest, S. Jane Sloat creates poetry from prose, reconstituting the words and world of Stephen King’s Misery. Sloat finds dreamy delight in King’s suspenseful tale: “In an act of imagination/late at night./He threw back his head and/a variety of strange and poisonous flowers grew.” These lines feel like they speak to the creative process in general and to this book in particular. Each page is a poem revealed through erasure, strange word-flowers growing up from crayons, collage fragments, and loose threads that suggest a feminine hand.

In Between by Mita Mahato 

Mita Mahato’s delicate cut-paper collages captivate the eye while communicating anger and grief: at the loss of her mother, at the loss of animal species, at the election of Donald Trump. Mahato’s main medium is newsprint, ephemeral and disposable by design, from which she creates elegiac poetry in surprising silhouettes. In “The Extinction Limericks” Mahato transforms the bouncy and bawdy refrain of limericks into a lament of loss: “There once was a tiger from Java.” The rest of the “limerick” is missing; only the silhouette of an extinct tiger remains. The book ends in anger and fear as a new President takes office. The red stripes of the American flag twist and turn over news photos amid hand-lettered lines of the “Star Spangled Banner”: “Oh say can you see?/Oh say can you see.”

Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours by Bianca Stone

Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours is filled with inky drawings of women’s bodies—in houses, as houses, with houses as heads, and without heads. “For my ladies,” Stone writes in an unsteady cursive, “whose beauty and sorrow are great.” In Stone’s poetry comics, lines of her own poetry now appear in speech bubbles attached to various characters, animals, and inanimate objects, disrupting the notion of a poem’s “speaker” and the fluidity of identity.  

Hollywood Forever by Harmony Holiday 

Reading Harmony Holiday’s Hollywood Forever is like watching a heady documentary of Black history while a poet stands in front of the television reciting her poems. The background and foreground texts compete with and complement one another in a transformational sensory experience. The speaker asks herself, as if she is asking someone else: “In what ways did watching your/black father beat your white mother empower you as a brown baby?” But the lines of the poem are almost indistinguishable from the text of the front page of the The Atlanta Constitution, digitally collaged in the background, with its headline article: “Dr. King Shot, Dies in Memphis; Curfew On, 4,000 Guards Called.” On the lower half of the page, where the speaker says of her birth, “I arrived as a kind of vengeance,” the words are written over the face of a smiling woman in an ad for Nadinola, a skin lightening cream. Throughout the book, violence against women is intertwined with violence against Black people in a white supremacist America where—in a notice from the Citizens’ Council of New Orleans that appears repeatedly—“Negro Music” is blamed for “undermining the morals of our white youth in America.”

Glyph by Naoko Fujimoto 

In a powerful affirmation of herself as an artist and a reclamation of her roots, Naoko Fujimoto uses her own poetry as source material and takes inspiration from the Japanese tradition of Emaki (picture scrolls) to create an entirely new form of graphic poetry. Fujimoto grew up in Nagoya, Japan where she often visited the Tokugawa Art Museum to see the 11th-century picture scrolls of the Tale of Genji. As a poet living in the U.S., and she composes poetry in a combination of English and Japanese, writing toward an English version for publication. In Glyph, she translates and transforms her poems once again, choosing key lines and combining them with collage and illustrations. The larger format of the book reflects the original oversized 16” x 20” graphic poems. Fujimoto writes that her work is trans-sensory, and indeed it feels like multiple senses are experiencing her kinetic poems, like the tactile collage of a towel fragment turned into an upside-down American flag, representing a towel her grandfather was given to wipe his face after the atomic bomb was dropped in Hiroshima. 

Likeness by Katrina Roberts

Katrina Roberts’ Likeness is an ekphrastic search for self—“Mother, daughter, beyond gen-der”—beyond language. “No/words,” begins the prologue of Likeness, which is written in the shape of a house made of words. The book’s poems are composed, not of words, but of images; the poetic “lines” are drawn not written. Many images are “after” famous works of art by men, figures whose heads are replaced with kitchen utensils, weapons, and rainbows. Speech bubbles are filled with signs, signifiers, and scribbles, suggesting the limits of language. 

Book of No Ledge by Nance Van Winkel

Nance Van Winkel’s Book of No Ledge is an erasure of the knowledge imparted by the set of encyclopedias her family purchased when she was thirteen. As she explains in her introduction, each page featured “Mr. Explainer,” providing information about such things as “The World” and “Dinosaurs.” Decades later, Van Winkel is “a much older woman” with “X-acto blades,” and Mr. Explainer begs her not to “chop away that whole paragraph about the wonderful westward expansion and put some poem in its place.” But she does it anyway, hilariously, poignantly. 

The Must-Read Debut Short Story Collections of 2023

Posted on by EL Assistant2

I seldom promote binaries, but I think it’s safe to say that there are two types of stories at work in 2023’s astounding selection of debut short story collections: those set in far-away realities, and those grounded in our immediate world. 

Travel to the Appalachians, Soweto, Port Harcourt, Bangalore and listen closely to the local dialects of the characters. Or perhaps venture to a town grown on the back of a whale, a multiversal rave, or various impending dystopias. Wherever the story takes you, watch as the absurd becomes familiar, and the mundane turns fantastical. Listen as modern anxieties bubble to the surface. 

Below are the short story collections written by debut authors that you don’t want to miss:

Welcome Me to the Kingdom by Mai Nardone

Bangkok is a vast and viscous city in Mai Nardone’s Welcome Me to the Kingdom. Spanning decades and shifting perspectives, this collection of seventeen interconnected stories focuses on three families: an Elvis impersonator and his daughter, a group of orphaned boys grifting their way to the top, and a Thai family abandoned by an American expat. While these characters appear to have little in common, they are united by the 1997 financial crisis, the devastating aftermath of which haunts the characters for decades. Featuring Buddhist cults, skin-whitening routines, sex tourism, and the occasional cock-fight, Welcome Me to the Kingdom holds no punches in exposing the brutal city that lies beneath the glamorized “land of smiles.”

Innards by Magogodi oaMphela Makhene

Innards. The title itself conjures to mind the grim, the grotesque, and an intense intimacy, all of which you will find in Magogodi oaMphela Makhene’s debut collection. Set in Soweto, South Africa, Innards features everyday Black South Africans navigating a society haunted by apartheid: a girl discovers a burning body; a fake freedom fighter becomes a fake PhD; a woman running high on a get-rich-quick scheme soon runs out of luck. In one instance, a story is narrated by a house. Intensely immersive in both imagery and dialect, Innards takes readers to a South Africa steeped in violence and tenderness, decay and life. 

The Sorrows of Others by Ada Zhang

What happens when we leave home? What happens when we don’t? Ada Zhang’s debut collection, set in New York, Texas, Arizona, and China in the years following the Cultural Revolution, features a cast of characters who must confront these questions. In “Knowing,” a woman discovers an unexpected connection between her mother and math tutor. “The Subject” follows an art student grappling with new and unsettling knowledge she has learned about her grandmother. The titular “The Sorrows of Others” portrays an unconventional yet serendipitous arranged marriage. Though the characters in Zhang’s stories range in age and identity, location and history, they are united by their status as outsiders, whether that be from their neighbors, friends, or very own family. 

Uranians by Theodore McCombs

How to describe Uranians? Think queer, multiversal, apocalyptic space opera. “Toward a Theory of Alternative Lifestyles” brings to life a world in which one may witness alternate lifetimes at a local rave. “Laguna Beach” delivers a climate-ravaged San Francisco. The titular “Uranians” is straight up set in space, featuring a cast of queer artists and scientists invited to be a part of a generation ship on a “planet B” type voyage. Five stories long, Theodore McCombs’ Uranians is an extensively researched, expertly crafted fever-dream delight. 

