On the Accidental Art of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

When I turned eighteen, I started going to a Lincoln Heights music venue called Low End Theory a couple times a month. Hosted every Wednesday, the spot was a hotbed for experimental hip-hop producers. I’d pick up my friend David in Anaheim’s fringes, and then we’d make the hour-long drive to the venue. We’d met online six or seven years earlier playing Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland, which at the time was the most recent installment of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (THPS) series. The “Wasteland,” of course, was Greater Los Angeles. The game’s open-world design was innovative for its time—players weaved through the palm trees of Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive, carved the banks of the Los Angeles River somewhere near Low End Theory, or popped over to Orange County for a session at the Vans skatepark, where David and I had first met up in middle school.

The tiny subcommunity of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series taught me how to read like a writer, to appreciate decisions made and not made

David and I didn’t see each other much during high school, mostly because neither of us drove. But we talked almost daily, and when we turned eighteen, we were suddenly making the fortnightly pilgrimage together a few times a month. David was simultaneously a stranger and a brother; for years he was the only real friend I had who also loved reading. He introduced me to the dense brilliance of Gene Wolfe, while I can proudly claim introducing him to Borges. Whenever there was a lull in conversation during those first few car rides, we turned back to books. In describing an author, we’d look for metaphor in our shared native language, that of THPS’s online community. At first, this was a kind of joke. I’d say something like, “You see that new video by team tRM? Very Jonathan Franzen. Masterfully crafted, ambitious in its scope, but who gives a shit?” And David: “That video by Nonsense was really ahead of its time, holy shit. This is our Moby Dick. People are going to be watching this fifteen years from now, I swear.” (He was right.) For a long time, I thought that this was simply how David and I had learned to bond. But as I became older and grew more serious about writing, I realized my love for reading and THPS came from the same place, exercised the same muscle. The tiny subcommunity of THPS that David and I both belonged to taught me how to read like a writer, to appreciate decisions made and not made. It gave me a working language to talk about craft in. Above all, it introduced me to the joys and frustrations of practicing art. Without that community, I doubt I would have become a writer. 

THPS could not have become an art without its community, and even though THPS1 and 2 were wildly popular, it wasn’t until the release of the game’s third installment, which had an online feature, that a serious community started to form. There were various mini-games you could choose from while playing online, and “Trick Attack,” which awards you points for doing tricks, remains the most popular. To rack up a high score, you need to string together a “combo” of tricks. Here’s what this looks like: You grind an actionable part of the landscape, manual (the skateboard equivalent of a wheelie) to get to a quarterpipe, and so on. If you’re able to maintain a combo after the time runs out on the session, you’re allowed to keep skating until your combo ends. On THPS3, you played a Trick Attack, the game ended, and then the host of the virtual room started another. It got old fast, and the underwhelming size of the online community reflected this.

Tournaments with judges, each with her own, wholly subjective idea about what prov should constitute, were held regularly.

Not long after THPS went online, hardcore players grew tired of the endless Trick Attacks. Rather than following repetitive “robot” lines guaranteeing maximum points and easy balance—and thus “winning” a game devoid of incentives—these same players started prioritizing artful trick usage and general elegance. Early language surrounding this phenomenon varied, but a common term—improvisation, “prov” for short—concretized. Players started making videos and posting them to new, community-run forums whose domain names were paid for by one of the handful of players older than eighteen: Bens0nn, Nacho, Cio. The zeitgeist was changing, expedited by the release of Tony Hawk’s Underground (THUG), the first game in the series that allowed you to observe players still holding combos after the time in the session expired. The “best” players were no longer on the Trick Attack leaderboards. They were those who, for one reason or another, were uniquely watchable after your own combo had ended. 

Tournaments with judges, each with her own, wholly subjective idea about what prov should constitute, were held regularly. Some of these tournaments are permanently embedded in prov’s collective memory. There are 15-year-long running jokes about so-and-so being robbed, about clandestine arrangements between players and judges. The community has since moved from a constellation of forums to Discord, and in that migration, countless videos fell through the cracks. KC and Diz’s first transfer video, once canon, is thought to be unrecoverable, and Brazbox’s hard drive, the greatest collection of videos by any one player, bit the dust. Despite these losses, the community has a strong sense of history.

Slowly, these Trick Attack sessions stopped being win-lose mini-games and instead became the most convenient way for prov players to show off. In a prov lobby, nobody cared in the slightest about winning, and the repeated matches literally became pointless. This is why casual players were so flummoxed at watching a combo stretch on for minutes at a time when that player had already won, and why it was so difficult for me to explain prov to my friends. It was like trying to explain the nuances of a sport without being able to agree on its basic rules. But to call prov a type of sport, or an eSport, even, would be misguided. Prov is purely expressive, there’s no winning or losing. A real-world parallel might be capoeira, that mesmerizing Afro-Brazilian martial art that is, at its core, an art. As soon as players stopped trying to win Trick Attack games, THPS prov became something more than a game. 

There was a Platonic ideal, and the best provers perfectly adhered to canonical trick usage.

To say that multiplayer THPS became pointless is not a condemnation. Real-life skateboarding is similarly pointless, answering only to internal and perpetually morphing conventions. Curt Lindgren (or Rodney Mullen, depending on whom you ask) came along and kickflipped, something hitherto absent from skateboarding’s collective imagination. Like skateboarding, all innovation within the closed system of THPS’s laws and physics is fair game. Strapping a board to your thigh with an exercise band and skipping around erratically in public is not yet part of what falls under the umbrella of skateboarding, but it could be—skateboarding is mutable in a way that a sport like basketball is not. JM Coetzee’s words about the modern conception of the novel in his genre-bending book Elizabeth Costello make for an apt comparison here: “When it entered the languages of Europe, [the word novel] had the vaguest of meanings: it meant the form of writing that was formless, that had no rules, that made up its own rules as it went along.” Prov was similarly disinterested in defining its own parameters. While this was initially an oversight—the result of a bunch of teens not knowing what they had stumbled upon—this looseness and openness toward aesthetic change has become one of prov’s defining characteristics.

In chaotic and horizontal fashion, THPS prov continued to evolve. Early prov prized “style”—the use of certain skateboarding tricks in harmonious, agreed-upon patterns—as more important than interesting decision-making or originality. There was a Platonic ideal, and the best provers perfectly adhered to canonical trick usage. This early philosophy of prov was a harmonious, total system, but there was little room for innovation. Players seen as having particularly novel or unconventional trick usage—see Jens, who resembles a whirling dervish with his dizzying, maximalist playstyle—were understood to merely be better at representing Perfect Trick Usage in its totality. It was mimetic rather than creative, akin to early landscape painting.

In the end, the question is about the extent to which prov must truly be improvised.

As the years have gone on, opinions on how to evaluate prov players have only become more fragmented and nuanced. Some think that “flow” is among the highest indicators of a skilled prover. In this philosophy, a player’s ability to gracefully maneuver through all of a map without losing momentum is prized. Each map is its own “complete library” to borrow Jorge Luis Borges’s idea, replete with endless permutations and potential decisions. 

Flow is prioritized in the videos of early prodigies like Ksk and Gonzo, whose playstyles would seem risk-averse if judged by today’s standards. On the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, some players value unpredictable movement above all else. Silent, whose Downtown and East LA video holds a special place in my heart, is probably the most important name here. His willingness to change direction and break a combo for spontaneity’s sake pushed the boundaries of prov and marked a major turning point. Even though he hasn’t played seriously in years, you can see his influence in contemporary videos. At any given point in prov’s history, public opinion has favored either flow or unpredictability to varying degrees. A flow-oriented player is likely more skilled at keeping a combo after a Trick Attack session expires because, ostensibly, they’re taking fewer risks. Likewise, flow-oriented players are consistent, and they often perform well in tournaments. A recent history of winners—Konek in the famed i5 tournament, which I judged in 2020, Voyage in the tLTourney—bears this out. In my opinion, the best players synthesize both polarities of these philosophies, carrying combos into deep waters while making daring, innovative choices.

Within this question of flow versus unpredictability, there are more unresolved issues. Do you value large, difficult stunts pulled off during runs, or are you instead attuned to the small, interesting decisions made at every turn? Particularly bombastic players might incorporate stunts called “transfers” into their runs. It’s a slippery term, but I’d define the transfer as a unique move that gets a player from one part of the map to another in a creative way—exploiting a ramp with glitchy physics to grind an impossibly high scaffolding, for example. The community’s tolerance of incorporating transfers into prov runs depends on what’s trending. It’s a question of subtle economy vs. absolute vitality: do you prefer, for example, the restrained quietude of Marilynne Robinson’s writing, or the maximalist intensity of Thomas Bernhard’s? 

Like a photograph, a certain player’s prov either punctures me or it doesn’t.

Debates about the place of transfers in prov are contentious, but in the end, the question is about the extent to which prov must truly be improvised. Some think that doing a logistically difficult maneuver during a run is the pinnacle of improvisational skill, while others think it is lazy lip-service to the real art of improvisation and, if it seems like a player has planned a particularly interesting move in advance, those observing might voice their displeasure with the player’s brazen disregard for true improvisation. Some players are now polarizing because their playstyles are so transfer-heavy—so glitzy and showy—that many think it can no longer be called improvisation. There’s a delicate balancing act here between doing interesting things during runs, but not having them be so interesting that they’re obviously premeditated. I feel this same tension when watching a dance like samba or forró; I’m captivated by how dancers are simultaneously capable of technical mastery and utter nonchalance in real-time.

Discussions about the true nature of improvisation aren’t unique to THPS. When I started regularly playing the game, debates about freestyle rapping in hip-hop were at their height, and freestyle purists would flock to the internet, indignant that, in a freestyle cipher, their favorite rapper had recycled lines from an earlier session. The more moderate camp argued that part of a freestyle rapper’s genius is her ability to seamlessly stitch together disparate elements or verses, a skill  closer to collage than divine inspiration. Maybe jazz is the best comparison: successful improvisation requires a fantastically broad skill base and understanding of the art to begin with. Some take issue with how far away from true improvisation certain players are, but nobody doubts their raw ability. I would not be surprised if this playstyle returns to fashion one day.

