Lydia Millet on the Value of Neighbors in an Alienated Society

Posted on by Jo Lou

Lydia Millet has a well-earned reputation as a climate novelist, which means the weather is in her books. Not just the weather; there are floods and hurricanes, she includes the names of birds and trees and cactuses, she observes tidal patterns and migrations. She includes these things because this is the world we live in, whether you pay attention to it or not. In her previous novel, A Children’s Bible, which earned her a National Book Award nomination, a 100-year storm knocks out power and access to a coastal town where old college friends are vacationing with their families. The vibes are hilarious and apocalyptic. In her first short story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys, which was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, animals are the protagonists of poignant satire. The natural world is in everything she writes, and her range is enormous. 

Dinosaurs paints with more muted colors—a desert at dusk. A wealthy, adult orphan named Gil walks from Manhattan to his new home in Phoenix, Arizona, which he purchased sight unseen. He arrives as the book begins, sparing the reader miles of glass-strewn highways and bone-rattling semi trucks. The inheritance he received from his parents means he doesn’t have to work. He donates generously and volunteers at a women’s shelter. He watches the birds in his yard, learns about the desert flora. He watches his neighbors, and learns about them too. But not in a creepy way—Gil is an unassumingly great guy. He is humble and reflective; he is generous, not just with his money but also with his attention. He listens. He does what is needed. 

Dinosaurs is a book about doing good in your own backyard, literally and figuratively. It is about being a good neighbor, about making small differences where you can. We need a writer with Lydia Millet’s prowess to elevate these seemingly small questions, and to embolden the rest of us, because really, wanting to make a difference, and wanting to connect, are actually some of the most vulnerable desires to which a person can admit.

Halimah Marcus: Gil has a profile that could invite contempt, particularly in the context of contemporary identity politics, internet discourse, and debate about cancel culture. He’s white, he’s straight, and he’s extremely wealthy. But there are also these countervailing factors: he’s an orphan; he volunteers at a women’s shelter. He gives large sums of money away. What did you want to explore with a character like this? 

Lydia Millet: If readers are interested in seeing white privileged males vilified, they can always look to my previous 12 books. So, it’s not as though I don’t have a track record of critiquing those particular demographics. But, honestly, I didn’t really approach this in those terms. I was just writing a character I wanted to write, even though that’s a boring answer. I was writing from voice and sentence and character, like I always do. And that’s where I ended up. 

I was aware that the book, which is a sort of modest and domestic story, had what could be construed as an unfortunate demographic. But honestly, I was just writing about this particular man, whom I saw not really in terms of his identity characteristics, but in terms of his pathos and his solitude, which can befall anyone. I had no political agenda, of course, with this novel. I mean, that’s not true. It’s not an “of course.” I had no political agenda regarding the construction of this protagonist in terms of his identity features. I was more interested in the ideas and his internal conversation about social responsibility, which has to do with his demographic. He is acutely aware of his privilege and has a tormented relationship with it. 

I wanted to look through the prism of this person, that I made up, who was benign, really, in all these different ways. I wanted to look at a problem I think most people have, whether privileged or not privileged, male or not male, white or not white, which is just how terribly difficult it is these days to be confronted with the vast world of information, and the perceived paralysis of personal and individual agency. And I chose this lonely person, this lonely character, to do it with. 

HM: Gil tries to do good, and he’s sometimes successful. Other time’s he’s stymied; he’s calling these places to volunteer, and people won’t call him back. He eventually volunteers for the women’s shelter, and that is successful for a time. But then they end their “friendly man” program and no longer allow men to volunteer at the shelter. But putting gender aside, and thinking more broadly, is there a connection between this kind of good hearted ineffectualness and liberalism? 

LM: I like your question very much. It’s very witty. Yes, is the short answer, but it depends what you mean by liberalism. I don’t know whether it’s more correlated to liberalism or progressivism or whatever you’d call the activist left. I do think that what the ineffectual attempt to be part of society refers to is just the larger problem of simply not knowing what to do. What to do in the world, what to do in the face of this imminent chaos that that sort of seems to multiply day by day. It’s more about the existential problems that many people now are grappling with, where they have a universe of data and not many roads to dissent or resistance that are perceptible. The way that we often are asked to explore dissent or resistance is literally through clicking buttons on our computers or by sending emails. It’s the armchair activist paradigm, where we are told that this is dissent or resistance. 

HM: The place where Gil does have actually a real impact is in his own very narrowly defined community within his neighborhood, particularly with a neighbor kid who is having a bad time at home, and Gil tries to intervene. The ways in which he’s effectual in his small circles is very touching. It’s a counterbalance, but what does that really mean in the grand scheme of things? 

LM: Our tragedy is a tragedy of scale, or of cognitive capacity, maybe having to do with things like the Dunbar number. We live in these communities of millions and billions and we really don’t have the cognitive machinery or equipment to achieve a relationship with somebody, or to support all the people that we are now comprised of. We are still most effective and most real and most devoted when we have faces to look at—even the faces of animals. Individuals on a personal level in small transactions and relationships; that is where we operate most authentically. Gil is no different. That is what we can do organically, in our homes and in our neighborhoods. That’s where it feels real. We obviously need to vote for politicians who do the right things on a macro level and have long term plans, rather than short term profiteering plans. That’s the most crucial thing we can do. But maybe the next scale where we’re really effective is among our houses, and maybe the in-between is the really difficult terrain to navigate, between the far distant and the close up—the middle distance.

HM: Gil inherits all this money, and when he’s still pretty young, he decides he wants to give it all away. His financial adviser tells him he’ll be able to give away much more over time if he invests it, and explains that this wasn’t wealth hoarding, but “philanthropic wealth management.” He’s so excited to give up all his money, and he talks about how it makes him feel free, the prospect of it. If you’re rich and give away all your money, that’s the pure thing, but he’s not allowed to make this big grand charitable gesture. Also, his manager’s correct. That kind of money appreciates so much over time. So then, Gil’s left with this moral question: is having wealth evil to begin with or can people manage it well? Would you have wanted him to be able to have given away all his money? Is that the thing that would have freed him? 

The way that we often are asked to explore dissent or resistance is literally through clicking buttons on our computers or by sending emails. It’s the armchair activist paradigm.

LM: Yes, it probably would have liberated him. I’ve known some wealthy people and they are rendered sort of passive by inherited wealth. I think it’s psychologically healthier for people to just be upper middle class than to be filthy rich, someone who is secure and doesn’t have to worry constantly about money, but also has to forge a living and have agency on their own, have some sort of dominion over themselves. That person generally that has better ego strength than super rich folks. I think worrying that all your relationships are just determined by money, for those super wealthy folks—it’s not nothing. It’s nontrivial to think that maybe your relationships have nothing to do with you as an individual, or have little to do with you as an individual. Gil obviously was deeply harmed by that in his sort of central failed relationship. Seen through certain lenses, it’s clearly more rational to retain wealth and dispense it, given the system that we have. So it’s not possible to ever say he made the wrong choice. He might have actually made the right choice for the beneficiaries of his largesse, but the wrong choice for himself, as a young guy in his twenties with ideals. 

HM: Before the book begins, Gill walks from New York City to Phoenix, Arizona. I’m so curious why you had that take place before the book starts. 

LM: It was kind of vaguely based on my boyfriend’s walk that he did. The rest of the book is not based on him, but before he moved to the desert to live with me, he actually walked the whole Appalachian Trail. It also sort of inspired a few passages in A Children’s Bible, with the trail angels. And it inspired Gil’s walk across the country. But I thought it would be quite boring to embed it in greater detail unless it became a book about the journey. And so it just became a journey referred to in the book. The thing that is really noteworthy about those long walks is their tedium and the internal meditation, if you choose to meditate. I had never undertaken such a walk and I do not wish to undertake such a walk, but I was able to fairly closely observe [my boyfriend] Aaron’s walk, and I was interested in thinking how such a walk would be different if it wasn’t on the trail. 

Walking is its own sort of deliberate act and it has its own deliberate rhythm and reality. The way we travel now is so divorced from reality. The reality of human physicality. When we go in cars or planes or whatever, it’s so divorced from our real selves and the history and evolution of our bodies. All of these things are interesting and worthy of scrutiny in their own ways. You live really distinctly plunged into time, when you walk. That relationship to time is important and does important things that I don’t fully understand for the way we feel and think. 

HM: At the center of this book is Gil’s relationship with his neighbors: Ardis, her husband, Ted, and their kids, Clem and Tom. He becomes involved in their family unit in a way that seems very organic. I found it quite touching, but it also struck me as unusual. Even the idea that a single middle-aged man might provide child care for someone outside of his family, or that you would ask your neighbor to pick your kid up from karate when there wasn’t an emergency, was kind of novel to me. I think that’s a great example of the possibilities of community. What about these characters allows them to slot into these routines? Do they represent something idealistic or something that you observe in your own communities? 

LM: I do not observe it in my personal community here outside Tucson, Arizona. But that may have more to do with me and my isolation and forms of introversion than with my neighbors. Because when my mother lived on the same street, she knew everyone. And on the street where she lives now, which is a 10-minute drive away, she still knows everyone. She goes to their houses and they come to hers and they just know each other. They socialize and do things for each other. Neighbors of hers I never even met got groceries for her during the early lockdown for months. There are people who respond to neighborhoods that way. I’m not one of them myself. But it is ideal. I wanted to have this really strong character artist enveloped Gil, like instantly, in this permission to be familiar. I was interested in how that can happen, that you become enveloped by people in this natural way. 

The older I get, the more leery I get about happiness and the idea of happiness, the more it worries me as a sort of cultural institution.

I’ve had times in my life—mostly when I was younger, in college and after college—where I was instantly subsumed into a community, and I don’t know whether I grew out of being open to that kind of subsumption. I don’t know if I would be capable of it again in; under duress I would think probably so. 

You sort of make certain choices about how public or private to be with your time, and you make different choices at different times in your life. I probably became more selfish with my time since I had children, because you have to sequester yourself once you have children to be able to do the amount of work that you could do without sequestering yourself before you had children. It’s a choice. 

I wanted to have this magic of this family happen to him. And it’s clearly idealized in that way, as you say, but I also do think it happens—just not to me. The characters in this book, they mesh in this extraordinary way, these next-door neighbors. That’s just the great stroke of good luck you have when you meet a friend. 

HM: The trajectory of this story is Gil finding community, finding contentment, finding purpose, finding relationships. And the final scene, when he’s reflecting on all of that, I felt good for him. I felt he’s going to be okay. Is that the trajectory of the narrative, towards finding happiness? 

LM: The older I get, the more leery I get about happiness and the idea of happiness, the more it worries me as a sort of cultural institution. I think it’s just a move toward company. It’s just having company, having beloved company as you go forward in your life, someone that you can see and who can see you, who can witness your existence even though it’s fleeting, and whose existence you can witness also. 

Tarot Prompts for Writers

Posted on by Wynter Miller

When I left my career in publishing four years ago to take a job that allowed me to focus more on my writing, I found myself in a very precarious and emotionally fraught moment in life. I hadn’t written a word in nearly two years, I was feeling beaten down by the industry and capitalism and my finances (or lack thereof), and I was incredibly unsure of whether or not I was out of my mind for leaving the career I was just beginning to build for an even less lucrative and more precarious writing life that would maybe never pan out. As luck would have it, it was around this time that Alexander Chee published his book of essays, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, which turned out to be exactly the book I needed. Chee’s words helped me through the free fall I was in, having taken a leap of faith in myself and feeling as yet unsure whether or not I would land with my feet on the ground.

This is all to say that I was impressionable and in need of guidance, and I found that guidance in Chee’s writing. So when I read his essay “The Querent,” I became obsessed with the idea of doing tarot myself. A friend who knew my interest decided to buy me a deck, and I started reading for myself, trying to make sense of this moment in my life. For the record, Chee very much advises against this very thing in his essay, but having found my unwitting mentor, I was overconfident in my ability to do it “right,” feeling I had learned all I needed to know from reading about Chee’s mistakes (I’m not sure whether I succeeded in this at the time, but I will say that Chee’s words did remain a guiding principle as I practiced, and that my relationship with tarot ultimately grew into a very healthy one).

I taught myself tarot relatively quickly and with a lot of enjoyment, and inspired by a brief section of the essay that mentioned a friend of Chee’s, Rachel Pollack, who utilized tarot as writing inspiration, I began to pull cards for writing prompts. I was working on a novel at the time, and occasionally, when I was stuck, I would pull spreads for my characters to help me gain a deeper understanding of them, allowing the cards to help me see blind spots I may have been missing. I find these spreads a helpful and fun way to engage more intimately with my writing practice and my characters. They help me get out of my head a little, and see my work from a birds-eye view.

Below, I’ve pulled four spreads that you can use as prompts in your own practice. These prompts are meant to be the building blocks for your story—they may give you an idea of a protagonist or spell out a central conflict. You’re welcome to use them exactly as pulled or, if you happen to read tarot yourself (or decide that you’d like to start!), you can use these spreads and pull your own cards to fill in the prompt yourself. You can also bounce off these to create your own spreads-as-prompts—tarot inspiration doesn’t have to be rigid! If you’re working on a novel, you may want to use more in-depth spreads, like the classic Celtic cross, to help you get to know characters whose personalities and motives are less clear than your protagonist. I recommend playing around and seeing what works for you. In the meantime, here are a few prompts to get you started.

Prompt 1: Character

1: Who They Are Right Now; 2: How They Outwardly Present to Others; 3: How They Feel Inside

This spread is meant to give us a sense of a main character for a story. It tells us a bit about who this character is, what they want, and where they’re headed. Looking at this spread, the first thing I notice is that we’re looking at a character who is dealing with an internal, emotional struggle—likely a struggle with their mental health. Currently, they’re coming to the end of a difficult period. Things have been rough for a while, but they’re starting to feel their way out of it.  They’re planning to spend some time with their closest friends (maybe a little friend vacation?) to help them get over the hump, which is something they’re looking forward to as a light at the end of the tunnel. However, they’re not quite over their struggle yet. While on the outside, they’re presenting as purely happy to spend time with their friends and acting as though they’re already over their pain, inside, they’re still deeply struggling with feelings of depression and doubt. Whatever happened that put them in this negative mental space is still greatly impacting them, even if they’re pretending it’s not.

Prompt 2: Conflict

1: What your character wants; 2: What’s getting in the way; 3 – 5: Contributing factors that exacerbate the issue

This spread is meant to tell you a bit about the central conflict of the story—what your protagonist wants, and what is getting in their way. For this prompt, your character is seeking change. They’re hoping that fate is going to step in and change their fortune for the better, and may even be feeling like they are karmically deserving of it. Or—though I certainly wouldn’t read it this way if I were reading for a person, it’s a fun way to interpret the prompt based on the other cards I’m seeing—they may be praying on the downfall of someone who wronged them, hoping that karma will step in and do its thing. This is a character who has overcome great difficulties and is just beginning to flourish. Things are finally starting to go their way, but that success is also getting in the way of the change they genuinely want. They’re experiencing the positivity of having overcome a bad situation, but they still aren’t exactly where they want to be. It may be their success is also linked to the success of the person they are hoping will be karmically punished—the character’s own success is standing in the way of their enemy getting their just desserts. This conflict is leaving them feeling trapped. They want to make a move that will push along the change they’re hoping for (perhaps they’re plotting ways to hasten their enemy’s downfall), but the circumstances, and their own internal struggle surrounding it, are making it impossible to do so. It also doesn’t help things that this character is extremely sensitive and conflict-avoidant in nature. They spend so much time daydreaming with their head in the clouds, feeling deeply hopeful (usually a good thing, but in this case, to their detriment) that fate is on their side and will take care of things, that they aren’t taking initiative or agency over their own life. Will they be able to get out of their own head enough to make the change they’re hoping for? And if they do, will that change even be for the better?

Prompt 3: Relationship

1: How character A sees character B; 2: How character B sees character A; 3: Character A’s feelings; 4: Character B’s feelings; 5: What connects them

For this prompt, we’re looking at a story that is centered on two characters and examining their conflict and connection with one another. This could be any sort of relationship—romantic, platonic, familial, coworkers, enemies, etc. In this reading, I’m seeing two characters who are causing each other no small amount of pain. Our first character (we’ll call them A) and our second character (who we’ll call B), are connected by having started a journey together. Maybe they were both newbies in their career at the same time, or they were best friends at a turning point in their lives (like freshman year of college or right after graduation), or maybe they were each other’s first loves. Either way, they began something together that made them feel linked—they were both just starting off, fresh-faced and clueless, and are bonded by having gone through and grown out of that phase of life together. A sees B as someone who is quite successful, with a good job and financial stability, but believes it’s come at a cost. B, in A’s mind, is materialistic, someone who is so focused on money and status that their success has come at the cost of genuine happiness or perhaps even meaningful relationships. A is having a hard time trusting B—they see B as someone who has hurt them before and will likely hurt them again. In spite of this, B is a person A keeps returning to over and over, even though A knows that whenever they bring B back into their lives, A winds up getting hurt. B, on the other hand, sees A as someone who is emotionally stuck, by A’s own doing. B believes that A isn’t honest with themselves and that A refuses to see the patterns that are keeping them stuck. B really worries about A and feels a sense of loss whenever they think about A. B likely even sees A as someone who stands in the way of B’s professional and financial success, and worries about losing their professional standing if they get too involved with A. B feels they can’t continue having a relationship with A, even though it hurts B greatly to think about letting go.

Prompt 4: Story Arc

1: Beginning—3 of Wands; 2: Middle—2 of Pentacles; 3: End—7 of Pentacles

This spread is the simplest of the bunch—just a classic story arc! We’re looking at themes for the beginning, middle, and end of your story. For this pull, at the beginning of the story, your character is about to take agency over something they’ve been working toward. This seems to be a creative project that also, ultimately, becomes their professional life as well. They’re in a good place and have had a lot of help from others to get where they are, but they’re ready to begin striking out on their own and taking things to the next level. They’re aware it will be difficult, but they’re up for the challenge. By the middle, they’re experiencing success, but are feeling a bit overwhelmed by the workload. They’re struggling to find balance between their professional goals and personal life. By the end of this story, they’re feeling a bit lost. Though they’ve experienced professional success, it isn’t exactly what they thought success would look like. They’re feeling as though things didn’t quite turn out the way they’d anticipated, or that they aren’t where they expected themselves to be.

Inside the Process of Translating Korean Literature

Posted on by Jo Lou

Translated Korean literature in the English-speaking world has seen a remarkable growth in the past couple of years, the rise of which has been propelled by the Smoking Tigers, a small but mighty cohort of nine literary translators working from Korean to English. Collectively, they have translated a diverse range of books: a mind-boggling sci-fi story collection, a critically-acclaimed, queer, coming-of-age novel, an ever so timely memoir about mental health, and a tender YA novel lauded by BTS’s RM himself. While they are not the first or the only translators bringing Korean stories to an English-reading audience, the Smoking Tigers have been critical in recent years in championing contemporary and emerging Korean voices that provide a peek into Korean life and push our understanding of literature beyond Western conventions.

The translators featured in this article are three Smoking Tigers members who have seen tremendous success internationally. Anton Hur was longlisted not once but twice for the 2022 International Booker Prize for his translations of Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny and Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City. Sandy Joosun Lee’s translation of Won-pyung Sohn’s Almond made best-of lists at publications like Entertainment Weekly and Salon. On top of receiving stellar reviews for her translation of Choi Eunyoung’s Shoko’s Smile, Sung Ryu also had three books of translations published within a single year in 2021.

To commemorate Korea’s Hangul Day a.k.a. Korean Alphabet Day on October 9, I video called with Hur, Lee, and Ryu to discuss their careers as literary translators, the art of translating the Korean language, and the current landscape of Korean literature.

Anton Hur: I’m one of the few full-time Korean to English literary translators in the world. I’m not diaspora myself and I have full Korean citizenship, but I had to interpret for my parents who were not living in Korea. We moved a lot so half of my schooling was overseas, hence a perfect bilingual education. When you’re bilingual in Korea, you get all these opportunities to make a little pocket money through translating and interpreting. After college, I started to build up my client list and take the profession seriously. After ten years of freelance translating and interpreting, I eventually got the chance to audition to become Kyung-sook Shin’s new translator and I got the part. I proposed The Court Dancer to her agent and that became my first book. For a while, I also had a job in tech and was translating two books on the weekends. But I left the company when I won a PEN grant to work on a third book and realized I couldn’t translate three books on the weekends. I’ve been thinking in terms of runway for six years now in terms of when I might have to go find another job. My current runway extends to next June.

Brandon J. Choi: I recently finished your translation of Baek Sehee’s I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki. Since you have translated across multiple genres and forms, was translating this memoir different in any way?

AH: I don’t think so. People always ask me how I choose the books I work on. The most important thing is the language. They have to be good writers. Translating good writing is easy. I have never talked to Baek Sehee but while I’m sure it was a very harrowing book to write, it was a very smooth book to translate because she is an excellent writer. Her honesty just vibrates off the page. I thought that as long as I could convey her feelings and insights as accurately as possible, then people would get the book.

BJC: I didn’t realize you had never met her. Do translators often work closely with their authors?

AH: For me, the norm is to not really know my authors. I get such a visceral feeling when I read their books. I understand what they’re saying and I don’t need the author to explain anything to me. A part of me doesn’t want to bother the author because if I were being asked questions about my work after I finished it, I would think, why is this not clear to you? For example, Kyung-sook Shin is a god of Korean literature. She doesn’t need to explain herself. Everything is clear to me because I’ve been reading her for forever. There are writers I am close to like Bora. We talk all the time but we never talk about work. We’re usually exchanging memes on our email thread. I did drag Bora out to a lot of press events though. We called it the Bora World Tour.

BJC: I want to go back to what you said about good writing. What does good writing mean to you?

AH: There’s a big oral element for me. I have to hear it. Kyung-sook Shin, for example, in Korean, does not use fancy words or complicated sentence structures. In Violets, there is a moment where the third person omniscient becomes the first person omniscient and it’s really noticeable because I hadn’t seen that in any of her other literature. Her prose in Korean has a rhythm to it that rocks you into your deep emotions. It’s very difficult to decode but it’s very clear that she is writing to me in absolute silence. I think it’s something ineffable and primordial like that.

BJC: You’re also a writer yourself. Has that changed your perception of “good writing”?

AH: I translated Lee Seong-bok’s Indeterminate Inflorescence, a collection of aphorisms broken down from his lectures, and that book was life changing for me. He talks about how you think you’re writing with your brain but you’re not. Your hands or your pen are doing the writing so you have to let your pen write and not think about it. Each word has another word coming out after and you can sense the shape of that word. You have to write down the sounds no matter how absurd they are. Eventually, the words keep coming out and you have a book. I tried it out and it worked. I wrote a book and it’s now being shopped around by my agent.

BJC: That’s incredibly poetic. I love that.

There’s a lot of racism in the industry because they expect an English translator to be white and preferably a man.

AH: For me, writing is really about the sensitivity to yourself. If you are sensitive, you can hear the words that are trying to come out of your subconscious. I always knew my subconscious was how I translated because I can’t explain how I came to translate one sentence into another. It surfaces from the depths. The machine is down there and it’s like a black box that I can’t figure out.

BJC: Since your 2022 Booker nominations for Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny and Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City, have you noticed any changes in the Korean literary scene?

AH: I think there’s more respect for genre literature after Cursed Bunny. Sang Young Park has always been award winning so I’m not sure how much the nomination affected him. But I will tell anyone reading this that he loves getting messages from around the world from readers, especially queer readers, who are moved by Love in the Big City.

BJC: What has changed for you?

AH: So why I agree to interviews, especially in Korea, is because I’m so tired of going to rights holders and them not giving me the rights to a book. There’s a lot of racism in the industry because they expect an English translator to be white and preferably a man. If you look at some of my bios, I always mention that I was born in Sweden first. I’m trying to play on people’s racism. I guess it’s bad because it perpetuates it to some degree but you have to understand, especially in the beginning of my career, it was very difficult to have people take me seriously. This has gotten a bit better now that I can say that I’m a Booker nominee.

BJC: That’s infuriating. I actually appreciate reading Korean books translated by Korean artists.

AH: I’m very grateful for Korean American readers because they’ve been hugely instrumental and supportive. Korean American writers like Alexander Chee and R.O. Kwon are so selfless. So many Asian Americans have come to bat for Korean literature in translation. 

Basically, we’re a website and a bunch of friends who occasionally workshop together. People think we’re like the Avengers of Korean translation but it’s not as huge of a deal as they make it.

BJC: Along those lines of community, can you tell me about the Smoking Tigers?

AH: The Smoking Tigers became a thing at the British Centre for Literary Translation in 2017. The Starling Bureau, which is another translator collective, came and gave a talk. We thought we were also like a team so why not make it formal? Because I’m a web developer, I put together the site. Basically, we’re a website and a bunch of friends who occasionally workshop together. People think we’re like the Avengers of Korean translation but it’s not as huge of a deal as they make it. I don’t want people to think of it as a gated community because it really isn’t.

BJC: If someone is just starting out reading translated Korean literature, what would you recommend?

AH: The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness by Kyung-sook Shin, translated by Ha-yun Jung. That book is the most important work of postwar literature in Korea. It also tells you how to write. It’s a very important book on every level.

BJC: Who is a translator you admire and would like to shout out?

AH: So many. I’ll say Mui Poopoksakul, who is a Thai translator. There was no full length Thai translation published in the U.K. or the U.S. until she came along and basically became Thai literature in translation. My husband, who is Thai American, and I are huge fans and are very grateful to her. I admire her because she operates like a literary translator in the year of 2022. It’s not just translating. We have to be responsible for the discourse that surrounds that translation. She does all of that without something like the Smoking Tigers to have her back.

BJC: The American versions of I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki and Cursed Bunny come out in November and December respectively. Did I miss anything?

AH: Kyung-sook Shin’s I Went to See My Father comes out next April. Djuna’s Counterweight is coming out in July. Lee Seong-bok’s Indeterminate Inflorescence is coming out in September.

Sandy Joosun Lee: Being a translator is actually my only job. I started my career as an in-house corporate translator and interpreter. It was for a startup animation studio called Studio Mir in Korea that produced some of the hit animated series in the States. I got to translate a lot of fun, exciting animation scripts and interpret for artists and directors. I still work at that studio and this year will mark my 10th anniversary. I find it extremely lucky to work in an environment that gives me a sense of mutual growth. The company took a chance on me and I guess I took a chance on the company.

Brandon J. Choi: How did you end up working on Almond?

SJL:  A few years into my job, I started having this thirst to hone my skills as a translator and writer. The studio was much smaller back then so I had no translating mentors to look up to or colleagues to share this thirst with. I started taking translation courses at LTI Korea. I was in a workshop course where I had to choose works that I would translate. Almond happened to be my very first work that I chose and it started as an assignment at LTI. I got a lot of painfully helpful feedback from the professor, Sora Kim-Russell, who is also an esteemed literary translator, and my colleagues in the course.

BJC: What drew you to the book?

SJL: I picked up this book and it was love at first sight. It was the story that drew me in first. Looking back, I realize I was drawn to the character because he reminded me of my brother, who has autism. The connection was obvious to everyone who knows me, but interestingly, it hadn’t dawned on me until recently. I realized that translating Almond was a personal and therapeutic process for me and allowed me to tap into my brother’s world. It gave me such comfort as someone who has a family member with a neurological condition.

BJC: Can you talk about how closely you worked with the author?

SJL: The author pretty much let me translate the whole thing until the last draft. We didn’t meet up and only communicated virtually. She was very thorough and gave feedback line by line and even suggested better translations. Her feedback was very helpful in honing the tone of Almond but, for the most part, she left me to finish the translated version.

BJC: The tone and prose is so distinct. While reading it, I was trying to translate some lines myself to the original Korean. In the translator’s note, you discussed your experience translating Yunjae and Gon, the two central characters. Can you elaborate on that? What was it like inhabiting the voices of such young characters?

I realized that translating Almond was a personal and therapeutic process for me and allowed me to tap into my [autistic] brother’s world.

SJL: I have a thing for YA novels. I just gravitate towards them. I think I have a young, nervous tone that I find to be compatible with those books. The tone and prose of Almond was definitely what drew me to it. I found compatibility partially due to my experience with my brother’s condition. I experienced for myself that what is left unsaid can be powerful so it was natural for me to pick up the tone of the Yunjae.

BJC: Both characters change so much throughout the novel. I think that type of development is also the beauty of the YA novel. Were there specific parts of the characters that you found frustrating?

SJL: Gon was a hard one. I don’t cuss that much and I’m not a very emotional person myself so it was very difficult for me. I actually got a lot of feedback from a friend who is an expert in swear words, which was helpful. He helped me find the right cuss words for each and every moment of Gon. I was also very mindful of Yunjae’s outbursts that I didn’t want to drop. It’s something I got a lot of feedback on while communicating with the author.

BJC: Since you translate for your day job too, are there particular aspects of the Korean language that you find unique and especially expressive? Or any specific difficulties you have had while translating Korean?

SJL: This is a hard question. If I had to choose one thing that I find unique about the Korean language as opposed to the English language is that I can drop the subject of a sentence and it still works grammatically. The pronouns can be omitted and therefore the sentence can be gender free. I find this particularly fascinating and very timely. I remember when I translated Almond and some of the sentences had no specific gender pronouns associated with the subjects. I was unknowingly stereotyping certain types of professions to be either feminine or masculine and used incorrect pronouns. When the author came back to me after reading my draft and corrected the pronouns, I was embarrassed of my stupidity and unprofessionalism. I guess that’s the beauty and frustration for me.

I want to borrow what Morgan Giles, the translator of Tokyo Ueno Station, said in an interview once. She said that nothing is untranslatable. It’s just that we haven’t been imaginative enough. So if there is any frustration I run into, I tell myself to be more imaginative to pull it all together.

BJC: What are you working on now?

I was annoyingly stereotyping certain types of professions to be either feminine or masculine and used incorrect pronouns.

SJL: I just finished translating the manuscript for a YA novel called Dallergut Dream Department Store by Lee Mi-ye. It’s a fantasy story about a magical store where you can buy all kinds of dreams while you sleep. It’s such a fun and heartwarming story for both kids and adults. I’m hoping that will be my next publication. I also started going back to write my own story but it’s still in progress. I have a very unique family and background that I want to delve deep into. Of course, my brother will be involved and hopefully I can finish it before I turn 70.

BJC: Can you tell me about your experiences as a member of the Smoking Tigers?

SJL: I cannot talk about Almond without talking about the Smoking Tigers. We are a collective of active, successful Korean to English translators. They are valuable readers who helped me shape the tone of Almond and some of them have become my closest friends. I am proud to say that they are the source of inspiration and pride. I couldn’t be happier to grow with them and to celebrate their achievements as my own.

BJC: If someone is just starting out reading translated Korean literature, what would you recommend?

SJL: I would obviously say to start with Almond. Not because BTS read it but because it’s an easy read to start with. It will also leave you with some poignant reflection on complex ideas like emotion or lack thereof as well as trauma and life.

BJC: Lastly, who is a translator you admire and would like to shout out?

SJL: I will start with my first literary translation teacher, Sora Kim-Russell. Her work Our Happy Time by Gong Ji-young was the first ever Korean translated book that inspired me to get into this industry and got me to where I am. And of course, Anton Hur, who was double listed for the Booker this year, as well as Sung Ryu, who encouraged me to push forward and made Almond possible.

Sung Ryu: I translate mostly from Korean to English but also from English to Korean. My first literary translation class was in 2013 at LTI Korea and I loved it enough to quit my full-time job to study translation in earnest. I studied translation for a total of seven years but it was only in 2021 that my first book translation came out. But it’s funny how life catches you off guard because, after years of waiting, I had three books come out in the same year. But then in another twist, shortly after I started translating the first book, I fell ill to the point that I consider it a personal miracle that I finished all three translations on time. So since I handed in Shoko’s Smile in March 2020, I’ve been hibernating and healing but am regaining the desire to translate again.

Brandon J. Choi: I’m ready for three more books. Shoko’s Smile was one of my favorite reads last year. What was it like translating a story collection with numerous characters and styles?

SR: Interestingly enough, translating Shoko’s Smile felt like translating a novel because the characters share a similar voice. All of the narrators are women and they meet and ultimately lose someone very special in their lives, so their sense of grief is what knits the stories together. 

BJC: Was there a particular story you were drawn to most or found challenging?

SR: The moment I start translating a story, it becomes my favorite story. I had a bit of difficulty translating “Michaela.” There are three women characters and they’ve been indirectly affected by the Sewol ferry disaster. Only one of the characters is named and the rest are unnamed. Even for Michaela, she is only directly referenced by her pronouns. In rendering that into English, I had to somehow make it clear which of the women “she” was referring to. Korean doesn’t have this problem because it doesn’t require personal pronouns. In the end, the ubiquity of “she” in my translation worked out well because it highlighted the anonymity and universality of these characters and the fact that Sewol could’ve happened to any of us.

BJC: You also translated Kim Bo-Young’s I’m Waiting for You with Sophie Bowman. What were the differences and challenges in translating sci-fi?

SR: When translating sci-fi, having the story worldview down pat is as critical as nailing the voice. In the set of stories that I translated in that quartet, the universe was mind boggling. I had to ask Bo-Young many rounds of questions and even included diagrams to make sure I understood what the world looked like. It made sense for me to spend as much time as I could to understand and reassemble the world that Bo-Young had researched extensively to build.

BJC: How was co-translating the book with another translator?

When translating sci-fi, having the story worldview down pat is as critical as nailing the voice.

SR: There are many models of co-translation. We translated two stories each independently then swapped manuscripts to edit each other. We were very familiar with each other’s source texts so we didn’t just edit for readability, but also compared and discussed our readings. Readings are bound to differ so when we couldn’t figure something out, we went back to Bo-Young. But by the time I got edits on my translation from the publisher, I had gotten too sick to review them myself so Sophie stepped in. By the time Sophie got edits on her translation from the publisher, she also had a lot going on in her life so I negotiated the edits on her behalf. Although we translated independently, I would say we were intimately dependent on each other. I’m convinced that if either one of us had translated the entire book alone, it would not have turned out as beautifully as it did. The key to a successful co-translation is balance—balance of workload, balance of skill, and above all, mutual trust. I feel really lucky to have worked with Sophie.

BJC: You also translate from English to Korean. How does this process differ for you? 

SR: Korean to English is easier for me but as I grow more comfortable writing in Korean, my English to Korean is catching up. I have found that Korean has really flexible syntax. You can drop things like the subject, object, plural markers, or personal pronouns and the sentence would still be able to stand on its own. So when I read Korean, there’s a lot of reading between the lines. Rendering that into English means I often have to decide which of those blanks to fill in. When working into Korean, I have to think about what excesses to trim away from the English syntax to create some breathing room. It would sound so awkward if I carried over every single piece of information from the English into Korean.

BJC: Out of curiosity, how do you handle translating idioms?

SR: It depends. My immediate urge would be to try to at least carry over this idiom because it contains a worldview of the source text and the source culture. But if it gets in the way of the voice of characters or the emotions of a scene, then I wouldn’t try to literally translate the idiom.

BJC: I love your webtoons on Korean Literature Now. I found them so tender and I wanted to ask: what have been your favorite and most joyous moments as a translator?

SR: I love this question because when translators get together, we tend to complain a lot about how demoralizing this job and industry are. But there have been moments of joy in every step of the way. Even right from the start: that adrenaline rush when a book commands me to translate it. The inspiration after a particularly thought-provoking workshop. My peak fangirl bliss when I get to meet my author for the first time. The sublime catharsis when I find the perfect pitch and flow of my translation. The relief of finally finding a home for my work and being able to tell my author that after years of making them wait. I remember ugly crying when Honford Star told me that they wanted to publish Tower by Bae Myung-hoon. It was my first sale, which came seven years after I started dabbling in literary translation. It’s a moment that I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

BJC: What’s coming up for you next?

The key to a successful co-translation is balance—balance of workload, balance of skill, and above all, mutual trust.

SR: I’m working on rebuilding my body from scratch so that I can translate more sustainably. I do have a translation that’s just been sort of gathering dust that I haven’t actively pitched yet. It’s a translation of the Jeju myth of Jacheongbi. She’s a girl who outwits and outlasts all her patriarchal abusers. She goes on to win the hand of her lover and a seat among the most celebrated goddesses on Jeju Island. For me, it’s a fascinating tale of female aggression and desire. That whole island is a treasure trove of myths.

BJC: Thank you for being honest about your health. One big thing that I’ve learned from my mentor this year is how to be gentle with and kind to myself as a writer.

SR: Thank you. I debated how much I should share about my hiatus and health. In the end, I couldn’t omit that part of my career journey. It might reach some other translators who might also be struggling. I want to let them know that there is someone out here who is biding her time and trying to see this as a long run. I love translation too much to quit it but I need to figure out how to make it a healthier practice.

BJC: If someone is just starting out reading translated Korean literature, what would you recommend?

SR: Almond by Sohn Won-pyung. Sandy Joosun Lee’s powerful translation is one of the most highly rated and widely read Korean literature in English translation. I will also recommend Soje’s translation of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla and Emily Yae Won’s translation of Hwang Jungeun’s I’ll Go On. They’re both astonishing translations.

BJC: Who is a translator you admire and would like to shout out?

SR: I’ll shout out two translator communities that I am grateful for. chogwa is a zine that publishes multiple translations of the same Korean poem. It was started by Soje and brings people together to the pleasures of translating poetry. The other one is the BIPOC Literary Translators Caucus. It is a thriving community that has empowered me by simply existing.

8 Novels About Humans Eating Humans

Posted on by Wynter Miller

From the Showtime series Yellowjackets to the upcoming Timothée Chalamet film Bones and All to the increasingly unsettling allegations against the actor Armie Hammer, cannibalism is having a moment—in popular culture, anyway.

Literature has long been fascinated with this particular form of savagery, which found an unexpected home in my forthcoming book, The Goddess Effect. 

Cannibalism was not at all on my mind when I began the story that evolved into my debut novel. I worked it into the narrative after an early reader observed that the only thing the villain at the center of my wellness satire was guilty of was “arch capitalism.” Looking for a way to make The Goddess Effect more absurd, I delved into a form of barbarity that has captured the imagination of contemporary authors, as well as older and classic writers over the years. Below are eight works of literature that explore cannibalism in manners both overt and discreet.

Beowulf, translated by Maria Dahvana Headley

In her 2020 translation of the epic Old English poem, Headley uses modern slang like “bro” and “stan” to contemporize scenes like the monstrous Grendel’s cannibalism of the people who disrupt his sleep. In her introduction, Headley compares the original text to “Old English freestyle” and “the wedding toast of a drunk uncle.” Her liberties with translation make such chronicles of inhumanity feel all the more cinematic.

A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G Summers

Dorothy, the protagonist of this faux memoir of a serial killer-slash-restaurant critic who feasts on the flesh of men, takes pleasure in describing the stomach-churning spoils that have graced her past plates, likening a hunk of a man’s buttocks to “rump roast.” A satire of over-the-top paeans to food, the prose in this novel turned even Summers’s stomach: she told the New York Times that combing over a final version of her manuscript prompted her to go vegan for two weeks.

Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh

A master of spinning stories from the profane, Moshfegh weaves cannibalism into her tale of a medieval village on the brink of collapse, writing, perhaps, the most gruesome scene ever involving a pinkie toe. That the village in question is religiously vegetarian makes the act, and the character who commits it, even more depraved.

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

This coming-of-age story revolves around Natsuki, a disenchanted girl convinced that she’s an alien from another planet. As an adult, Natsuki loses (among other things) her sense of taste, reunites with her cousin, and retreats, along with her husband, to the mountains outside of Tokyo. Without modern conveniences (like the titular staple of Murata’s previous novel, Convenience Store Woman) Natsuki resorts to cannibalism:  “Miso Soup with Man” and “Man Simmered in Sweetened Soy Sauce” bring back her sense of taste—and lead her to sink her teeth into her cousin and husband, as well.

Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, translated by Sarah Moses

Originally published in Spanish in 2017, and translated by Sarah Moses into English in 2020, Agustina Bazterrica’s dystopian novel imagines what the world would look like if the meat factory farms produced were human. A love story is embedded in this graphic repudiation of the industrialization of meat, as is a commentary on the relationship between man and animal.

Mother for Dinner by Shalom Auslander

This darkly funny novel revolves around Seventh Seltzer, a Cannibal American who initially wants nothing to do with his minority identity. With his mother on her deathbed and her dying wish to be consumed by her own children, Seventh and his siblings are forced to reckon with their heritage for reasons sentimental and practical — obeying their mother is the only way for them to receive their inheritance. 

The Devourers by Indra Das

This genre-bending tale begins with a history professor in modern Kolkata who is solicited by a “half werewolf” to transcribe a pile of handwritten scrolls. As the professor gets more and more absorbed by the contents of the scrolls, the novel turns into a chronicle of shape-shifting people from centuries ago who regularly engaged in cannibalism, rape, murder, and other barbaric acts.

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

No round-up of cannibalistic literature would be complete without a mention of Thomas Harris’ 1988 icon of horror fiction, which revolves around the serial killer and human organ gourmand Hannibal Lecter. Immortalized on screen by Anthony Hopkins, the 1991 film version of Lecter took liberties with Harris’s prose. In the book, Lecter recounts eating a victim’s liver with fava beans and a “big Amarone.” Wary that viewers might not be able to identify the Italian wine, the film’s producers changed the line, giving Chianti a reputation that it has yet to live down.

Just Let Women Be Horny Monsters

Posted on by Jo Lou

Porn and weddings: two of America’s most beloved forms of sexual fantasy. The former imagines a world where the fucking is both constant and constantly good, while the latter plays out a virginity pageant in which the indelicate deed doesn’t happen at all until marriage. Whether the fetish gear of choice is a white dress or a leather harness, our thirsts for both kinds of wet dream show no signs of abating. COVID sent internet pornography use through the roof as horny people the world over sheltered in place, while the gradual lifting of those same home confinement rules a few months later has positioned 2022 to be the most prolific year in four decades for American nuptials. 

Kathleen J. Woods’s novella White Wedding is a psychedelic marriage of these two species of erotic reverie. A nameless woman arrives at a mountainside wedding, uninvited, and serially seduces anyone in her path, from the father of the bride to the caterer. Meanwhile, we slowly learn about the woman’s prior work in a pleasure mansion in the woods, where she fulfilled other women’s highly particular desires. Magic blurs with queer smut and kink as the woman seems to intuit exactly what each of her marks wants in their filthiest, softest heart of hearts—even if they don’t yet know they want it. She would also know exactly what you want. Can you imagine anything hotter? Can you imagine anything more terrifying?

Indeed, those darker body genres, horror and fairytale, are also at play in Woods’s erotica—and they don’t always play nice. From a tender fisting scene on a playground slide to a taxi driver who takes an unusual interest in his fares’ hookup habits, the fantasies in White Wedding push just as hard on the bounds of propriety as they do on those of literary genre. Woods’s interlinked tales are refreshing in their refusal to frame sex either as morally degrading or as intrinsically liberating. In a year when the rights of women, queer, and trans people undergo fresh assaults every week—legal attacks on abortion and on trans children’s access to gender-affirming care being just two recent instances thereof—White Wedding frankly asserts our rights to sex, freedom, and power. 

Chelsea Davis: What attracts you to writing porn, as a genre?

Kathleen J. Woods: The pornographic mode was appealing to me because of its potential to not just be academically unsettling or philosophically unsettling, but to be viscerally unsettling to the reader. To enact confusion at the bodily level of the reader; to engage them in a way so that their senses are actually engaged and immersed; to make them discomfited by their own responses to what they’re reading. And also to give them some feeling of being out of reality.

When I was working on White Wedding, I found very useful a book called The Feminist Porn Book, which gives the following definition of feminist porn: “using sexually explicit imagery to contest and complicate dominant representations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class ability, age, body types, and other identity markers. It explores concepts of desire, agency, power, beauty, and pleasure at their most confounding and difficult.” I’ve found this definition to be guiding because it’s quite broad: it doesn’t lay out a specific way that feminist porn must appear, but is instead interested in an unsettling of normative standards of sexuality and in asking probing questions. 

CD: Speaking of normative standards of sexuality: as we speak, it’s been less than a week since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Has your book assumed any new significance for you since that court decision?

KW: The writing of the book happened over about seven years. Some of my initial impulses to write about a woman who is divorced from a past but who embodies sexual desire—those came from a world that already had a lot of misogyny and suspicion of overt sexuality. The election of Trump, and the #MeToo movement becoming really widespread, for example; those happened during the writing of the book. So the book already contains cathartic expressions of my anger in response to those events.

But the book has also remained a constant touchstone for me, of trying to ask, “What is a feminine sexuality, a queer sexuality, that isn’t a response to the harms of what the world does to us?” That’s not a question I think is answerable, for myself, outside of fiction. 

CD: I think one of the ways your book answers that question is to depict scenes of non-mainstream sexuality with great detail and tenderness. But because of that intense detail (and I don’t say this with any moral judgment, of course), some of the book’s more intense edgeplay scenes were squirm-inducing for me, personally, to read. There’s a scene in the pleasure mansion where the woman pierces a lady’s back with small metal hoops, and another where the woman does a sounding act on the bride’s father, penetrating his urethra. 

KW: It wasn’t out of a desire for shock value that I wrote those scenes. I was instead thinking about the different modes of the erotic. Feminine desire (and I’m going to continue using the word “feminine,” here, even acknowledging its limitations as a blanket term) to me does often seem like it centers on fantasies outside of the typical penetrative act. That is, feminine desire is not just for penis-in-vagina sex, which has so often been used to define sex in our Judeo-Christian culture, beginning with the concept of “virginity.” 

With the corseting scene, I was also thinking about all the ways in which performing the feminine involves alteration of the body—how there can be a horror in that. So I included a shaving scene and a piercing scene. And it’s not just any back piercing that takes place; it’s a series of piercings in the shape of a corset. Today, corsets evoke a desire for the forbidden: we have more or less concluded that the corsetry of the past was painful and unnecessary for women—yet corseting remains a big part of contemporary kink, as does extreme body modification. 

In writing that scene I wanted to make the medium of language as visceral as it would be if you were watching it in a movie or experiencing it in real life. Such that you want it to let up, you want relief—the same way that the girl who’s being corseted by the woman does. Using all five senses in those scenes was important to me, in order to have that penetrated effect on the reader.  

CD: Of the five senses, smell is the sense that the reader gains the most access to in this book. On the one hand, there are the odors that accumulate on the woman’s body over the course of her repeated sex acts. But then there are also the odors that she’s constantly noticing in the world, from mulch to fabric softener. I thought your choice to focus on scent was fascinating because it’s so often a collective open secret that sex has a smell, or smells, associated with it. We all know it, yet much erotica doesn’t talk about it beyond a cursory nod to “musk.” I was curious why you chose to deviate from the pornographic norm in that way.

What is a feminine sexuality, a queer sexuality, that isn’t a response to the harms of what the world does to us?

KW:  Smell seems to me like one of our most animalistic senses. And we don’t have very much control over our reactions to it—over whether we’re excited by a smell or revolted by it. Smell enters us, penetrates us. 

It’s also a sense that the form of fiction, versus a painting or a film, has a unique ability to capture. I mean, I’ve definitely seen smell evoked in film. But it still seems like something that the page had a particular advantage in approaching.

CD: Much of your book takes place in a mysterious pleasure mansion in the woods, where women come to have erotic desires of all stripes fulfilled by the woman in a private room. Elsewhere, you’ve noted that the pleasure mansion is a recurring setting in erotic fiction and film, from Pauline Réage’s novel The Story of O to the video for Beyoncé’s song “Haunted.” We could also add the music video for “WAP” to that list. What do you think is so appealing about the pleasure mansion as a structure of sexual fantasy, perhaps even especially (since those creators I’ve just named are all women) of female erotic fantasy?

KW: There’s something that I find personally true about the vision of desire as a hallway of doors, in which what is behind them is suspected, but unknown. And your own response to what’s behind the doors is also both suspected and unknown. You move through this mysterious space with the agency of movement, with the agency of opening the door, with the agency of walking through and deciding to enter or look into a room—but also with a lack of agency in the sense that you have no control over what’s going to be behind that door. 

You see this in so many stories about female curiosity, right? Eros and Psyche; Bluebeard’s wife; Pandora. It feels like an image that comes from our cultural makeup around women’s desire. There’s the thrill of the closed door and the long stretching hallway of what could be there. What could I find, and will it delight me? Will it hurt me? Will it condemn me?   

CD: In some ways your book is itself structured like a pleasure mansion itself. The novella consists of a series of interpolated stories, like a hallway of doors each with private fantasies behind them. A character will describe a sexual encounter they’ve had in the past (or perhaps one they would’ve liked to have), which will then infect the listening character with lust, the desire to recall her own real or imagined sex scene. Why did you choose to arrange the book this way, with even more of an emphasis on erotic storytelling than on real-time sex scenes?

KW: One of the themes I was reflecting on a lot as I was approaching this book was the narratives we hear about sex—how we form our own story of what desire should be and what sex looks like through a bunch of different sources. We hear snippets of conversation; there are stories that we inherit from reading books and watching movies; and there are also the stories that we are told by figures in our life. It’s very confusing: you get a lot of contrasting stories. So the storytelling form itself is in question here—how true any of these stories that the Woman tells are.

I also wanted the book to have that feeling of an unsettling of time, of temporality being hazy and a little confused. Because I also think that is part of what is so potentially sometimes liberatory and terrifying about sexual pleasure is that, in moments of orgasm or pleasure, you’re often removed from and out of time. You are fully in the present in a way that is not true (for me, at least) a lot of the time out in the world. You get to exist without a past, without a future for a brief second (or a brief few seconds, or hours, depending on—you know—exactly what’s going on). 

As in, you can briefly think, “I still have rights!” Although it’s not a perfect trick. Even during sex recently, “Roe v. Wade” has flashed through my brain.  

CD: So even if sex can potentially create a sort of floating shell around you, sometimes the outside world still intrudes. 

KW: Yeah. And I think sometimes that intrusive world is from those stories that we hear throughout our lives, too. As in, “I shouldn’t be doing this.” Or “I should hide this part of my body.”  

CD: One of my favorite sequences in the book is a four-part Russian nesting doll of stories about just that—how body image concerns can intrude upon women’s experiences of sex. It begins when the bride’s father, Greg, gives a speech at the wedding about the bride’s sexual play with Barbie dolls as a child (every bride’s worst nightmare). And that speech spurs the Woman into telling a story to the bride’s stepsister about two women at a bar, a singer and a bartender. It’s a romance that’s become sexually fraught because the singer is ashamed of the shape of her vulva and is planning to undergo a kind of labiaplasty surgery known as “the Barbie procedure.” Then the Woman shows up and helps the bartender and singer fuck in a playground slide. But in between that frustrated beginning and that cathartic ending, the woman and the bartender tell each other what I think are the novella’s scariest stories. One is about a professor who makes dolls out of little girls’ corpses. And the other is about a father-daughter pair who kidnap and mutilate women together. I was really affected by the mixture of horror and catharsis and liberation throughout the sequence. It was a heady and, as you were saying earlier, confusing thing to encounter as a reader.  

I was very tired of the idea that, ‘Oh, a woman is a sexual aggressor because this horrible thing happened to her.’ Is that really our only reason why a woman can be a horny monster?

KW: Some of the pieces of that sequence developed as I experienced and learned about things in the real world. So, for example, while I was writing the book, I was also working separately as a content writer on a contract basis. And I was assigned to help women who were sexual health advocates write a free guide about labiaplasty and its potential harms. So I had to research labiaplasty for many, many, hours, and that’s when I encountered the very real “Barbie procedure.” This is an operation that was developed to make a woman’s vulva look flat and “neat”—“neat” is the word I kept seeing, “tidy,” “clean.” This is a plastic surgery that is solely for the aesthetics of the vulva, even though you lose sensory tissue, and you can also damage the clitoris and clitoral hood. I was not pleased reading about these things. And the book already had some dolls in that scene, and so the Barbie procedure just seemed like an obvious fit. 

While I was writing, I also learned about the other stories you mentioned, which are the only other parts of this novella that have some basis in real, true-crime stories—those about the man who made dolls out of the corpses of young girls, and the one about the father and daughter. I think those are the parts of my own narratives I’ve inherited about being a woman in the world. And after I learned about those incidents, I just remember thinking, “Ugh, get out of me, stop being in my head.” So they had to be in the book, I guess, for that reason.

CD: Well, the woman says this really interesting thing of the father-daughter torture team. She says, “They wanted what they wanted and they took it.” Which speaks to the fact that, yes, these people are doing horrific things, but what they’re doing also started as a fantasy, for them. What could be a more literal living out of your own fantasy than making a real human corpse into your fantasy doll?

KW: Yeah, totally. And I also became really interested in the idea that there are always these stories that are trying to break down the psychology of, for example, the man who dug up corpses and made dolls out of them, like, “Oh, he did it because of this. He had this trauma that there’s this reason why he did these things.” And I thought about how a figure like the woman would be pretty uninterested in that reasoning versus the actual act of just grabbing what you want. 

CD: Your book doesn’t shy away from depicting sexual trauma, but it also never focuses on trauma as the sole reason that anyone acts in a certain way, sexually or otherwise. It’s a real intervention, given the ubiquity of the term “trauma” in today’s discourse around sex. Was that a conscious choice, on your part, to avoid the language and narrative structures of trauma?

KW: Yeah. As a person, outside my writing, I value conversations around the impacts of sexual trauma. They’re important. But in the world of fiction, in the world of an erotic novel that is moving through pleasure and desire, I was finding myself very weary and tired of the idea that, “Oh, a woman is a sexual aggressor because this horrible thing happened to her.” Is that really our only reason why a woman can be a horny monster? Why can’t she just be the horny monster, you know?

CD: Let’s talk more about her, your central monster-character. Even though the woman’s senses are so finely tuned, and she really takes in the world through her body—is, in some ways, nothing but a body, one that tastes and smells and touches and fucks—she lacks most of the markers of physical character description. We don’t know what color her hair is; we don’t know what her build is. You’ve also labeled her with a prototype instead of a specific name—“the woman.” Why did you choose to make your focalizing character a kind of everywoman in these ways? 

You experience the world through your body, but your body is also read by others. Those two things are too interconnected to be separated.

KW: Early on in the writing of this book, one of my graduate thesis advisors, Elisabeth Sheffield, said, “It’s probably intellectually and artistically dishonest to ignore that the woman is passing through this wedding of all these white people so easily that she’s probably white.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, you can’t write an ‘everywoman.’ That was naive of me.”

And so that is where I became interested in further developing this idea of whiteness throughout the book. You experience the world through your body, but your body is also read by others. Those two things are too interconnected to be separated.

That also brings me back to, what I was talking about with the corset piercing in the mansion, or the erotic shaving scene. These oppressive ideas of what a female body is supposed to look like come from white standards of beauty, specifically. Hairless, thin, all that stuff. 

And so the wedding itself just became whiter and whiter as I wrote. It was important to me that it wasn’t divorced of race just because there are only white people there. Whiteness is as racialized as being nonwhite.

CD: This is flagged in the book’s title, of course. “White” is doing a lot of work there. 

KW: And it’s not just about the purity fantasy of weddings, which is already disrupted the moment the reader realizes the bride is pregnant. It is also about white, upper-class codes of conduct.

CD: I’m curious about your experience of reading your work in public. Porn is not a shocking thing to encounter in San Francisco (your and my home city) in the year 2022, but the genre definitely still has its associations with taboo in some circles. What’s it like to know that you might be arousing your audience, or even angering or shocking some of them?

KW:: If they’re just angry because it’s porn, that’s not an interesting critique to me, so I don’t worry about it. I’ve mainly gotten feedback from the audience in the vein of, “I was very frightened and aroused.” And I’m like, “Good. Perfect. It worked.”

What It’s Worth Giving Up to Stay in a Family

Posted on by Wynter Miller

“Compromisos” by Manuel Muñoz

“Compromisos” by Manuel Muñoz is no longer available to read online, at the Author’s request. The full text can be found in The Consequences by Manuel Muñoz (2022), as well as in the 2023 edition of Best American Short Stories, selected by Min Jin Lee.

Ask Yourself if You’re The Right Storyteller for This Story

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Every few months, it seems there is an eruption over cultural appropriation in the literary world. Writers and readers who share an identity take issue with the portrayal of their community by a writer from outside of their community. Fellow writers, especially those from outside of this community come to the defense of this writer, decrying their artistic freedom is in danger from cultural censorship. A raging debate ensues, with writers and thinkers divided between these views. Rinse and repeat. Cultural appropriation is amongst the most fraught social issues in the literary and broader artistic arena and one for which there isn’t always a simple, straightforward answer. 

When I was immersed in writing my biography, Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar, I noticed how woefully undiverse the field of biography was, both in terms of authors as well as subjects. As the debate about cultural appropriation raged on, I wondered how it related to writing biographies, stories of other people’s lives. I was an Indian American woman writing the life story of an Indian American woman musician. What did I think of white biographers writing the life story of marginalized subjects? What was gained and lost by this? 

I parsed my thoughts about this question in my essay, “Who Gets to Write About Whom: Examining Authority, Authenticity, and Appropriation in Biography.” Although I focused on the field of biography, my exploration applies broadly to nonfiction writing. I observed that issues of authority, authenticity, and appropriation kept bubbling up in the literary realm in terms of “Who is permitted to tell whose story?” and the more specific question “should non-marginalized writers write about marginalized people?” As I note in my piece, these questions seem especially important to biography, “a genre specifically tasked with telling other people’s real-life stories.” But before we answer these questions, we have to acknowledge the context for these questions. The realm of biography has long been biased towards the life stories of white individuals, most often white male figureheads, told by white authors, also most often male. This context is significant because as I state in my essay, it “results in a reinforcement of cultural erasure,” which in turn impacts the way history is told, whose contributions are credited and whose are left out. 

When I came to the question of who should be writing the life stories of marginalized individuals, I reflected on my own experiences and observations as a woman of color writer writing the life story of an overlooked woman of color artist. Here are my guiding observations: 

  • First, I believe, in theory, most anyone can write about most anyone else. 
  • Second, if the biographer doesn’t share the same racial, cultural, or other marginalized background as their subject, it is incumbent on the biographer to address this through extensive and immersive research. 
  • Third, in addition, the biographer who does not share identity or experience with their subject must also spend much time and energy reflecting on how their own identity relates to that of their subject and consider how it shapes or colors the lens through which they are viewing their subject’s life. This element, I believe, is most at risk of being absent from biographies by “outside” biographers. 
  • Finally, even with all the research and self-reflection, ultimately, a skilled biographer who shares the same identity or background as the subject will be able to yield certain insights that are unavailable to the biographer who doesn’t share these attributes. 

Writers who believe themselves to be objective and colorblind are usually not, and as Paisley Rekdal incisively noted in Appropriate: A Provocation, they are not “prepared to unravel the Gordian knot of social realities, history, and fantasy that constitute a self and its attendant ideas of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or even physical or mental ability.”

Some in the literary world believe writers should keep identity—their subject’s as well as their own—out of the scope of their work. This is falsely framed as being objective but instead is an attempt to mitigate the fact that they do not share an identity, community, and experiences with their subject. I don’t see how an author can plumb the depths of a person’s life story without addressing their identity, even in instances where the subject might not have publicly identified with their identity, which in itself reveals something about them that should be investigated in the telling of their life story. Just as importantly, I don’t believe an author can truly convey a person’s life story without reflecting on how their own identity shapes their approach to telling this story. Who are they relative to their subject? How do/did their respective identities shape their lives? How does their identity affect the way they view their subject’s life, judge their actions? It is crucial to reflect on whether there are power dynamics at play that impact how the writer views their subject and the ways in which this is reflected in the approach to, and writing of, their life story. 

As much as I believe just about anyone can write about anyone else, I also believe writers who share an identity, community, and set of experiences are more able to understand the nuances and traits specific to that culture and community in a way that outsiders cannot. No amount of research is guaranteed to provide an outside writer with access to intangible yet indelible elements, as I note in my final observation. 

When writing the lives of those from marginalized backgrounds, it’s crucial they are rendered in ways that are well researched, are nuanced and fully embodied, and avoid stereotypes. This cultural sensitivity is a matter of respect for cultural identity but also a matter of good writing craft. When you think of the most compelling stories you have read about people, fictional or nonfictional, those characters are vibrant because they are detailed, fully embodied and nuanced, not rendered with broad strokes or reliant on tired (and possibly biased) stereotypes. 

No amount of research is guaranteed to provide an outside writer with access to intangible yet indelible elements.

The farther the writer is from the community they are writing about, the more research they need to do, and this research needs to be immersive. This means that the writer must interrogate their sources of information. Who are the sources of information they are primarily referencing about this community? Are they from within or outside of this community? And in the writer’s vision for their piece, how often will voices from within the community be heard? Is it important to acknowledge that there may be multiple viewpoints within this community? 

Writers writing about a subject or community outside of their identity or experience should consider having an individual from within that community who is familiar with the topic read their work to ensure their rendering of the community is accurate and culturally sensitive. Informally, writers who already know each other professionally and personally might do this work as a favor or in exchange for other tasks. However, this has bred a tendency by writers to assume that writers from marginalized communities will do this for free, instead of recognizing that this is, in fact, labor and should be compensated. 

In response to the growing recognition of the importance of cultural sensitivity, formal resources and networks of cultural sensitivity readers have developed. Conscious Style Guide is an online resource offering guidance on a host of stylistic issues around identity and other areas. Two networks of sensitivity readers, including Writing Diversely and Writing with Color, list sensitivity readers according to their areas of expertise and services offered. Other useful resources include People of Color in Publishing, Editors of Color Database, and Black Editors & Proofreaders. 

Even when writers share a similar background to their subject, it is still important to probe the assumptions shaping their approach to writing about their subject.

In truth, even when writers share a similar background to their subject, it is still important to probe the assumptions shaping their approach to writing about their subject because no identity or community is monolithic. For example, in the South Asian diaspora, caste wields a strong influence even though it often goes unremarked upon. Therefore, a south Asian writer should consider how caste may be at play in the dynamics of a South Asian community they are covering and they should reflect on how their own understanding and experience of caste influences their perceptions and interactions with their subject. Meanwhile, when a Black writer is writing about a Black subject, issues such as class or education can influence their perspective. Similarly, immigrant journalists should be conscious of tendencies of some in the media and in their own communities to harmfully frame documented immigrants as good and deserving and undocumented immigrants as criminal and undeserving. 

While cultural insensitivity and cultural appropriation are fraught and complicated issues and the prospect of avoiding them might seem daunting to writers, hopefully, this chapter offers a range of insight and guidance. One key aspect of avoiding cultural insensitivity and appropriation is to make conscious and informed choices about how to depict our subjects, especially if we do not share an identity or community with them. And while there are no guarantees that every reader will accept those choices as culturally sensitive, there is something to be said for taking the issue head on, just as we would any other aspect of craft, thereby demonstrating that others’ humanity takes precedence over our desire for unfettered artistic freedom.

Excerpted and adapted from Craft and Conscience: How to Write about Social Issues by Kavita Das, published by Beacon Press.

I Can’t Separate America’s Mass Shootings From Its Long History of Racial Terrorism

Posted on by Wynter Miller

I’ve been wanting to see Jordan Peele’s Nope in theaters for a while now, but I feel uncertain about it. I’ve never been much of a moviegoer, but I make an exception for iconic Black films. I saw Get Out three times when it first released; currently, I have only seen one movie in theaters since shuttered movie houses reopened from their months-long COVID-19 closures. Yet COVID—and its seeming resurgence—isn’t my main concern. It’s the endless mass shootings that have me on edge. What if a shooting happens in our movie theater? That’s happened before. I had suggested our family watch Nope during an upcoming trip to Rehoboth beach, but news of an Indiana mall shooting quickly had me doom scrolling and looking up Delaware’s gun laws. Were they open carry? Does that even matter? Shooting after shooting, reporters and journalists analyze different factors that led to that day’s unnecessary mass casualty. We never seem to ask—why do so many Americans resort to extremist violence as a solution to social, emotional or mental issues? America’s long history of white supremacy is never factored into discussions of rampant mass shootings. 

 “If you want to know a place, you talk to its history.” This is what Mama Z—a centenarian who has documented the names of every lynching victim in the US—tells detectives looking to unravel a string of murders at the heart of Percival Everett’s most recent novel. The Trees is a genre-defying revenge fantasy masquerading as detective fiction. Set In Money, Mississippi—the location of the infamous lynching of Emmett Till—the sons of Till’s murderers are mysteriously killed. A body resembling Till’s appears at each crime scene. The novel is crude and graphic, yet absurdly funny. I tore through all 308 pages, finishing in just 2 days. With the recent rogue nature of the supreme court—overturning Roe v. Wade, environmental protections and a longstanding gun law—as well as another police murder (RIP, Jayland Walker)—The Trees felt like the perfect read to “celebrate” our nation’s birth. I spent much of this year’s July 4th holiday reading it. The news of yet another shooting, just as I finished the novel, felt especially telling and sickening. Displays of vitriol and destruction couldn’t even be paused for family enjoyment of a national holiday. 

The vengeance that dominates The Trees stayed with me after I finished the book. Had Everett crossed a line? Was it too much?  By the end of the novel, the carnage extends beyond retribution for the sins of Emmett Til’s murderers or even the Jim Crow South. Across the country there are multiple homicides alongside violent castrations. The avenged are not only Black. An incident in California is the first to show a string of similar murders outside of the south, but instead an unidentifiable Asian male body is left at the crime scene. The dispossessed and exploited had come to claim their due. Everett writes a truly violent spectacle; at times it made me feel deeply uncomfortable. When the detective first sees the scene of Junior Junior Milam’s death, we’re told: “A long length of rusty barbed wire was wrapped several times around his [Junior Junior’s] neck. One of his eyes had been either gouged out or carved out and lay next to his thigh, looking up at him … His pants were undone and pulled down to below his knees. His groin was covered in matted blood, and it looked like his scrotum was missing.” There were several depictions of grotesque lynching scenes. While I am personally squeamish about all violence and prefer to avoid it at all costs—I understand the grave importance of detailing these scenes. Everett wants an eye for an eye or a testicle for a testicle.

Displays of vitriol and destruction couldn’t even be paused for family enjoyment of a national holiday.

Lynchings in the south were spectacles of racial violence and terror; Everett’s fictional replication only scratches the surface. A 2017 report by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” describes public spectacle lynchings as “festive community gatherings [where] large crowds of whites watched and participated in the black victims prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment and burning at the stake.” Souvenirs from such events could easily be procured such as photographs, pieces of flesh, teeth, fingers and toes. That level of depravity is unfathomable—and yet a tangible part of white America’s 400-plus year reign of terror upon Black Americans. 

It is only fitting that Everett envision retribution where white men are tortuously murdered, castrated and their testicles left to sit in the hands of a second racialized body at the murder scene. It is gruesome, yes, but symbolic of a vengeful emasculation, centuries in the making. 

This history is directly tied to my family; one I honestly had not thought so much about. Growing up in the NYC metropolitan area, I was fed myths about the north’s colorblind mentality and acceptance of African Americans. When I think of my family’s connection to the South, I usually draw a blank. My family has lived in the NYC area for 100 years. As an adult, I now understand the north is just as complicit in the horrors of slavery, racism and exploitation as the South—northern complicity just looked different. Remember at its peak—in 1730, New York City was only second to Charleston in its population of enslaved persons; they built the city. New York City still has the most segregated school system in the nation, and we watched Eric Garner strangled to death on video in Staten Island. Mama Z tells detectives she “consider[s] police shootings to be lynchings” as we all should. Before Eric Garner there were many others, including Amadou Diallo. New York has never been the safe haven from racial violence we were led to believe it was. 

Souvenirs from such events could easily be procured such as photographs, pieces of flesh, teeth, fingers and toes.

My great-grandmother Janie Manley died four years before I was born. I grew up knowing very little about her, except that she came to New York during the great migration from North Carolina not long after the end of World War I. She worked as a domestic for well-off families in the north end of New Rochelle (a suburb just seventeen miles north of NYC). My grandmother fondly referred to her mother as “the sergeant general”; Janie was a woman who “didn’t take no stuff.” Maybe as a young mother, who had lost two earlier daughters as babies, she had to toughen herself for a rough world. As far as my mother could remember, Janie never talked about North Carolina and never went back while my mother was alive. Janie was the first of her siblings to migrate north and the rest–Isabel, Lillian, James and David would follow suit. Even Janie’s mother, Eliza Manley would come north. Eliza, a woman born in the height of the Reconstruction era, 1880, would live out the rest of her life in New York City. My grandmother loved visiting her grandmother in Manhattan. Reading through the EJI report, which, honestly, brought me to tears—I wondered, if my great-grandmother had fled unspeakable violence? Had she seen things that she prayed to forget? For the first time, it occurred to me … economic opportunity may not have been the only factor that pulled my maternal family northward. We may still have family in North Carolina, but we have long since lost touch. I wonder what my great grandmother would say about shootings on the NYC subway or the horrific mass murder in Buffalo.

The most notable and fantastic element of The Trees is the non-existence of white backlash to the ongoing murders. Historically, any kind of racial reckoning in America—particularly the non-violent kind, is met with physical, legislative, political and social counter violence. As Kalli Holloway writes of the response to the summer 2020 protests for George Floyd; “to reestablish unchallenged white dominance, a movement of white resistance or anti-anti-racism is working tirelessly to blot out what it sees as a problematic presence—purging Black folks from democracy by stripping voting rights, erasing Black struggle from history by banning the teaching of slavery and its legacy and prohibiting protests that threaten the white supremacist status quo.” All of that as a response to the demand for justice and equity. I think of the backlash against integration and the national guard escorting Ruby Bridges to school. My own mother was part of the first group of Black students to be bussed and integrated into an all white elementary school in our town. At one point our hometown was known as the Little Rock of the North. While my mother has never mentioned violence while attending elementary school–the north side of our town has talked about secession for years. Realistically, if white Americans were lynched en mass for their abstract culpability in America’s history of racism, it is difficult to imagine that Black and Brown communities wouldn’t immediately suffer counter violence in kind. However, the white America of The Trees is impotent. FBI agents, police officers and other white government officials might curse and say the n-word, but they are powerless to halt the scourge of inexplicable white death. 

My own mother was part of the first group of Black students to be bussed and integrated into an all white elementary school in our town.

But perhaps Everett’s interpretation is not so far off from reality. Currently, there are 393 million firearms in the U.S. and nearly fifty-three people are killed a day by a firearm. In 2020, 79% of murders—19,384 involved a firearm. News of mass shootings is endless, and our elected officials are continuously stymied by the gun lobby. The racially motivated shooting in Buffalo tells us that lynchings are no longer the preferred method of racial terror; “such acts of racial barbarity have not been relegated to America’s past, however they are links in an unbroken chain that continue.” Yet, shootings in predominantly white communities like Highland Park on the 4th of July or the Parkland shooting of four years ago mean that white Americans also suffer for America’s lust for violence. Chicago native Tamar Manasseh writes “locals know that Highland Park may as well be a million miles from Chicago’s south side. Some of the wealthiest people, the most expensive real estate and the best schools in the state are there.” Even in my own suburban town, there was a strict divide where violence happened. It was not in the wealthier, whiter north side of town. Or at least, those incidents never made it to the nightly news. But now, America’s love for guns and violence is so pervasive that no one is safe. As a Black woman in Chicago, Tamar was “always aware of the danger [her] family … lived in every minute of every day. It was present as oxygen.” Black mothers have always contended with an ever-present violence both structural and literal. While the kind of gun violence Tamar feared likely was not directly related to racial tension—the reality is that America’s longstanding history of violence endangers us all. 

The US is reaping what has long been sewn—from lynchings to mass shootings. The EJI report contends that “avoiding honest conversation about this history [of racial terror and lynching] has undermined our ability to a build a nation where racial justice can be achieved.” I would argue we are undermining not only racial justice but our ability to sustain as a nation. Because we have not reckoned with past violence and brutality baked into the fabric of this country—how can we address the present? We must start connecting the nation’s history of white supremacist violence to mass shootings. The two are not mutually exclusive. The Second Amendment was created at a time when the founding fathers feared rebellions from enslaved Africans and resistance from indigenous people whom they marginalized, oppressed and murdered. Who, now, do Americans feel they must bear arms against? It is an increasing population of people of color and anyone unlucky enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. “Many victims of terror lynchings were murdered without being accused of any crime; they were killed for social transgressions or for demanding basic rights or fair treatment.” Emmett Till was brutally murdered for offending a white woman; the idea that he would dare interact with a white woman was his transgression. For Black Americans, our mere existence has always been an encroachment on white America. 

Today in the US, anyone can find themselves on the other end of gun violence be it for real or imagined infractions. The acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse exemplifies America’s determination to uphold capricious white supremacist violence. Increasingly, all Americans live in fear of gun violence—a certain zip code, skin color or economic status can’t protect you. White supremacist violence has done the inevitable, becoming so toxic that it’s now eating itself, and in so doing, promises to  destroy us all. But maybe I’ll go see Nope anyway; I can’t let white supremacy steal all my joy. 

7 Novels That Blend Romance and Body Horror

Posted on by Jo Lou

The first movie I saw in theaters was Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It’s perhaps my earliest memory, I was two years old. My brother, who was three, was afraid of the beast and had to be escorted out of the theater. I, however, was quite taken with the monster. I think about this experience a lot because I’m fairly certain the movie romanticized unhealthy relationship dynamics and instilled false hope of someday being gifted a library, and because of this line delivered via dramatic voiceover: “For who could ever learn to love a beast?”

This question came back to me over the years—usually when one of my friends or I was dating someone beastly, or when I was feeling beastly myself. It came up once again when I set out to write my werewolf book, Such Sharp Teeth. I began to think about body horror and romance, about how often they intersect and why. There’s the element of monstrous desire, but deeper than that, it seems to me at the core of both is control. A loss of control over the body, over the heart. A forced surrender. Inescapable vulnerability. 

What could be more terrifying than revealing your true form and hoping to be loved as you are? Or falling in love with someone who might not be as they appear? And love can be transformative, but is that always a good thing—or could it be a very bad thing? 

The books on this list blend elements of body horror and romance, both conventionally and unconventionally, with beautifully grim and sometimes gruesome results. 

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield 

“It is still comforting, of a fashion, to think about my Leah, though such thoughts come attendant on the usual wave of grief that my Leah is not who I have with me now.”

When Miri’s wife Leah finally returns after a deep-sea mission gone awry, it becomes evident that the wife Miri sent to sea is not the same wife who came back. Armfield’s stunning novel explores the glory of falling in love and the devastation of it slipping through your fingers. There are moments of shudder-inducing body horror, but what’s truly scary is reckoning with the fleeting, mysterious nature of love. 

The Seas by Samantha Hunt

“I stand naked, looking at Jude, concentrating on becoming one hundred percent water so that I could slip down the drain and out to sea or at least I could slip down Jude’s wrong pipe and fill his lungs, lovingly washing away every breath he takes.”

In Samantha Hunt’s The Seas, our 19-year-old unnamed protagonist suspects she’s a mermaid. Her father vanished into the sea years ago and left her to pine in a small, sad coastal town. She’s hopelessly in love with a haunted local veteran, Jude, though their bond proves complicated. More poignant and heart-wrenching than horrifying, The Seas is about how grief, loneliness, and love—especially our first love—can alter us forever.  

House of Hunger by Alexis Henderson

“We bleed for those we love most.”

In Alexis Henderson’s deliciously gothic novel, indentured bloodmaids must dedicate themselves to their noble-class mistress or master by providing their blood for consumption. In exchange, they’re rewarded handsomely. When Marion Shaw leaves the slums behind to work as a bloodmaid for Countess Lisavet, she’s enthralled by her extravagant new lifestyle and striking mistress but unable to shake the nagging suspicion that something is amiss. Lisavet soon takes a special interest in Marion, but is it true love, or will Lisavet (literally) bleed Marion dry? There’s some swoony, sultry gothic romance, some dizzying body horror, but perhaps what’s most riveting about the novel is how it ruminates on toxic relationships.

Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith

“He did not have to have him. He just had to be near him. It was enough.”

It’s difficult to distill the sprawling brilliance of Violet Kupersmith’s novel, which weaves together multiple narratives across different timelines, seamlessly incorporates folklore, ghosts, and monsters, and explores themes of love and violence and revenge, of identity and colonialism. To save from spoiling anything, I will only say there are several instances where love—pure, genuine love, and selfish love—prove horrifying and/or transformative. It’s sometimes bittersweet, and sometimes downright terrifying. 

The Unsuitable by Molly Pohlig

“…I only want your happiness your happiness and mine ours both please eat you need our strength.”

Molly Pohlig’s inventive novel, set during the Victorian era, centers around 28-year-old spinster Iseult, who is tortured by the bitter ghost of her mother Beatrice. Beatrice died giving birth to Iseult, and now haunts her daughter’s body, constantly uttering cruelties, driving Iseult to self-harm as a coping mechanism. Iseult’s equally cruel father exercises his control by attempting to marry her off—unsuccessfully, until Jacob Vinke enters the picture. Jacob has silver skin, a side-effect of a medical treatment that has made him, like Iseult, undesirable. Will they be two misfits in love? Maybe. But Pohlig’s novel has more to say about the ghosts that roam under our skin and the struggle of taking full possession over our bodies and our fates.

Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes by Eric LaRocca

“What have you done today to deserve your eyes?”

In LaRocca’s gripping novella, two women connect in a chat room in the early 2000s and form an online relationship. Lost, lonely Agnes is quick to fall for the generous and enigmatic Zoe. Their skewed power balance is clear from the start, but how this dynamic plays out is truly shocking. The dread escalates as love turns to obsession, and both physical and emotional boundaries are tested. The conclusion is as heart-rending as it is stomach-turning. This novella delivers on the body horror, but it also captures something specific and profound about the need for connection and the early aughts of the internet. 

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!”

As most of us grow up under the impression that Frankenstein’s monster is a big green oaf with bolts sticking out of its neck, reading Mary Shelley’s horror classic for the first time can be jarring. The Creature in the novel is a gentle, intelligent soul trapped in a monstrous form, aware his appearance prohibits the love and connection he craves. The Creature’s dilemma taps into the fear that we won’t be embraced and accepted for who we are because of how we look, that our love won’t be reciprocated because of the superficial. It’s the most obliterating intersection of romance and body horror, where the former can’t exist because of the latter. Reanimation and revenge-plot aside, it’s pretty relatable. 

Display Me in the Museum’s Secret Room

Posted on by Wynter Miller

Museum

in the back of the museum is the oldest room
the door is always shut but unlocked
when you go in no one will stop you
no one else is ever inside

the ceilings are low    dark
hushed   still air

in the room 
a dozen glass boxes 
atop a dozen black velvet pedestals
inside each glass box 
a specimen of fossilized light

you step closer to the fossils
the room is darker    colder

the room itself accommodates no future
the room’s only time is already past
the room is ending ending ending ending
       andyou      andthelight

andthere are no labels 
or titles or descriptions to read
andthere are no names     only
the velvet andthe glass 
andthe fossils of light perspiring
their memory of burning and

you
        the memory you’ve already lit

Pregnancy Poem

I am two prophets / I am the space between bones / melted as cheese 
/ I am more / but less individual / I am not sorry enough / with my 
cupped hands / I am a bucket everyone asks / is that a bucket / I am 
sick with questions / I am moonstupid / I am water and mineral / and 
mucus and the angriest hair / I am more wounded than ever / I am 
giant sadness / I am a raw planet / I am a swollen arrow / I worry the 
air