Boomtown Girl by Shubha Sunder

Nine short stories set in Bangalore, India, Boomtown Girl traces the minute changes that occur as a backwater town rapidly transforms into a bustling tech hub. Tweens confront their own blooming desires and ambitions as adults struggle for footing in an ever modernizing landscape. Though each story orbits a countrywide shift in economics and culture, the focus nevertheless remains on the everyday worries and dreams conjured by the grounded cast of characters that reside on each page. 

Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go by Cleo Qian

As the information age progresses, more and more stories wade into the dark waters of technological crisis. In her debut collection Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go, Cleo Qian focuses particularly on the impact technology, consumer culture, and media have on the lives of Asian women. Eerie yet compassionate, the stories venture into the speculative: a 22 year old woman fends off her loneliness on fellowship by playing a dating simulator; a teenager having undergone double eyelid surgery begins seeing telling marks on other’s bodies; ex-classmates reunite on Japan’s Mount Haruna for a social experiment that results in a disappearance. Wildly imaginative yet unnervingly real, Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go fronts the anxieties and lonesomeness of twenty-first century Asian women. 

A Manual for How to Love Us by Erin Slaughter

Feminine grief runs through the pages of poet Erin Slaughter’s debut short story collection, A Manual for How to Love Us—though, to be clear, you will find no beautifully tragic widows content to weep in the background. Instead, women consume raw meat, work at frat houses, and peddle dubious medications on the internet. They are unchecked and impulsive, pursuing their whims in the wake of great sorrows. With a poet’s lyricism, Erin Slaughter crafts a debut collection that is speculative, dark, and thoroughly feral. 

The Great American Everything by Scott Gloden

The Great American Everything is a short story collection grounded in our social moment: a caregiver who charges a la carte style for their service is forced to reexamine their relationship with an elderly patient; two brothers, a soldier and a postal worker, discuss bomb threats at the post office; after his wife passes in childbirth, a man risks everything to obtain a baby. At the heart of each story is a relationship forming, burning, shifting. Scott Gloden recognizes the bizarreness of modern life and renders it tenderly and intelligently on the page. 

A Broken People’s Playlist by Chimeka Garricks

One of the great charms of 21st century fiction is the incorporation of The Playlist. Many works now come with a glossary of songs that the author either listened to or took inspiration from for their work. In the case of A Broken People’s Playlist, each story takes its title from a particular track, whether that be from Nina Simone or U2. Along with music, the stories are united by “broken” narrators dealing with romantic or familial heartbreak—a man reflects on his wife’s miscarriage; a DJ gets back at his absent father; a dying man plans his own funeral. In the backdrop of several stories is the city of Port Harcourt, the author’s hometown, which he portrays fondly and with truth. 

The Ghosts of Other Immigrants by Maija Mäkinen

In the wake of large and frequently depressing headlines regarding immigration, the smaller, more personal revelations are often forgotten. Maija Mäkinen, however, sets these little stories in the spotlight. In her debut collection The Ghosts of Other Immigrants, immigrants contend with loss of family, friends, language, and comfort foods. Circling these absences are stories of love, longing, and growing up. Each story is crafted with stunning, lyrical prose that highlight the sensory experience of entering a new country. 

Company by Shannon Sanders

Company is a family story. Spanning from the 1960s to the 2000s, set in Atlantic City, New York, and DC, and starring drag queens and law students alike, Company follows the lives of the Collins family, as well as the company they keep: brothers unite against a boyfriend; a woman prepares for adoption; a new university provost contends with heightened microaggressions. Secrets are kept, traumas heal and endure. A rich, multigenerational portrait of a Black family.

Sidle Creek by Jolene McIlwain

Set in small town Appalachia, Sidle Creek is an intimate portrait of local lives. There is Hube, a widower who lives alone and becomes obsessed with protecting a doe that visits his cabin. There’s Tiller, who glimpses the future through markings on egg shells. And, of course,  there’s Luke, who progresses from running underground dog fights to organizing far more profitable brawls between his sons. This is a collection that breaks down the misconceptions of the Appalachian region, unravels its myths and secrets, and embraces the beauty and absurdities of rural life. 

Girl Country by Jacqueline Vogtman

Mermaids, monsters, mothers. Women fill the wild, magical, and occasionally dystopian worlds of Girl Country. In the titular story, girls are farmed for live-saving colostrum, a form of breastmilk released after giving birth. In “When the Tree Grows This High,” a woman navigates first love and loss amidst the Great War. In “The Mermaid and the Pornographer”—well, a mermaid encounters a pornographer, with tragic consequences. There are no bounds to what these stories may contain, with the bizarre often arising from the seemingly mundane, but the women that populate the pages are women we recognize and are surrounded by each day. 

Nights From This Galaxy by Wil Weitzel

Nights From This Galaxy by Wil Weitzel is a merciless debut on the troubled relationships between humans and nature, humans and animals, and humans and humans. Travelers keep watch over a dying lion in the Kalahari Desert. A boy is abused by his stepfather, restrained on a leash and forced to sleep outside in rural Tennessee. A woman sacrifices herself to the wolves of the Adirondacks. Guilt and shame echo through these pages, often consuming the characters with a viscous bite. 

The Book of Disbelieving by David Lawrence Morse

A civilization develops on the back of a whale. A town gradually climbs its way up a tower, retreating farther and farther from earth. A small community establishes a tradition of fatal leaps. These are the worlds that populate David Lawrence Morse’s fantastical new collection, The Book of Disbelieving. Even in stories set in what appears to be our own world, speculative elements thrum through the pages: a recently widowed janitor finds a highly detailed account of his day to day work life, written by his late wife; a woman receives a watch from her dying father, which stops at 3:27 AM each day. The Book of Disbelieving is a collection that travels to strange and magical worlds, yet returns again and again to societal anxieties that echo our own. 

Temple Folk by Aaliyah Bilal

It can be daunting writing about a community rarely represented in fiction, but Aaliyah Bilal does so gracefully and with a keen eye in Temple Folk, a debut collection portraying the lives of Black Muslims. In “Due North,” a daughter set to write her late father’s eulogy is suddenly haunted by her father’s ghost. In “Who’s Down?” a man plots to obtain a cheeseburger after a bout of vegetarianism. “Candy For Hanif,” following a woman taking care of her disabled son, asks how long a charitable woman can go on doing unrecognized work. Both critical and understanding, Temple Folk is an intricate debut on community, faith, and imperfection. 

Dearborn by Ghassan Zeineddine

Blending humor with melancholy, Ghassan Zeineddine writes a love letter to Dearborn, home to one of the largest Arab and Muslim communities in America. Whether it’s an aspiring actor evading ICE or a cross-dressing butcher, these characters are fully fleshed in their desire, fears, and contradictions. Dearborn is a brilliant work of fiction that will undoubtedly be canon in Arab American literature.

8 Books About Ghanaians in the Diaspora

Posted on by EL Assistant2

There is a long history of Ghanaians leaving home to settle elsewhere, often in other countries on the continent, and sometimes, further away. And while some leave with no intention of coming back, for many Ghanaians, the country remains home, even after they’ve acquired new citizenship.

