We Are Gathered Here Today to Eat, Drink, and Be Ruthless

Posted on by Wynter Miller

“Wedding Party” by Christine Sneed

1

It was the bride’s second marriage, the groom’s third. They were both in their thirties, but Kim wasn’t sure if the groom was fibbing about his age—half of his face was hidden behind a dark beard, and he kept his hair, thick and shiny, tied in a youthful ponytail. She hadn’t searched for him online, having managed to break this habit after looking up a different client several months earlier and discovering he was semi-famous for a series of YouTube videos he’d posted of himself performing homegrown stunts in the Jackass vein, which included swallowing half a bottle of motor oil mixed with Bailey’s Irish Cream and dangling heavy objects from his penis while, off-camera, others howled with drunken laughter. After watching four of these clips for reasons Kim still didn’t understand, she’d had trouble looking him and the bride in the eye.

These new clients, Ryan and Emily Ann, had money and divorced parents, several half- and step-siblings, and, for the moment, good attitudes. Kim had a feeling the groom was stoned every time she met with him and the bride, but he wasn’t inarticulate or dopey, only vague and smiling. She wondered why they were in such a hurry to marry—they’d met only seven months earlier, when the ink on Ryan’s second set of divorce papers wasn’t yet dry and Emily Ann had just joined Gamblers Anonymous and was trying to adopt a child from Guatemala, a quest Ryan had convinced her to set aside in favor of adopting two puggles. He liked other people’s children just fine, he’d told Kim during their second meeting, his fiancée’s expression blank as he talked, but he didn’t want any of his own—lucky for him because his sperm count wasn’t the greatest, possibly because he was born during a period of intense solar flares, and his mother had eaten a lot of seaweed while pregnant with him.

Kim had learned to take in the superstitions and idiosyncratic details couples shared with her without letting her surprise or boredom show. She knew they couldn’t help themselves—most of them were young and in the habit of posting every thought and whim online. One couple she’d worked with the previous year had wanted to marry on a rocket blasting into space—did Kim know if anyone had ever done this? (She did not, nor had she ever heard of it—though with billionaires now taking rides on the space shuttle, she supposed space weddings were coming.) Another couple wanted a silent wedding with their vows and the priest’s words projected onto a big screen suspended above the altar. Another wanted to marry on the ocean with everyone floating on air mattresses while dolphins leapt in the distance against the setting sun.

Ryan and Emily Ann were less dramatic and ambitious, but they’d decided to host their ceremony on the lakefront and had a guest list of a hundred and fifty people, most of whom were bringing a plus one. In late September, an outdoor wedding was risky, but the bride and groom had agreed to use a tent for the reception and a half dozen portable heaters in case of a cold night. As a rule, outdoor weddings made Kim nervous, especially when the guest list was large—even in the summer, Chicago weather was unpredictable. Her feeling was that if people wanted to get married outdoors, they should move to San Diego, or at least hold their wedding there.

2

Clay did not understand his nephew. Two divorces already, and now a third wedding, and the boy wasn’t even close to the age when AARP started sending out those membership forms that looked like a check might be inside but of course there never was a check. Why couldn’t Ryan simply live with a woman and keep lawyers out of it when one of them got sick of the other? No one batted an eye these days over unmarried cohabitation unless they were pious hypocrites, but who cared what those reprobates thought anyway. In his experience, those folks routinely cheated on their taxes and sent their gay sons off to be deprogrammed by scripture-spouting maniacs.

Clay had only been married once, and that was back in his idiotic mid-twenties when he rode a motorcycle and kept an iguana named Clint Eastwood as a pet. The marriage hadn’t been his idea, but he’d thought it might be fun and for a couple of years it was, but then his wife’s sister moved in with them, after she’d left the commune in rural Oregon where she’d learned to cook without meat and had stopped shaving her legs and armpits. He’d gotten into some trouble with her, and for a year and a half he and the sister had lived in a tent in whichever friend’s yard they could pitch it. It had been tough to hold down a job when he couldn’t shower very often and didn’t have a washer, and on top of this, his dental hygiene was on the questionable side, but all that nonsense was more than thirty years ago now, and in the end, he’d managed to hold on to most of his teeth and had been waking up alone for nearly ten years. Much of the time, it wasn’t as bad as you’d think it would be.

3

Ryan had asked his uncle Clay to be his best man—his two closest friends had already filled that position in one of his previous weddings, and he thought it might jinx the whole thing if he were to ask one of them to stand up again. If he were called before God or some sort of almighty bogeyman to reveal who his favorite family member was, he’d have to say Clay because his parents were bat-shit, his grandparents were dead, and even though he got along all right with his brother and sister, Sebastian was a little off and possibly a peeping Tom, and Jill’s house was crammed full of so much crap from flea markets and yard sales you could barely move from one room to the next without knocking something over, and she was only forty-two. She had too many pets, and the place smelled terrible. Although Ryan appreciated her soft spot for birds and various four-legged creatures, he kept his house pet acquisitions firmly in the dog realm.

But he wasn’t prone to throwing stones—he had his own set of problems, and one of them was he didn’t like being alone and certainly couldn’t live alone for more than a week or two without sort of losing his mind and joining chat rooms about owl migration routes and French cooking and other topics he knew nothing about. His therapist had told him this was something of a Trojan-horse problem, with other problems living like stowaways inside a bigger problem. His therapist had advised him not to remarry so quickly—couldn’t he and Emily Ann take it slower than Ryan had with his two ex-wives?

Well, a year and a half into his first marriage, his wife realized she was still in love with her college girlfriend, and three years into his next marriage, his second wife, Gabrielle, slept with one of her coworkers, and despite saying it wouldn’t happen again, it did happen again, and even though Ryan knew he was still in love with her, he also knew he would never trust her again. She hadn’t wanted the divorce, but he wasn’t able to sleep the night through without waking up in a blind rage after he found out she was still having sex with her coworker. He didn’t like worrying that his fury at being cuckolded might jump the wall at some point and make a lunge for her. And because he was still in love with her, he realized he would probably be a confused wreck for a while.

When he was with Emily Ann, however, he felt saner and relatively happy. So far, she’d been extremely loyal, and even better than her loyalty was the fact that men did not ogle her like they did Gabrielle. Emily Ann was pretty but not a knockout. No other guy ever stared at her as if Ryan, with his arm around her as they entered a restaurant or a party, were invisible.

His secret thought was that one day he and Gabrielle might get back together—when they were both in their sixties or seventies, and she was done screwing around. After her looks had faded and she’d had a cancer scare and come through it a more humble person who understood how deeply her lust for the bonehead at work who played drums in a Doors cover band had hurt and tormented her adoring, occasionally stoned former husband.

4

Emily Ann was her father’s third daughter and the fifth child of six. She was her mother’s only daughter and first of her three children. She was glad Ryan had only two siblings and was the calmest guy she’d ever dated seriously, but it worried her a little that he didn’t seem to want kids. She wasn’t entirely sure she wanted them either, although she did think she might at some point. Her first husband had wanted kids, but he’d also wanted to live in Alaska, and when he insisted they move from Chicago to Anchorage, she’d become very depressed. She couldn’t stand exceedingly cold weather, and this had turned out to be only one of several major problems. The biggest wasn’t his fault, but hers—she’d lost all their money playing online poker at the beginning of the pandemic, a period of collective quasi-insanity that wasn’t over yet. The virus was also the reason why she and Ryan had decided to hold their wedding outside. She sensed the wedding planner would have preferred a banquet hall or a hotel ballroom, but at least she wasn’t being pushy about it.

When they had their first meeting with the wedding planner, Ryan mentioned the idea of hiring a psychic for the reception, and he wouldn’t let it go like Emily Ann had initially hoped. She knew without doubt it was a bad idea because no matter what the psychic said, at least a few people would end up angry or traumatized, and Emily Ann really didn’t want any of the guests to remember their wedding as the night they were told their house would burn down or their teenage daughter would run off with the father of three who lived two doors away. She’d been at a New Year’s Eve party a few years ago where this very thing had occurred. It had taken a couple of months for the psychic’s predictions to come true, but this had only heightened the suspense, and one person was still talking about suing the host for psychological damages.

She wasn’t sure why Ryan had proposed so quickly, even though she’d been hoping since their fourth date he would. On that date, he’d taken her to a pottery shop and they’d both crafted little animals—a lion, a seal, a fox, and a frog—and she supposed she’d fallen in love with him on the spot. His second ex-wife was still calling him, and although Ryan said it was only because they shared custody of a dog, a high-strung German shepherd mix named Horst, he seemed happy whenever she called or texted, which was at least once nearly every time he and Emily Ann were together.

5

Poor Emily Ann—even though she was the firstborn, she was the most lost of Julia’s three children. It didn’t help that Bill, Emily Ann’s father, was a blowhard and a fool who had spoiled her rotten until she was thirteen—the year he’d left Julia for another woman—after which he’d neglected Emily Ann and her brother Zachary obscenely. No wonder their daughter was so confused and unhappy and had had that awful gambling problem in the early months of the pandemic. Fortunately, Zachary had stronger self-esteem—maybe a little too strong, but at least he knew he didn’t have to turn himself inside out to please everyone who crossed his path, nor did he go chasing after validation in virtual casinos. It did bother her that he was a musician, but he hadn’t impregnated anyone yet, as far as Julia knew.

She hoped this second marriage of Emily Ann’s would last—her own second marriage was a solid, waterproof vessel, and much of this, she felt certain, was due to her loving husband’s strong moral compass and distrust of the internet (thank goodness—Bill had met the woman he’d dumped her for online!). Stewart did not leer at other women, nor did he make up stories about the year he served in the Vietnam War. He didn’t have the supplest sense of humor, but she would take his steady seriousness any day over Bill’s dumb jokiness and wandering eye. It was a wonder he hadn’t been MeToo’d with all the other would-be Casanovas, though for all she knew, he had but had quietly settled with whatever women he’d made a grab for. She hadn’t seen him in four years—not since Emily Ann’s first wedding—and Julia wasn’t exactly looking forward to seeing him again, but it couldn’t be helped. At least she’d held on to her figure, despite having three babies—the third, Stewart’s and her good-natured Benjamin, arriving when she was forty-one—and on the whole, she liked weddings but would have preferred her only daughter to have had just one.

As for her son-in-law-to-be, he was a cheerful bore who seemed not to let things get under his skin, but Stewart worried Ryan would never amount to anything and wished he had some sort of career. Ryan had family money and technically didn’t need to work, so, well, he didn’t, though he pretended to—apparently he did something nebulous in the field of graphic design. Trust funds corrupted the mind, in Stewart’s view. Julia didn’t share this opinion, and all things being equal, she would rather Emily Ann have a rich husband than a poor one (but she hoped Ryan wasn’t planning to give her unfettered access to his bank account because he would surely regret it).

It didn’t seem likely he intended to, in any case—there was a prenup, which, although coldhearted, was never a bad idea, in Julia’s view. The world was coldhearted. People didn’t like to hear this, but it was nonetheless true.

6

To Kim’s great relief, the day of the wedding was clear, the temperature in the mid-seventies—San Diego weather having been bestowed by the weather gods upon Chicago’s North Shore—a perfect early autumn Saturday. The tent had been pitched with no snafus, the tables and chairs unpacked and set up on time, the flowers, the caterers—everything had come together like a well-rehearsed symphony of moneyed goodwill and bracing competence. She really could not believe it.

Ryan and Emily Ann had rented a house with beachfront property for the ceremony and reception—a good tactical choice, as the house also served as the launch pad for the wedding party. Kim had been assigned a small, sunny room off the kitchen as her base of operations. There was one bizarre, slightly sinister occurrence, however, something Kim had never before encountered while on the job: she witnessed the groom’s sister stuffing a small, triangular throw pillow from the living room sofa into a black duffel bag and scurrying out of the room with surprising nimbleness, despite the air cast on her ankle. Perhaps the cast was subterfuge, meant to keep Jill from being enlisted last-minute as an usher or a gofer, or perhaps she had a phobia about dancing in public?

Regardless of the reason, Kim was annoyed that she now had to decide if she should report Jill’s crime to the groom or confront the thief directly. Neither scenario promised anything but awkwardness at best, and at worst, she risked being shown the door if she embroiled herself in what was likely some ongoing family drama over Jill’s ostensible kleptomania. Better to say nothing at all.

Yet, she did wonder what else was in the duffel and hoped Jill’s light fingers would not find their way into her or anyone else’s wallet. The duffel’s lumpish appearance certainly implied it held more cargo than a small throw pillow. If Kim herself were prone to stealing, she would already have filched the five-pound bag of white Jordan almonds that sat unattended ten feet away from her office doorway on the kitchen counter. If she craned her neck from where she sat at her temporary antique walnut desk, the candy was right in her sightline. Her mouth tingled at the thought of the hard candy shell softening on her tongue.

She got up and tiptoed over to the bag, nodding at the caterer who stood rolling silverware into white cloth napkins. The bag of almonds wasn’t yet opened. “May I have a few? I didn’t eat lunch,” said Kim, pointing at the still-pristine bag.

The caterer, a woman in her fifties with the sinewy look of a distance runner, nodded. “Help yourself. You actually like those things?”

“I do,” said Kim with a diffident laugh.

“They taste like wood to me,” said the caterer.

The bag’s seal wouldn’t yield to Kim’s slippery hands. Flustered, she pulled a knife from the wooden block of Chicago Cutlery next to the enormous stainless steel sink and sawed into the bag. The caterer watched with benign interest. “You’re the wedding planner, right?” she said.

Kim nodded as the knife finally breached the bag and the sugary, plasticine smell of the candied almonds streamed out. She inhaled greedily as she poured several almonds into her palm. They were flawless—the Platonic ideal of candied nuts. Kim held her breath to keep herself from sighing.

“How’d you get into this line of work?” the caterer asked, as she placed a fresh silverware roll at the apex of a lopsided pyramid.

An almond’s coating was melting on Kim’s tongue now, her saliva glands tingling. It was almost too blissful to be borne. She looked at the caterer through misty eyes. “I’ve loved weddings since I was a little girl. I remember watching Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s wedding on television when I was visiting my grandmother, and she woke me up very early. We sat in our pajamas, eating raspberry coffee cake as we watched, and Grandma cried and said she had never witnessed a more perfect wedding.”

The caterer gave her a pitying look. “A shame how that one turned out.”

7

Clay didn’t mind public speaking, but he hadn’t done any since high school speech class, when he’d written a report on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with one hand tied behind your back and another on how to give a cat a bath. (The answer was you didn’t—that was the whole speech, but the teacher didn’t think Clay was funny.) Now that his nephew and this shy girl with nice legs were officially married—the bride, to everyone’s amusement but her own, had had hiccups the whole time they were saying their vows—Clay hoped to make a best-man speech people might fondly reminisce about for years. He’d spent many hours writing it and had practiced several times in front of the mirror and had also read it to the Comcast repairman as he fixed Clay’s wi-fi, which had gone on the blink when he was trying to order Ryan’s wedding gift (a year’s supply of eco-friendly laundry soap—it wasn’t on their registry but he was sure they’d need it, unlike the fancy placemats from Provence which cost twice as much as his monthly cable and wi-fi bill!). When he was done reading his speech, the Comcast guy had said, “That was a whole lot better than the one I got at my wedding.”

Now, under the big white circus tent, Clay looked out at the expanse of shining faces, some alert and receptive, others bleary from all the free liquor—he’d overheard someone losing his lunch on the other side of the canvas wall a few minutes earlier (if you didn’t charge at least a few dollars for the hard liquor, the whole evening would of course turn into a goddamn fraternity party).

Clay noticed his sister giving him an apprehensive look as he stood up from the table and pulled his speech from the inside pocket of his tuxedo jacket. He knew she’d opposed Ryan’s decision to ask him to be in the wedding party, but Stephanie had always been a wet blanket, and Clay was going to claim his moment in the proverbial sun whether she liked it or not.

He cleared his throat and glanced at Ryan, who lifted his champagne glass merrily. Clay raised the microphone to his mouth and peered down at his speech, which he saw was not his speech at all. He’d brought the goddamn power bill.

“Fuck me,” he said. Some of the guests tittered nervously. He hadn’t meant to say the words aloud. “Sorry, everyone,” he muttered. “I brought a utility bill instead of my speech. At least I can stop by the library later and renew my card.”

Clay smiled uncertainly at Ryan, who seemed to be enjoying himself. Emily Ann looked wary. He didn’t risk another glance at Stephanie—even several yards away, he could feel the scorn and fear rolling off of his sister. “Don’t worry, young lady,” he said to the bride. “You and your groom are in good hands.” He turned back to the tent full of guests, sensing their sharpened attention. He would not fuck this up. Objectively speaking, he’d probably fucked up a lot in his life, but tonight he would do his best not to humiliate himself or anyone else.

Objectively speaking, he’d probably fucked up a lot in his life, but tonight he would do his best not to humiliate himself or anyone else.

“My nephew, Ryan Alexander Fisher, is someone I’ve known from the day he was born. When his mother was in labor at the hospital, I was there, waiting with his father, for Ryan’s big debut. After several hours in the waiting room, flipping through Reader’s Digests and Prevention magazines, I got up to stretch my legs and ended up having a minor run-in with a bad-tempered nurse who reprimanded me for loitering—her words, not mine—by the vending machines, but my view was, you never knew when someone would forget to grab their change or a second bag of barbecue chips might drop down into the well—and bingo! Your lucky day.”

People were laughing, including both members of the bridal couple. Clay looked down at the power bill and noticed it was his next-door neighbor’s—the mailman had mis-delivered it once before—and payment was two weeks overdue.

“I knew you’d all know what I meant,” he said, smiling at a dark-haired woman a few tables away whose breasts were loose in her top. His ex-wife’s sister hadn’t worn a bra either, saying they’d been invented by a man (which Clay later learned wasn’t true) to serve the male gaze.

He glanced over at Stephanie, whose eyes were wide and staring. She looked a little like one of those life-sized first-aid dolls. He gave her a reassuring smile, but her expression didn’t change.

“As you all know,” he said. “Ryan’s birth was a success, because here he is, and here we all are tonight, some of us actually enjoying ourselves and not wondering how early is too early to leave. Any time before ten o’clock. That’s the answer.” He paused, unable to remember what he was supposed to say next. “I guess I should wrap this up—”

A female voice in the back screamed, “Yes!” followed by two male voices shouting, “No! Keep going!”

“—so those of you who don’t intend to stay until ten o’clock can make your excuses and head out into the night. Wedding cake and Lyle Lovett cover band be damned. Let me close by saying I wish my nephew Ryan and his lovely new bride Emily Ann lasting happiness, no flat tires, lifelong fidelity, a steadfast sense of humor, no lawsuits, and no mass shootings.”

Emily Ann appeared to be exhaling slowly, and Ryan was grinning and nodding like a man who knew the best answers. Many of the guests looked perplexed, but some were gamely chuckling, and one guy, maybe one of the “Keep going!” shouters, was guffawing. Clay took a bow and sunk into his seat, his face flushed with victory. He didn’t look over at Stephanie or try to locate Griffin, Ryan’s father, who had divorced Stephanie fifteen years earlier and subsequently begun camping in a Utah cave, living in it on and off for several years before he’d fully reentered society six years ago.

Clay knew his sister wouldn’t smile back, and Griffin was probably in the bathroom or on the beach, staring out at the dark lake—he hated chairs and had stayed on his feet behind the rows of seated guests during the exchange of vows. He’d likely missed the whole speech. Clay owed him money and although Griffin no longer brought up the unpaid debt on the rare occasion their paths crossed, Clay doubted he’d forgotten about it. He’d brought some of the money he owed Griffin with him tonight. Before the wedding, he’d sold two old LPs, one a pristine early Dylan and the other a Janis Joplin. He’d gotten a fair price too.

He was aware that a man who didn’t pay his debts (or at least try to) wasn’t worth knowing, and Griffin, Clay was sure, had already written him off.

8

Sebastian knew his sister was at it again—he’d seen her putting a box of votive candles into the black duffel she was carrying around, pretending it was her purse. The air cast was also doubtless pure theater: he did not believe she had a sprain. He stood behind her as she clomped to their assigned table after the vows and discreetly groped the duffel’s nether regions, his hand finding the hard edges of what felt like a picture frame and another object with the contours of an apple or a pomegranate, along with a third object, soft and dense, some kind of small cushion.

When she sensed his hand on the duffel, she yanked it closer and hissed, “Degenerate.”

He wasn’t sure why he still talked to her. A few years ago, when she was angry with him for telling their parents about her klepto tendencies, she’d retaliated by making up a malicious lie, one he probably could have sued her over if he were a litigious person unafraid of bad publicity. She’d told them she’d caught him spying on her neighbor’s teenage daughter while the girl undressed for bed. Their father hadn’t believed her, but their mother was less sure, probably because she’d once caught him in a vulnerable moment in front of his iMac, the actress in the porn clip he’d cued up dressed like a Catholic schoolgirl. It was all so absurd and unfair—he was only sixteen at the time, not some creepy pedophile in his fifties!

At the reception, Sebastian was seated one table over from Jill. When she got up and limped across the tent for a second piece of cake, she left the duffel under her chair, and it was then that he pounced. The three other people at her table, their cousins, looked on with curiosity as he unzipped the duffel. Out tumbled a small triangular pillow, a framed picture of a beach at sunset, and an apple-shaped candle, along with the box of votives, a package of floral paper hand towels, a small blue frog figurine, a pizza cutter, two tampons, and a pair of purple flip-flops.

Behind him he heard a screech and recognized the pitch as Jill’s. She was two tables away and tried to run toward him but tripped over the leg of their great-aunt Lucy’s date’s chair and fell in a heap onto this frail-looking man’s lap, her cake plate exploding into shards and greasy clumps at the edge of the dance floor. Sebastian raised the triangular pillow and waved it at her.

“That’s mine,” she cried as she freed herself from Lucy’s date’s lap and ran toward Sebastian, her air cast flapping loosely around her ankle. “Give it back!”

People were watching them, but not as many as might have been—half the wedding guests were on the dance floor, shuffling along to “If I Had a Boat.” The band was good, but he wondered when Ryan had become a Lyle Lovett fan. Or maybe Emily Ann was the one.

“I very much doubt it’s yours,” said Sebastian, suddenly furious, tightening his grip on the duffel and the pillow. “You’re a liar and a thief and you need help.”

Jill pulled back, doubt in her eyes. Before she could come up with a retort, the wedding planner was at their sides, gently extricating the pillow from Sebastian’s grasp. “This needs to go back in the house,” she said gently, as if calming frightened children. “Where it came from.”

Jill and Sebastian both looked at her dumbly.

“The rental house,” said the wedding planner, pointing behind them. “I’ll put it back where it belongs.”

“Thank you,” said Sebastian.

The wedding planner nodded. She was pretty and wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. He liked the way she stood before them with authority but no meanness. He wondered if she had a boyfriend.

The band segued into another song, something about skinny legs—that was its title too, Sebastian was fairly sure. The bassist, he remembered now, was Emily Ann’s brother.

Jill looked as if she was about to cry after the wedding planner left the tent, the small pillow wedged under her arm. She turned away and began stuffing the other purloined objects back into her duffel. Sebastian met the gazes of their cousins, each having watched the scene in silence.

Mickey, the youngest, finally spoke up. “Man, you guys never change.” His laugh was rueful.

9

The psychic had been told to set up in a small room off the foyer, but no one came to see her, and after forty-five minutes of sitting alone with her phone on silent and no signs of life in the hall, she realized they’d changed their minds about needing her services but hadn’t bothered to tell her. The one fortunate thing was they’d paid two-thirds of her fee in advance and the other third she’d insist on collecting before she went home.

Out the window she could see a large tent lit from within, people silhouetted as they moved around inside. A song she recognized but didn’t know the name of filtered in through the open window, and she closed her eyes for a moment before she stood up and went into the hall. She passed two servers, both in spotless white button-downs and knee-length black skirts, carrying metal trays loaded with soiled cake plates.

The psychic wondered if there was any cake left, and a minute later, when she slipped into the tent, she saw the bride and groom embarking on their first dance as a married couple. She studied the bride’s hopeful face and the groom’s less hopeful face and recognized that he was more afraid of the future than his bride was, but the psychic thought they might outlast his ambivalence and depression (as yet undiagnosed) and the bride’s bad habits with money. Except the past was pulling at him particularly hard, which was often the case with grooms. In her experience, the secrets men guarded most closely were rooted in nostalgia and sentimentality. Much would depend on whom they decided to let into the marriage and whom they kept out. Their families were dark vortices swirling around them—trouble, pain, resentment, confusion.

This was nothing new. Even though her own family was small and most of its members were now in the ground, she could still feel her mother’s gaze upon her from beyond the grave, the impassive crow on the high branch staring down at her in silent judgment.

The cake was delicious—chocolate with vanilla icing and fresh raspberries in between layers. The psychic ate greedily, having skipped dinner because she’d hoped to be showered with leftovers from the wedding banquet. She’d predicted this poorly, however, and although she’d been certain before she set out for this job in her little red Fiat (a car she loved as much as any person she’d ever known) that the night would feature some surprises, she hadn’t been able to foresee what kind. Her own future was generally a fog to her, whereas other people’s future successes and disappointments were often discernible, like shapes in the clouds, as she’d discovered in college when, one drunken night around Halloween, her roommate dragged her to see a tarot card reader, who, after laying out the cards, looked at the psychic and told her she had the gift too. At the time, the psychic had laughed it off, but the tarot reader was undeterred. “Don’t mock your gift,” he said. “It’s as much a part of you as your spine.”

As she savored the last bite of cake, she watched the wedding planner approach her from the other side of the tent. The wedding planner did not, as the psychic expected, shoo her back into the house. “Would you tell my fortune?” she asked shyly.

“Follow me,” said the psychic with a nod, before leading the wedding planner out of the tent, down the flagstone path to the back door, and into her temporary room. She motioned for the wedding planner to sit on one of the two velvet cushions she’d arranged on the floor nearly an hour ago.

The wedding planner settled onto a cushion, tucking her slim legs beneath her, her expression timidly expectant. The psychic sat down across from her and reached for her hand, turning it palm up. She peered in silence at the wedding planner’s soft pink skin with its forking lines, several seconds passing before she said, “Let me see your other hand.”

The wedding planner offered it with a nervous laugh. “I don’t know how much I believe in any of this.”

“We all want answers to questions we doubt anyone has the answers to, but we ask them anyway.” She traced the younger woman’s left-hand lifeline and looked into her face. She sensed the wedding planner’s kindness, and the fact she had less self-interest than the psychic expected of someone in her line of work. “Your mother died not long ago,” she said.

The wedding planner blinked. “Did someone tell you?”

The psychic shook her head. “No one told me. There’s someone here you should get to know better. You’ve already met him,” she said. “Your father’s ill but he’ll get better. You should say no more often than you do.”

“My father’s ill?” said the wedding planner, alarmed.

“Make him go to the doctor. There’s still enough time.”

The wedding planner gave her a stricken look. “I can’t lose him so soon after my mother. If no one has the answers to our questions, why are you pretending you do?”

“I’m not pretending. What I said was we doubt anyone has the answers. That doesn’t mean no one does.”

The wedding planner hesitated before she said, “Is the man I’m supposed to meet the brother of the groom?”

The psychic nodded. “That’s my impression.”

“I’m not sure I want to get mixed up in this.”

“You’ll figure out what to do.”

The wedding planner did not look convinced. “Let me get the remainder of your payment,” she said. “And after that, you’re free to go unless you want to stay and listen to the band.”

The psychic didn’t ask why the bride and groom had changed their minds about hiring her. It wasn’t the first time a client had gotten cold feet, but usually they did not make her wait so long before telling her she could leave.

The moon was visible above the treetops as she made her way back to her car. Someone had left a flyer for a doughnut shop under a windshield wiper. The psychic folded it up and put it in her shoulder bag. Other drivers had thrown theirs onto the pavement. Down the street, a woman stared at her phone as her dog sniffed at the base of a tree, her face ghostly in the phone’s thin light. The psychic had made six hundred dollars for two hours of her time. Her mother had called her a grifter, never once taking it back. Some people would not love you, or not love you enough, no matter what you did. The sooner you understood that, the psychic knew, the better off you’d be.

7 Books by Southern African Women You Should Be Reading

Posted on by EL Assistant2

In school, my favorite books were either banned or censored from my school and public libraries. Books like Stephen Bantu Biko’s I Write What I Like, Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy, and George Jackson’s Soledad Brother. I learned something blandly boring and yet extraordinarily potent in those books: Black folks’ tall and full humanity could be captured on the page. Like a 3-D photograph. What a dangerous idea.

And as revolutionary as those books were, it took me entering woman-country to see their own form of conformity, their pattern of patriarchal blindness. They were all books by men. All men. Always men. Even at an all-girls’ high school, what we read on the sly wasn’t Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel laureate whose work openly criticized our racist society, or Bessie Head, who grandmothered modern Southern African letters. We read men. How much more dangerously liberated would we have become, as grown women, if we’d seen our girlish humanity fleshed in full on the page?  

Hard to say. What I can say is I know who and how I want to be when I grow up—the kind of dangerously liberated woman who’d emerge from a mashup of the greatest Black women writers. That roll-call is long and lustrous and gave me the courage to write Innards, my debut short story collection about everyday Black folks processing the savagery of apartheid.

Meanwhile, here’s 6 Black women Southern African writers to read right now. Plus one token white writer, to honor a tradition of how literary lists have long celebrated “we, the women.” 

Zimbabwe: We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

NoViolet Bulawayo’s language cackles like lightning and is equal to characters wrought with an indelible imprint. I still think about Darling and her scruffy crew of friends living in the shadows of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Darling eventually leaves Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Sbho and Stina for America. But this is no happy Coming to America cliche. Darling’s U.S. misadventures offer a sharp portrayal of her new land’s allergy to blackness and its ignorance of what she left behind in Africa—that great big unknowable country. This book’s fiery language gave me permission to fully inhabit Innards’ characters as they speak, without constant translation for the white gaze. Also check out Bulawayo’s most recent novel, Glory.

South Africa: Rape, A South African Nightmare by Pumla Dineo Gqola

Prof. Gqola deftly unpacks how rape is baptized as a normal, if insidious, part of everyday culture in a country founded on the “trauma of slavery and sexual subjection.” She reroutes the reader to the roots of rape culture in South Africa’s “architecture of slave-ordered Cape Colony” and links these beginnings with an intersectional analysis of a today’s rape crisis. This book matters in a culture haunted by monster mutations, like corrective gang rapes (violations against queer bodies to “correct” their sexuality) and Jacob Zuma, whose trial on accusations of rape didn’t stop him from becoming president. Sound like another leader you know? Or another country whose wealth is rooted in the rape of Black women?  

South Africa: Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog

Antjie shot to global literary fame, Hollywood film inclusive, for this unflinching look at the open and active wound of apartheid’s trauma. Writing about her own great white reckoning as a reporter covering the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, Krog does not spare the reader any intimacies of how Black bodies were maimed, electrocuted and finished by her fellow Afrikaaners—men who could’ve been, as Krog  admits, her own brothers or uncles or neighbors. It’s also part of a large body of books I researched in shaping the texture and political milieu of Innards. Reading County of My Skull left my body retching, clutching the toilet bowl. Not an easy or light recommendation, but then again, South Africa’s genocidal past is nobody’s easy picnic basket.  

Zambia: The Old Drift by Namwalli Serpell

Zambia is a vast and large open country. Fitting then, that a novel about this place would stuff every kind of storytelling magic within its spine. Strange historical fiction, check. Concrete science fiction, check. Tender and broken love story between man and woman, woman and child? Double check. This epic novel has it all, plus a Greek tragedy-styled chorus of mosquitoes to boot! The moments where Serpell  really soars are grounded in good old fashioned storytelling. Years after reading, I can still vividly see Thandi on a bus, leaving Vic Falls. I still feel her loneliness, lying next to her strayed husband, Dr. Lee Banda, who’s in love with a sex worker. It’s no wonder Serpell  is the kind of writer who makes hot-shot lists like President Barack Obama’s Best Books of 2022 for her sophomore act, The Furrows. 

South Africa: Always Another Country by Sisonke Msimang

Sisonke’s memoir takes you through the many places her family made home as displaced people, exiled from apartheid South Africa. There’s Zambia, where her mother supports the family while her father tends an armed struggle. There’s Canada, where Sisonke gets a crash course in white suburban racism and later Kenya, where she confronts her own class privilege. And after college at Macalester, Minnesota, there’s South Africa—a faraway promised land she’s spent her whole life imagining. Spoiler alert, there is no shangri-la in the promised land. Instead, Sisonke is met by a messily beautiful homeland that rips her heart open with its vibrant and violent potency. “South Africa doesn’t need heroes.” Sisonke offers. “She needs the best type of friends—those who bear witness.” 

South Africa: Collective Amnesia by Koleka Putuma

These poems ruptured onto South African shores like a hurricane so loud and drunk on its own power that it sounds like the centuries-long white noise of the very silence Koleka wants to talk about. The poems touch a tender tinder box of living questions about Blackness, queerness, class, color and neo-colonialism in cutting text that challenges the reader’s complicity in oppression, while offering a praise song for our ancestors. No Easter Sunday for Queers asks, “…why is it that there is no Easter Sunday for queer bodies/When lesbians are crucified like Christ?” Each poem smacks us out of our collective amnesia, biting back with a brilliant and urgent look at South Africa today. 

Zimbabwe: House of Stone by NoVuyo Rosa Tshuma

NoVuyo Rosa Tshuma’s debut novel moves with the deep and muscular intelligence of an all-seeing, fully conscious octopus. 

Abednego and Agnes Mlambo’s son, Bukhosi is missing. Their lodger Zamani seems helpful with their search. But really, Zamani wants to replace Bukhosi, so he plots and schemes his way into taking up residence in the heart space of the Mlambos. This plot—thick with the absurd–is a deft match for the even more absurd reality that House of Stone’s characters embody, living as they are in an increasingly desperate Zimbabwe.

 The book sweeps through Zimbabwe’s neon-shocks of history, from Cecil Rhodes’ 1890s pillaging of a whole subcontinent, to Bob Marley famously serenading a newly free Zimbabwe at its 1980 independence celebrations, followed by Mugabe’s 1983 genocide of Ndebele people, Gukurahundi. This book deserves a patient and languid reader. It’ll leave you as eager as I am for Tshuma’s sophomore novel—Digging Stars—out fall of 2023.

I Think of My Book As A Naked Version of Myself

Posted on by EL Assistant2

A cover is all about disclosure. A cover may encase a book but its purpose is to encourage readers to pry open its pages. A cover is as much an invitation as it is a revelation. This I’ve long understood in the abstract, but it wasn’t until the design proofs for my own came in that I realized just how literal that would feel. With its warm orange-yellow hue staring back at me, The Male Gazed cover was an arresting reminder that I’d written an entire book about desire and masculinity (there was a male torso on full display asking you to lust after it) filtered through my own experience (there was that “taught me” line in the magenta-colored subtitle right atop my own bolded name). All of this gave me pause: if every cover is a promise, I realized that what I’d be asking of my readers was precisely the kind of welcome ogling my prose dissected through its many chapters. On a more frivolous note, that image of a shirtless man wearing only a chain around his neck made me uneasy for a wholly different reason: I knew close friends would inquire whether, narcissist that I can sometimes be, I had posed for my own cover. 

The reason such a question wouldn’t feel unwarranted (and hasn’t, for I’ve fielded it several times already) is that one of my more unorthodox long term hobbies has been collaborating with photographers. I’ve dropped trou in New York City office spaces on sunlit weekends and on sun-kissed mornings in my Hollywood apartment in a jockstrap; I’ve attended a World Naked Gardening Party where images that were of me and a Monstera leaf still give me pause, and a naked games night where a photo of me playing Twister wearing nothing but the shame of a second place finish. Some are striking in their simplicity (atop a stripped bed with a sheet serving as a makeshift prop to barely cover my so-called privates), others in their artistic ambition (against a pink furry backdrop mirroring a famous Playboy cover). Many have been taken with digital cameras and iPhones at the ready, their candid nature capturing me at my most unguarded, laughing gleefully at some already forgotten quip. But others have found me posing for polaroids and decades’ old cameras that required me to sit still for minutes at a time, revealing how rarely I smile unprompted when faced with such a lens.

To open that Google Drive folder (“Photographs: Manuel” ) is to run through the gamut of my amateur modeling career. I began that journey as a way to see myself anew; to find others who would gaze at me through their lens the way I’d gazed at men in underwear ads, sexy magazine photo shoots, and increasingly thirst-trappy Instagram posts. In hopes, I guess, of being able to wield whatever confidence boost I’d get from them in my day to day life. I yearned to find ways of feeling wanted and to find power in letting myself be so desired—you know, the very thing my book is all about. Then again, it would have been too on the nose, perhaps, to have fed the amazing creative team over at Catapult any one of the many tasteful nudes I’ve taken over the years and have it adorn a book that became, in its writing, a begrudging autobiography of sorts.

I began that journey as a way to see myself anew.

The working title for this cultural criticism-cum-personal-essay collection was “Thirst for Men.” I thought it playfully centered the elusive if titillating concept of “thirst” in a project about what it means to desire men, all while spoofing that needless “for men” branding that so litters beauty product marketing and which reinforces the idea that vanity is inherently a decidedly not-for-men practice. My partner at the time hated this title, groaning quite accurately that it was much too clumsy. It required too much explanation, he pointed out; the last thing a title needs. My agent similarly found it wanting. He encouraged me to find an alternative, one that would capture the key question at the heart of the book: Do I want him or do I want to be him? That’s how The Male Gazed came to be. Even without the cheeky nod to that famed Julia Mulvey essay, I enjoyed landing on an expression that used the elasticity of tenses to anchor the wordplay I so love deploying all throughout the book. 

Such a shift in tone had an added benefit; it stressed how much more personal the overall pieces had become since I first scribbled essay ideas in a notebook back in the summer of 2019. When I first dreamed up what became The Male Gazed, true to my academic roots, my voice was rather impersonal. I moved through my prose like a hidden puppeteer of my own thoughts and arguments. You could see it was me behind the many discussions around how masculinity was an armor that trafficked in its own invisibility. But you didn’t really get much sense of who I was or why this topic so fascinated me. At the urging (or, really, encouragement) of my agent and editor alike, the essays began to feel more memoiristic. Childhood memories of going to the movies became cornerstones in discussions around Disney princes; angered tantrums led the way to a chapter about how I grew up on a steady diet of Japanese anime—even my own coming out story makes a cameo amid a meditation on the queer and queered futures that movies like The Fifth Element help us imagine. Such personal disclosures, I told myself while writing them out, were a means to an end. They were necessary anchors in what I still wanted to consider a work of cultural criticism. It was only when I stepped back and examined them together that I saw just how much of myself I’d poured into those pages. The title ended up being even more revealing than the cover: I am the male who gazed, but also the man who is and has been gazed. 

I struggled a bit when first deciding to post one of the nudes a photographer in New York City had taken of me.

A central tenet of the book is the paradoxical power found in the demand to be looked at. The looker, we’re often told, is the one who wields control: they’re the ones who figure out the frame, who structure the shot, who bring in cultural strictures that strip agency of those who are ogled. They are active, and thus, in charge. But such a simplistic scheme erases the gravitational pull of those who beg to be watched, seen, looked at. What can sometimes be understood as a passive endeavor can, in fact, be quite empowering. In 2023 such a lesson feels obvious. We live in a world so guided by self-curated imagery that it may be hard to remember there was a time when we could all grow up without needing to think of ourselves as personal branding managers, where digital “walls” and “grids” didn’t double as surprisingly non-ephemeral photo albums and online vision boards cataloging our every move (and mood). It’s hard to disentangle who we present ourselves to be in our writing and how we offer ourselves to the (digital) world via candid pics or more carefully curated photos. Who among us, these days, doesn’t want to be seen? To be liked? To be favorited?

I struggled a bit when first deciding to post one of the nudes a photographer in New York City had taken of me. Back then I was a graduate student. Though I was already imagining off-ramps to a life in academia, posting that photo (in black and white, naturally), melancholy and tasteful as it was, meant forfeiting a professional kind of authority I was supposed to be nurturing in all aspects of my life. But what I’d learned from that photo session, and this is something that continues to be the case in the many that have followed (all with queer photographers, it must be noted) was the freeing sensation I felt once I let go of any shame and any embarrassment over being nude and having it so simply and unassumingly be  so celebrated. That came from who and in what context I was being looked at. There was comfort, not to mention a level of titillation, to know that a fellow queer guy was the one letting me finally feel so at home in my own body. I’d say it was revelatory if such an expression didn’t feel so painfully cliché.

Realizing just how self-revealing The Male Gazed’s title and cover are, I can’t help but feel ill-equipped about inviting such a readerly gaze. And how much anxiety I’m experiencing as I muster up the courage to allow myself to be so emotionally vulnerable—so naked on the page, if you will. Perhaps this would have been different if I’d decided to write an autobiographical project from the start. I’d have known what to expect, of myself and of my readers. Instead, I find the prospect of having shown so much of myself rather daunting, embarrassing, even. Therein lies, perhaps, the most personal revelation of the entire project: I’ve long armed and hid myself in criticism. In pop culture, even. It was easier to dissect the way telenovelas spoke to my sense of self as a teenager than to really evaluate what such prime time lessons taught me about my own frail grasp on socially-sanctioned masculinities, the kind I coveted and feared in equal measure. The Male Gazed ended up being a call to finally strip down. 

As writers we offer up our work in hopes it’ll find an audience. Or, at the very least (or, most, as the case may be) a generous attentive reader who’ll savor our sentences with gusto and turn our ideas over in their heads with grace. My chastely erotic scenario—where I’ve come to think of my book as a naked version of myself, a nude in prose that makes me sound like an acolyte of Frank O’Hara’s “Personism”—is ultimately a humbling prospect. To ask to be read, after all, is to ask to be seen. An ask as emboldening as it is terrifying. Best then, to see it as freeing as I found those nude photoshoots; a chance to let others see me as I am, as I was, as I could still be.

9 Novels Honoring Women’s Unseen Contributions to Science

Posted on by Wynter Miller

Women’s achievements have long been overlooked in the annals of history, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of science. When I first began digging into the history of nineteenth-century geology for my novel Our Hideous Progeny, I was shocked to find how many women were actually working in the field, considering how scarcely their names crop up in textbooks. Without access to formal education, many of these women either taught themselves or became involved in science by acting as assistants to their male relatives, learning on the job and often making significant discoveries in their own right. Indeed, many well-known and prolific scientists in recent history were enabled by women, who acted not only as their lab assistants and scientific illustrators, but also as their editors, translators, housekeepers, child-minders, and travel agents.

Even now, many women around the world are still denied access to education, and female scientists and academics have had to fight every step of the way for access to the same pay and recognition as their male peers. Although there is still a long way to go, modern historians, writers, and crowd-sourced efforts like Wikipedia Edit-a-Thons have made considerable progress in finally recognizing the women scientists whose work has long been overlooked.

As a nonbinary person and former engineering student, uncovering the real diversity of the history of science has always been important to me. The vast majority of scientists I read about as a child, in history books and in the science fiction stories I loved, were straight, cisgendered men; it took me years to discover Ada Lovelace, Katherine Johnson, Sally Ride, James Barry, and other role models who broke the mold. So, when I realized that I wanted to write a book that combined my love for nineteenth-century science with Frankenstein—transposing the fascinating themes of Mary Shelley’s classic into the turbulent world of 1850s paleontology—I knew that my main character had to be a Mary, not a Victor. Fortunately, Mary is in fantastic company, as novels honoring the work of women in science are now being more frequently published. Below are just some of my favorites.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

In the 1980s and the world of computer science, this story follows dual protagonists Sadie and Sam, who meet in the hospital as children and bond over a shared love of video games. Later, as college students, they meet again by chance and decide to collaborate on a video game of their own. But turning the thing they love into a means of making money means facing the prejudices of the game industry, like when a large studio offers to produce their game—but only if they make their intentionally genderless protagonist male. Not to mention, as the game becomes a runaway success and the team suffers several tragic setbacks, Sam (the male developer) becomes the public face of the project and Sadie receives little credit for the code she contributed. While neither character is without their flaws, and their relationship is complicated, Zevin brings them together for a nuanced story about the challenges of creative collaboration, the escapist power of video games, and the gendered difficulty associated with receiving one’s due.

The Tenth Muse by Catherine Chung

In this compact but powerful novel, set in the decades after World War II, we meet Katherine, a young Asian American woman determined to make her place in the world of mathematics. From an early age, Katherine’s parents foster in her a love of nature and science—but after her mother abruptly abandons the family one day, Katherine buries her hurt and confusion in her studies, eventually becoming fixated on proving the notorious Riemann Hypothesis. As it turns out, however, the Riemann hypothesis and her own family history are far more entangled than she knows, and Katherine finds herself journeying across Europe in search of the truth. I adored the way that Chung depicted the struggles that women (especially women of color) face in STEM—not just outright prejudice, but also loneliness, insecurity, and a complicated mix of inspiration and envy that comes from seeing someone else like you succeeding in your field. Plus, as a fan of mathematics myself, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing a character as driven and interesting as Katherine so passionate about the beauty and grace of a good equation.

Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

This fascinating and introspective story covers the friendship of Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, two real-life paleontologists of the nineteenth century. In the fossil-rich town of Lyme Regis, the Anning family made their living selling fossils to tourists and collectors, but Mary was the first in her family to appreciate the scientific importance of these objects and educate herself in paleontological classification. Elizabeth Philpot, originally from a well-to-do London family, moved to Lyme Regis and developed a fascination with fossil fish, through which she and Mary Anning forged a lifelong friendship. Chevalier does a fabulous job of exploring the religious and existential quandaries stirred up by the nascent science of paleontology, as well as the different ways in which gender and class affect the two friends’ lives: as a woman of some standing, Elizabeth is allowed scientific hobbies but will never be considered a professional; and as a working class woman, Mary is respected for her practical ability to find fossils, but never as a true contributor of scientific knowledge.

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

This introspective novel follows Gifty, a Ghanaian American student of neuroscience living in Alabama. Gifty’s parents immigrated to America before she was born in search of better opportunities for their future children; faced with poverty and racism, however, the family struggled, and Gifty’s father eventually returned to Ghana, claiming it was only a visit – though he never came back. Tragically, the family was wounded further when Gifty’s older brother, a talented high school athlete with a bright future ahead of him,  addicted to opioids after a training injury, falling into addiction and eventually dying of a heroin overdose. Now, in the present, Gifty’s mother barely leaves her bed, near-catatonic with grief, and Gifty focuses herself on her research, trying to use science to make sense of the misfortunes her family has suffered. Compelling and full of emotion, this fascinating novel asks complex questions about grief, religion, and the workings of the human mind.

The Fair Botanists by Sara Sheridan

This novel follows another Elizabeth, the recently widowed Elizabeth Rocheid, who arrives in Edinburgh in the 1820s. An eager botanist and artist, she offers her services as an illustrator to capture the once-in-a-lifetime flowering of the Agave Americana plant in the city’s brand-new Botanic Garden. Along the way, Elizabeth strikes up a touching friendship with Belle Brodie, a fellow botany enthusiast (whose interest in the rare flower, however, runs in a far more commercially-exploitable direction). With plenty of cameos from famous scientists and thinkers of the era, Sheridan skillfully captures the buzz and excitement of this period of scientific history, painting a fascinating portrait of the Botanic Garden and Georgian Edinburgh as a whole.

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

In this fast-paced sci-fi thriller, geneticist Evelyn Caldwell is the pioneering scientist behind a new cloning technology that can be used to replicate already-existing humans with complete accuracy—at least, in terms of their physical form. When Evelyn creates a clone of herself named Martine, her husband decides that he actually prefers the personality of the clone, and leaves Evelyn for Martine. Forced to confront the ethical quandaries brought about by the technology she has created, and the long-standing flaws in her marriage, Evelyn’s life is thrown into disarray. Suspenseful yet also filled with deeper questions about personal autonomy and identity, The Echo Wife asks if we really know our loved ones as well as we think we do.

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

Set in an alternate 1950s in which the Eastern US is devastated by a meteorite and the resulting global warming necessitates the human colonization of space much earlier than planned, this novel follows Elma York, a brilliant mathematician and former WWII WASP pilot. Elma works as a computer at the International Aerospace Coalition (think: NASA), and despite her debilitating anxiety around reporters, her tireless campaigning for women to be included in the space program shoves her into the public eye as “The Lady Astronaut.” Kowal’s exhaustive research into the history of space travel shines in this novel, and touches on many aspects of real history, including the (sadly short-lived) female astronaut training program of the 1960s. In some ways, Kowal’s version of the 50s is almost better than ours, as the necessity for international cooperation requires that scientists of different races and nationalities be included in the space program far sooner than they were in reality. However, it is still the 1950s, and Elma’s Black colleagues, in particular, face countless obstacles. Elma, as a Jewish woman, is no stranger to prejudice herself, and finds solace throughout the difficulties she faces in her faith, community, and wonderfully supportive husband.

The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins

Beginning in the middle of a murder trial, this razor-sharp and beautifully written novel follows the life (and confessions, as the title suggests) of Frannie Langton. We meet Frannie as a domestic servant in early nineteenth-century London when she is accused of brutally killing her employers, a respected scientist and his wife—though she claims she cannot remember whether she did so or not. Through Frannie’s tense and atmospheric narration, we learn that she was originally born as a slave on a Jamaican plantation, where she was educated and taught to assist with her master’s scientific experiments, but at a terrible price. Based upon the real and horrifying history of medical experimentation on Black (and frequently enslaved) people, Collins sheds light on the ugly underbelly of nineteenth-century science, much of which was founded upon racist ideas and funded by colonialism. Evoking the best of the Gothic tradition, Collins’ prose brings Frannie (and her complicated and compelling relationship with her English mistress, Marguerite) utterly to life. I was glued to every page.

Chemistry by Weike Wang

Sharp and thought provoking, Chemistry follows a young Chinese American student grappling with the expectations of academia, society, and her demanding parents. At first glance, our unnamed narrator seems to be on the perfect track to a successful and happy life: she’s studying for a PhD in chemistry, and her wonderful boyfriend just proposed marriage. But in reality, she’s overworked, riddled with stress, and unsure whether she wants to marry at all. Her PhD has already dragged on for several years—much to her and her parents’ frustration—and the question of whether she actually enjoys chemistry is impossible to disentangle from the heavy burden placed on her as a “model minority” and child of immigrant parents. Through the eyes of this anxious young student, Wang explores the immense pressure on women (particularly women of color) to prove themselves worthy of their place in academia.

I Chose Life and a Second Adolescence

Posted on by EL Assistant2

One school morning in 2012, I woke up at home and alone. Everyone else was on holiday and I stayed behind by request. The class activity that day in high school was a debate about abortion. I was excited to participate – argument formulation was a strength of mine, and anything beat having homework.

Regrettably, my class schedule conflicted with another important event I was attending: my death.

I contacted my ride to school and told her that I couldn’t do it that day. I apologized for my absence, but left out the part where I planned to asphyxiate myself by noon. This wasn’t a suicide attempt with an subconscious desire to reach out for help and awareness. I had no intention of failing.

As I dragged my miserable self out of bed, a voice implored me to find help one last time. I wasn’t happy, but I struck a bargain: I would seek help one last time as a courtesy to that voice. I picked up the phone and called a suicide hotline, ready to ruin some underpaid counsellor’s morning. It rang for over a minute without a response – not even an answering machine. I put it down, thinking I had misdialed. I tried again and the same thing happened. 

I had phoned a suicide hotline and nobody picked up. 

When the realization hit home, I laughed – truly laughed – for the first time in weeks. The funniest point in one of the darkest periods of my life. The whole disaster put me in such good spirits that I postponed my death and skipped school for the day. I napped, and played video games, the same as any other teenaged boy would do with cherished spare time. I now had a mirthful secret: I was such a human catastrophe that I had failed my own death.

I postponed my death a few times during my teens, but this is the only story I tell to strangers. It’s the only one with any entertainment value. The other incidents aren’t funny.

I picked up the phone and called a suicide hotline, ready to ruin some underpaid counsellor’s morning.

There was the logical conclusion to my disjointed upbringing: failing at so many appointed tasks and then, failing at death. 

With the privilege of hindsight and a Master’s in Psychology, I now know that fractured mental health and a critical shortage of support structures is ruinous. Tragically, I spent my formative adolescence in that whirlpool of ruinous emotions. I didn’t evade death through force-of-will or artful self-care. I avoided death because of small fortunes and a tiny spark of resistance.

May we never have to confront our killer in the mirror.

I was an auspicious creature, a thing of humble destiny that would bear my branch of the family tree forward. Chinese families often prefer boys for their value as income providers and bearers of the family name. A good education. A ‘respectable’ job (don’t tell them I did online sex work). Wife and kids. The responsibilities of Chinese masculinity mingle with the privileges. Boys are shaped into morally-upright and productive creatures who maintain their family’s face. Face. An untranslatable concept of social respectability, dignity, and public relations that governs many aspects of Chinese life. 

What I’m saying is that I had a lot riding on my shoulders, and I don’t remember signing up for any of it. 

Growing up, I was intimidated with stories of Chinese children failing to uphold their families’ standards. Young men who became video game-playing deadbeats; ‘good girls’ who partied their grades away at university. Chattering ladies and grandmothers endlessly compared their children to see who had the best one. Picture the javelin throw event, but the stakes are a family’s reputation and the children are the projectile. Who had the best grades? The best extracurricular record? The best musical performance? The children who left this crucible bore lasting imprints of the messages they heard. Depression, maladjusted personalities, and alcoholism. The coping mechanisms for success. 

All of this was a preferable alternative to failure – becoming a failure was certainly the worst thing that could happen to a Chinese child. The ‘failures’ of my youth became cautionary tales passed to other children. Like the Titanic: doomed to serve as a warning to others. I sometimes think about a family friend whose son slipped so far that he failed a grade. I think he just needed social support. I hope he’s okay. I hope they all are. 

I grew up under relentless pressure to be better than the person next to me, rather than befriend them. I bore the weight of being a Chinese boy remarkably well, considering that I was actually a girl. 

May we reach our future without being twisted in someone else’s straitjacket.

By first grade, I was enrolled in visual art, dance and piano classes. My first piano teacher believed that a five-year old was too young to start. Unfortunately for her, my elders are Chinese. They knew enough stories of prodigal musicians to know that if you didn’t get your child against a grindstone early, they’d never be successful. I joined the millions of Chinese kids who were nudged (coerced) into extracurricular activities at their parents’ behest. My parents took pride in how liberal their parenting techniques were. They proudly told me that they consulted me, asking if I preferred piano or violin. They were under the impression that ‘asking’ me made it an informed decision. The fact that my five-year old brain wasn’t able to process the responsibility and expectations wasn’t considered. In adulthood, they asked why I hated it so much if I ‘chose it’. I had to explain the inability of children to give informed consent to them while sharing a pizza.

I bore the weight of being a Chinese boy remarkably well, considering that I was actually a girl.

Piano is just one of the many things I failed at during my childhood. The dance class melted away. My art class teacher politely ejected me from the class because I was too energetic for it. I wanted to draw fighting robots and she was interested in teaching still life and basic color theory. A thoughtful parent would have reconsidered their decision to enroll a child in extracurriculars that were beyond their child. These are Chinese parents, so I bore the mounting weight of familial disappointment. My upbringing was defined by my inadequacy. My failure to attain high grades. My extracurricular failures. My lack of piano achievements. My room was devoid of trophies like other children. Better children. 

My body wasn’t good enough, either. The matriarchs got it into their heads that a seven-year old shouldn’t be so skinny. I was required to drink a loose fluid dotted with atolls of dusty powder—protein shakes— of a sickly vanilla flavor. Instead of turning me into the big, strong boy they wanted, I became more troublesome. I was a picky and slow eater, the way children who are forced to drink half-mixed protein shakes get picky. The way children who eat under risk of punishment eat slowly to appease their elders despite how little they’re enjoying the food.

Under threat of punishment, I learned to eat faster than anyone else at the table. When my family visits nowadays, they remark that I eat like ‘someone who has never seen food before,’ and implore me to slow down and enjoy it. I don’t even have the energy to explain the irony of this to them.

Every time I failed at an endeavor, I received a dressing-down about my shortcomings. If I was lucky, there was just an exasperated sigh. Still, the message was clear: I wasn’t good enough. 

May we never be pulled away from the small things that bring us delight.

I tried to be a guy. I really did. By my teens, I was insisting to other guys that lesbian porn was the best, because it had twice the volume of women. In 10th grade, someone behind me was talking about a friend who was acting strangely. I shouted across that, “Well at least he’s not gay! It’s the gays that are the real problem!” That made me feel good, like a regular, gross teenager. They didn’t have to know that I grimaced in the mirror at home. Or that I hated compliments aimed at my broad shoulders and deepening voice. They needn’t know that I clung to my last plush toy until age seventeen – slightly ashamed of, but fiercely protective of my last ‘soft’ possession.

When I wasn’t a foreigner in my skin, I was reminded of it by the people around me. A stable feature of my childhood was being made aware of my differences. Casual remarks from classmates and passersby about my ethnicity. People asking if I ‘knew kung fu’ or was related to Jackie Chan. Casual, prejudicial ribbing from those around reminded me of my difference. I was being seen. 

I once received a royal chewing-out from my grandmother for inviting two ‘ungrateful’ girls over to our house. They asked for a snack, which she considered a wildly inappropriate gesture. She encouraged me to stop befriending them. Not long after, I dared to ask a host for permission to watch TV while she tutored my cousin. Word reached my grandmother and I received an extraordinary dressing-down of my inadequacies as a human being. I never found out what I did wrong.

I was caught between Chinese and South African modes of being without an instruction manual. Each turn of the Earth made me more accustomed to the idea that I was a poor fit for my body and a poor fit for my life. Being alienated from society is familiar to most of us sometime or the other. Bodily alienation is a bit harder to grasp, even when you’re living in it. We all get ambushed by negative thoughts about our bodies, but the disconnection brought by dysphoria is truly alien. Even after a vibrant and successful gender transition, it hasn’t fully left me. 

May we all graduate from our rental bodies to something that truly feels like home.

Every gender transition is different.

Mine started off exactly unsurprisingly: my mouth outran my brain. And before my brain had a chance to put a lid on it – to rationalize it away – I told my girlfriend Lucy that I might be trans. We blinked at each other in a feeble effort to process the gravity of what was just said. My mouth never paused to ask my brain for forgiveness. It still doesn’t, and I respect its enthusiasm. It was swift and resolute. 

The year was 2020. There wasn’t much to do during lockdown other than make earth-shattering personal journeys and complain about life’s proceedings. My girlfriend ended her lifelong nail-biting habit. I realized that I’m transgender during lockdown. I’d say these were equally substantial events.

I was caught between Chinese and South African modes of being without an instruction manual.

I must have been insufferable during those early weeks, because the dam had broken, and all I could think or talk about was transition. I cooked up a schedule for transitioning: I would research for the next few months so that I could be extra sure about it. I would consider starting hormone replacement therapy in 2021 and let it work for three or four years. Then, I’d gradually make femininity a full-time thing. This was an orderly and steadily-paced transition that gave Lucy and I plenty of space to adjust.

Turns out, there’s no planning for reality. I was out of the closet to everyone in my social circle in two months (oops!). I started hormones in 2020, a year ahead of my plan. I was a full-time girl by the end of 2021. So, several years faster than expected. I was incorrigible. I studied every change to my physicality in joyful fascination. I wondered what the next change would be. How would I look once the body fat settled? How would my breasts turn out? Would people still like me? My internal monologue sounded like an adolescent girl – which in fairness, I sort of was.

I didn’t go into my transition blind to the trials that women face. In 2016, I was a crossdressing man in exploration, a tourist in femininity. I did so with the love and support of my friends. I was quickly exposed to the street harassment and nightclub groping that come with feminine presentation. When I started my transition, these experiences were a core part of the ruthless arithmetic of whether this was ‘worth it’. I was one of the few ‘men’ who had first-hand experience of some of the misogynies that women face. Was I willing to take up those experiences and shed the safety of manhood?

May we all be gifted with the determination to craft our best selves.

I noticed it quickly: the second glances and lingering looks. My anxiety said that people were ogling the broad-shouldered ogre man-lady who will never be a girl. My anxiety is kind of a dick. 

With time, those negative thoughts were dispelled for the acrid illusion they were. Eventually, ‘positive’ confirmations of my femininity appeared. Drivers were much more polite to me at pedestrian crossings. I received offers for assistance with my groceries. Men were much more amenable to making chit-chat with me. People saw a woman and acted accordingly. 

Success.

My internal monologue sounded like an adolescent girl – which in fairness, I sort of was.

Happiness bloomed in me. Society now saw the person I wanted them to see. Still, I mourned the men who society largely treats as unworthy of assistance or attention. I don’t see how things would be worse if we offered to help men with their groceries a bit. 

My confidence escalated, but so did the attention. My girlfriend steadfastly told me that I wasn’t just any woman, but a beautiful woman. I entered the pandemic as a lanky young man with a penchant for baggy clothes, and escaped as a stately young woman. The physical traits that I found ill-fitting for manhood were now prized: thinness, long limbs, soft facial features. Men asked for my number. There was an occasional whistle or comment as I walked past (ugh). 

I was being read as a woman. As many trans people would say, I ‘passed’. This wasn’t a test like my childhood weight or piano recitals. It was self-imposed. I signed up for it, and I succeeded.

From now on, this is how it would be.

This new gaze of society – one reserved for beautiful Asian women – unsettled me. I didn’t consider myself beautiful. My anxiety and wounded self-esteem always assured me otherwise. However, others thought so. Strangers are inexplicably more polite to me despite no change in my behavior. Every time I’ve been asked on a date was post-transition. The unwanted compliments are a torrent. Being so vividly seen took me back to my childhood, but the jeering had been replaced with hungry second glances. 

There’s a word for that. Trans people talk about gender euphoria – the unbridled joy of having our gender affirmed. But, this was gender ewphoria: the disconcerting half-happiness of one’s gender being affirmed in a harmful way. A trans woman encounters street harassment for the first time, but feels her femininity affirmed despite it being sexual harassment. A trans man is invited to participate in casually misogynistic conversation because he’s now one of the boys. Gender ewphoria. 

‘Passing’ has its consequences. Even success has shortcomings, but it’s always worth it. That’s what makes it success.

May we please be affirmed for our beautiful selves in ways that aren’t gross.

Starting antidepressants didn’t cure my paired anxiety and depression. They took on the burden so that I could better uphold my daily life. Gender transition was the same. It freed up mental capacity previously occupied by the need to endure my incompatible body. With that alignment, I could focus my resilience on other endeavors. 

Being so vividly seen took me back to my childhood. 

Masculinity taught me much, not all of it good. It taught me hardness and suppression. I politely abided and suppressed my tears, my interest in men, and my femininity, to name a few. By the time people stopped telling me to bury myself, the lessons were entrenched and I perpetuated them myself. There was a lot of digging to do. With my newfound energy, I confronted parts of myself that I’d driven into the ground. One by one, I decided their fate.

My masculine upbringing taught me independence, assertiveness, and emotional resilience. A keeper, but I sanded down the hardest edges. My insular, nerdy-boy childhood formed a love for military history, scale model making and video games. Keep! But, let’s augment them with the feminine interests that I was always too afraid to try: cultivating my wardrobe and collecting plush toys. 

But the eating disorder? That had to go.

It was anchored in my childhood diets. My family disciplined me for being a ‘fussy’ and slow eater. As a child, I was fed protein shakes because my body was too weedy. By my teens, this overbearing watch was replaced by apathy – I could eat whatever I want, whenever I wanted and nobody cared anymore. Great idea, right? 

My understanding of what constituted healthy eating has always been lacking. My childhood primed me for an unhealthy relationship with food. However, that didn’t spawn an eating disorder. I needed motivation. One final push. It came in 2015, during my crossdressing cis-man era. My tourism in femininity showed me the joy of seeing my feminine form (euphoria), but I noticed a few squishy parts. Areas that could be a little ‘leaner’, or where my clothes could fit a little ‘better’.

One final push.

I didn’t have the language to make sense of dysphoria, euphoria, or men’s eating disorders in 2015. I just let my mind dictate this new path – just vibin’, if you will. I lost an alarming amount of weight by starving myself, and kept it off for over a year by force of will. I accepted a constant state of exhaustion and daily headaches as the price for my goal body—a feminine body. It never occurred to me to ask why a ‘cisgender man’ would crave a feminine body. I wasn’t eating enough to form such big thoughts. 

This downward spiral only stopped when I was confronted with the reality of my situation: I was at a dangerously low weight and I wasn’t looking more feminine. I was just gaunt. Pallid in the face, and struggling to focus in my lectures. The pendulum swung in the opposite direction and I binge-ate to regain the weight. I declared this episode over when my weight returned. I was under the mistaken impression that eating disorders were just about weight.

My transition was marked by near misses and short relapses. I nearly relapsed when I dug up my old feminine wardrobe to see how the clothes fit. They didn’t. I did the smart thing and thrifted them away before I let Size S become a ‘body goal’. I relapsed when I visited Lucy’s family home and was surrounded by women who had complex (read: terrible) relationships with weight, and also unable to maintain my eating schedule. At work, someone remarked on my thinness and I later watched her scrape the chocolate icing from her cupcake before starting on it. I ate briskly and left, before those thoughts came back.

I was at a dangerously low weight and I wasn’t looking more feminine.

When my mother saw the new me for the first time, she said that I was too skinny and I had to eat more. There it is; ewphoria. No tradition in a Chinese family is more hallowed than making inappropriate remarks about a daughter’s weight. I knew at that moment that she saw a daughter in me. Still, Lucy had to talk me out of cutting down on my next meals.

Wicking away the pain of my past in careful, measured movements. Small, incremental successes chipped by the occasional failure. This is the trajectory of my eating disorder recovery. 

May we all liberate ourselves from the pain that marks our body.

Most people who want to kill themselves don’t actually want to die. Dying is anathema to our body’s every interest. What we actually want is a quiet end to the suffering. Unfortunately, we know that such a thing can never pass, so dying becomes an adequate facsimile. 

I was a frightened, lonely boy. I had finally been burdened with too much trauma – bodily, psychologically, socially. The scripts of inadequacy and manhood gave me none of the agency to cope with it. I didn’t want to die. I just wanted to go away. I’ll never know what pressed me to each new day during those years, but I’m glad it happened. 

In 2015, I escaped my childhood to a university hundreds of miles away. That university experience shaped me into the woman I am today. Even better than shaping me into this woman, it gave me the courage to pick the threads of my past apart in search of that lonely child. In the recesses of inadequacy and trauma-memory, I found the definitive reward for the life I built. I gave the suicidally depressed boy-I-was what he wanted most: a conclusion. 

By transitioning, I relegated him to the past tense. I released his life into the realm of memory. I ended his pain.

I didn’t have to take his life to accomplish it.

This is joyful beyond words. I am one of the few people who was able to put their suicidal self to rest without the horror of taking a life. That is prettier than living in a body I can call home and striding the world as my truest self.

I am proud of that shaken and bewildered boy for enduring his world while still trying his best. 

I am proud of him for giving up his life piece-by-piece to shield a woman he didn’t know. 

May he rest peacefully in the knowledge that it was worth it.

I am one of the few people who was able to put their suicidal self to rest without the horror of taking a life.

I empathize with trans people who want to relegate their past selves to oblivion. But this is my story and I’m obliged to make room for the sacrifices my past self made. I remember him for the courageous child that he was, even if he never believed it. He bore guilt for every test he supposedly failed, and he was nearly overcome. Only with the freedom of adulthood and recovery did I learn that sometimes, the bar for success is set at survival. It’s the only bar that really mattered to my younger self, and he upheld it.

No undertaking can affirm my agency as much as undergoing an adolescence of my choosing. Nothing can match the bliss of awarding my past self the accolades and rest he earned. 

This delight – the embodiment of my euphoria deserved a name.

Her name is Summer.

I named her for the warmth roiling in her heart, the prosperity in her smile, and the unbound hope in every step she takes.

May we all be privileged enough to have a name that fits perfectly.

10 Queer Horror Books Coming Out in 2023

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Horror is queer. I don’t make the rules. 

From the moment Carmilla sprang onto Laura’s bed to when M3GAN murder-danced her way down the red hall, the horror genre has been dominated by queer icons—and loved by queer audiences as well. While the subtext-entrenched classics remain iconic, the past few years have inspired explicitly queer retellings, such as AMC’s Interview with the Vampire, as well as fresh original stories, including one of my favorites, Carmen Maria Machado’s genre bending collection Her Body and Other Parties.

Here are 10 horror books coming out in 2023 to keep this queer tradition going.

Carmilla: The First Vampire by Amy Chu & Soo Lee 

Set in 1990s New York, Carmilla: The First Vampire follows a Chinese-American social worker named Athena who is determined to get to the bottom of a string of murders targeting young, homeless women in Chinatown. Athena’s clues lead her to Carmilla’s, a nightclub run by a mysterious figure who is always lurking behind the scenes. Filled with deliciously gothic artwork, Chu and Lee’s graphic novel is both an ode to Sheridan Le Fanu’s original and a stunning, modern take infused with dark, Chinese folklore. 

Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova

Monstrilio opens with the death of 11 year-old Santiago, who was born with only one lung. Not ready to give up on her only son, Santiago’s mother, Magos, extracts his lung and returns it to Mexico City, where she nurtures it into a ravenous, fanged creature who she calls Monstrilio. As Monstrilio—or M for short—develops into a young man, he must contend with the longings and desires of all boys his age, as well as the deep seated hunger which only grows by the day. Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s horror debut on grief and monstrous love is not one to miss. 

Everything the Darkness Eats by Eric LaRocca

Eric LaRocca, author of the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, returns with a dark, occult tale set in rural Connecticut. As local law enforcement investigate a string of recent disappearances, a grieving widower finds herself pulled into the dark magic rituals of a man named Heart Crowley. Underneath these tangled threads is a simmering, unrestrained bigotry which threatens to swallow the town whole. 

Brainwyrms by Alison Rumfitt

Alison Rumfitt, a self described “semi-professional trans woman,” has crafted a body horror novel not meant for the faint of heart. Brainwyrms follows Frankie, a woman whose life falls apart after her workplace is blown up in a transphobic attack. What follows is a messy aftermath of binge-drinking and one nightstands, until Frankie meets Vanya. Vanya is beautiful. Vanya is frightening. Vanya is—hiding something? As the relationship deepens, Frankie slowly uncovers the sick, twisted secrets between them.

Such Pretty Flowers by K.L. Cerra

Holly receives one last message before her brother’s body is found torn apart in his girlfriend’s home: “Get it out of me.” While the death is ruled a horrific suicide, Holly believes something more sinister is at play, and begins stalking her brother’s girlfriend: a beautiful, sophisticated woman named Maura. As Holly digs deeper into the world of Savannah high society, she finds herself lured into a confusing, guilt-inducing attraction to Maura. 

Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky 

Arguably no genre pairs better with horror than comedy. Boys Weekend, a graphic novel by Mattie Lubchansky, follows artist assistant Sammie, who despite recently coming out as trans, is invited to be ‘best man’ at their old friend Adam’s wedding. What follows is a bachelor party from hell, set in what is essentially a floating Las Vegas and featuring—you guessed it—a murder cult. 

Eyes Guts Throat Bones by Moïra Fowley

In Moïra Fowley’s short story collection Eyes Guts Throat Bones, horror is beautiful, horror is funny, horror is romantic, and horror is, of course, haunting. An immersive, gothic read about queer lives at the end of the world.

Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle 

Chuck Tingle—if anything, you probably know him for his viral gay erotica, but in Camp Damascus, he captures the twisted horrors that take place at a gay conversion camp in Neverton, Montana. At the center of this story is Rose Darling, a God-fearing young woman who happily attends her town’s cult-like mega-church. It is uncertain how someone such as Rose has any involvement with a place like Camp Damascus—until she starts vomiting flies and seeing a strange woman in the woods. 

She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran 

She Is a Haunting follows one of my favorite horror storylines: that of the broken family. The book begins when Jade Nguyen arrives in Vietnam to visit her estranged father, who promises he will pay for her dream school if she stays five weeks with him while he restores a 1920s French colonial for a bed-n-breakfast. Jade doesn’t mind helping out, nor pretending to be straight for a couple of weeks, but then she begins finding bugs in strange places and hearing noises in the walls at night. It soon becomes clear the house intends to destroy its inhabitants, and as the only one who can see the horrors, Jade must save her family. Warning: there are a lot of bugs in this. Hopefully you’re into that kind of thing.

Chlorine by Jade Song

Bildungsroman meets body horror in Jade Song’s debut Chlorine. The novel follows high school student Ren Yu, whose whole life revolves around swimming. Nothing comes close to the “isolated grandeur” she feels when she first plunges into the pool. It is her parents’ wish for her to get scouted, earn a scholarship, and eventually attend a good college—but Ren Yu wants more than to be a good swimmer. She longs for the touch of water. Needs it. It’s a desire that transcends human boundaries. When the pressures of everyday life become too much, Ren takes inspiration from the mermaid folklore she used to read as a child.

The Bluest Crab at Grandpa’s Funeral

Posted on by Wynter Miller

The following story was chosen by Anthony Doerr as the winner of the 2023 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. The prize is awarded annually by Selected Shorts and a guest author judge. Subscribe to Selected Shorts wherever you get your podcasts to hear this story performed by an actor in the near future. 

Carapace

Three crabs attended my grandfather’s funeral.

Atlantic blues, they picked at a lump of chicken inside a milk crate trap, legs turquoise and spine-tipped, shells olive, bellies white. As a puddle formed on Auntie Yin’s dock, their antennae stroked the poultry with a delicate, oblivious air. The ten of us paused to admire her catch.

“Fat ones.” My grandmother gave the tub of ashes an affectionate little pat. Yin, Uncle Teong, his wife, his twins, my parents, my sister, and I all nodded.

“Weng must be thinking of us up there.”

By her logic, the deceased had thought to send us dinner amidst the most profound spiritual bliss, while we, sweating in the Carolina summer damp, wouldn’t let his funeral begin until we had planned the resulting meal.

Appropriately, the tub was labeled: Daisy Sour Cream.

If the man hadn’t died, his memorial might have killed him.

Born in Malaysia, albeit more Anglicized than the average Brit, my grandfather exuded a knightʼs poetic strictness. Every day, he brushed his lone suit like a vassal polishing steel. His era had reduced him to a paralegal assistant. Still, on weekends, he made a leaky waterbed his court, where enchanted by his voiceʼs rumble, I absorbed chivalric illusions of King Arthur and Guan Yu.

Behind gold spectacles, his face was square. His skin was line-less save the forehead, bisected by a solitary, reddish crease. When I fell in love in college, it furrowed gravely.

“Knowledge is a jealous mistress,” he said.

For this exacting chevalier, we gathered behind the milk crate in T-shirts and shorts, faced the sound, and improvised our prayers. I sensed something ridiculous in the act. It didn’t help that by all appearances, we were speaking to the crabs.

“I never knew anyone so generous,” said Teong, a high-ranking member of a multilevel marketing scheme. “I remember . . . ”

Shifting so that its outer mandibles could reach a skirt of fat, the smallest crab pivoted its eye stalks, then undulated an orange-fingered claw.

I pictured the movement of my grandfatherʼs thumb. Somehow, this creature felt closer to us than him. Our T-shirts, dotted with sweat, the double rings of minnowsʼ jumps, the tub, the smell of brine, the wooden dock, where algal veins twisted under the cracked surface gray—they had no place in that incorporeal realm, so removed from us that describing it as angelic light or absent dark presumes, myopically, the eyes.

Even before his death, age reduced my grandfather to his strictness.

When a stroke claimed his right hand, he insisted on buttoning his shirts. Later, after persistent clots left him with aphasia, he arranged to study Japanese.

“I-if-ff I c-can’t enj-j-joy m-m-y c-c-conq-q-que-r-rors-s,” he rasped over Issaʼs collected verse, “th-th-then h-how ca-n I en-j-joy o-old a-ge?”

In two years, the man was bedridden, incontinent, held together by morphine and his shirt. Unable to speak, he moaned softly through his gums. The spare bedroom was his world, the flutter of curtains a major current event. Only when I read aloud to him could I spot flickers of intelligence. For instance, hours before he passed, I bungled a line of Yeats, “Nine bean-rows I will have there—” and saw his left thumb twitch. Incredulous, I skipped a word.

Another twitch. Secured by a tendon, the severity of his mind remained.

“Are you there?” I asked.

Phlegm bubbled in his throat. If he gave me a sign, I couldn’t understand it.

Eventually, to my horror, it was my turn to speak. Behind their legs, the paddle-like appendages the crabs used to swim accompanied the silence with gentle, useless clicks. They had their own language, I knew, alien and impenetrable as a mind whose body had abandoned it.

Having only known my own life, how could I hope for communion with the dead?

Desperate, I decided to become a crab. I liquified my bones, letting them rise through my capillaries to harden atop my skin. My torso widened; my belly formed segments. Then, once I had sprouted antennae, legs, and claws, I scuttled into the water, floating past shifting trails of sand, formless shadows, the refracted light of fish, and as my vision divided itself between ten eyes, I sensed vast eddies of nothingness. I released my words. At last, I hoped, the sounds were inhuman enough to reach him.

My family perceived none of this.

Instead, they saw me bow and whisper to the shellfish, “I’m here, I’m here.”

Evening came. We butchered the crabs and ate them.

Luis Alberto Urrea Writes Like He’s a Mexican Faulkner

Posted on by Jo Lou

For 17 books, Luis Alberto Urrea has highlighted the joys and sorrows of life along the U.S.-Mexican border, a territory which moves with its peoples, no matter the walls we build on the land and in our hearts. Through his memoir Nobody’s Son, novels like The House of Broken Angels, his essay and poetry collections, and the investigative reportage which produced The Devil’s Highway, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Urrea worked his way into a somewhat estranged but ultimately exuberant embrace of being born to a Mexican father and an American mother.  

In his 18th book, a World War II novel called Good Night, Irene, Urrea shifts his focus away from Latinidad and toward the womanly resilience required by the collective trauma of defeating the Nazis. Hitler is everywhere and nowhere in this story, appearing as the negative space created by his depraved ambitions. Instead, Urrea gives us Irene and Dorothy, Red Cross workers who delivered coffee, donuts, and the will to live to soldiers who were fellow witnesses to atrocities from the Battle of the Bulge to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Those horrors imbued Urrea’s own mother Phyllis with silences and night terrors. Like the Irene character she inspired, Phyllis evaded domestic confinement to become a Donut Dolly, a popular name which undermines the truth of what these frontline workers saw and did, much of which has been lost to history’s erasure of womanly courage. 

Centering the triumphant friendship between Irene and Dorothy, this heavily researched novel traces the joyful arc of reconciliation which takes a lifetime to achieve. Like his prior oeuvre, Good Night, Irene is most profoundly about grace, whether in crisis or during the long reckoning which follows. 

Kristen Millares Young: Let’s get into it. Your mother served on the front lines with the Red Cross during World War Two. She was a Buchenwald liberator. How did you learn her stories? 

Luis Alberto Urrea: My mom was the only American in the family. Very proper, very New York from upper-crust people. I didn’t understand who she was, really. However, my mom had nightmares almost every night. Cried out in her sleep. I had seen that her thighs were deeply scarred and her abdomen was deeply scarred. I thought, Wow, what happened to Mom? 

We lived in the barrio in South San Diego. A rough and tumble place. We had a terrible apartment. My mom had her war chest, and I was under strict orders not to open it. “Now, dear boy, we’re not going to open Mama’s chest, are we?” “No, ma’am.” She’d leave for work, and I’d be like, Yeah. She had an army jacket with patches from the Red Cross and Patton’s Army. But within that was her album of Buchenwald pictures. I believe I was seven when I discovered those pictures. They’re very gruesome. It’s just mind boggling. I tried to put it all back together neatly. Of course, she knew I’d been in there. “The world is terrible, dear boy. Terrible things happened to Mama.” 

A little later, we left the barrio. We moved up to a little suburb with white folks. Though she felt that our neighbors were not of the class that she would prefer, they were her people for a change. She was quite happy, and she began to open up. She was with the Red Cross, the Clubmobile Corps, making donuts and coffee in combat. General Patton came and told them, “There’s a prisoner camp up on top of the mount, and I need you to help us go set everybody free and attend to people.” The women thought he was talking about a P.O.W. camp. They hadn’t yet encountered concentration camps. They thought they were going to go set American pilots free. Ironically, they made ham sandwiches. Baskets of ham sandwiches. They had no idea that the Jews were being exterminated. They were driven up the mountain in the morning, and my mother said she had no understanding of what was going on. There was a rail line with an abandoned train. There were piles of clothing and this weird odor they couldn’t figure out. As they walked in, the camp was full of shuffling, almost ghostlike, skeletal people. She saw a tractor pushing chopped down birch trees, the logs white across the ground. She realized those were not tree trunks. That’s where she turned a corner that she could never come back from. So that was our first talk about war. 

KMY: What did her silence teach you about how past generations handle trauma? Is there anything that you learned to do or not do from what she did or did not disclose?

LAU: You couldn’t touch her at night if she was having a rough time. You couldn’t wake her. You absolutely could not lay a hand on her. She was having a nightmare. They don’t share. So many people with veteran grandparents or parents are astonished because they haven’t ever mentioned what they went through. I take them out for carnitas or chilaquiles. That always works. It’s like a truth serum. They’ll start telling me the most haunting things they saw or lived through. 

Some of those stories are in the book. For example, when they’re first making the transatlantic journey and the ship explodes. Irene is watching the men go by, but they’re under orders not to stop. If they stop, the U-boats will sink them, too. They are to accelerate. She watches them vanish into the dark, and they see her and they’re yelling, and she knows they’re going to go die. She’s helpless. That actually happened to someone in our extended family. 

The Donut Dollies. Nobody ever talked about them. They weren’t in any movies; they’re just forgotten. That’s part of the trauma: these women gave everything and were erased.

KMY: In “Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that the way many creative writers and instructors prioritize conflict—wherein the rising and falling of action is oriented around conflict—prioritizes the worst aspects of our culture. Instead, we should build storytelling around seeking and knowing and discovery and meaning making. Even though Good Night, Irene is a wartime novel, it’s not about the conflict. It’s about the ways that these women find meaning despite what they encounter and what it does to them. So it would seem Le Guin got you into shape. I know she was your mentor. What did she teach you?

LAU: I was discovered by Ursula K. Le Guin. She used to call me Luisito, and she published my first story in an anthology. She was Ursula from the first moment… a little pageboy haircut, drinking whiskey. She had a pipe. She opened the door and said, “Luisito. Come in. It’s time for you to become a feminist.” 1977. She stopped me in my tracks: “Quit being an idiotic Southern California male and open up.” While writing the book, I thought, What would Ursula think about this? Am I telling the truth here? I’m very interested in the heroine’s journey rather than the hero’s journey. The manly shit intrudes almost for comedic effect. 

She kicked me around for many years. Very tough, but very loving. I always felt answerable to her. Answerable to my mom. To Miss Jill, who was the model for Dorothy. I finally got to give my mother…to give what may have seemed baffling the meaning and resolution she never got.

KMY: Why do you think your mom and Jill, and the characters they inspired, fell out of correspondence after having such an intense experience of bonding together? 

LAU: PTSD. It’s not rare at all that people traumatized by war and violence cut themselves off. For example, all Mom ever wanted was to come back home. She came home and she could not be with her family anymore. They didn’t believe her about the Holocaust. Very conservative. They said, “You’re dramatizing it. It wasn’t that bad.” Probably big Lindbergh fans, you know, America first folks. Lovely people, but they just didn’t understand. And she felt alienated. If you read about women with shell shock, as they called it back then, they isolated themselves. She could not find a way. 