It is, I’ll admit, unsurprising that formal THPS criticism among provers has never quite taken off in the way I hoped for. When trying to articulate to other critics in the community why I find a particular player special, I’m often forced to resort to the same vague language used to describe a writer’s unique “voice.” “They have a unique ______; they play in a way that is distinct and wholly their own.” Among the most unique players, their “voice” (or whatever word you’d like to use) is like a watermark permanently stamped on their skateboarder’s forehead. Even if an innovative player assumes a different alias and created skateboarder, it’s entirely possible she might be recognized by other provers. Every so often a prov phenom comes from nowhere, and just like fans and journalists alike pored through the syntax of notable Italian authors to unearth Elena Ferrante’s identity, the prov community might perform a close reading of this new prodigy’s playstyle to confirm that they aren’t, in fact, an already-established player in disguise. We have, too, our own outsider artists, provers who, partially disconnected from the community’s influence, make increasingly bizarre and innovative videos that have little in common with the contemporary canon. Many of these outsider artists come from countries without a strong tradition of English-language education. This fact has hindered the players in some ways, but it has also allowed them to flourish without the anxiety of influence, to borrow a phrase from the literary critic Harold Bloom.

To a novice prover, videos of notable early players—the aforementioned Ksk and Gonzo—might seem banal in the same way that a casual movie-watcher might find Citizen Kane boring. If their playstyle seems unremarkable now, this is because players who came after them have already digested and internalized the way they changed the game, and that foundational link has been lost. There was a before them and an after; they have permanently changed the trajectory of our little art. “I like the way he plays” is neither insightful nor meaningful, so I’ll borrow from Roland Barthes and his words on photography instead. Like a photograph, a certain player’s prov either punctures me or it doesn’t. I am sometimes unable to describe certain aspects of prov in the same way that, as someone chiefly interested in prose, I feel incapable of saying anything intelligent about a poem or painting. “I like the way it makes me feel” is my lone recourse.

I’m also unable to explain why I was considered an innovative THAW prover, but nothing more than average on earlier installments like THUG and THUG2. In the maps of these earlier games—Moscow, Berlin, Manhattan, Barcelona—I feel unsure of myself, far from THAW, far from Los Angeles’s great sprawl. The games are basically the same, save minor differences in physics, map design, and balance meters. But maybe the reasons were sentimental: I am from Southern California, and so the opportunity to prov right under the Hollywood sign or grind the rails on the Santa Monica Pier or Downtown’s famed Alameda ledge remains a deeply personal affair. Or maybe it’s a question of translation, maybe I find myself mediocre at earlier games in the series for the same reasons I find the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector beautiful in Portuguese but saccharine in English despite diligent, faithful translations of her work. But this isn’t a perfect metaphor, as THUG was actually released before THAW. Perhaps, as Borges says, the original is unfaithful to the translation.

Years removed from having seriously played any other video game, I still feel the same sense of exhilaration starting a Trick Attack prov run as when I start a creative essay. In both instances, I have no idea where I’ll end up, no idea what art I will have arrived at. Neither will live up to the Edenic, idealized expectation I have before starting, but I will have at least done something new. I thought seriously about the craft elements of improv before I did so with literature, and without THPS, I doubt I would have ever started writing. Prov gave me a critical vocabulary for thinking about the importance of imitation; it helped me identify one artist’s influence on another. It helped me appreciate the nebulous qualities of a work—voice, mood, tone—that, while anathema to writing 100 students everywhere, make close reading worth the effort. Whether video games are art is an old discussion that I’m not particularly interested in; the question is so broad that it’s meaningless. Prov is an art, and there is meaning in total dedication to an art. Even a minor one.

On The Edge Of The Abyss, Putting Our Skincare Creams On

Posted on by EL Assistant2

A few years back, Mona Awad found herself in the grips of a skincare addiction. Hauling her laptop with her wherever she went, she watched video after video about Retinol and exfoliants, spellbound by the soothing voices and gently glowing faces of the skinfluencers on her screen. And she bought; she bought; she bought, whatever it was they were selling, whatever the price. This endless diet of Youtube tutorials and impulse buys left her “totally enchanted, but also suspicious and filled with dread,” Awad told me by phone from her home in Boston. “Which is always a good sign for me and means that I’m probably going to write a novel about it.” 

That’s exactly what she did. Rouge, Awad’s fourth novel, captures all the false hope and real self-hatred propagated by a beauty industry whose chokehold on women’s souls only tightens with each passing year. The story’s protagonist, Belle, has learned from a tender age that girlhood (and especially mixed-race girlhood) means loathing one’s own reflection. Her chief instructor in this lesson is her mother, a glamorous but frosty woman who models with her obsessive skincare routine the expensive, endless swim against the tide of wrinkles and sagging that will soon be Belle’s inheritance. When her mom dies under suspicious circumstances, a now-grown Belle begins to investigate the regimens and lotions that kept her mother’s skin preternaturally fresh. The literal cult that Belle discovers behind the scenes is equal parts dangerous and tempting. Who wouldn’t want to look forever young (and perhaps just a little bit whiter)? What wouldn’t one give? 

Like Awad’s previous works Bunny, All’s Well, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, this latest novel is interested in the calamities and ecstasies we reap when we pursue our desires with desperation. Amidst its fairytale horrors, though (and believe me, Awad pulls no punches in the high Gothic intensity of the cabal’s beauty rituals), Rouge also tenderly explores grief, the psychic damage wrought by Eurocentric beauty standards, and the fierce, fraught love between mothers and daughters.

Chelsea Davis: Rouge is not just a story about the beauty industry writ large; it’s about skincare in particular. What drew you to writing about skin instead of hair or lips or body image more broadly? 

Mona Awad: There’s just something so insidious about skin, and so intimate, and so horror. It’s this very, very, delicate protective covering of all this stuff on the inside. What does our obsession with the exterior, the surface, suggest about that interior? When you’re fixating so much on the surface of something seemingly so superficial as skincare, what are you avoiding? 

I think a lot of what’s lurking behind skincare is anxiety about death. I started watching the videos and I was like, “Death is the thing we’re not talking about. We’re all on the edge of the abyss, putting our creams on.”

CD: There’s this beautifully jarring pair of sentences early in the novel that gets at exactly that—the way we run away from our own mortality towards an obsession with appearance. Belle is at the reception for her mother’s funeral, and says, “After the funeral. I’m hiding in Mother’s bathroom watching a skincare video about necks.” She’s in mourning, a state of extreme distress where she could be leaning on the people immediately around her for support. But she’s instead drawn like a moth to a flame to this skincare influencer she’s never met, on a screen. 

MA: The fact that we are becoming more and more isolated makes us more vulnerable to whatever visual messaging we’re engaging with online or on our screens. That emphasis on the self will have consequences for our ability to connect with each other and see past ourselves. In Belle’s case, her loneliness makes her a target, the perfect candidate for La Maison de Méduse. 

CD: Rouge is both a kind of fairytale in its own right and a meta-commentary on the genre. You also wrote a dissertation on fairytales, and your novel Bunny had elements of them. What about fairytales has such an abiding appeal for you? 

The fact that we are becoming more and more isolated makes us more vulnerable to whatever visual messaging we’re engaging with on our screens.

MA: They are transformation stories at their core. They present the possibility of change, often to people who are powerless and wouldn’t have the means to change otherwise. And maybe the fairy tale indulges that longing for change—and then shows the shadow side, too. The fairy tales that are the most exciting to me will often present the wonder of transformation, but also the horror of it, the consequences.

The other aspect of fairytales that I love is that they present situations to us that I think are emotionally and psychologically resonant to a modern reader in a very real way—parent-child conflicts, issues with siblings, anxiety around sex and partnership, life changes—but they use a magical language of symbols to explore it. And I think part of why fairytales remain among the stories we keep coming back to across the centuries is because those motifs are so mysterious at their core. They’re elastic enough that you could cast them in a really sinister light, or you could cast them in a wondrous light. They will always ultimately elude being completely contained by any one meaning. And that is incredibly exciting as a writer. For instance, the mirror is highly mysterious in “Snow White,” and I was drawn to exploring its potential meaning in a story. 

CD: It seems like another element of “Snow White” that your novel pulls in heavily is color. Both the original Grimm’s story and the Disney cartoon adaptation are characterized by a very strong palette of primary colors—red, yellow, blue, white, black. Red is flagged in your novel’s title, of course, and black and red are ubiquitous in the Maison de Méduse. Why was it important to you to inject this particular story with such a strong sense of color?

MA: Red, black, and white are the colors of folklore. And so emphasizing that color palette felt important to signal to the reader that we’re entering that kind of world. Also, in fairytales, red has a couple of different meanings, but certainly one of them is danger. So it’s a bit of a warning—but it’s also a lure, because it’s visually so attractive and it’s what’s right beneath the surface. The book might, at first glance, be interested in skin, but ultimately it’s interested in something deeper and more vital.

CD: What about that third color you mentioned as being crucial to Rouge: white? When people join the Maison de Méduse cult, they gain skin that is not just smooth and youthful, but specifically white. 

MA: Snow White has such an interesting history in that sense. There are variants from all over the world. And in the Grimm version, Snow White’s whiteness is really more metaphorical; they never explicitly say that she is white-skinned. It’s the Disney version that gives us “skin as white as snow.” That was really interesting to me, that history of how Snow White becomes unequivocally, unambiguously white. And of course the object of such envy. 

So Rouge became a story also about how beauty and whiteness are tied together in a very problematic way. That connection exists in the real-world beauty industry, too. As somebody who is of mixed ethnicity, an ethnicity that I share with Belle, I’ve always been really sensitive to that subtext—the idea of “brightening,” which is just a breath away from “lightening.” So race was definitely an aspect of beauty culture and the beauty industry that I wanted to have inform Belle’s own insecurity about her face and her skin. 

CD: In pursuing whiteness and eternal youth through the cult, Belle ends up getting a lot more than she bargained for. That monkey’s paw plot structure is a common one across your novels: your protagonist gains something they want desperately, but at devastating cost. That “something” is a thin body, in 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl; in Bunny, it’s creative success. What do you find exciting about the Faustian bargain as a narrative setup? 

MA: It’s my favorite dilemma because it’s at the heart of all fairytales. There’s a desire; there is a longing. Usually the person who has the longing is an underdog of some kind, and is not able to acquire the thing that they want. The Little Mermaid is a great example. 

Fairytales are transformation stories at their core. They present the possibility of change, often to people who are powerless.