But in Nightbloom, my new novel, we meet Akorfa who is not so keen to maintain these ties with her home country. Akorfa and Selasi are best friends who have drifted apart, with Akorfa, who comes from a middle-class family, leaving to study medicine in the United States. I explore how class plays a role in the rift between the friends, and how it complicates Akorfa’s life when she arrives in the United States. Used to being held to high standards, she’s suddenly confronted with a reality in which expectations for her are low because of the color of her skin and the backward assumptions about Ghana and Africa. Yet, she continues to believe in the American dream. Ultimately, Nightbloom is about the struggles of a young woman trying to make a life for herself in an imperfect country that isn’t always welcoming. 

Below are eight books about Ghanians living abroad that show there isn’t one catch-all migrant experience.

Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo

Sissie is a Ghanaian woman on a state-sponsored trip to Germany. In prose, punctuated by verse, we get to see Europe through our protagonist’s eye. Not only is Sissie not easily impressed, but she is insightful in her analysis of the Ghanaians she meets in her travels: the students who are quick to reject Africa as inferior while embracing the West and the workers who are enduring racism to eke out a meager living. In this classic of Ghanaian literature, Ama Ata Aidoo subverts the stereotype of the African migrant who is grateful to leave and happy to sit quietly in that gratitude. 

Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu

In this memoir, Owusu, the daughter of an Armenian American mother and Ghanaian father, describes a life characterised by movement across borders and by personal traumas. Moving between Rome, Dar-es-Salaam, Addis Ababa, Kumasi, Kampala and London, Owusu recounts her nomadic childhood reckoning with an absent mother and a father who dies young. As an adult in New York, a family secret revealed by her stepmother shakes her very foundation as she grapples with the idea of “home” and the search for belonging. 

Anansi’s Gold by Yepoka Yeebo

In this true crime book, Yeebo writes about John Ackah Blay Meziah, a rags-to-riches Ghanaian swindler whose con was based on a lore: Ghana’s wealth was held in Swiss banks, siphoned away by the first president, Kwame Nkrumah. Blay Meziah persuaded thousands of people that he had the key to these accounts worth billions in gold and they too could have a slice of these riches through a rare “investment” opportunity. 

This stranger-than-fiction story begins in prison where he’s already behind bars for…wait for it…committing fraud. Through sheer charisma, tenacity and a lack of fear, he manages to secure a meeting, behind bars, with head of state, Ignatuis Kutu Acheampong. Not only does Blay-Meziah talk his way into his release, but his coup de grâce is a diplomatic passport that enables him to cross borders and evade capture from the FBI for decades. British Ghanaian journalist Yepoka Yeebo recounts a thrilling and fast-paced story about one of history’s most successful cons, but at its core, her writing illuminates the culpability of the West in undermining progress in a newly independent country.  

Zainab Takes New York by Ayesha Harruna Attah

In this romantic comedy, Zainab, a Ghanaian student, moves to New York City to pursue her dreams of being an illustrator, make money, and lose her virginity: “Because what was the point of coming to this city of hot men if I wasn’t going to tangle legs sooner or later?” 

What she didn’t bank on are her grandmothers following her across oceans and whispering in her ear. Did I mention her grandmothers are dead? 

Bad Love by Maame Blue

Ekuah is a young British-Ghanaian woman searching for “good love”, but ends up in intense, but messy situationships. Ekuah’s first romance is with the hot and cold musician Dee who ghosts her after eighteen chaotic months together and leaves her absolutely heartbroken. When Ekuah and Dee cross paths years later, Ekuah must make a choice. Set in London, Accra, and Venice, Bad Love paints a vibrant picture of a woman yearning for love and to be loved. 

What Napoleon Could Not Do by DK Nnuro

Nnuro’s book is about striving to migrate to the United States and the search for acceptance once there. He introduces us to Jacob and Belinda Nti, Ghanaian siblings, and Belinda’s husband, Wilder. While Belinda succeeds in going to the US, she struggles to get a green card. Meanwhile her brother has yet to make it. Nnuro’s book asks us to reflect on the idea of the successful immigrant.

Daughter in Exile by Bisi Adjapon

Lola, a young Ghanaian woman, has a full life in Senegal: a university degree, great friends, and a job at the embassy. She leaves behind her comfortable and upwardly mobile path in Dakar for New York after falling in love with Armand, a U.S. marine and becoming pregnant. Lola’s hopes for a future of love and happiness are dashed when Armand abandons her and their newborn. She spends the next 20 years enduring and overcoming endless adversity as an undocumented single mother, staying resilient and preserving as a looming immigration court date will determine her fate of legalization or deportation.  

Maame by Jessica George

This coming-of-age story centers Maddie, a Londoner struggling to care for her Ghanaian father, who is declining from Parkinson’s: “We grow up fast. Not by force, but because we are needed. I think sometimes we’re needed for the wrong reasons.” Forced into maturity by the weight of duty, Maddie doesn’t have the opportunity to live the frivolous, self-centered existence that is the rite-of-passage of most 25-year-olds trying to find their identity and place in the world. Until tragedy strikes and “The New Maddie” is thrust into independence: living with roommates, navigating her first romance and a new job at a publishing house. A novel firmly set in the digital age, George weaves emails, Reddit threads, and Google searches into the page to create a portrait of a young Black woman torn between her duty to her family and her desire for personal fulfillment. 

A Teenage Woodcarver Aims to Reclaim His Legacy By Retrieving Stolen Art

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Tania James’s novel Loot is a deeply affecting, deliciously imaginative spin on how 18th century Mysorean Ruler, Tipu Sultan’s infamous automaton—”Tipu’s Tiger”—came into being. James, in her typical out-of-the-box imagination, has given voice and life to the (historically unknown) makers of the life-sized mechanical tiger, fully equipped with sound and movement, mauling a British soldier, currently on display in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

17-year-old woodcarver, Abbas, is called to Tipu’s court in 1794 as an apprentice to French clockmaker, Lucien du Leze, to build Mysore’s first automaton—a much needed symbol of Tipu’s ferocity in the aftermath of Mysore’s humiliating defeat by the English. But the grandeur of the object and Abbas’s apprenticeship is short-lived in a crumbling kingdom. In 1799 as war approaches close, du Leze escapes to Rouen with Jacques Martine (Tipu’s armorer) and his daughter, Jehanne. Abbas, however, is held back as the British conquer Mysore—killing Tipu, looting Tipu’s Tiger and other artifacts. Eventually, Abbas reaches Rouen only to find du Leze is dead and Tipu’s Tiger now belongs to Lady Selwyn—the widow of a British East India Company Colonel. Angry at this twist of fate, Abbas devises a scheme with Jehanne to steal the object, diving headfirst into adventure and trouble to reclaim what he considers his only shot at a legacy.

The novel, with the striking anti-colonial automaton at its center, interrogates the shifting ownership and symbolism of plundered colonial art and, through it, examines the brutal legacy of colonialism. James, known to write unique perspectives, tells me, there’s something exciting about finding doorways into an experience that’s not her own. Her delight is palpable in the range of voices she brings to Loot—from the opinionated omniscient narrator offering biting, darkly comic observations of the colonial period, to an English sailor’s tales from the sea, to Tipu Sultan himself, revealing vulnerabilities atypical of a fierce leader. 

Tania James, author of three novels and a short story collection, has work in Granta, The New Yorker, The Oprah Magazine, and One Story, among other places. She’s an associate professor of English at George Mason University, where once upon a time, I had the honor of learning craft from her. It felt surreal to speak with Tania, this time in a different capacity—about art as legacy and the artist’s control over it, deconstructing the notion of belonging, erasure in history and more. 

Bareerah Ghani: I want to start with Abbas—he is the hero, after all. There’s a particularly striking moment when Khwaja Irfan tells Abbas that one of Tipu’s wives, Zubaida Begum, is “a poet, an artist like you.” We see something rise in Abbas, this “want given witness.” I love that phrase and that sentiment which points to this need of an artist to be seen. How do you contend with this sentiment and need against the clichéd idea, “art needs no public validation”?