I go through life thinking I’m a Mexican Faulkner.

We thought the Donut Dollies were all dead. Cindy found a news story called “Miss Jill Goes to War.” From Champaign-Urbana, minutes from our house. We found Jill. They were all dead, except my mom’s best friend. Cindy wrote a letter because I was too shy. Jill called us the next day. 94-year-old woman. None of this Luis stuff. She called me Louis. My mom last saw her in 1954. And we visited with her until she was 102, when she died. 

Jill had a very strong ego. A six-foot-tall woman. She had a picture of my mom on the Riviera, looking like a forties movie star, standing with this dude in black trunks. Leaning on her with a smirk. And I said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Who’s this guy?” Jill leaned over, “Oh. That’s Jake.” And I said, “Jake, who the heck is Jake?” She thought for a second and said, “Louis, it was a war. We all had men.” 

All these revelations through Jill’s lens…I could have written a nonfiction book. I was going to, but I thought it’d be so much richer as fiction. If you notice, my actual mom Phyllis and Jill do drive by once in a while and show up in the background. So much of this story comes from her. She still had the actual map she used on the steering wheel. It’s got all of her notes and scribbles. On her wall was a huge portrait of my mom. She said, “I drove the truck. Your mother brought the joy.” That was the first time I really saw my mom. 

KMY: In The House of Broken Angels, you explored an iteration of an event that you experienced: the funeral and gathering and celebration. Here you have taken up your mother’s experience and her burden of memory. How do you put those things down once you’ve picked them up? Do you ever?

LAU: I only write something if it’s haunting to me. So the house is full of ghosts already. 

Both of my parents had PTSD. My dad, from awful things that happened in the Mexican government and army. My mother from her awful army experiences. My house was not a laugh riot. He ground his teeth so hard through nightmares that they all shattered. It’d be this grinding and grunting from his room and her whimpering and crying and yelling from her room. And me in my bedroom, sitting on the floor in my underpants listening to Leonard Cohen. I started writing stuff in notebooks. 

KMY: Almost the entirety of your creative production has been preoccupied with Latinidad, as well as the proximity, burdens and complicity of being white adjacent. Here we have, for the very first time from you, a novel that centers two white women during a global conflict. This book is still, because it’s made by you, part of the Latinx canon. How does its production complicate what that means? How do you see it within your own creative arc? 

LAU: It’s all been a work of witness, and that’s what interests me. It’s also a work of conjuring. In Good Night, Irene, the Lakota guy is my brother from Pine Ridge Reservation, Duane Brewer. Mr. Walker is Frank Walker, the former poet laureate of Kentucky who started the Affrilachian poetry movement. Zoot, the Chicano zoot suit, is Garcia from my first novel, In Search of Snow. Here he’s the hero. He was an anti-hero in that book, working at a gas station between Tucson and Yuma. I hinted that he’d had a terrible experience at Buchenwald. Finally, I found a way to show what happened to him. 

I only write something if it’s haunting to me.

I go through life thinking I’m a Mexican Faulkner. Everything’s connected. At the beginning of The House of Broken Angels, when Big Angel is in bed looking at family pictures, there’s a picture of Segundo from The Hummingbird’s Daughter. That’s his grandfather. Everybody’s related; nobody knows it but me. 

I was given the gift. I thought it was the curse. Spanish and English with two absolute language fascists who wanted me to be perfect in each one. I didn’t know until later that there was a chess game going between them. Who’s going to win? Is he going to be Luis, or is he going to be Louis? I’m just praying for that day when it’s okay to be you. 

You know you’re representing. My next book is called The Zebras of Tijuana, so I’m not completely turning my back. And I would probably be suspicious of one of the great Chicano writers out there suddenly writing a book about, you know, non-Chicano characters. But it’s my mom, and my interest in bearing witness prevails. She was silenced and forgotten and battered by fate. Just like people in Tijuana. A garbage dump where she was somebody who was white. But she was my mama. You want to set the record straight. That’s more than being a writer. Maybe that’s my calling. 

KMY: The characters in Good Night, Irene are fighting for a vision of America—as a bringer of freedom and moxie—that is out of keeping with our current political climate. That’s no longer the shared vision of America. What would it mean to demand that America can, and should be, what it was once conceived as being? Does literature play a role in that? 

LAU: Just watch me, sister. We must understand that America is whatever we agree upon the myth of America to be. It’s a question of mythos. Of historicity. The dream of America is worth still having. Not the nightmare of America. A lot of what happens in this weird, perverse era is absurd to me. I’m not a big fan of the hate. The people I loved and cherish and worship were invisible. Mexicanos, Chicanos, my mother. I made it my duty to make them visible. I want to make my family your family as best I can. 

7 Arab and Arab Diasporic Novels about Storytellers

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

In The Skin and Its Girl, my writing about Arab identity is driven both by a rich personal and cultural storytelling tradition and by a perhaps-endemic Arab American anxiety about how our stories are told in the West. I inherited, without really knowing I was inheriting, an existential comfort in the storytelling my jiddo saved for the airless time after meals, when the dishes were clean but Jeopardy wasn’t on yet, or the cookout was over but the fire was still hot and no one quite knew what to do before it was time to eat again. His was a style handed down from the old country but honed among his steel-mill crew, careful to note who was a good egg and who was the bad apple, and his stories were capable of unfolding to fill a temporal container of any size. 

Structured by repetition, confidence, and deliberate uncertainty about whether the eventual resolution might ultimately break toward realism, absurdity, or a mere punchline, the stories riveted me. They also influenced the sort of tales we cousins invented for each other, straddling reality and fabulism. As I began to write seriously in the early 2000s, fiction from a literary magical realist vein felt natural. But when I began to seek more writing about my ancestors’ part of the world, I found a lot of it distorted by an Orientalist lens—that colonialist hangover that preserves racial bias in portrayals of SWANA cultures.

The problem has a root in Sir Richard Francis Burton’s (in)famous 1885 translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. No one skewers it better than Diana Abu-Jaber, who writes in Crescent that the project is “his famous, criminal, suggestive, imperial version of Victorian madness dissolved in the sky over the Middle East.” Today, it still inspires writing directed at Western audiences because its stories are so recognizable, and even novels critical of its influence often reckon with it anyway. Yet for as many stories as Sheherazade tells the sultan Shahriyar, there are other ones that preserve, by turns, the humor, adventure, profluence, and moral instruction of a broader oral folktale tradition. Some of these stories appear in lesser-known works; for example, when writing The Skin and Its Girl, I found inspiration in the Palestinian Arab tales recorded in Speak, Bird, Speak Again (Sharif Kanaana and Ibrahim Muhawi, 1989). 

I’m eager to share these seven novels. Familiar figures haunt their edges, but what feels like home to me is the way they engage their audiences, subtly teasing and feinting and coaxing us along until we find ourselves transported to an expanded world. I learned so much from these writers, particularly in how they use degrees of postmodern, self-aware storytelling to counter-colonize the narrative and reclaim cultural agency.

Arabian Nights and Days by Naguib Mahfouz, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies

Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) spent an extraordinarily prolific career in Cairo and is, so far, the only Arab writer to have won a Nobel Prize in Literature. For his deep concern with Egyptian politics and his allegorical writing style, he shares with Salman Rushdie the unlucky distinction of surviving an assassination attempt brought on by extremists’ reaction to his work.

Borrowing from the traditional style of The Arabian Nights, this loose sequel picks up when the sultan Shahriyar chooses to marry Shahrzad following her life-or-death storytelling gambit, which has saved her life and the lives of many others. The sultan now commits himself to a leadership style that uses less rape and murder, but the personal transformation does nothing to change his city’s fundamental corruption, its governors, or the merchants who have profited from a lifetime of favors. Shahrzad says “[o]nly hypocrites are left in the kingdom,” but then genies begin appearing to various characters, coercing morally ambiguous chaos from her husband’s toxic legacy.

It’s one of the novel’s modernist ironies that its most fantastical element—the genies—provokes the novel’s most cutting realist critiques. The premise relies on Mahfouz’s contemporary reader, specifically an Egyptian reader, with whom the experience of living in a corrupt and hypocritical system is intended to resonate. Bound by a firm philosophical thread, its episodic chapters are propelled by the complexity of the wish for a more ethical society. Mahfouz writes in a cool, controlled tone; the original text serves, on one hand, to contain and magnify his critique, and on the other, to slide it behind an engaging screen that renders his protest indirectly, just as Shahrzad’s own storytelling protested the sultan’s cruelty.

The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine

When Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after 25 years to be with his terminally ill father, he reenters a family in which he has long struggled to find his place. Politics, atheism, and sexuality are all taboo, and Osama’s communication with his father has been frosty since immigrating to the United States. This terse situation is a far cry from where it began long ago, with Osama’s gregarious pauper of a grandfather, whose skill as a traditional storyteller (“hakawati”) impressed a local bigwig enough to earn him the official surname al-Kharrat, fibster. Storytelling is in Osama’s name and in his blood, and as the novel weaves in and out of traditional-sounding tales, we follow a dizzy number threads that inter-borrow emotional notes. Osama, a first-person narrator, uses these stories to give his grief, familial love, and outsider identity their place when straightforward speech does not.

Inside its realist, short-timespan framing, The Hakawati is narratively agile, rich, and often hilarious. Incorporating family lore and fabulism, the stories draw on mythology, religious narratives, and characters familiar across the region. We see tales within tales, adventures within adventures, a cyclic storytelling style that also appears in The Arabian Nights. The style compares to the arabesque, whose ornate patterns repeat and occur within other repeating patterns, such as in music; it also harkens to a day when reciting a good yarn might take weeks or months. In my reading of the novel, I felt in the stories’ ever-subdividing complexity Osama’s wish to extend the amount of time he had left with his dying father.

All of Alameddine’s novels draw on his Lebanese American background. Nowhere else, however, does he sublimate reality into fabulism to such a degree, and so sublimely. He demonstrates not just how traditional storytelling can hold contemporary themes, but also how high the stakes are for his character in his father’s last days.

Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber

Written in the pre-9/11 U.S. but published in the years immediately afterward, Crescent pairs a sensuous, realist narrative with “the moralless story of Abdelrahman Salahadin,” a fable that “is deep yet takes no longer to tell than it takes to steep a cup of mint tea,” or so the teller assures us.

In Abu-Jaber’s body of work, food and cheeky father-figures abound. Here, Sirine is a 38-year-old chef who lives in West L.A. with the Iraqi uncle who raised her. Their peace is disturbed when she falls for Hanif, an Iraqi political exile who soon deserts her for a risky return to Baghdad to help his family. The relationship makes Sirine more interested in her “Arab” identity even as the novel criticizes the essential emptiness of such a broad term. It does so by using a second, seemingly independent fable told by Sirine’s uncle. The self-aware tale of Abdelrahman Salahadin draws on the cadence of an oral storytelling tradition, following a mother who sells herself into slavery to Sir Richard Burton find her missing son. The tale meanwhile aims jabs at Burton, Hollywood, and Western racism, landing punches with strategic humor.

The novel was published in a time where anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bias were no less ingrained in Western culture than they are today. Its two storylines twine around those biases, pulling them apart piece by piece from two literary directions. In Sirine’s narrative, the realist storytelling conventions of a Western fictive tradition embody and complicate the day-to-day experience of having an Iraqi immigrant family. Meanwhile, the fable invites us to loosen our grip on that reality just enough to for it to work its magic, upending expectations about Arab femininity, agency, and identity.

Dreams of Maryam Tair: Blue Boots and Orange Blossoms by Mhani Alaoui

Situated with one foot in fable and one in the dark times of the 1981 Casablanca Bread Riots, this debut novel uses its inventive powers as a form of political resistance.

Multiple storylines braid around italicized sections featuring a wizened Sheherazade, who sits outside of time narrating to a young girl. In the main story, we meet Adam and Leila, an unlikely couple: Leila is a daughter of a wealthy and influential Casablanca family, and Adam is a poor scholar. Unable to conceive and unsure what the future holds, they feel the passion in their marriage draining away ever since they’ve returned from London. Casablanca itself struggles under a similar inertia, stuck in an economic depression and “forged in second-hand steel, barely able to resist decay.” The narrative is at its most surprising when the armed authorities who beat, imprison, and murder the city’s inhabitants turn out to be actual winged monsters. And because of them, after Leila’s imprisonment and rape, a daughter, Maryam, is born. Sheherazade foretells that Maryam, who rides a magic bicycle and can commune with the city’s fabulist creatures, will wield a power to change everything.

The outside-of-time narration gives the rest of the story a sense of being fated, almost immobile. Sheherazade’s character is a straightforward borrowing from The Arabian Nights: at last independent of any earthly power, she once again holds many narrative threads in her hands, and she once again uses them to weave a story capable of altering a city’s bloody fate. Alongside Maryam’s puckish character, Sheherazade’s retelling of old myths, such as an alternative Adam-and-Lilith creation story, opens up a space from which the power of the imagination can shift reality for the better.

The Night Counter by Alia Yunis

Taking a lighter tone than many of the books on this list, The Night Counter tells the story of Fatima, a Lebanese grandmother living with her grandson Amir in L.A. a few years after 9/11. At its core, it’s about the evasions that undermine love. A grieving mother, Fatima divorced her husband after sixty-five years of marriage and is now determined to spend the remaining days of her life attending funerals and stubbornly searching for a wife for gay Amir. She’s lodged in the past, waxing poetic about an idyllic village in Lebanon. Nights, Amir hears her telling stories and wonders whether she is losing her sanity—but in fact, only the reader knows that she’s speaking to the apparition of Sheherazade.

This is the novel’s distinctive magical realist conceit: After arriving in L.A., Fatima began seeing Sheherazade in her window each night. The famous storyteller wanted to be a listener, and Fatima obliged, resigning to a belief that after the 1,001 nights are done, she’s fated to die. Yunis shields the narrative from its risks with deadpan humor, and now that only a handful of nights remain, Sheherazade is weary of Fatima’s repetitions, cajoling her to talk about the love she won’t admit to ever having felt. The light touch allows Yunis to probe these more painful spots in the family’s history.

Her humorous tone also allows the novel to juggle some traditional ideas in a contemporary context, such as the novel’s competing views on the role of fate in its characters’ lives—an important philosophical element of The Arabian Nights. More often, however, Sheherazade is (intentionally) cartoonish, such as when she travels by magic carpet to observe Fatima’s many children and grandchildren. But this choice helps Yunis mark a clear path between so many characters, preventing the reader from buckling beneath the effort to keep track of everyone. As a result, the novel can play with the many forms Arab identity takes in the family, pushing back against the monolithic exoticism of the original text.

Pillars of Salt by Fadia Faqir

Faquir is a Jordanian-British writer, and according to her mentor Angela Carter, Pillars of Salt offers a feminist vision of Orientalism. It’s a dark vision, at that: two women are confined to a Jordanian asylum, sharing a room, and they endure the days by telling each other their domestic stories of misogyny and abuse. Maha, a rural Bedouin woman, relates the tale of her husband’s death fighting the British, and her subsequent misfortunes at the hands of a lecherous brother. The other woman is Um Saad, whose more urban life offered her no more protection from violent patriarchy.

While the novel is engrossing both for its depiction of these two women’s lives and for its ability to capture the Arabic idiom in English, its use of a third narrator is what sets it apart as a postmodern critique of a particular kind of narrative. Speaking to an implied group of listeners, this third narrator calls himself Sami al-Adjnabi (“the stranger,” in Arabic) and his chapters are all titled “The Storyteller.” The pairing is intentional, as his voice picks up the bombastic cadences of Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights and other Orientalist texts that were written to “interpret” and exotify Arabic-speaking cultures for Western audiences. This narrator inhabits only the margins of the women’s stories, distorting and misunderstanding them, all the while swaggering and insulting the women as temptresses deserving their punishments.

Faqir writes from a specific resistance to a text she positions as calcified and pandering. Um Saad herself tells Maha the traditional tales are all but useless in their own predicament: “I am not a character in One Thousand and One Nights. … I will never be able to roll into another identity, another body, travel to better times and greener places.” Of all the layers of their entrapment, the Storyteller’s distortion of their experiences seems to be the cruelest. And what makes this vision so dark is that though the novel gives these women limited agency as their own storytellers, they are still confined to a madhouse with an audience of only one.

The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami

Based on a true story, Lalami’s novel is narrated by Mustafa al-Zamori, the first African to explore the New World. Remembered as Esteban the Moor, he was enslaved to a conquistador and thus became one of four survivors of an ill-fated Spanish expedition to Florida.

As the party treks deeper into tribal territories in a fever-search for gold, Mustafa records the men’s abuses and failures alongside his own history. This is done in episodic chapters, each one titled as “the story of” an event. The novel is modeled after classical Arab travelogues, but at times it also takes on the dimensions of a traditional tale, like light catching the cut of a gem. It shines most often where Mustafa relates the rise and fall in his fortunes that led him to sell himself into slavery. As a believing Muslim from the city of Azemmur, he views the episodes of his early life on a moral dimension, whereby fates are written and human follies are punished. (Before his city fell to the Portuguese, he was a merchant who sold slaves.) The traditional stories and proverbs that initially skirt the novel’s margins, however, become central: Mustafa turns to the power of storytelling for agency, wielding it to record a more truthful account of the disastrous colonial expedition and then to trick his enslavers, becoming the clever hero who outsmarts a stronger enemy.

The novel uses a more classic approach than the other books here—Lalami dissolves most of the traditional storytelling style into the main narrative, drawing less attention to it as a self-aware element—but it is a fitting conclusion to this list. I can’t help but think of Sir Richard Burton’s intention that his translation serve as a serious ethnography of Arabic-speaking peoples, and how profoundly he blundered. No book can undo the past, but The Moor’s Account takes special care with Mustafa’s portrayal of Native Americans. It reminds the reader that these tribes were wiped out twice: once by violence and again in American culture by a colonizing story. Like the Apalache women who raise a cry in response to the rapacious soldiers, the novel has “made witnesses of us,” and its counternarrative warns against the violence—and insidiousness—of a single story.

“The Mermaid Has to Die”

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Penelope Schleeman never thought she’d write a bestseller, but she’s trying to make the most of it. In the wake of her debut’s unexpected success, she departs her teaching job for Hollywood in order to adapt American Mermaid for the big screen. But as her co-writers’ suggestions tug and twist her beloved protagonist’s story further away from its original form, certain inexplicable events cause Penelope to wonder whether her creation has somehow taken on a life of her own in an effort to fight back.

As chapters from Penelope’s novel unfurl alongside her adventures in Hollywood, we come to know the eco-warrior mermaid protagonist of American Mermaid as well as the novelist who wrote her. While each character strives to understand their place in a world where they don’t quite feel like they belong—Sylvia, an actual fish out of water and Penelope, still a teacher at heart—both women find connection in unexpected places as they learn how to stay true to who they really are.

From characters who leap off the page—perhaps literally?—to a structure its author credits to her improv background, this debut’s dual narratives defy prediction on every page. The sheer joy that Julia Langbein garners from her work is evident, and as a result American Mermaid reveals itself to be far more than an exercise in entertainment—it’s a portal of discovery for its creator. And what a delight it is as a reader to join her for the ride.

I spoke with Langbein over Zoom about the complex dynamics of Hollywood film adaptation and mermaids. 

Abigail Oswald: So first off, how did this book come to be? Why mermaids?

Julia Langbein: I’ve always been a reader, but really what I always did was just kind of compulsive weird projects—including a lot of comedy stuff—and in 2014-15 I went back to doing improv comedy. At that time I was a postdoc at Oxford in art history, and that was a serious job—I had serious pressures to get my academic book published and so on—but something in me just could not be a serious person in the world, and I started doing improv again. And then I got pregnant, and literally the day I became too pregnant to perform in bars anymore late at night, I sat down and started writing this. Even the structure uses longform improv, you know, the Harold… I feel like what happened was I sat down, and I was just a lonely, pregnant woman, and I started doing improv with myself. 

And a couple of years before I started writing this particular project, I had gotten a bit obsessed with the idea of mermaids. I don’t remember why, but it was just something I talked about with people at cafes. It wasn’t that I was going to the British Library and pulling up everything I could on mermaids; I would just kind of poke people in the arm and say, “Do you guys not think there’s more here?” And everyone would go, “Okay, Julia, like, I guess?” Nobody cared as much as I did. So I guess there was a seed of curiosity about what a character of a mermaid could be. I realized there was an absurd comedy that could come out of it, you know? That it wasn’t just about mythology and sexuality and all these things, but there’s something absurdly comic about mermaids—that they’re half-fish and half-lady, namely. And there’s all kinds of things about the whole mermaid mythology that are strange and where there’s room to find funniness. So there was the desire to start improv-ing by myself, and then I had this story. I didn’t sit down to rewrite The Little Mermaid or something. It just came out of a potential for hilarity.

AO: Early on Penelope admits, “When I heard about the success of the book, I often felt like someone else had written it.” It seems like she frequently feels distanced from her own accomplishments. How does her self-image factor into the book’s events?

JL: Well, it’s funny. I suppose some people might call her a passive heroine, or something like that—that she lets things happen to herself. But one of her great gifts is being very analytical, and she sometimes has a hard time being both an analyst of the world around her and an actor in it. Her imagination is so powerful that she drowns in it all the time. Like when she’s at parties or in social situations, she gets overwhelmed with the density of her own internal analysis of the world and her own imaginative take on things. 

And she thinks of herself as a teacher. She has a very strong identity as a teacher, and it just sucks that she can’t be that. So that’s what casts her adrift in this story, actually. I think she knows who she is, and she gets to be who she is in the end, but she also finds a place for her excessive imagination in the literary project that, to her surprise, ended up taking off. 

But I very much identify with loving teaching and being so at home in the classroom. I wrote this book when I was a postdoc, which is this incredibly sought-after position where you essentially get bought out of teaching. But I actually loved teaching, and I feel like I went into academia to teach. So a longing to be in the classroom fully fed those descriptions of her comfort and her identity as a teacher.

AO: Penelope clearly has a complicated relationship to teaching but ultimately does love it, I think. What kept her coming back? 

JL: You have to be so caring and careful with the people who allow you, as a teacher, to see them learning to think, being bad at things, being new at things. It’s such a psychically vulnerable relationship, teacher-student, and it’s also one that in a university setting, at least, is theoretically sheltered from commercial imperatives. One reason why I loved university life and the classroom is that at its best, it is a place where there is no financial interest, no self-interest. At its most utopian, it’s a place where you are just trying to learn from each other and you’re just trying to get to the meat of ideas. There are very few places in the world where that is purely true. 

And of course, universities—I mean, there’s a whole Russian nesting doll of corruption that this activity takes place within, and financial compromise and elitism and all this stuff. But the classroom at its very heart, ideally. There are conversations, there are ways of being, there are ways of interacting that are shielded from self-marketing, you know, marketing from the logic of capitalism. So to me that is also a really important place for the book, right? Because of this idea of the part of you that can’t be sold. And also for the way people speak—the classroom has this crazy freedom, it’s a space of play. People end up saying insane things in the classroom, and that is an energy I want to hold on to. There are a lot of things about the classroom that I think have gone unexplored. People think about it purely as a pedagogical space. But actually all of the economic and emotional aspects of it are things that just refuse to leave me, even though I’ve left it.

AO: Conflict inevitably arises as Penelope’s fellow screenwriters begin to massage her novel into a more “Hollywood” tale, altering elements of Sylvia’s story that feel crucial and immutable to Penelope or removing them altogether. What do you think are realistic expectations a writer can have for their story once it’s released into the world?

JL: It’s funny you should ask that. A lot of people have been asking me, “Are you gonna freak out if this gets adapted and everyone wants to make it really sexy?” And actually my attitude is, “No, like, remake it with all dinosaurs!” I think the coolest thing about making a book is that there are lots of things about it that I don’t know, and someone else might literally know more than I know, might have a feeling that a minor character has a whole psychic life that I’m unaware of or whatever. So I actually think the process of adaptation has so much exciting potential and losing control is fun; I like losing control. (Watch me regret saying that.)

Mermaids are a very puzzling kind of seducer, right? They’re seductive and yet they are also, somehow not fuckable? Like, they are fish.

But I’m very careful in the book to not make Randy and Murphy monsters. Like, I point out repeatedly that what they do is very difficult. The art of the page and the art of the screen, things may get mangled in transition… but they’re not monsters. But there’s something that I do care about in the violation of the book in its transition to a movie, which is the kind of inevitability of nuance getting sucked out of it, and the inevitable [loss] of interiority. Like, the things that matter to me about being an embodied person in the world might be impossible to represent cinematically, or at least in the format of this kind of broadly popular cinema that the book deals with. 

But there’s nothing about this book that’s, like, a “Hollywood is dumb” screed, right? Nothing at all. It’s not an anti-Hollywood book; it’s a satire. It’s finding the funny in the gaps between the see-able and the sayable, or the lived embodiment and the way it’s represented. So it was more like finding a potential for hilarity and comic structure in a novel than it was having some powerful critique of Hollywood. What I want to do is deeper than a critique of Hollywood. It’s actually really easy to critique Hollywood.

AO: I thought it was fascinating that within your book, we get scenes from a novelist’s life juxtaposed with excerpts from the book she writes—almost as if American Mermaid is inviting us to make connections between the two stories. It feels on some level that when the book presents Sylvia and Penelope’s stories side-by-side, we are being given the option to view the narrative through an autobiographical lens. There are certainly parallels to be drawn between Penelope and her protagonist, but at the same time, I thought about how often writers—particularly women—are asked whether their work is autobiographical. Was the concept of the “autobiographical novel” something you contemplated while working on this book?

JL: Well, you’re never told why Penelope writes about mermaids, are you? There’s no part of her backstory or anything that has anything to do with mermaids. In a way, I think it becomes more autobiographical after she writes it. In a sense, what she imagines springs her reality forward into a certain direction that then resembles the fiction, and that is a much more interesting phenomenon to me—particularly as a way to structure a story—than to think about women’s fiction as autobiographical. How is it that the things we imagine—like, speculation or imagination—can literally loose forces that change the world, create chaos, create situations that upend power structures? 

Actually, in a weird way that happened to me, because I wrote a book about a person who writes a book, and then my book got published. I speculated about a teacher writing a book, and then I was a teacher who ended up writing a book… More interesting to me than the idea of autofiction is the idea of how what you invent is smarter than you know. That if you let yourself think really deeply and imagine things really freely, you might create a new reality. That’s an idea that’s knocked around all of the critical theory around speculative fiction and stuff; I’m not coming up with this for the first time. But for me, that kind of energy is very present in this book.

AO: There’s this question that Sylvia’s narrative returns to that she might be “immune” to love; this perceived absence often makes her feel alienated from the rest of the world. Can you speak more to how you thought about love and desire while writing this novel?

JL: I didn’t go into this novel knowing that Penelope would have this desire to be kind of without desire or, as I think she says, to live without the humiliations of desire. That she’s scared of the part of herself that is sexual or gendered. But I think it came out of an awareness that something had attracted her to the mermaid story, first of all. And mermaids are a very puzzling kind of seducer, right? They’re seductive and yet they are also, somehow—as the novel makes great comedy out of—not fuckable? Like, they are fish. They are tuna from the waist down! So between those poles of the mermaid as this incredibly seductive, sexy, beautiful idea—even Disney’s The Little Mermaid, right, like, the curves on her—and these other potentials in the mermaid to resist sexuality, and to challenge these kinds of sexual norms, there was a lot of room to play. And Penelope’s character just grew into that space. 

But I think desire is so important and so powerful. I don’t want to give any spoilers, but there are many hints that Penelope is going to continue to invest in and commit to and explore her sexuality, but on her terms, and always with a kind of awareness of the way she’s being seen, or that desire is going to motivate her in cheap or wrong or bad or dishonest ways. I think at one point I talk about, like, sexuality is transactional, and I think this book has a real care for the spaces where we can be ourselves without selling ourselves, and I think that sex and desire are moments where they are transactional, and they can be transactional in a safe and loving way, or they can be transactional in ways that are bad and scary. These questions about how to feel desire or how to live out desire and engage with other people, how do you do it without being transactional?