That careful-what-you-wish-for story connects us all because we all long for something that we think would make everything better. And I’m so interested in exploring that longing and of what it feels like to attain it—the wonder of attaining it, but also the really deep dread that might arise when it is not all that we hoped for. Because the longing is always a disguise for some other longing. Belle might long for great skin—but what does she really want? Connection with her mother; feeling accepted in the world that she finds herself in.  

CD: Yes, that mother-daughter dyad is really at the dead center of Rouge. I was wondering whether the process of writing this novel clarified or complexified your understanding of your relationship with your own mother. 

MA: In some ways it did. I was really interested in the dynamic in which a mother knows she is going down a destructive path, but can’t keep herself from doing so. And her daughter is watching her go down this path, and wants to follow. The mother doesn’t want her daughter to experience the damage that she’s already experienced herself. But it’s already too late. 

And the mother’s navigation of that in Rouge, the ways that she tries and fails to protect her daughter from the irreversible damage she herself has undergone—for me, just thinking about my own mother, and thinking about my mother’s relationship to her mother, that was really meaningful to explore that in the story. It helped me understand just how difficult that might be. You don’t want to harm someone by doing harm to yourself, but you still might, against all your good intentions. That’s just the nature of parent-child relationships.

CD: A young daughter is like a mirror, in that sense. She’s taking in everything you do. 

MA: Yes, that’s right. Including the beautiful things, too. I really wanted to do justice to each of these two characters, the mother and the daughter. To present the truth of both experiences, even as we’re looking at the world of the story through the daughter’s eyes. 

CD: Both the mother and daughter eventually succumb to the same shady skincare cabal, and both experience, as a result of those spa treatments, gradual memory loss. A significant stretch of the novel is narrated by Belle as she’s experiencing this and other forms of cognitive impairment. What it was like to write a story through the perspective of someone whose memory is deteriorating?  

MA: I’m fascinated by altered states of consciousness. I love reading stories where the character’s mind is altered in a way that’s reflected in how they’re telling us the story, because we can see things that they can’t. That’s a great pleasure for the reader, to know things that the main character does not.

It was both fun and scary to write Belle in such a state. I teach a class on horror, and of course, there are many possession stories in that genre. So the idea that what’s on the outside might be seeping inside and changing Belle, altering her consciousness, is a nightmare. And the worst part of the nightmare is that she’s not fully aware that it’s happening to her. That’s the most terrifying part of possession: if you’re truly possessed, you don’t know it. I wanted to explore what that might feel like.

But beyond the supernatural element at play, Belle’s changing mind was also a way of exploring a real-life fear that I have. Memory loss is something that could happen to any of us any time; you could somehow lose your grip on your understanding of who you are. 

CD: It sounds like you often write directly into your fears.

MA: Yeah, I do. That’s where the heat is. For me, it’s the engine of creativity—fear and longing, together. I love asking the question, “what if?” I can make my own horror novel just sitting in the dark by myself. I’ll really scare myself in the process, but I’ll probably have fun, too.  

CD: On the flip side, since you’re often writing about your own anxieties, do you find that there’s any personal catharsis at the end of the process of writing a novel like this? For example, are you in a different place with regard to skincare and beauty after writing Rouge than you were beforehand? 

MA: Ultimately, there is catharsis whenever I feel like I’ve written a scene that is really meant to be in the story. But then there is a feeling of great loss when it’s all over because I’ve lived inside of this world for two or three years. I’ve completely inhabited it. It’s been the place that I go in my mind. And when it’s finished, there’s no place to go. And so I have to go through a real period of grieving, actually, when it’s over. 

Rouge was particularly hard to let go of, in terms of how it changed my view of skincare. I mean, when I first finished the book, I had no desire to watch skincare videos ever again. [Laughs.] And then I wrote a piece about my skincare addiction for a Canadian magazine called The Walrus, and so I had to revisit some of those videos. And when I started watching again, I got hooked again. I bought all these products that I can’t afford, that I won’t use, that I definitely don’t need. So it truly was an addiction. I thought I was going to be so above it. But I’m not above anything. 

CD: I mean, you’re not alone. In the age of Instagram, and casual filler, and twenty-year-olds getting into Retinol, it’s easy to feel like our culture’s obsession with appearance is only getting more inescapable. Do you, or Rouge, hold out any kind of hope for ways out of the trap? 

MA: Without giving too much away, I think that the novel does offer ways to find connection in isolation, either through mutual trauma or sharing trauma, which is something that I think can be very meaningful. And in fact, social media might be a way to do that—already is, for many people. But that connection can also happen through art, through sharing stories. Being both the reader and the audience, both the teller of the story and the listener. I think that is the way forward. Or at least that’s my hope. 

7 Dark and Thrilling Novels about Women Who Kill

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Murder has long been a man’s game in literature. Patrick Batemen, Joe Goldberg and Tom Ripley are just a few of the complicated killers who have appeared in novels (and later on screens). Readers take a front row seat to their sadistic minds and delight in their depravity as they kill with few consequences. Similarly, horror films, murder thrillers and shows like SVU abound, in which male killers stalk women who often function as disposable prey. 

It’s a refreshing change when an author can turn the tables on this narrative. My debut novel Kill for Love “neatly flips the formula of the male serial killer on its bashed-in head” (Kirkus Reviews). The novel follows Tiffany, an L.A. sorority girl who seemingly has it all—but wants more. A frat party hookup gone wrong unleashes within her a lethal urge: the insatiable desire to kill attractive, young men. 

The books on this list also feature women who kill, some for revenge and many just for the hell of it. From a professor to a fashion editor, the female serial killers in these books are both cruel and captivating. These women are dark, demented and don’t mind being labeled as “unlikeable.” The novels listed below are stand-alone works of fiction. Included with each title are film and TV recommendations, all featuring women creators at the helm. 

A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers 

This gastronomic, gut-busting novel can be devoured in a couple sittings or savored like a fine Chianti. The narrator, Dorothy Daniels, is a food critic with a sophisticated palate that extends beyond acceptable norms when she develops a literal taste for men. Dorothy regales readers with her history of killing and consuming her male suitors. She challenges you to throw away any gendered expectations on just how bad she can be: “You who call women the fairer sex, you may repress and deny all you want, but some of us were born with a howling void where our souls should sway.” The prose sings, and the mayhem is delicious. 

Movie pairing: Julia Ducournau’s cannibal film Raw.

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite 

In this fast-paced dark comedy, the story revolves around kind-hearted and responsible narrator Korede, who lives in Lagos and has found a perfect potential boyfriend in Tade, one of the doctors at the hospital where she works. There’s just one little problem: her beautiful and spoiled sister Ayoola has caught his eye too – and she has a habit of murdering her boyfriends. The story moves quickly and builds tension from page one when our narrator states, “Ayoola summons me with these words – Korede, I killed him.” Braithwaite uses the character of Korede as the level-headed foil to her brash, killer sister in order to explore the bonds of sisterhood, the weight of the patriarchy, and the emotional burden of carrying family secrets.

Movie pairing: For another wicked tale about a woman reckoning with her murderous companion, check out Jennifer’s Body, directed by Karyn Kusama and written by Diablo Cody.

Maeve Fly by C.J. Leede 

Looking for a serial killer story with strong horror vibes that can pair perfectly with Halloween season? This novel follows Maeve, who is a sweet-looking Disney princess by day, sadistic Sunset Strip serial killer by night. Leede infuses gothic horror into the narrative with a storyline involving Maeve’s once-starlet grandmother Talullah that has shades of old Hollywood films like Sunset Boulevard and Psycho. Maeve is all her own though, and she rightfully rails against the double standards often placed on misanthropic female characters in literature. “Men have always been permitted in fiction and in life to simply be what they are, no matter how dark or terrifying that might be. But with a woman, we expect an answer, a reason.” There is in fact a method to Maeve’s madness, and the story builds to a horrifically satisfying conclusion. 

Movie pairing: Mary Harron’s cult classic film adaptation of American Psycho. 

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo 

If you’re looking for a story of revenge and feminist rage, this is your book. Dr. Scarlett Clark is an English professor at an East Coast university, and her extracurricular activities include uncovering men’s wrongs and making them pay. A female Dexter with a similarly strict code to her murders, her career and freedom are jeopardized when a colleague begins investigating the suspicious deaths that have plagued the college town since she took up tenure. The novel also features a second narrator, Carly, a new student who is learning to develop her own agency after leaving her abusive household behind. The story has plenty of twists and turns that will keep you guessing until the suspense-filled close. 

Movie pairing: For more violent justice, make it a double feature with Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman and Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.

#FashionVictim by Amina Akhtar 

A fiendish blend of The Devil Wears Prada, Heathers and Scream Queens, Akhtar’s novel revels in satirizing the fashion industry and its impossible, Westernized beauty standards. The plot delivers pulpy, gory camp as narrator and fashion editor Anya St. Clair stops at nothing to rise amid the fashion ranks at the fictional New York magazine La Vie. She quickly sets her sights on her colleague Sarah, and Anya’s increasingly unhinged obsession with befriending her work rival sets in motion a succession of elaborately staged and hilarious murders that involve everything from spiked heels to poisoned tampons.  

TV pairing: For another tale of feminine obsession and serial murder, buzz over to the series Swarm, co-created by Janine Nabers.

My Men by Victoria Kielland, translated by Damion Searls

This recently published Norwegian novel provides a fictionalized account of one of America’s most prolific serial killers, Belle Gunness. A Norwegian transplant who murdered her lovers, she found many of her victims through personal ads. The prose is meditative, poetic and almost hallucinatory as Belle reinvents herself with each passing decade and begins to lose her grip on reality. The narrative is framed by revealing newspaper ads and chapter titles that read like aphorisms. Belle’s surprising longing and romanticism (“Love was the only thing that could save her”) provides a fascinating contrast to the increasingly brutal dispassion of her murders. 

Movie pairing: For another look at the humanity behind a real-life murderer, watch Patty Jenkins’ Monster. 

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn 

Before Amy Dunne burned into our brains in Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s razor-sharp debut introduced readers to Camille Preaker, a reporter sent to unearth the dark crimes occurring in her hometown of Wind Gap. There is a serial killer afoot who is targeting and torturing little girls. Everyone in the town assumes the murderer is a man, but Camille senses the predator’s identity might not be so straightforward. While on the case, she is forced to stay with her previously estranged family and quickly settles into toxic old habits. Saying anything more might give away the book’s many shocks. Immersive and unsettling, you’ll feel Camille’s unease and the palpable danger lurking in the decaying town.