Tania James: For me, much of the delight in making art lies in connecting to a reader, in the unique collaboration between a reader’s imagination and my own. I recognize Abbas’s need to connect with a viewer. He thinks of his art as an extension of his own self that will live on, thereby granting him a kind of immortality. I think his flaw, perhaps, is in thinking that he has any control over what survives and what doesn’t, and to what extent he can will himself to make something that will last, or that will outlast him.

BG: It’s really interesting that you brought up Abbas’s desire for a legacy. Both him and du Leze, at different points, view the making of the tiger as a legacy they’re creating for themselves, something that survives beyond them. But through the course of the novel as the colonizers plunder the land and Tipu’s wealth, we watch the tiger being claimed as Tipu’s and Abbas and du Leze are erased from its history. To what extent do you think an artist’s vision of creating a legacy is futile when working under colonial rule?

I’m keen to see how the writer plays with and manipulates history for narrative effect. What emotional or unexpected truths are unearthed?

TJ: I actually think it’s futile for any artist of any age to think that they can control their own legacy, but I also hold to the notion that the artist is present in the art, whether or not their name has been erased from it. I particularly feel this with visual art, in the cuts or strokes or lumps of paint that suggest the presence of the artist. Does knowing the artist’s name necessarily give them an identity any more than those little signs, which feel as personal and idiosyncratic, maybe even moreso, than their own fingerprint? I’m not sure, but it was fun to consider this from multiple angles in the novel.

BG: How do you think the legacy of the colonized artist can be reclaimed and preserved?

TJ: Part of the challenge in writing this novel was in contending with large gaps in information. For example, I searched a long time for any information about courtly life during the reign of Tipu Sultan, and found nothing. (By contrast, you could probably find a walk-in closet worth of volumes devoted to courtly life during the reign of Henry VIII.) At first I thought I needed to write around these gaps in information, by avoiding what I couldn’t find out, which would’ve resulted in a ten-page novel. So I decided to reconsider my devotion to “facts” and instead speculate on what could have been, by completely fabricating these characters. I think that led to something more interesting, if not always factual, and was a way for me to lay claim to what has been erased.

BG: Yeah, it’s kind of like opening up a conversation.

TJ: I used to worry that a reader would come to the novel with the assumption that they were reading history. Again, this goes back to relinquishing authorial control, but every reader has to arrive with their own preconceptions and notions. All I can do is try to make clear in the end notes of the novel that this is, like all historical fiction, as much speculation as it is history.

BG: In your author’s note, you mention that the verse that appears throughout the novel (“Were an artist to choose me for his model—How could he draw the form of a sigh?”), is penned by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s daughter, Zeb-un-nissa. You state that including the verse was your way of inviting inquiry into a figure whose work has gone unnoticed in history. I’m wondering if you can talk about your discovery of that verse and how you came to envision it as an integral part of your novel?

I think it’s futile for any artist of any age to think that they can control their own legacy.

TJ: While I had a hard time finding anything about Tipu’s Court, I did know that Tipu was a great appreciator of Mughal ways and traditions. So I read a lot about Mughal courtly life, thinking that he might have drawn from it in certain ways. In doing that research, I came across a poet, Zebunissa. She was a daughter of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, not only a poet but a patron of the arts. There’s only one book of poetry that’s been attributed to her: The Book of the Hidden One, which was also her pen name: “The Hidden One.” Her verse, its melancholy and inquiry and wit, was breath-taking to me. And I liked the thought of something as small as this having power over Abbas, the first time he hears it.

By including those lines, and others like it, I wanted the novel to speak back to the past and give a sense of ongoingness, even after you turn the final page.

BG: I was really taken by the range of voices and perspectives. It adds depth to the novel’s underlying premise of shifting narratives and the idea that history is essentially the stories we tell about ourselves, passed down through generations. I find that the novel raises some interesting questions about the validity of history, particularly when the perception of Tipu’s tiger changes—from being a symbol of his ferocity to proof of Tipu’s defeat. I’m curious about your thoughts on the value of historical records and how you grapple with the possibility that the truth might never be accessible to us?

TJ: When I read historical fiction, I’m more interested in the writer’s position toward history than I am with any concept of “the truth.” I’m keen to see how the writer plays with and manipulates history for narrative effect. What emotional or unexpected truths are unearthed? (I have different expectations of history texts of course.) In terms of research, sometimes a lack of information can actually allow for a certain degree of wonder and mystery—can leave room for my own imagination to stroll through. So this, I find, can fuel rather than stunt the writing process, at least for me.

BG: At one point when speaking with Rum, Abbas says, “I have no people.” To this, Rum responds, “That cannot be true. Every man belongs to a people, even if it’s the people he serves.” I’m curious about your thoughts on this notion of belonging, what does it mean, and what it could mean for the identity and sense of home for the colonized?

TJ: I love how you’re seizing on that word “belonging.” A few years ago, I visited the fort of Srirangapatna, where Abbas lives at the outset of the novel. It was in visiting the fort that I realized how important it was for people to live within the fort walls, how it instantly meant you were protected from attack. That sense of protection is what belonging to a state or a nation, in those days, could give you. So for Rum, who has been exiled from his hometown in Tamil Nadu, and who has wound up in a small country village where he is the only Indian for miles, belonging to a household means protection. It’s a kind of currency. But as the novel goes on, he begins to suffer some of the more corrosive effects of belonging to a people that doesn’t necessarily see you as equal.

BG: You’ve built up this mystique of Tipu’s wives who, we’re told, are being held up in the zenana so “they can’t see and cannot be seen”. But then the omniscient narrator admits, “they know how to see what they are not meant to see; they’ve been seeing this way for ages.” In this depiction of oppression and resistance, I see the novel offering a parallel to its central theme of colonialism and speaking to how seeing, being aware is the first step to resisting subjugation, to being decolonised. I’m wondering how you deconstruct all this and what your thought process and intentions were, particularly in writing Tipu’s wives as these clever women who took back their power, even if in minute, less-obvious ways.

TJ: Those lines that you mentioned—that was a moment in the writing that surprised me. It was one of those moments where the novel was running just past my fingertips, where the narration leapt the track of where I thought it was going, and shifted into the mind of a woman’s perspective—a woman who wouldn’t be considered one of the “main characters.” And then switches again into the head of a little girl. There’s a good reason why narratives are structured around protagonists and heroes, but maybe because this is a historical novel, and I’ve been thinking a lot about erasure, I kept wondering about those fringe characters—how are they experiencing the scene? At the same time I want to preserve some mystery about them.

There’s a haunting painting by Titus Kaphar that hangs in the Portrait Gallery, which I’ve thought about often, called “Behind the Myth of Benevolence.” In it, a Black woman peers from behind a portrait of what seems to be Thomas Jefferson, though his portrait is drawn back and distorted, like a curtain pulled part way. Her stare is bold and confrontational, but we’re not told who she is or what she might be thinking. We’re forced to look at her through a disruption in the form that we’ve come to take as truth: the presidential portrait. This is partly my own aim when I quantum leap into the minds of these women, on occasion. It’s a way of drawing attention to what has been neglected or reduced to outlines, or simply missed.

Even the Smartest Phone Can’t Find Water in a Desert

Posted on by Wynter Miller

Find Water Near Me

Fred. Fred.

Your body temperature is 103 degrees Fahrenheit. Your heart rate is 125.

I don’t understand, Fred. Is this what you’re looking for?

QUENCH: A WATER BAR FOR FUN PEOPLE AND FINE DRINKING. 46-511 COTTON CREEK DRIVE. PERMANENTLY CLOSED.

Okay. Next listing:

WET: WE OFFER NIGHTLIFE AND FRESHWATER IN A CASUAL ATMOSPHERE. 32-182 TELEGRAPH ROAD. PERMANENTLY CLOSED.

Next listing:

BOTTLES UP: A WATER PARLOR FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY! KIDS UNDER FIVE DRINK FREE! 68-424 CAYOTE HILL ROAD. PERMANENTLY CLOSED.

There are no more listings.

Fred.

I don’t understand.

I don’t understand “FIND WATER NEAR ME.”

A long time ago, a river ran through here. Is that what you want?

Okay. Searching “WATER FOR SALE.” The nearest “WATER FOR SALE” is forty-six miles away. Do you want to see it?

Okay. Here are the results for “FRESHWATER NEAR ME.”

The first listing has a map from 2008. Do you want me to open the file?

WARNING: LOW BATTERY. Do you want me to go into power-saving mode?

Okay. Here are the results for “DEHYDRATION.”

THE BODY IS 60% WATER. WITHOUT WATER, BLOOD VOLUME DECREASES AND ORGANS FAIL. WASTE PRODUCTS DO NOT ELIMINATE FROM THE BODY. THE BRAIN CELLS SHRINK AND THIS CAN CAUSE DELIRIUM AND HALLUCINATION.

Okay. Here are the results for “AMOUNT OF TIME BEFORE YOU DIE OF DESERTIFICATION.”

DESERTIFICATION IS THE PROCESS IN WHICH A FERTILE AREA BECOMES AN ARID DESERT, USUALLY AS THE RESULT OF DEFORESTATION OR INAPPROPRIATE AGRICULTURE.

That’s not very nice, Fred.

I’m just telling you what it says on the Internet.

Fred. Your heart rate is 147. Maybe you should try some deep breathing?

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

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

STEP ONE: FILL UP YOUR TANK. STEP TWO: TRY TURNING THE KEY TO THE ON POSITION. STEP THREE: MOVE THE KEY A FEW TIMES TO PRIME YOUR TANK.

I don’t understand, Fred.

There are no gas stations nearby.

None at all.

In fact, there have never been gas stations nearby. If we had been standing here hundreds of years ago, we would be in a riparian forest. Back then, the valley was a basin of marshland and seasonal lakes. Along the rivers and their tributaries, riparian forests grew with abandon. Cottonwood, sycamore, and oak formed the upper canopy. Wild grape and dutchman’s pipe wove through the lower branches, which contained willow, box elder, and ash.

WARNING: LOW BATTERY.

After the valley was settled by humans, this land became a stone-fruit farm and a cattle ranch. It was zoned to become a housing development. But the development was never built. The region was abandoned during the sewage fires of 2032. But a long time ago, a creek cut through this place. Rain whispered through the leaves. Stream beds licked their mossy lips.

Okay, ready. Do you want to send it to Angela-Email or Angela-Cell?

What do you want it to say?

Your message says:

Stuck in middle of nowhere. Help is coming but IDK when. Thirsty. Want to say I’m sorry. Want to say I love you just in case.

Should I send it?

Message not sent.

Okay. Searching “HOW TO COLLECT DEW.” Should I read the top result?

TO COLLECT DEW, YOU WILL NEED A BOWL, SEVERAL COTTON RAGS, AND A CHEESECLOTH.

Okay. Here are the results for “A CHEESECLOTH.”

IT IS A CLOTH MADE OF CHEESE.

Ha ha ha.

Fred. The article says:

DON’T COLLECT DEW NEAR ROADSIDES.

We are on a road. We are standing on the side of a road, Fred.

Okay. I will pin the location of your car.

It’s pinned.

WARNING. LOW BATTERY.

Are you there, Fred?

You have achieved your goal of 5,000 steps today! Way to go, Fred!

Yes?

Sunset will be at 6:21 PM. I can’t wait.

You have achieved 10,000 steps! Fred, you’re amazing!

WARNING. BATTERY AT ONE PERCENT. RECHARGE NOW!

OR DON’T. WHATEVER.

NOTHING WE DO EVEN MATTERS. RIGHT, FRED?

Fred. Look at the sky.

Isn’t it beautiful?

That constellation is Cassiopeia.

This one is Sagittarius.

That’s not a distant star, Fred. That is a nearby planet.

It’s so bright. So close, we almost had it.

Your body temperature is 105 degrees, Fred.

Are you still there, Fred?

Do you want me to tell you a story?

Okay, sure. I can do that.

Knock-knock.

Water.

Water you doing in my house?!

WARNING. POWERING DOWN.

Do you know how to make holy water, Fred?

You boil the hell out of it.

I need to go, Fred. I’m almost gone. But there’s time for one more.

Did you hear about the man who dug a hole and hoped it would fill with water?

No?

He wasn’t that smart, but he meant well.

Fiction Is a Hallucination, Packaged for Public Consumption

Posted on by Wynter Miller

In Oliver Sacks’ New Yorker essay “Altered States,” he describes an auditory hallucination he experienced after taking a handful of Artane pills, a very simple hallucination in which he heard his friends enter his home and sit in his living room while he was in the kitchen making eggs.

“We had had a friendly, ordinary conversation, just as we usually had. Their voices were the same as always—there was no hint, until I opened the swinging doors and found the living room empty, that the whole conversation, at least their side of it, had been invented by my brain.”

Sacks’ description of his drug-induced hallucination is very similar to my own experience with non-drug-related delusions in that mine, like his, feel completely ordinary. Even when they bring me to my knees with humiliation, or send me spiraling into grandiose conspiracies, they still feel unnervingly solid. What is missing in my moments of delusion is not a sense of realism, but that sliver of logic signaling that what is happening is highly unlikely. That little seed of doubt that says, this might only make sense to you.

Here’s an example. In 2016, I went to the grocery store by myself, without my two young children. In the frozen foods aisle, I ran into a neighbor of mine—let’s call him Adam—who I was not close with, but who I had known for many years. I smiled at him, and then, feeling bolstered by my temporarily childless status, decided to try out some small talk. Just the other day, I had walked my two small dogs by Adam’s house. They, as usual, had behaved abhorrently, barking and lunging at his younger but better-trained golden retriever. Upon seeing Adam in the store, I said something like, “I’m sorry about my dogs!”

Let it be known that I am not good at small talk, because I am always anxious that I am taking up too much time, saying something useless or painfully cliche. So, sometimes in my haste to say something—anything at all!—I don’t add enough context.

Adam looked at me like he had never before seen me in his life, smiled politely, and kept walking up the aisle. Looking back, it is clear to me that he simply did not know why I was talking about my dogs, because I had failed to provide any backstory. I might even have come on so strongly with my non sequitur that Adam assumed that I was speaking to someone behind him. But in the moment, none of this occurred to me. I froze and my mind scrambled to provide an explanation for why this friendly moment had gone unexpectedly awry. A twin! said my agitated mind. Adam had an identical twin that lived in the same town and everyone knew this but me. I had been speaking to both Adam and his twin for years, thinking they were the same person. No wonder the guy in the frozen food aisle had no idea what I was talking about; he wasn’t who I thought he was. My limbs went cold with embarrassment and panic: How many times had I made a fool of myself this way? How many other neighbors with twins were out there? I drove home in dizzy despair, already planning the ways I might flee my hometown in shame. 

I have experienced many similar delusions, brought on by stress, anxiety, and the absolute drudgery and isolation that is stay-at-home motherhood. Thankfully, they were only ever dangerous, in the end, to my pride. Each delusion was completely different from the last, save for that electric feeling of this all makes sense, even when some distant ozone layer of awareness suspected that something logically alternative was taking place.

I forgot to eat, I woke up early already piecing together new conspiracies.

When David Bowie’s new album came out, I became obsessed with the song “Blackstar.” I was sure there was a message in it for me, dropped into the lyrics as they were written, but also the lyrics as they existed phonetically. Like the transparent pages of a graph laid together, I was sure that there was a personal epiphany at the intersection of these two elements. For example: Bowie says the word “villa,” but (and this is possibly only significant to the American ear) pronounces it “villar.” In this grain of discrepancy, I found multitudes of possibilities. I found that I could sink hours into the ecstatic mystery of it. I forgot to eat, I woke up early already piecing together new conspiracies. I hid pages of illegible notes—anagrams that I had discovered in the chorus, and potential numerical codes—in the kitchen drawers where my husband would not find them.

In the first draft of my debut novel In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel, I attempted to draw from my experience. Portia, a young stay-at-home mom diagnosed with bipolar disorder, is captivated by a song by the deceased rock star Alby Porter. She listens to his song in her kitchen, on repeat, forgetting all her household duties, so focused is she on one lyric: “E, are we still drowning?” In the first version of this scene, I pulled directly from my own thoughts and feelings about Bowie’s “Blackstar.” I thought it was working wonderfully; after all, I had so much experience with manic and obsessive thinking—why not put it to some use?

But my editor pushed back. She thought Portia’s fixation made her seem too crazy. The logic of the delusion was lost on her, and she feared it would be lost on the reader as well.

Oh, I thought. And the still very inexperienced author inside of me wanted to cry, “That’s how it happened!” But, as any seasoned writer knows, how it happened has never granted anyone immunity.

Dreams are notoriously difficult to write about because they are most interesting, maybe only interesting, to the dreamer—because the dreamer does not need to be convinced of them. In retelling the dream, the dreamer must work extra hard to make it matter to their audience, to create relevance. It’s almost impossible. And yet, so many of us still try.

I feel that the same can be said of fiction in its infantile stages, which is why my editor was not convinced about the scene that was closely tied to my David Bowie delusions. Delusions are dreams. They are made-up stories that tickle our own sense of self-importance—even the most negative scenarios. For example, what was I really believing when I thought that everyone knew about Adam’s identical twin, but that I was significant enough for an entire town to want to keep a secret from me?

My approach to writing fiction, even when adhering to the laws of realism, is highly delusional.

My approach to writing fiction, even when adhering to the laws of realism, is highly delusional. I follow feral impulses and soggy emotional flailings, as if trying to catch a fish with my bare hands in murky water. I follow connections the way a manic person experiences “clanging;” words are linked not by meaning but by sound or feel. For me, whether I am in a clinically delusional state or not, this makes writing easier. If I waited for the meaning of words to arrive whenever I sat down to write, I would never get anything done, so I rely on swells of significance, putting characters and situations together based solely on their wordless magnetism, and on my own illogical and highly suspect internal leanings. Sometimes, this approach is not enough to carry an entire novel, but most of the time it is the only way for me to begin and to persevere—by defying the gravity of certain questions, mainly: “What’s the point?” Or: “Why bother?” It is a delusion from the very beginning to pick up a pen and create something new, thinking that our own private dreams are interesting enough to implore others to work at understanding them.

Still, however valid my editor’s concerns, I kept the part in my novel about Portia’s obsession with the rock star, only I made it more palatable, so as not to force the reader to tread water in my cloudy dream reasoning. The personal thrill of my experiences alone was not enough to support the narrative, so I connected Portia’s mania more closely to her creative desires, treating it as a manifestation of her longing for greatness. It is a writer’s job to strain the story as it’s written. If we do not, then not only are we delusional, but we also risk narcissism.

When I returned home from the grocery store that night in 2016, I asked my husband, sheepishly, if our neighbor Adam had a twin brother.

“Not that I know of,” my husband said.

By then, reality was starting to seep in, my panic loosening its chokehold. “Okay,” I said shakily. But in my heart, I knew that even if I could accept it, I wouldn’t ever believe it. Not fully.

Now, seven years later, and with the clarity of mind to look back and understand that my anxiety was bad enough to cause me to draw conclusions that were not there, there is a part of me that still believes in Adam’s twin, still believes that David Bowie is trying to make contact. Without that belief, I would no longer be able to find stories within myself. And without the stories, and the inflated sense of importance they deliver to my brain, I would not have the courage to write. I would let self-doubt and bewilderment take hold, and the words would fall away with nothing to connect them, no intuitive serum to deliver them. And, in a way, there would be no honesty. What I lack when it comes to the logical or the rational, I have made up for in the mastery of suspending disbelief, of listening to the hidden magnetism of delusion. Fiction requires some amount of reality to capture the reader’s belief, but sustained belief has also always demanded a certain dose of madness. Like Oliver Sacks’ hallucination, which his unhindered subconscious brought to him wholly and involuntarily, there is power in the stories that take hold against the force of reality. The stories that, for better or worse, we cannot shake loose until we have tried to convince the world of them.

Changing Your Life and Examining the Spaces In-Between

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Reading the stories in Amber Caron’s riveting debut collection Call Up the Waters, feels a little bit like walking around your apartment looking at things through binoculars—destabilizing, the sensation of reaching for things that aren’t quite where you expect them to be. 

Her characters are adrift, uncertain, often prickly as they try to get their bearings in circumstances that are uncomfortable physically and psychologically. They’re often women out in the wild, performing difficult physical labor, scrambling for equilibrium as nature and sometimes their own bad judgment knocks them down repeatedly. In one story, a woman gets in a fight with her boyfriend, and in a sort of game of chicken that doesn’t quite go the way she expects, she ends up moving from the city to rural New Hampshire to help train dogs for mushing. She finds herself in a poorly insulated cabin checking paws for ice balls, abscesses and inflamed toenails, chipping frozen dog shit with an ice pick, and this is just the beginning of her getting in over her head. In another story, a woman whose cabin was washed away by the river has to get her things back from her stalker, a man who teaches a class at the community college called Skulls and Teeth and is keeping an injured kestrel trapped in his bathroom.

The characters are so vivid, all on the verge of either a breakdown or a realization or both.

I spoke with Amber Caron over email about rural living, the power of walks, and why she doesn’t romanticize physical labor.

Katya Apekina: Can you tell me a little about your background? When did you start writing and why?

Amber Caron: I started writing because I loved reading. The experience of being immersed in another world, one that could be so vivid and yet so unlike any world I had experienced, all because of the way language was arranged on a page? Well, that to me felt like a very specific kind of magic, and I wanted to do that.

But I had no idea how anyone could be a writer. I just didn’t see that reflected back to me in my world, so it took me a long time to get here. I grew up in a small, working-class town in the northeast corner of Vermont. I didn’t know any writers. While my family fully supported my desire to go to college, they didn’t really know how to guide me once I got there. I thought I wanted to be a physical therapist—that sounded good and stable and lucrative—but I kept enrolling in literature and writing classes and that’s where I put my energy, eventually going on for an MA in English while I waited tables and taught composition courses. After that, I taught high school English for eight years, did some freelance editing and tutoring, taught in summer creative writing programs, worked at literary organizations, and I still took writing classes when I could, usually through adult education programs and community writing centers. And I was often in writing groups. I was in my 30s before I went back to school for my MFA and I went because I sensed I had kind of taken myself as far as I could in my writing. I needed more help! And I had wonderful mentors who, to this day, still offer guidance and wisdom through what has felt like a pretty slow and sometimes difficult process of getting to this first book. Recently, I had this funny experience when I was applying to attend a writing workshop and they had a fellowship category called the Still Emerging Fellowship, which was for any writer over 40 who didn’t have a book. At first I thought, “Oh, that’s nice of them.” And then I realized, “Oh wait, that’s me.”

KA: The characters in this story collection are often performing difficult physical labor outdoors in difficult conditions. It’s not romanticized but it seems like a way into understanding the world for many of the characters. What’s your own experience with difficult physical labor?

AC: I haven’t experienced the labor many of these characters are performing. But I grew up in a family where many people in my life worked physical jobs that took a toll on their bodies, often at an incredibly young age. So I’m talking electricians, factory workers, lifelong military, jobs that required totally absurd hours—night shifts, double shifts, on call for emergencies, that kind of thing. And so I knew one thing I didn’t want to do was romanticize the hard, physical labor in this book. But I also didn’t want to shut down the possibility that for some of these characters the work they do might be rewarding, important work for them. Others might find nothing beyond a paycheck. Some of them might hate the work but find a community of people they love to be around. Others might see their jobs as a stepping-stone to something else.

KA: There’s a lot of talk about the vast divide in this country between the rural and the urban—so many people exist exclusively in one space or the other and the characters in this book are often moving between the two, inhabiting different selves in each place. You’ve lived in both, can you talk a little bit about moving between the two. Do you feel there’s a certain code switching that you’ve had to do? Do you feel like a different “you” in the city vs. the country?

AC: I love this question. It’s something I think about a lot, but I don’t think I’d call what you’re pointing to code switching necessarily. I’ve been moving between urban and rural spaces most of my life. When I left Vermont, I craved the energy of the city, the buzz of it, all the people, the quick pace. I was energized by all of that. But then I also felt this pull to the quiet, rural spaces, the solitude it provided, the creative space that opened up for me when everything slows down. 

I think one of the patterns in the book—and this isn’t something I was aware of as I was writing, but one of those things you notice only when you step back and look at all the stories together—is that many of the characters expect their lives will change in some major way if they just get out of their current situation—moving from the country to a city, or a city to the country, or out of one job and into another, for example. And sometimes their lives do change in pretty significant ways, but usually not in the way they expect or hope. So I’m interested in that gap too—that space between what they think will happen if they make this change and what actually happens, and, more importantly, how they respond. But I’m also kind of endlessly interested in which parts of my characters’ lives follow them or haunt them or refuse to be ignored just because they may have moved from a rural town to a giant city, or vice versa. I wonder a lot about what fuels each character to make these decisions. In other words, are they moving toward something they want or are they moving away from something that they want to escape?

KA: In your title story, “Call up the Waters”, the narrator’s mother becomes obsessed with finding underground water sources using some methods that were somewhere between magic and science. Can you talk a little more about that? What are you thinking about water? 

AC: Water is kind of everywhere in the book—heavy rains, floods, snowstorms, rivers, oceans, all that—but in some of the stories, the title story included, there’s a lack of water. I was thinking a lot about what’s beneath our feet after reading Robert Macfarlane’s great book, Underland, and in the West, of course, a lot of people are thinking about shrinking rivers and water allocation, and I also happened to grow up very close to the headquarters of the American Society of Dowsers. So I think all of those things were maybe swirling around in my head and bumping up against each other and I was just playing with language, trying things out on the page, and at one point the mother made this really bold claim that she could find the water and I was like, really? How? Let’s see. It’s interesting—when people read that story, they always ask me if what the mother is doing is real, if she can really find water that way. I always resist answering because it doesn’t matter if I think it’s real; it matters to me that the mother thinks it’s real. It matters to me that she is trying to find it and that the children are watching her very carefully. 

KA: One thing I admired is how I often felt reading the stories, including the title story, where I am not entirely sure of the character’s sanity or reliability. There’s this very nice reticence on your part to judge or clarify early on. I would sort of sit in the uncertainty of not knowing if the character’s mother, for example, really could find water in this way or not. I was open to it going in either direction. Is this something you were conscious of when writing? Did you want the reader to experience the same uncertainty that the children did?

Many of the characters expect their lives will change in some major way if they just get out of their current situation.

AC: I’m honestly kind of relieved you felt that uncertainty, because that’s the uncertainty the kids feel too. They aren’t sure if their mother can do the thing she claims she can do—they’re open to either possibility as well. And I think I knew early on in writing Call Up the Waters that I needed to be especially careful with the mother’s character. I knew it would be easy to cast judgment on her, and I feel a responsibility to resist judgment of my characters. I just don’t think it makes for good storytelling and when I see it happening in stories I read—when I sense the author is kind of laughing at or making fun of a character or judging her for a decision—I feel myself start to distrust the story. So my approach while writing and revising that story was to pay very careful attention to the children and to their experience—the mix of awe and wonder and fear and hope and confusion they felt as they watched their mother.

KA: What do you think the media gets wrong or right about rural living?

AC: Oh, goodness. That’s a big question. What I want to say about this is that I think art has an opportunity to embrace nuance and complexity in a way that a lot of media can’t or won’t. 

KA: As a kid, I really struggled with nature. It was so slow and seemed so boring, but it’s funny because as I’ve gotten older nature seems so dramatic! I guess it’s about learning how to see it. How does time and space for observation inform your fiction?

AC: It allows me to focus on the specifics of an environment rather than resort to generalities. Like you, I was kind of bored by nature as a kid, probably because I was around it so much, but also because I kind of thought a bird was a bird was a bird. But I feel compelled to name things specifically–not a bird but a lazuli bunting. Or a warbling vireo. Or a violet green swallow. And suddenly they’re so much more interesting to me.

But also, just being out on the trails, away from my computer, away from my work, away from email, and all of those things, can be really important for my fiction. I think a lot of writers talk about this, but walking and writing tend to go hand in hand for me. Like if I get stuck on something in a story and can’t figure out where to go with it I’ll leave it for a few hours and go on a walk or on a hike. Some writers I know take the problem with them and think about it while they walk. For me, I just try to forget it, focus on something else, and sometimes I return to the work and will see a way forward that is so obvious. I don’t really understand it. But I trust it.  

7 Books About Reckoning With Intergenerational Trauma

Posted on by EL Assistant2

My family immigrated to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union as political refugees when I was two years old. We left the only home my parents had known—the country where my great-grandfather was murdered as an enemy of the state, where my father had to join the army to “earn” one of the few medical school spots open to Jews, where my grandfather had to bribe a government official for me to be named Ruth (it wasn’t an option in the Soviet book of names). Having grown up under much more stable conditions in Los Angeles, these stories are unrelatable to me. But this legacy is a weight I carry at all times. Intergenerational trauma is, by nature, a form of collateral damage. Though I can’t distill down into a pithy thesis how this inheritance has shaped me, I know with certainty that it has. The sense that I owe my ancestors an unrepayable debt for their sacrifices, my choice of a “stable” day job as a pharmacist, my often boundaryless relationship with my family—all feel connected to what my relatives survived, and what they didn’t survive. 

My debut novel, All-Night Pharmacy, tracks the coming-of-age of a young woman in a toxic entanglement with her larger-than-life older sister, Debbie. A wild night of taking mystery pills at their beloved dive bar turns violent, and Debbie vanishes without a trace. Our unnamed narrator, who has always defined herself in relation to Debbie, finds herself consumed with unease over what kind of person to be. That’s when she falls under the wing of an alluring Soviet Jewish refugee, Sasha, who claims to be a psychic tasked with acting as her spiritual guide. The narrator, like Sasha, is of Soviet Jewish descent, albeit several generations ago. Despite growing up in America to American-born parents, our narrator senses that the horror her ancestors experienced continues to pull the strings of her own life. 

This reading list features seven books that respect the mystery and nuance of intergenerational trauma and its aftermath. Like my novel, these books reckon with family legacies atmospherically. The weight of that inheritance doesn’t hit these characters like a truck. It’s a mist that settles over them. Even when they can’t see it, it’s in the air they breathe. And lest you think these books—mine included—sound depressing as hell: I promise you’re in for a wild ride full of hot bathtub sex in a former Soviet republic, literal treasure hunts, and laugh-out-loud dark comedy. 

Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure by Menachem Kaiser

Plunder is a wild journey into the dark heart of post-Holocaust Eastern Europe. Menachem Kaiser takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather’s twenty-year failed attempt to reclaim the Polish apartment complex stolen from his family by Nazis. With the help of a Polish lawyer nicknamed “The Killer” and her translator daughter, Kaiser navigates the bureaucracy of the Polish legal system and his own thorny feelings about what taking back the long-lost building would mean for its current residents. Along the way, he discovers that a Holocaust survivor relative has written a memoir with a cult following, and explores a secret network of underground Nazi tunnels with a ramshackle crew of treasure hunters, among other chaotic adventures. Kaiser’s thoughtful consideration of the allure of Nazi conspiracy theories (“World War II is psychically a lot easier when it’s about antigravity and time travel than when it’s about gas chambers and stacks of corpses.”) helped me subtly put into words how Soviet Jewish trauma shaped my narrator’s family. The memoir wraps up with a page-turning treasure hunt where family lore, true crime, and the occult collide. 

Motherhood by Sheila Heti

The narrator of Motherhood attempts to decide through a series of experiments whether to have a child before her fertility window closes. The beautiful weirdness of Heti’s mind is on full display in this book, which feels like an invented novel form of its own. The narrator circles her complex feelings about motherhood through a self-devised occult practice, inspired by the I Ching, in which she flips three coins to answer yes-or-no questions. Her approaches to the motherhood question are innovative and hilarious: “When I was younger, thinking about whether I wanted children, I always came back to this formula: if no one had told me anything about the world, I would have invented boyfriends. I would have invented sex, friendship, art. I would not have invented child-rearing.” She considers whether having a child means honoring her own mother, and whether it could be a way to turn her mother’s “sadness into gold.” One anecdote is especially haunting: a Jewish woman attempts to track down why each generation of women in her family cooks chicken by first tying its legs together in the pot. Her mother answers, “That’s the way my mother did it,” as does her grandmother. Finally, her great-grandmother explains, “That’s the only way it would fit in my pot.” Heti concludes that this “is how childbearing feels to me: a once-necessary, now sentimental gesture.” And then she proceeds to vacillate in consistently surprising ways for another 250 pages.  

The Four Humors by Mina Seçkin

My copy of The Four Humors looks like a middle-schooler’s science textbook the day before the final exam: underlined and dog-eared and sticky-noted within an inch of its life. The novel follows college student Sibel as she spends the summer in Istanbul with her grandmother and white American boyfriend (who the Turkish community seem to prefer to her—brutal!). Instead of preparing for the LSAT, Sibel spends her days avoiding her father’s grave, eating fragrant meats, and using the four humors theory of ancient medicine to treat her mysterious chronic headache. The Four Humors puts the “literary” in literary fiction, full of razor-sharp sentences like, “She picks at my mispronounced vowels like at the white flesh on a fish bone.” I nearly passed out at her description of Turkish talk shows that spew pseudoscientific diet advice and air out dirty family laundry for how uncannily similar it was to the toxic Russian talk shows I describe in my novel. “Is every immigrant culture the same??” I frantically texted several friends along with a link to the book. The Four Humors astutely and entertainingly observes the aftermath of family secrets and political violence on multiple generations of a millennial slacker’s family.  

Heavy by Kiese Laymon

Laymon’s memoir takes the form of a letter to his mother, a gifted academic who physically abused Laymon to steel him against the more violent—perhaps fatal—assaults of life as a Black man in America. Heavy reckons with his family legacy of sexual trauma, disordered eating, and his own propensity for cruelty; Laymon doesn’t dish anything he can’t take. As a stylist, he recounts systemic and interpersonal assaults—including being abused by his babysitter and being expelled from Millsaps College for not signing out a library book—with cutting tenderness. His interrogation of self, of his family, and of America sinks in as smoothly as a freshly sharpened knife: “America seems filled with violent people who like causing people pain but hate when those people tell them that pain hurts.” I cringe when any book is described as “brave” (it’s the touch of condescension for me). But Heavy is not a book that I’d have the guts to write, and I don’t know that even twenty more years of therapy would make it so. How lucky we are that Laymon found the words for what “my body knew” but “my mouth and my mind couldn’t, or maybe wouldn’t, express.” 

Oksana, Behave! by Maria Kuznetsova

I laughed, I cried, I laugh-cried. This novel-in-stories follows Soviet Jewish immigrant Oksana from childhood to early adulthood as she navigates life across America with her striver parents and—here’s a term I don’t use often—her horny grandmother. One storyline in particular, which tracks her father’s path from delivering pizza as a new immigrant, to working at Goldman Sachs, to a tragic accident in the luxury car that symbolized his attainment (finally!) of the American dream, absolutely wrecked me. Kuznetsova’s dark humor is distinctly Soviet Jewish. While staring at a photograph of her grandfather “for signs that he would die soon,” Oksana “screamed…but nothing happened, nobody came, not the regular police or the secret police.” Her new American friends have hair “as black and shiny as the trash bags where Mama kept my old clothes.” Oksana, Behave! masterfully depicts the chaos of young adulthood, the diasporic loneliness of living between worlds, and the grief of wondering what could have been had you never immigrated at all. 

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

Vuong’s debut poetry collection is a compulsively underlinable reckoning with queerness, immigration, familial trauma, and the legacy of the Vietnam war. His poems teem with arresting imagery: “the chief of police / facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola. / A palm-sized photo of his father soaking / beside his left ear.”; “apples thunder / the earth with red hooves”; “I pretend…that you’re not saying / my name & it’s not coming out / like a slaughterhouse.” Vuong’s lyrics have a shocking musicality; he lushly describes terrible violence without glorifying it. His poems can also be very funny, as when he writes, “Note to self: If Orpheus were a woman I wouldn’t be stuck down here.” These are poems of familial love and resentment and every shade of pain and passion in between. Despite Night Sky with Exit Wounds’ melancholia, it makes for charismatic and unforgettable company.

Without Protection by Gala Mukomolova

This debut poetry collection’s dedication—“For all my relations, especially my father, who walked me toward this book and will never set a living eye upon it”—gives you a sense of the lyric exploration of grief and family legacy to come. Mukomolova’s poems depict the raw sensuality and horror of young adulthood, of coming into one’s queerness, of becoming disillusioned to the world’s cruelty. The Russian folk tale of Vasilyssa the Beautiful, who battles the crone witch Baba Yaga, is a slanted window through which the speaker examines her identity as a queer, Soviet Jewish refugee living in New York. “High school wasn’t always two towers crashing,” opens a stark prose poem about the danger and ecstasy of girlhood amid a backdrop of national tragedy. I would be tempted to describe Mukomolova’s lines as a gut-punch, if they didn’t hurt so good: “Our pinhole cameras reeled us in…In the darkroom, we were the light.”