Movie pairing: For a similarly uneasy horror tale about the family ties that bind, watch Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook. 

Electric Lit Is Thrilled To Welcome Deesha Philyaw to Its Board of Directors

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Electric Literature is excited to welcome Deesha Philyaw, acclaimed author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, to its board of directors.

Much of Philyaw’s fiction centers Black women, sex, and the Black church. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Philyaw’s debut short story collection, was published to immediate critical acclaim, and went on to win the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. It was also a Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, and is being adapted for HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. 

Her next two books, the novel The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman and the story collection Girl, Look, recently sold to Mariner, a division of HarperCollins, in a major deal. 

“What excites me most about joining Electric Lit’s Board of Directors,” Philyaw says, “is their unwavering commitment to breaking down barriers for all writers, but especially writers whose voices we don’t often hear from. I’m thrilled to support a publication that takes real, tangible steps toward building a more equitable publishing industry, and helping emerging writers grow their audience.” 

In addition to her success as a writer, Philyaw is a proven champion of new and emerging writers. She is a current fellow of Baldwin for the Arts and Kimbilio Fiction, and has recently taught and mentored at Tin House, VONA, The University of Mississippi, and The Periplus Collective. Her commitment to giving back to the literary community and advocating for writers from marginalized communities is well-established, and comes in the form of fighting gatekeeping and opening doors for the writers who follow in her footsteps.  

“Deesha’s ability to inspire and energize those around her, in addition to the drive and determination she injects into her own career, is sure to excite our efforts to support and grow Electric Literature. She’s a friend, a confidante, and an endless resource for new ideas addressing age-old challenges. For me, Deesha Philyaw is a literary north star,” says Denne Michele Norris, Electric Literature’s editor-in-chief.  

Electric Literature’s connection with Philyaw extends back to 2017, when Norris acquired “Eula” from The Secret Lives of Church Ladies in her capacity as fiction editor of Apogee Journal. Another story from the collection, “When Eddie Levert Comes,” was later published in Electric Literature by executive director and fiction editor Halimah Marcus, and continues to be one of EL’s most read short stories.

“Not only is Deesha an exceptionally talented writer, her passion for giving back to her community is infectiously motivating. We are so fortunate to be able to count on her as a leader and mentor,” says Halimah Marcus. 

Philyaw will join board chair Andy Hunter, Electric Lit’s co-founder and founder and CEO of Bookshop.org, and board members Nicole Cliffe, Meredith Talusan, Pulitzer prize-winning author Michael Cunningham, and the vice president and executive editor of HarperCollins, Sara Nelson.

“Can’t You See That the Wall Is Growing?”

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Brando Skyhorse’s new novel My Name is Iris, is a harrowing and, at times, darkly funny exploration of one woman’s complex relationship with her own identity as Mexican American in a slightly fictionalized United States. 

Iris (born Inés) is an educated and semi-successful businesswoman. She sees herself as a good citizen, a good mother to her young daughter Melanie, and deserving of a good life. Early in the novel, she leaves her husband and moves into a beautiful new home in a tony suburb. Iris is intent on fitting into a white America that marginalizes her no matter how hard she works. Haunted by the ghosts of her past, Iris struggles to balance the demands of a hostile workplace and single-parenting, and when a strange wall suddenly starts to grow in front of her new house, Iris begins to panic. Although the wall is only visible to Iris and her daughter, its presence exhausts and terrifies her. And when a new law requires citizens to wear a biometric band proving their citizenship status, the illusion of safety Iris has carefully created rapidly unravels and she is forced to make terrible choices to survive. 

Skyhorse and I recently spoke via Zoom about his decision to write from a woman’s point of view, the conservative politics of some Latino Americans, and how his new novel reflects the existential dread of living in Trump’s America.

Yvonne Garrett: Your new novel focuses on a woman—Ines renamed Iris—and her desire to build and maintain a specific type of American life. One that she describes as “responsible, college-educated Mexican American.” She has a mantra: “Rules mean structure, structure means order, and order means safety, which means a life without fear.” Can you talk a little about where the idea for the novel came from? And about the decision to write from a woman’s point of view? 

Brando Skyhorse: If we could all think back to what was going on in 2016. It’s a lot like now—the T-word —that was being discussed a lot, and I was hearing the word “wall” a lot. The word over that summer had ceased to become this dead noun, it became alive, animated. I wanted to try to figure out a way to respond. I was staring out the window. I saw this wall and I heard this voice and it said, “Can’t you see that the wall is growing?” So for the past six and a half years, I’ve been trying to figure out what that voice wanted, what it’s intent was, what it’s agenda was. That voice ultimately belonged to Iris. And because it was a woman’s voice, I said, okay, I’m going to write this from a woman’s perspective. 

I was raised by women—my mother and my grandmother—and essentially this rotating cast of stepfathers, four of whom had been incarcerated or had done some time behind bars. My perspective has always been how a woman runs a household. I grew up learning and, frankly, stressing about all the issues that come with managing a household and trying to raise a kid. And being acutely aware that these were two women who were doing their best to try to raise me in a complicated situation. 

YG: In the opening of the novel, Iris states, “Like every Mexican-American we knew, we worked for everything we had and we hated those who expected handouts.” Much has been made in the media about what they call the “Hispanic” vote—as if that’s a monolithic thing—and the conservative “immigrant” voter—not just conservative Cubans in Florida but the “we’re doing immigration the right way” people. 

I’ve lived on the Lower East Side in New York City for many years, where all of the Latino/Latinx people I’m in community with are to the left of Left. How different is it in LA? And in your personal experience? I’m also thinking about Iris’s own journey from “not in my backyard” protests to where she is at the end of the novel, but also her husband Alex’s secret evening trips with white racists. I also noticed that a lot of the law enforcement characters have seemingly Latino names. 

BS: My experience is that, if you grow up in an environment like New York, you’re used to this multicultural experience. In places like Los Angeles, it can be very easy to get into bubbles: you bubble in a car, you bubble in your neighborhood, you don’t necessarily have to interact with people whose paths you wouldn’t cross, like going into the subway. 

There is a strand of Hispanic Americans who pride themselves on the culture of work ethic and the belief that nothing is handed to them. They worked hard for everything that they have, and when they see footage of undocumented laborers or all the stuff that’s run on the television ad nauseum, it’s belittling, it’s insulting, right? They’ve been so far removed from any experience that’s even remotely like that. They’ve invested in America. They believe in America. They have houses. They pay taxes. They’re Americans first, Mexicans second.

I grew up in Echo Park and I remember that election, Reagan versus Mondale in 1984. I was eleven-years-old. I don’t think I ran into a single Mexican American who was voting for Mondale. They were fiercely Republican! Fiercely “God, Country, anti-abortion, this is who I am! This person speaks to my values!” Which is why when we talk about the Latino vote, the Hispanic vote, or whatever, it’s always shocking to me that the Republican Party is like, “We’re gonna make inroads, and we’re gonna talk to Hispanic Americans outside of Miami,” or outside of areas that are ostensibly conservative, and they somehow always miss a step. “Oh yeah, we have your values, but at the same time, you really know your place.” But they don’t! They believe that they are Americans! That they’ve earned the right to shed that part of their identity and that’s something that’s an experience that was very familiar to me growing up, very familiar interacting with people in Los Angeles. 

One of my father figures was kind of liberal in certain ways, but also staunchly conservative, anti-gay marriage, and “if you’re gonna come here, you gotta come here the right way!” I was astonished! Do you know who you are? And I guess it’s because you get to have that bubble experience where, essentially, all you see is this curated community, this curated neighborhood, and especially this is where colorism factors in a lot as well.

YG: When the “band” is introduced—Ines’s carefully built life becomes challenging and then impossible—in the grocery store, at work, and so on as racist hate builds. As I was reading, I felt almost overwhelmed with dread and fear: this could happen here, and in some ways it already has. 

I was thinking about how in my neighborhood, there was a movement pre-pandemic to boycott “no cash” businesses because they’re inaccessible to the population without bank accounts, who are the most marginalized: the unhoused, people of color, undocumented or low income, but then that conversation disappeared and now they’re everywhere. It might seem like a small thing until you think about how that cuts people off from access and is so much part of a larger oppression. Can you speak about “the band” and Iris’s reaction—first denial, then the desperate decision she makes? 

BS: The idea stemmed from thinking about what’s on conservatives’ wish-lists: finding a way to get rid of birthright citizenship. It was a constitutional amendment proposed by Louisiana Senator David Vitter and Vitter’s amendment that basically said, “You can only qualify for citizenship if both of your parents are also citizens.” So, in other words, you couldn’t cross the border, have your kid, etc. I was really fascinated by that idea and wondered if there was a way to connect that idea to technology. And honestly, the technology is already there: Apple Watch, the iPhone. The idea that the band would be sold as something that would actually save the planet—monitoring your garbage usage, monitoring your water usage—all these metrics. Iris’s stance is “just leave me alone. I’m not interested in the politics of the day. I’m not interested in having hard conversations. I can figure out a way to get along and I don’t have to get involved.” What if she had to? By creating this slow burn with this Trojan Horse of an idea that’s going to help society but with a catch. Iris’s stance [has been] “who cares? I’ve got my own concerns. I’ve got my family, I’ve got my daughter to raise, I don’t have time for that.” This is her worst nightmare—it’s like a wave that just lapped up by her door, three feet high and rising, at what point do you decide “I have to care now. I have to take a stand on these things”?

YG: The definition of privilege is when things don’t affect you. 

BS: That’s the novel’s central conceit: how much is enough? At what point do you say, “Oh, the water’s up to here now, it’s up to my nose. I gotta do something now!” 

YG: There are moments in the novel—she got promoted and now she makes 50% less than her male counterpart—that’s not just a race thing but the reality of being a woman in the working world. And the joy I felt for her when she got her own house away from her jerk of a husband. And then the realization that it’s a total fabrication. 

There is a strand of Hispanic Americans who pride themselves on their work ethic and the belief that nothing is handed to them.

BS: That freedom has a cost and that cost has basically been ignoring—again, the way the band was introduced, this was passed by an election, a referendum, a proposition—loosely based on the California process. To me, even though this book doesn’t take place specifically in California, it’s not that impossible for me to believe that this could happen in California, it could happen anywhere. 

YG: It’s interesting, when people refer to it as a dystopian novel, I’m like “are you sure? Are you sure it’s not just a few years ahead realism?“

BS: When I was writing this, I could never keep up with what was happening. It became, let me just look at what’s happening now and report accurately to the best of my ability. So, yeah, I wouldn’t say this is dystopic. If you’re asked when this book is set: nowish. 

YG: And I think that explains a lot of the dread and fear I felt as I was reading. Now I’m going to shift a little bit and talk about the use of Spanish in the novel. I felt like the use of Spanish increased as the tension ramped up which, for me, really highlighted my own limitations but I also really loved the experience of stopping and looking up all of the words then re-reading. Can you speak a little about your choice to use Spanish particularly in dialogue? And the way that it related to ramping up tension? 

BS: As you so deftly pointed out, the use of Spanish increases as the tension builds in the novel. Iris is reclaiming her identity, so more Spanish is coming out. Iris is having to grapple with [the collapse of] her very cultivated facade of “I’m an American and I know Spanish but I don’t need to trot it out— or only for effect, with my friends.” [The use of Spanish] becomes a central key to understanding Iris’s mindset: seeing how Spanish functions in her relationship with her family, the code-switching between English and Spanish. 

I tried to make this as representative of my own experience with my own family. My biological father left me when I was three, and I didn’t find him again until I was in my mid-thirties. He’d started over and all of a sudden I had three sisters and they all speak in English and Spanish as the situation demands. My Spanish isn’t great, so if I don’t speak it or hear it for a while, I completely lose it. I loved writing the family sequences in this novel, they capture what I feel like my family situation is now. Someone might be saying something exclusively in Spanish and then translate back in English and then someone else might use English and Spanish together and it feels like home now if that makes any sense. 

YG: There is a point in the novel that focuses on forged documents. Without overstepping, I’m wondering if you can talk a bit about your own history which you wrote about in your memoir and if that informed anything in the novel? 

I wouldn’t say this is dystopic. If you’re asked when this book is set: nowish.

BS: I was born Brandon Kelly Ulloa. Ulloa is a Mexican American name by way of Spain. It was the 1970s, there was a lot of activism in Southern California, all kinds of Power: Brown Berets, Brown Power, Black Power, and the American Indian Movement. My mother decided to re-invent us as American Indians. She reinvented me as Brando Skyhorse and she reinvented herself as Running Deer Skyhorse. I feel like those issues of identity that we’ve been talking about go all the way back in my family for years. Back in the day when you wanted to enroll a child in school, you didn’t need all these documents, you just went and rolled up to the school. So I was enrolled as Brando Skyhorse Johnson. As I got older, documents [became an issue] How do I cash my financial aid checks? I would have to use a little bit of white-out, Xerox some documents, and hand them over to the Bursar. After a couple of years I decided to apply for a formal name change. My name now is legally Brando Skyhorse. But up until that period. it was a very precarious situation. I [was] in this absurd position—I was born in America and I need papers! This informed Iris’s experience of feeling her legitimate status has been de-legitimized and not knowing how to respond. 

YG: Iris describes her sister Serena’s activism: “My sister’s urgency and activism never extended beyond what she could do on her phone…” I think we all know armchair activists like this, but later in the novel, Serena knows how to get illegal bands—is her activism as limited as Iris thinks, or is Iris’s view of her sister limited based on her own needs to blend in—and Serena’s refusal to blend? 

BS: There’s an evolution in Iris. Iris has lived her life structured, based around absolutes. Because of that experience she had with Brenda, the lesson that she took from that was to live with absolutes and survive. She has a very clear, absolutest view on what Serena is, what Serena does, her approach to the world, and even if Iris may be sympathetic to some of those aims and even at a few points think, yeah my sister actually had a good point there, right? There’s still this sense of—Serena is dangerous because she doesn’t live within the rules and that’s going to cause her problems and then it’s going to cause me (Iris) problems. She’s responding from a selfish standpoint, which is “You’re bringing attention to us. You’re bringing attention to me, you’re bringing attention to yourself. You gotta stop that. You gotta knock that out.” So much of her absolutest position about Serena stems from that sense of you’re causing us to be exposed to scrutiny—don’t do that. You’re young, you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know the danger that you’re putting yourself or you’re putting me in. Iris is frequently unaware of the deep implications of what’s happening, but that’s okay, that’s what makes her mindset at times really confusing. These are confusing times and these are confusing situations that I’ve put this character in. 

YG: I don’t know how I would respond. I think wow—how much braver and yet more difficult it is for someone like Serena. There is that snide comment that her sister makes, but there is also the reality that Serena does have that connect, she does know—where to get fake bands. 

BS: Serena is a survivor in the same way that Iris is a survivor. I hope that one of the things that comes through in the novel is that these two sisters from different generations reconcile and acknowledge that there is no one right way to survive and that survival evolves. It’s different for different people at different ages and what may work for Iris may not work for Serena or vice versa. They’re talking about the [band] amendment and Serena calls it: “You voted for this—didn’t you. You knew what you were doing so why do you want me to have sympathy for you now?” And Iris explains to the reader, I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t think it was going to impact people like me. I didn’t want myself to be hurt.

To me, Iris represents where a lot of people are right now in this country. I’m not even talking about Mexican Americans or persons of color. There’s a sense of like—I’m not quite sure where I am anymore and not in an Alice in Wonderland [way]… all of a sudden everything is up for grabs, everything is negotiable in a way that’s startling. Iris one of those characters that doesn’t function well in those kinds of environments. Just tell me what I need to do—she’s even pleading with her sister—just tell me what I need to do to get back to the way things were. It takes her almost the whole novel to get that there is no going back to the way things were. She’s never gonna have the uncomplicated view from her house anymore. It’s like a bell, once it’s been rung you can’t unring the bell.

7 Novels that Defined the Obama Era

Posted on by EL Assistant2

You can tell a lot about a country by the culture it consumes. The Bush era was defined by a brand of bombast befitting a blundering empire: from 24 to 300, Team America to Talladega Nights, the U.S. in the new millennium seemed intent on both dramatizing and lampooning the nation’s new role as dunderheaded defender of democracy. Trump hasn’t been out of office long—and he may soon be back—but to my mind, his presidential term is best embodied by colorful grifters both real and imagined: Joe Exotic, Kendall Roy, Howard Ratner. 

The pop culture of the Obama era, by contrast, betrays an upbeat earnestness that obscures a commitment to the status quo. Those were years when new media companies like Buzzfeed and Upworthy made millions pumping positivity into our feeds. Macklemore rapped about being “on some Malcolm Gladwell shit.” Alexander Hamilton rapped about establishing a national bank. Sincerity was in, irony was out. Obama’s campaign slogan, HOPE—which I borrowed for the title of my second novel—nailed the national mood. 

Speaking of novels, many of the most important works of fiction of the era explored questions of identity. Race, gender, history, trauma: the election of the country’s first Black president pushed these topics to the forefront of American life. 

In compiling the following list, I’ve limited my scope to Anglophone novels, which means excluding international sensations like My Struggle or My Brilliant Friend. The books listed below are not necessarily the “best” of the era, or even my favorite, but the most definitive—the stories that captured, and in some cases shaped, the culture of America under Obama. 

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

Published months before Obama took office, O’Neill’s postcolonial Gatsby is the story of Hans van den Broek, a Dutch financial analyst, and his friendship with a Trinidadian cricket enthusiast named Chuck Ramkissoon. Chuck introduces Hans to a New York he’s never known before, a city populated by immigrants, hustlers, and strivers. Chuck shares with the forty-fourth president a gift for oratory, a natural charisma, and an unshakable belief in the American dream. That Chuck, who turns out to be a con man of sorts, meets a tragic end, illustrates the interplay of hope and disillusionment that would come to define Obama’s presidency. 

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing.” So begins Americanah, Chimamanda Adichie’s bestselling 2013 novel of star-crossed lovers Ifemelu and Obinze. But Americanah is much more than a love story, tackling heady topics like immigration, identity, and meritocracy with sly humor. (Ifemelu’s blog, “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black” is a perfect vessel for Adichie’s trenchant commentary.) Few books better celebrate, and critique, the notion of America as a “melting pot.” In her introduction to the 2023 edition, Adichie writes of her desire to “contribute to that tradition [of Black American writing], but obliquely, as someone standing outside of American culture, a Black person without America’s blighted history.” In Americanah, she has done just that.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Two of the bestselling books of the Obama era, Gone Girl and Lean In, center on the difficulties facing women trying to thrive in a patriarchal society. One of these books offered practical, step-by-step advice for achieving that goal. The other was Lean In. Granted, Amy Elliott’s advice in Gone Girl involves forging a diary, staging a murder, committing a different murder, and lying about all of the above. But Gillian Flynn’s twisty thriller has more on its mind than revenge. In the book’s iconic “Cool Girl” monologue, Flynn’s Amy upbraids women who spend their lives “pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.” Like another major Obama-era novel, Fates and Furies, Gone Girl’s dueling perspectives paint a complex portrait of a marriage and male-female relations writ large. (The he-said, she-said narrative structure would take on even greater resonance a few years later, with the emergence of the #MeToo movement.) Why bother struggling to overcome imposter syndrome when you can frame your husband for murder instead?

Taipei by Tao Lin

Love it or hate it, the literary phenomenon known as “alt lit” was an original, organic outgrowth of Obama’s America. Unabashedly sincere and extremely online, the movement coalesced around one writer in particular: Tao Lin. (Nothing screams “Obama era” like the title of Lin’s 2009 novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel—or the fact that the book was sold in Urban Outfitters.) Lin’s breakout 2013 novel, Taipei, can be described as both alt lit and autofiction, another literary movement born—or rather, reborn—somewhere in Brooklyn circa 2009. Like other autofictional novels (Open City, 10:04, How Should a Person Be?), Taipei tracks a period of time in the life of a character who might as well be the author as he goes about the mostly-mundane business of life. Critics were divided on the novel—a critic at the Observer called it a masterpiece, while a critic at the Times said it made him want to kill himself—but whatever your take, Taipei is undoubtedly a book of its time. 

Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte

While many writers remained committed to sincerity under Obama, holdouts like Tony Tulathimutte and Paul Beatty (The Sellout) delivered the satirical goods. Private Citizens, which follows four recent Stanford grads in San Francisco, was published at the tail end of the Obama era, which might account for its more gimlet-eyed perspective. And while we’re on the subject of eyes, one character, Will, has his surgically removed after a botched surgery to make him less Asian-looking and therefore more marketable for his paraplegic girlfriend’s lifecasting venture. But the wild plot turns and dark jokes all serve the novel’s larger purpose: exposing the outrageous hypocrisies of millennial America. 

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The historical novel, once considered fusty and stale, was gut-renovated in the 2010s. During Obama’s two terms, novelists (and especially Black novelists) turned history (and especially Black history) on its head in a series of formally inventive books. James McBride’s National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird was a comedic reimagining of the life of John Brown and his raid on Harper’s Ferry. Marlon James’s Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings was a polyphonic telling of (among many other things) a real-life assassination attempt on the life of Bob Marley. And then there’s Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which won pretty much every prize there is. To focus on the premise underpinning Whitehead’s novel—what if the Underground Railroad was, in fact, a functioning railroad?—is to miss his even more audacious thematic gambits, collapsing centuries of oppression into one phantasmagoric journey.  

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

In his 2017 essay, “Considering the Novel in the Age of Obama,” to which this list is indebted, Christian Lorentzen defined four kinds of books that “have been particularly germane to the Obama years”: autofiction, fables of meritocracy, historical novels, and trauma novels. The biggest trauma novel of them all, in every respect, was undoubtedly A Little Life. Hanya Yanagihara’s epic was full of extraordinarily high highs—her four main characters are all some combination of handsome, successful, rich, loving, and glamorous—and unbearably low lows. (A tote bag bearing the names of her protagonists was ubiquitous in Brooklyn for a time, a rare feat for any novel, much less one that features so much physical abuse, pedophilia, and self-harm.) Lorentzen attributes the trauma novel’s success to the relative tranquility of the Obama era, “when American writers had the luxury of looking inward, investigating the systems that formed them, reimagining the romantic days just past, and registering the echoes of personal traumas.” Interestingly, the trauma novel only became more popular after Obama left office. It makes a kind of sense. After 2016, who wasn’t traumatized?

How to Dispose of a Toxic Father-in-Law

Posted on by Wynter Miller

Pushed Buttons

Liz put her father-in-law in the lift, pushed the button, and watched as he was taken away.

Liz, not thinking, carried her father-in-law down the stairs, through the hall, into the living room, where the lift was waiting, placed him inside, pushed the button, and watched as he was taken away.

Liz lifted her father-in-law from his chair to put him in his bed when he spat in her ear, called her a wretch and shrieked with laughter, so she carried him out of his room, down the stairs, through the hallway, where he swiped a portrait of her girls off the wall, into the living room, where the lift waited in the chimney breast, paused as the doors swished open, strode inside, placed her father-in-law in the centre with the greatest of care, pushed the down button, stepped back out, and watched as he was taken away.

Liz, with wretch stuffing her ear like Playdoh, released the locks of her mind and let it do what it most desired; picturing the lift in pin-sharp precision with those sleek chrome doors, the mirrored walls, the sparkling floor and the downward arrow of its button, with the soft chime of its arrival, the swish of the doors opening, the near-silence of their closing, and that great feeling of the endless depth below as the cabin swept down carrying whatever she felt the need to offer: that burnt lasagna, those boxes of wine, the dead mobile phones, a flat tire, the neighbor’s cat, her test results, and, now, her father-in-law, who she carried from his room, down the stairs, through the hall, past the family pictures, into the living room, before putting him inside the lift, pushing the button, stepping out, and watching as he was taken away.

Liz, the wretch, thought mostly of two things as she carried her father-in-law from his room to the lift: the sleek, slick, decadent elevator itself, in all the granular detail she needed to make it appear, and her plan: to tell Matt that after a brief but bitter argument she had finally triumphed and his father had agreed to be put into The Crescent where the nurses would take so much better care of him, and would understand him, and wouldn’t have eons of toxic history with him, and she’d seized the moment of his relenting, rung the home, got lucky with a spare bed, and had him carted off and settled him in within the space of a single afternoon, knowing full well that Matt would never, ever, ever get around to actually visiting his father, especially if she pledged to do all the visiting herself, while actually spending the time watching Marvel movies at the Plaza and/or volunteering at the food bank with Cathy, where their flirting might actually be able to start taking its promised course, and she was just about to recognize all that as the desperate fantasy it was when her father-in-law whacked the portrait of Bex and Faye off the wall cracking the glass and warping the frame, so her visions redoubled and popped into Technicolor, and when she rounded the corner and entered the living room the lift had never looked so fucking glorious, like the kind you’d expect in a Monte Carlo casino, and as she watched the doors close and snip away her father-in-law’s face, she had a quick but fabulous vision of herself and Cathy, dolled up to the nines, rolling Baccarat dice, getting giddy on cocktails and shagging each other senseless on a water bed in a hotel in Monaco, and that delirious new nonsense gave her face the tiny but vicious smile she was wearing as the cabin sank down and took her father-in-law with it.  

Liz, feeling wretched, was tapped and drained by the gob of octogenarian spittle that dashed like come into her ear canal, the little spermatozoan words burrowing at her auditory nerve and ripping their way into her mind, where they met with a knotted egg which opened like a lift, took in the bullet of spit, absorbed it, tasted it, measured and judged it, before plummeting down through the membranes of her body, to the meat of her heart, the pit of her belly, and the molten slag at the soles of her feet, which, in turn, were energized into stomping out of the bedroom, down the stairs, through the hall, into the living room, into the lift, where she set her father-in-law onto the sparkling floor as he made one last desperate grab at her, hands snapping, catching hold of her locket, yanking it off and then pulling the prize to his chest, and she was so lost in her Niagara of fantasies that the nerves of her neck failed to transmit their loss to her brain, and, oblivious, she pushed the button, stepped out, smiled as the doors closed, watched her father-in-law get taken away, wondered for half a glimmer of a microsecond why he too was smiling, before realizing, half an hour later, while stripping his bed and preparing her lies, that her neck was now bare and the locket was gone. The realization shatters her knees and sends her to the floor, and her mind runs frantic trying to create a vision of the lift being sent back up, even if that means it brings him back, but when she thinks she’s done it, struggling to her feet and down the stairs again to the living room, she is faced instead with the chimney breast and its floral wallpaper, its faded wedding picture, its landscape print of Paris, and nothing else.

Liz would think of her mum at such times. She would say, if anyone got the chance to ask, that a red mist would descend and her mind would switch to automatic, and she would think of nothing but the lift. But in truth, her mum was always there. Two very specific moments would appear showing her mum’s polar extremes; opposite moods each as forbidding as the other. First, she would think of the moment her mum found out that Liz was pregnant when the screamed threat of the lift became a sudden reality. Liz was dragged down the steps of the cellar and shown the far wall, in which a lift had appeared where there had been no lift before. It had a rickety grill gate across the cabin and the inside was lit by a dull bulb. Her mum threw open the gate and hissed: is this what you want Elizabeth? Is this what you want from life? while she brought her daughter right to the threshold and waited for an answer that Liz was too scared to give. But Liz was not sent away. Her mum pulled Liz’s Nokia from her apron and threw that in instead, the thing skittering into the corner and losing a slither of screen in the process. Down it went while Liz watched and, months later, at Christmas, when she was showing and everyone was warm and no one minded, she got a new phone off her dad and a glanced apology from her mum, and things were more or less OK again. But the second moment, which came to Liz this time as she carried her father-in-law from the ninth to the eighth step of the stairs, was seven months after the first when Bex was a slumbering newborn in her arms. Mum gave Liz the locket and said life rarely gives easy answers, Lizzie, especially to people like us. The gold was pressed into her palm and the fine chain draped between her fingers. Hold tight and don’t let go, her mum said, before giving Bex such a look as if to say; why have you bothered? Don’t you realize where you’ve ended up? And when Bex and her sister are swiped off the hallway wall by her father-in-law, Liz had one final clear micro-thought which flashed in like subliminal advertising: this is my final moment, my ultimate, because Bex is the age I was, not pregnant but quite active, and when she gets home from college, before she understands that her grandfather is gone, I will give her the locket on its fine gold chain delivered with a much warmer and more heartfelt message, and I will tell her that the lift is hers to use however she wants, and she should be careful, and cool-headed, and calm and considered, but that sometimes she’ll feel wretched and heartless and twisted, she’ll feel like a bitch, a hag, a whore, like a worthless flea, like a failure and a nobody and an unlovable maggot, but that’s just how life is, it has no easy answers, no template, no formula, and sometimes it’s totally fine to grasp that locket and wish for something pin-sharp and clear.

Liz carried her father-in-law from his chair to his bed, tucked him in, wiped her ear, said goodnight, John, closed the door, and walked away.

7 Novels About Abortion and the Fight for Reproductive Justice

Posted on by Jo Lou

Since Roe v Wade was repealed in the summer of 2022, those of us who believe in bodily autonomy have been reeling from the cascade of increasingly bad news about reproductive justice in America, as the rights of people who bear children are picked off state by state.  

We are fighting—and we need help, not just from lawmakers but from history and literature and art. We need community. I find solidarity in, and draw inspiration from, the stories of fighters who have gone before me and those who are in the thick of the fight today. This is one of the reasons I wrote my own historical novel All You Have To Do Is Call. In researching the women of the Jane Collective who offered safe, but illegal abortions in Chicago in the years before Roe, I felt both electrified and comforted by the heroism of women who took matters into their own hands. Though I started writing long before Dobbs, their story felt relevant and important, and I hope others will feel moved by their activism as well as their profound belief in the strength of people to endure. 

Here is a collection of 7 novels about abortion and reproductive justice:

The Cider House Rules by John Irving

Irving’s 1985 novel, banned in many states, is probably the most famous depiction of abortion in American literature. He tackles abortion from many angles, with Dr. Wilbur Larch performing abortions and his protégé Homer Wells initially refusing to follow in his footsteps, though the novel itself—and its author—are staunchly pro-choice. Irving won an Oscar for his screenplay adaptation, which became a movie starring Michael Caine and Tobey Maguire in 1999.  Chillingly, he wrote in a must-read 2019 Op-Ed in The New York Times that “If you think Roe v. Wade is safe, you’re one of the reasons it isn’t.”

A Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult

Picoult is a modern master of deftly handled issue novels that are increasingly banned instead of widely required like they should be. She sets this 2018 heart-pounder in Mississippi’s last standing abortion clinic, where a shooter has taken everyone hostage. This novel probes uncomfortably into our conversations about abortion, racial disparities in maternal health and infant mortality, and gun violence—all while making us care deeply about the diverse cast of characters, one of whom is a pregnant teenager inside the clinic with her police officer father acting as hostage negotiator outside. 

Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Inspired by the true story of the Relf sisters, Valdez tells the story of two young Black women in the rural outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama, who are given unnecessary birth control shots with hidden side effects in 1973. Civil Townsend is a nurse assigned to give the shots but she knows something isn’t right. Because Civil herself had an abortion in her youth, she feels compelled to help; her compassion and inner conviction leads her to the horrible truth of the white-run healthcare clinic. This moving novel explores a troubling historical moment in the fight for reproductive justice through the lens of civil rights.  

Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh

Outside the Boston abortion clinic of Mercy Street, tensions are running high between the pro-life protestors and the staff and their clients in this most Catholic of American cities. Haigh takes an unflinching look at the social, emotional, and economic costs of all aspects of reproductive justice, from the often heartbreaking counseling that goes on in the clinic to the vagaries of the foster care system.  Haigh’s wide lens takes in so much of the nuance of women’s health, motherhood, and “unwanted” children’s lives that it’s impossible to come away unchanged.

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

This literary tour-de-force follows five women in an America where The Personhood Amendment grants rights to every embryo at the cost of women losing all rights to their own bodies. The novel was extraordinarily prescient when it was published in 2018 and now post-Dobbs, Zumas’s searing work of fiction feels more contemporary than dystopian.

The House of Eve by Sadeqa Johnson

Johnson’s riveting novel, a Reese Witherspoon pick, is about the dire consequences of unwanted pregnancy for young Black women in the 1950s. It alternates between the perspectives of college-educated Eleanor, who desperately wants a baby with her doctor husband in Washington D.C. but cannot carry one to term, and Ruby, who is determined to get a college education and escape her humble beginnings but risks losing it all when she becomes pregnant.  Ruby’s aunt tries to procure an abortion for her niece, but the provider has come under scrutiny and fears arrest so refuses the service—which lands Ruby in a horror house for unwed mothers run by iron-handed white nuns. The House of Eve looks into the ways lives can be derailed by the punitive mistreatment of disenfranchised women, and the ways in which many of us blindly support those systems.

Looking for Jane by Heather Marshall

This ambitious debut novel braids together three storylines set in 2017, 1971, and 1980 Toronto that provides a broad view of the costs to women, children, and entire families when women don’t have full control of their own bodies. Marshall delves into the so-called “homes” where unmarried pregnant women were forced to give up their children.

In 1971, Dr. Evelyn Taylor is an abortion provider for an organization called Jane (based on the real-life Jane Collective of 1970s Chicago). Through fictionalizing and reimagining the organization, Marshall makes an essential contribution to the Jane lore, which in many ways is like the cycle of Arthurian legends chronicling the Knights of the Roundtable; their story has been and will be told and retold, as the moment the first Jane took up a curette has mythical power on par with Arthur pulling the sword from the stone.

8 Ghostly Short Novels that You Can Read in One Sitting

Posted on by EL Assistant2

I enjoy fiction that has a vaguely menacing atmosphere. Narratives with the threat of death looming over the characters, and they either are not able to identify the source or they do but face enormous difficulty reconciling their fears. This threat can manifest as ghostly projections of the characters’ unstable mental state. They might see or hear something that isn’t really there and then experience intense loneliness or paranoia due to their limited perspective. 

I can’t say for sure that I believe in ghosts, but I do believe feelings of loneliness and despair can be so powerful that the mind, in an attempt to force them out of the body, creates forms or containers for them in our environment. In my debut novella, We’re Safe When We’re Alone, I wanted a narrator who fully believes in ghosts and their power to destabilize the mind. The narrator and his father are the only humans in a purgatory world populated by ghosts, and he fights to hold onto his sanity as the rules of his surreal environment constantly shift to make him doubt his identity.

I’ve found that the novella form is especially suitable for evoking a ghostly atmosphere. It is long enough for the reader to experience several facets of the characters’ psychology, but it is short enough that the unique atmosphere can be maintained throughout the entire narrative. Novellas tend to be taut in structure, with almost no scenes that diverge from the central plot-line. This intense focus over a longish period excels at immersing the reader in a strange world and then bringing them out before the atmosphere loses its magic. In my search for books with this type of atmosphere, I found mainly novellas by women in translation. In these books, grief, violence, death, and loneliness transform realistic settings from all around the world into dreamlike, haunting landscapes. 

The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd

After Asa’s husband transfers to a job in the countryside, they move into his family home, and Asa tries to adjust to her new rural life. She is no longer working and has no friends in the area. Other than interacting with her in-laws, she has almost nothing to do and struggles to fill the time during an overwhelmingly hot summer. 

As she becomes lost and depressed in this alien environment, she encounters a strange dark creature, follows it to a river, and then falls into a hole. After she manages to get out of the hole, she experiences more bizarre incidents that cause her to question if the things she sees and feels are real. The isolation she experiences in her new home leads her to interact with one of the most chilling characters I’ve ever read, an old man who loves to water his plants, even in the dark. A moment that is completely ordinary and yet I’m unable to fully understand why I am so haunted by it. 

Love by Hanne Ørstavik, Translated by Martin Aitken

Vibeke, a single mother, and Jon, her son, have moved to a small town in northern Norway. The novella takes place over a single night as Vibeke goes off on her own to pursue a love interest and Jon wanders around his neighborhood and meets unusual strangers who might possibly put him in danger. 

The novella is told in third person, but the point of view switches between Vibeke and Jon’s consciousness from paragraph to paragraph. The effect can be disorienting at first, but once the reader is used to the shifts, the point of view highlights how neglectful Vibeke is since she rarely thinks about Jon while Jon is constantly thinking of her. As the night drags on, the cold and the dark heighten the atmosphere of peril, and the characters struggle against the loneliness that presses in on them. 

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, Translated by Megan McDowell

The novella is structured as a dialogue between Amanda who lies dying in a rural hospital clinic and a boy named David. He asks her questions about the events that occurred in the past few days while she was on vacation with her daughter. He pushes her to figure out the important details that she missed, and his urgency forces the reader to turn the pages to see if we can spot these key details that led to Amanda’s demise, thus building an atmosphere of dread. 

The main narrative takes place once Amanda meets her neighbor, Carla, at the vacation home, and she tells Amanda a menacing story about how she saved her son, David, from an unknown illness. Carla’s story prompts Amanda to fixate on keeping her daughter safe, but as the days pass she is forced to confront her own failures as a mother. 

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, Translated by Elisabeth Jaquette

The first half of the book takes place during the summer of 1949 and focuses on Israeli soldiers who set up camp in the Negev desert. After the war that led to the displacement and exile of the Palestinian people, these soldiers are here to murder any Bedouins who are still in the area. They find an encampment and capture a Palestinian girl. The second half fast forwards to the present and focuses on a young woman who reads an article about these murders in the Negev desert and sets off on a road trip to uncover more details around the tragedy. 

The soldiers’ indifference to the suffering of the girl, along with the overwhelming heat and the bodily illnesses that the officer suffers, build up so much vivid tension that ends up spreading into the present day and haunting the reader as we follow the young woman, desperately hoping that she’ll find some answers to make the injustices of the past less devastating to behold. But of course the book offers no easy answers. Instead, the author leaves the reader with images of the humanity of victims who have been erased from public records. 

Space Invaders by Nona Fernández, Translated by Natasha Wimmer

A group of childhood friends grow up under the Pinochet dictatorship in 1980s Chile. One day a new classmate, Estrella González arrives at their school, and they quickly grow fond of her and bring her into the group. However, her father is a government officer in the regime and ends up committing violent crimes against members of the opposition. Afterward, Estrella withdraws from school and disappears with her family from her friends’ lives. 

As the children turn into adults, they are haunted by dreams and questions about Estrella’s fate. The constant threat of violence from the dictatorship pervades the atmosphere, but what makes this book remarkable is the friends’ insistence on remembering the innocence of their childhood bonds. No matter how much their environment tries to crush their humanity, they speak in a lucid, dreamlike language that strengthens their devotion to one another.

The White Book by Han Kang, Translated by Deborah Smith 

A Korean writer arrives in a European city for a residency and reflects on the loss of her older sister, who died right after being born. This city was nearly destroyed in World War I but recovered from the ruins. As the narrator wanders this landscape, she sees the snow and the gray sky and feels haunted by the past. A historical and personal one. 

The book is broken into short chapters titled after white objects. The objects relate to the loss of her older sister or to her current surroundings. The author describes them with clear poetic language that illuminates the character’s sorrow. By the end of the book, the color white haunts the reader the way it does the narrator, and we’re left feeling that grief can be as beautiful as it is devastating.

Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, Translated by Tim Parks

The narrator recalls her experiences in a boarding school located in postwar Switzerland, specifically her obsessive relationship with a new student, Frédérique. The narrator’s voice is harsh, forceful, lyrical, and magnetic. Most notably she describes the relationship as one in which she “had to conquer [Frédérique],” and she feels the close presence of death in the environment, stating “There is a mortuary look somehow to the faces of boarders, a faint mortuary smell to even the youngest and most attractive girls.” The narrator’s fixation on death darkens the spirit of her relationships and strips away the innocence of girlhood at this boarding school, revealing the cold, desolate systems of control at the center. 

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, Translated by Megan Backus

After Mikage’s grandmother dies, she is taken in by her friend Yuichi and his mother Eriko. The three of them grow close and form a makeshift family. Eventually Mikage moves out and tries to create a life of her own. However, she learns about a horrific tragedy that befalls Eriko, and she returns to support Yuichi through this difficult period. Unfortunately, they are not able to connect as easily as they did in the past, and Yuichi plunges into the abyss of grief. Yuichi’s deteriorating mental state charges the atmosphere with dread, and I feared not only for his well-being but also for Mikage as she searches for him and attempts to bring him out of the darkness. The beauty of the novella lies in the compassion the characters show to each other even as the presence of death hovers directly over them. 

Can You Conquer Death By Depicting Your Life on Paper?

Posted on by EL Assistant2

In the opening pages of David Diop’s Beyond the Door of No Return, Michel Adanson, a renowned botanist, is dying. He thinks about a bush fire he started on the banks of the Senegal River years before, and remembers the way the trees split open violently and creatures, in their attempts to flee, emitted sounds of terror. Having spent his life dedicated to the work of cataloguing the flora and fauna of Senegal on behalf of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, he wonders, maybe for the first time in his career, whether the “burning trees must have screamed curses in a secret plant language, inaudible to men.”

As he dies, he reckons with what will survive him. His botany records, his collections, his drawings, the work he neglected his family for, will be washed away. Incapable of sharing his interior life with his daughter, Aglaé, even as the end of his life approaches, he hides a series of notebooks in which he reveals his journey to find a woman named Maram, who had been sold into slavery but was rumored to have escaped. When his daughter discovers them, she learns about a great love—and loss—in her father’s life, one that he kept a secret. 

The novel, told from a series of different perspectives—Michel Adanson’s narration and his notebooks, Aglaé’s memory, Maram’s testimony—encourages readers to consider the power of story; reckon with discrepancies between oral histories and the written accounts of colonists that are later received as truths; and think deeply about the capacity for healing that the natural world contains, as well as the harms inflicted on the environment through colonialism. I corresponded with David Diop, who won the 2021 International Booker Prize award for his novel At Night All Blood Is Black, about these themes and more by email in an interview translated from the French by Jonathan Woollen. 

Jacqueline Alnes: One of the main figures in this story, Michel Adanson, is based on a real historical figure, a Frenchman who traveled to Senegal in order to study the flora and fauna. What did you learn from examining Adanson as a historical figure?

David Diop: Michel Adanson was one of the first French scholars to travel to Senegal. He went at age 22 and was there from 1749 to 1753 with orders from his masters, the Jussieu brothers, who were members of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. His intent was to pioneer the description of flora and fauna, so that he could become a member of the Academy himself later on. He never reached his goal, which was to rigorously classify the three kingdoms of life in opposition to what was set down by the Swedish scientist Linnaeus. Nor did he ever publish his Natural History of Senegal, rough sketches of which can be found today in the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Found among those sketches, as the Senegalese historian Ousmane Seydi has studied, is the first French-Wolof dictionary. Michel Adanson learned Wolof, a prevalent Senegalese language, because he had come to realize that the usual translators didn’t know how to translate the words of people, male and female, with knowledge of the Senegalese plants’ medicinal properties.

JA: In the novel, Adanson is a man obsessed with his amassed collection of specimens, so much so that he neglects his wife and child. The irony, at the end of his life, is that his encyclopedias are unfinished and unavailable to the public, and his daughter knows nearly nothing about him as a person. What intrigues you about his fervor for cataloging at the cost of so much else?

In real life, this illusion of control of our own destinies doesn’t exist.

DD: Michel Adanson’s A Voyage to Senegal was published in 1757, four years after he returned home. It’s the first volume in his endeavor to write a Natural History of Senegal. Natural history is a crucial piece of this encyclopedic dream of his to plant stakes around the world through description. Its many fields of knowledge include botany, geology, ornithology, ichthyology and conchology, astronomy, and even a form of proto-ethnology since the planet’s non-European societies are also being broached as objects of study. To name every plant, every animal, every society, is to seek mastery for Western man over nature and all its creations. The naming act is a corollary to the drive to subordinate nature to mankind: “To make oneself master and possessor of nature,” to take Descartes’s formulation, is above all to measure, to quantify, to classify.

Michel Adanson suggests that it was during his trip to Senegal that he conceived of his life’s project, of which the Natural History of Senegal was but a minor part, the project being a super-encyclopedia of life that would unite the three realms: mineral, vegetable, animal—the “Universal Orb.” The title of this mega-encyclopedia—for the sake of which Adanson attests to having described tens and tens of thousands of “existences,” to use his term—refers to the objective of circumscribing the world into a kind of totalizing circularity. It’s something that he’ll never achieve, though he tried to until the end of his life. As an old man, he’ll keep soliciting Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte to finance the volumes of his Universal Orb. On the botanical level, his highly complex method posits the combination of a whole string of plant characteristics far more plentiful than what Linnaeus had proposed. But this method claiming to form a rational thesis about the world is called upon to renew itself every time an unheard-of plant or animal, unclassifiable under the old frameworks, emerges from some corner of the Amazon, Asia, or Africa. And that’s the tragedy of Michel Adanson’s intellectual life, continuously occupied with feeding the method for his thesis, for a world that’s impossible to circumscribe. Despite insistence from academics and friends of his in the European naturalist community, who begged him to publish the vast amounts of data he already had so that the thesis could be preserved and might inspire future scholars, Michel Adanson invariably refused, claiming he hadn’t finished. Death got the better of his hemming and hawing in 1806.

I like lives like Michel Adanson’s, lives consumed, absorbed, by some great impossible project, lives emblematic of the human mind’s thirst to sort the world into dictionary entries.

JA: This type of cataloging feels inextricably linked to colonization, and we see, throughout the novel, the types of harm inflicted on people and the natural environment in the name of “exploration”; the fates of the two seem interconnected, though Adanson seems more willing to recognize that plants have been harmed over people. (At one point, he laments that the “corpses” of trees are taken “so far from their mother Africa.”) And what did this novel reveal to you about the sinister ways colonization can ripple through the lives of people, places, and environments?

DD: Michel Adanson, by the mid-1700s, is already sensitive to the disappearing ebony forests exploited by Europeans since the 1500s. Awareness of mankind’s overexploitation of nature is nothing new. It felt that in my novel, through Michel Adanson, a man of the Enlightenment, a Cartesian, I could point to the negative impact that trade in raw materials from Africa has had on the environment and on the well-being of local populations. Maram Sack isn’t just a young woman Michel Adanson falls in love with, she’s also an emblematic character representing a nature different from his own. If Adanson is seeking to puncture nature’s mysteries in order to appropriate them, Maram as a healer is seeking nature’s conciliation, its cooperation. They’re two opposed visions of the world, which meet in Michel Adanson and Maram Seck.

JA: As much as Adanson tries to name and to know, it is clear there is a level of knowingness that he is never privy to. At what point does an outsider’s curiosity become a kind of violence? And how does language—or the imposition of language—factor into that?

We’re assailed by so many compromises due to happenstance in our daily lives, and we’re always so different from what we believe ourselves to be.

DD: One of Michel Adanson’s strengths is that, unlike with Linnaeus’s system of nomenclature, he wished to preserve the names of the African plants he was indexing. His thinking was that it wasn’t appropriate to give the plants Latin names, that the desirable thing was for the world’s memory banks to open up to non-European languages. For example, he wanted the baobab to go by its Wolof name, “Gouye” and not “Adansonia digitata” like Linnaeus advised as a form of paying homage. The Senegalese style of naming plants and animals wasn’t approved by the Academy of Sciences in Paris, who criticized him accordingly. But Michel Adanson says of the Wolof language, to anyone who wishes to hear it, “that it is gentle and vibrant.”

JA: You so deftly skewer colonialism even while writing from Adanson’s perspective. What was it like writing about this subject matter from a first person point of view, from a character who seems, in so many ways, to remain unaware of the ills he is perpetuating?

DD: The novel can be a wonderful staging device for the complexity of the human soul’s motivations. So, on the one hand, in his will, Michael Adanson sets aside some gold louis so a couple of his French friends can feast at his funeral like, and I quote, “the Black wise men and philosophers of Senegal.” And on the other hand he publishes a dissertation about the Compagnie du Sénégal’s interest in furthering the slave trade on the island of Gorée. Using “I” allows me to translate that complexity without actually expressing an anachronistic value judgment on the character.

JA: As a novelist and scholar, what interests you about story? And what power do stories hold?

DD: For me, what literature can do is seize hold of history and make it its own thing. Through some kind of transversal of the emotions at play in their literary work, writers can sensitize the reader around subjects or historical periods to which they otherwise would have remained indifferent. Literature moves where history explains.

JA: There is so much in this novel about narrative and the way stories shape us. For example, Adanson, in the novel, laments at one point that it is “too late to dictate the story of his own death” and also admits, “to what extent the opinion we have of ourselves depends on where we are and to whom we are talking.” What interests you about the intersections between identity and story? And what happens when the stories we tell ourselves prevent us from recognizing the ways we are harming others?

DD: Another power that the novel has is to give meaning, direction, and coherence to the lives of fictional characters. In real life, this illusion of control of our own destinies doesn’t exist. We’re assailed by so many contradictory feelings, so many compromises due to happenstance in our daily lives, and we’re always so different from what we believe ourselves to be, so that only the retrospective accounts we’re able to make about our lives seem to give them any meaning. Michel Adanson sees that “the more he writes” about Maram’s life, “the more he becomes a writer.” In other words, he gives Maram’s life meaning by recounting it and thus prevents her from escaping him again. But at the same time, by recounting Maram he’s recounting himself as well. Michel Adanson is discovering himself just as much as his daughter Aglaé will discover him by reading his secret notebooks.

For Michel Adanson, to write is to retrieve another self he thought he’d lost, and to find himself back in Maram’s company one last time. He carries her voice inside him. He can still see her with her loving eyes, like Orpheus turning to face Eurydice right at the moment when he thinks, wrongly, that the two of them have conquered death.

JA: What do you hope readers take away from this novel? And what do you take away from it, after writing?

DD: I would like readers to find additional reasons to shed their prejudices, as perhaps Aglaé will have done by reading her father’s “secret notebooks.” The start of the novel, relating how Aglaé discovers the writing Michel Adanson intended her to find in a secret drawer, is indicative. To read this story, Aglaé needed to prove that she deserved it. If she had neglected the shoddy furnishings his father bequeathed to her and the few memories they had in common, this manuscript hidden in a writing desk would never have been read, not by her, not by us over her shoulder. There are still far too many stories, perhaps, gathering dust in drawers of history no one has had the time or curiosity to open. To overcome your prejudices, you have to want to. Wisdom isn’t given, it has to be sought.

About the Translator:

Jonathan Woollen is a French-to-English translator from North Carolina, currently living in Brooklyn and working in publishing. Previously, he ran in-store events at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC.