The Battle of the Book Cover: British versus American Edition

Posted on by Jo Lou

We know, we know: you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover. And yet, for as widely as the adage as used, we are all—whether consciously or subconsciously—judging books by their covers every time we browse a bookstore, or quickly scroll through a most anticipated list, stopping at the ones that catch our eye. Publishers put an awful lot of stock into book covers as well, following certain hot trends (cough cough, the Blob, cough) and moving away from others (such as photorealism having taken a backseat the past few years).

Whether we book people like to admit it or not, the cover is a very important part of a book’s perception, and so we here at Electric Lit think it’s a worthwhile endeavor every now and again to take the pulse of the public and see what aesthetic choices are making a splash, and which aren’t faring so well. Is the Blob still in, with publishers or the public? Is realism making a comeback? To test the waters, we asked our Instagram followers to choose between the UK and US book cover editions, to see what the hottest book cover trends are this year, and which trends are soooOOoo 2021.

Careering by Daisy Buchanan

There’s something similar going on between the two covers here: the shade of green, even the pink—which is only a flash of lipstick and nail polish in the U.S. cover, rather than the primary element of the U.K. cover—and a clearly at-her-wits-end woman, which perfectly resonates with this book about a woman who finally lands her much-desired dream job writing for a magazine, only to find burnout waiting for her there. And in a very interesting twist for our first battle, realism is the clear favorite! If you’ve followed our book cover battles in the past, you may know that realism has historically been the loser, so this clear sweep is a surprising start. Is this the beginning of a turning tide? 

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

These two covers take different approaches to portraying this book about a mysterious inheritance a mother leaves her children: the U.K. cover opting to depict the more literal part—a spoon representing the physical black cake—while the U.S. cover chooses to depict the woman hiding behind secrets that are slowly uncovered after her death. The colorful swirls of the American cover feel very familiar—it’s sort of like those magic images where everything is a blur at first, but if you focus your eyes and stare long enough, the image beneath begins to appear. Comparatively, the British cover takes a more simplistic approach. Our voters, it seems, prefer the task of sussing out the secret inside swirls of the US cover.

Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades

These two covers once again feature a similar color scheme, this time neon green and pink, but are otherwise entirely different: while the American cover is more focused on the book’s New York City setting, the British version is more interested in the protagonists: Brown girls from immigrant families who grow up together in Queens. Both covers are also doing a little juxtaposition: the U.K. cover’s zine-esque ’90s-style squiggles, varied fonts, and sharper hues, set against the silhouettes of grown Brown women is perhaps meant to reflect both the playful youth of their friendship set against the adults they ultimately become, while the U.S. cover plays with the difference between their original homes deep in Queens and the sprawling cityscape of Manhattan—which, while in the same city, feel like two entirely different worlds. In another upset, realism once again prevails with a U.S. win here! 

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julie Armfield

Both covers here have a focus on water, which is fitting for this book about a woman whose marine biologist wife returns from a deep-sea mission gone awry as a seemingly entirely different person. The U.K. cover layers water over the figure of a woman in a way that begins to blur her out, symbolic of the protagonist watching her wife become unrecognizable after her expedition. The U.S. version goes with a more simplistic portrayal of waves under a pink sky (which calls to mind the old sailor’s saying, “Pink sky at night, sailors’ delight. Pink sky in morning, sailors’ take warning”). The U.K. win is on-theme with the interest in photographic realism we’ve been seeing so far!

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

Representing this smart, intense novel about a woman pegged by the government as a potential “bad mother” who may need to be sent to an institution that decide how fit of a parent she is, we once again have similar colors, different vibes. There’s something much more ominous about the U.S. cover’s shadowy doorways that draw you in and do justice to this book’s themes, and it seems that people responded better to the foreboding nature of the doors leading nowhere. The U.K. cover feels perhaps a bit too bubble gum—while it’s also representing the watchful nature of the institute with the shady building and searching spotlights, it doesn’t quite capture the mood the way the U.S. cover does, which our voters clearly responded to.

Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

In a battle of minimalist vs. maximalist realism, the maximalist wins out with the gorgeous U.S. cover that simultaneously evokes the art, hunger, and vampirism of the novel itself. The U.K. cover gets points for the peach, whose red veins feel distinctly bloody and do the work of evoking Kohda’s vampire protagonist’s hunger for both blood and human connection at once, but I have to agree that the U.S. cover is doing something special here. It’s not often that a book cover hits so many of a book’s themes so perfectly, while also being gorgeous, eye-catching, and quite unique. An impressive feat and well-deserved American win!

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

I suppose peaches are having a hot moment in the U.K. right now? And while it was less successful for Woman, Eating, for Deesha Philyaw’s short story collection full of Black women who are struggling to reconcile their own needs and desires with those of the church, the peach resulted in a successful win here, though not by a particularly wide margin. A significant percentage of voters still liked the U.S. cover’s depiction of a church lady herself, but not enough to win against the humble peach. Pink also seems to be having a hot moment in book covers, so it’s possible the color scheme was the real kicker here!

Hope and Glory by Jendella Benson

We haven’t seen a lot of abstract colors in this batch (it seems we’re trending away from the abstract), but the Blob makes a reappearance on the U.S. cover of this book about a woman who returns home to London from Los Angeles after her father’s death and is faced with the messiness that comes with reuniting with her family. It seems the Blob still has some sway with the public, as the colorful, ambiguous swirls of the U.S. cover took the win by a significant margin over the U.K.’s realist depiction of a woman crossing in front of a brick wall. Perhaps the bright blob-ishness, which feels like a callback to the book covers of yore (and by “yore,” I mean just a few months ago), sparked a bit of nostalgia within the new swath of realism.

Booth by Karen Joy Fowler

You’re seeing it here for the first time folks: a true 50/50 split! This is especially interesting, given how completely differently these two covers approach Karen Joy Fowler’s sweeping fictionalization exploring the family of John Wilkes Booth. Here, the U.K. cover opts for a simple color sketch of flowers and birds over a dark purple backdrop, with a singular snake looping through the title. The US cover is doing something entirely different (and quite unique!), with artwork that looks almost like it belongs on a box of deck of playing cards or an old timey cigarette box, with two distinct bullet holes punctuating the title (no explanation needed for that part). For whatever reason, these two covers representing the historical Booth family have equally struck a chord with our voters.

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Young Mungo brings us back around to the battle of photorealism vs. photorealism, and for Douglas Stuart’s much anticipated sophomore novel of an intense and dangerous queer romance set in Glasgow, the U.S. cover wins out. Both covers feature anonymous male faces, with the American version evoking some level of trouble and sadness, where the British is more focused on desire. It seems our voters preferred the slightly more dour of the two. Come on, y’all, are we not here for two men going at it on a book cover? No love for a sexy, unapologetically gay romance cover? Are readers simply not interested in seeing people making out on book covers (disagree, but alas, I’m merely the microphone, not the decider)? Either way: horny cover out, ambiguously sad cover in. 

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka

The American cover swept the competition for Julie Otsuka’s novel about a group of swimmers whose routine is disrupted when the pool they frequent is closed due to a crack in the bottom and the realities they are forced to grapple with when their escape is gone. This is a bit surprising, given how similar the two covers are when you break it down: both are blue covers with water on the front, but it looks like the voters were drawn more toward the classic chlorinated pool shade of the U.S. cover, which also features the swimmers themselves, over the U.K.’s darker, more interpretive design, which represents the crack in the pool itself.

The Colony by Audrey Magee

The theme of covers doing vastly different representations with similar styles continues with the artistic, painting-like brush strokes on both covers of Audrey Magee’s The Colony, about a painter who travels to a small Irish island from England for inspiration, a Frenchman who frequents this same island to study the language and people who live there, and the people who call this place their home. It’s no secret why both covers adopted the feeling of a painting, as a clear representation of the painter himself. While the U.K. cover went a bit more simple, representing a minimalist depiction of a small island in a large and lonely sea, the U.S. cover—which more of the voters responded too—depicts both the island and, it seems, the erasure of the individuals who live there by those who are attempting to depict them. 

Anonymous Sex edited by Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

Fruit-based covers are really having a moment it seems, though for this anthology of 27 anonymous sex stories that leaves you to guess which beloved author wrote what, featuring writing by Rebecca Makkai, Helen Oyeyemi, Jason Reynolds, and Téa Obreht, among many others, the strawberry butt was not preferred. The people have spoken, and they’re done with sexy fruits. No more fruit butts! Fruit butts out, sexy Rorschach in (is the Rorscach sexy? Is this my subconscious seeing lots of people doing it on the cover? Someone call in a professional).

Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King

Ambiguous colors once again take the win with Lily King’s Five Tuesdays in Winter, a short story collection that takes an intimate look at the pain and love of unforgettable characters.  It’s not quite the Blob, and more like an abstract still-life painting with a respectful nod to the Blob’s love of striking colors. Either way, the British cover’s more cartoonish cover of a woman contemplating by the water (featuring even more pink) seemed to draw the eye less than the brightly cluttered American edition.

New Animal by Ella Baxter

Another very close call here, with the U.S. barely eking it out! More photorealism and more pink are featured in these two colors, and the pink wins out for this book about a woman who, after a loss, skips out on her job painting the faces of the dead for their funerals, and explores her body’s grief through BDSM. Though by a very slim margin, our voters appeared to prefer the colorful U.S. cover that contrasts with the black-and-white woman swimming to the U.K.’s up-close depiction of a woman who looks as though she’s falling asleep at her desk, or just bored-as-hell, with the smeared lipstick of someone who’s had a long night (perhaps a subtle reference to doing the makeup of the dead?).

Checkout 19 by Claire Louise-Bennett

While both covers here are opting for an abstract art-feel, as we’ve seen time and time again, the voters prefer a flash of color to the U.K.’s black-and-white. The story of a girl whose world revolves around writing and reading, which examines what it means to understand yourself and your life through the lens of both creating and consuming literature, the U.K. cover might be a more direct depiction of notebook scribbles with a woman at the center of it all, it’s just a real uphill battle when you’re up against abstract colors. I’d also like to point out here that it seems like brush-stroke covers are very in right now!

True Biz by Sara Nović

Okay, I lied: black and white can win against colors, and does here with Sara Nović’s True Biz, about a residential school for the deaf that explores the worlds of the students and the hearing, CODA headmistress. Both designs take a literal depiction of sign language by featuring a hand on the cover, but the U.K. cover’s more serious, photographic depiction of faces within the hand, drew more people in than the colorful and playful U.S. version in this case. This begs the question: do we just love a serious cover over a playful one? Something a little more intense? Is colorful > plain, but sadness > colorful? Much to consider!

An Olive Grove in Ends by Moses McKenzie

The simple, cleaner U.K. cover won by a mile for Moses McKenzie’s story of a young Black British man who gets tangled up in a dangerous situation while trying to find a way to leave the neighborhood he grew up in with his childhood sweetheart. While the U.S. cover is evocative, with a bit of a graffiti feel that may be meant to represent the neighborhood in Bristol where the story takes place, the U.K. cover is a bit less busy and easier to read, and the circle containing and eye and colorful clouds elegantly depicts the protagonist’s dreams of a better life.

People Person by Candice Carty-Williams

The U.K. cover’s win for People Person feels a bit surprising here, as drawings of people have typically been a losing cover design thus far. For this story about a woman who suddenly finds herself back in close contact with her distant half-siblings, it might just be the perfect cover. While the U.S. cover takes the colorful route, it avoids taking any sort of abstract shape, which may be the factor in losing here. In general, it’s seemed that the color-based covers only win if there is some sort of shape—not necessarily the Blob, but something your eye can catch onto. Something to take note of, publishers!

Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

Maybe I’m biased here as someone with a deep love for foxes, but I personally am shocked that this was such a close one. I mean, it is a fox. A very cute—if slightly ominous—fox gracing the cover. The U.K. deserved a greater sweep here, if you ask me. Though maybe the U.S. cover gave that sweet little fox (sorry, am I making my favoritism too clear here?) a run for its money because the broken locket on an evocatively looping cord is a more direct representation of this novel that investigates a serial killer set to be executed through the eyes of the women who surround him and the detective who hunted him down. Fair enough—the U.S. cover is great too! And perhaps I shouldn’t be so obsessed with the cover of a book about a serial killer being extremely cute. But sorry, it’s cute. I love it. It wins with the audience and in my heart as well.

The Euphoria and Dysphoria of Liminal Queer Identities

Posted on by Jo Lou

Lydia Conklin’s Rainbow Rainbow feels faithful to its namesake. At times the debut story collection pushes its characters through the dreary and damp, the constant pressure of light emotional rain. And just as often, sunshine arrives to reflect off of the puddles, sprinkling the pages with sunshine and delight, illuminating the unique plights of queerness and transness in their vast spectrums and vivid colors. 

Conklin offers us an array of queer hilarity and heartbreak as their characters traipse, often with reluctant obligation, through the banal milestones of getting older and getting out––of the suburbs, of bad relationships, of the closet. The stories are not intended to capture the entirety of transness, but Conklin’s detailed fiction leaves the reader with the impression of universality, regardless of their gender identity. 

I spoke with Conklin in late February about what it’s like to be visibly trans in a world that looks so different from what they saw in their childhood in liberal white New England, and how the evolving landscape of queer representation informs their fiction and their life. 

Jessika Bouvier: How has your writing served as a vehicle of expression and exploration of gender? How would you define the reciprocal relationship between writing about transness and living in it?

Lydia Conklin: There’s a couple parts to your question. The part about living versus writing trans issues: I wrote about it before I ever talked about it in relationships myself. I think sometimes it’s easier to explore things in fiction. I knew I was trans, I knew all about my gender issues, but I wasn’t ready to talk about them with anyone. The story “Pioneer” in the collection was the first trans story I wrote, which I wrote in graduate school—probably 2011, about ten years ago. It was the easiest entry point for me. The dysphoria I felt as a child—it was so long ago and now I could see it clearly. It didn’t feel as exposing of me now, you know?

What does it mean to make art? What would you give up for it? What if it makes you a bad person?

In terms of how my work has evolved since that story, it has evolved alongside that. [Some of the stories] do deal with a theme that I’ve sort of been returning to again and again: What does it mean to make art? What would you give up for it? What if it makes you a bad person? What are the toxic parts of it that infect you, and what are the parts that are worthy and good? It doesn’t come up so much in Rainbow Rainbow actually, but both of the novels I’ve been going back and forth working on deal with those issues. 

JB: Much in the same way “Pioneer” is based on youth, I found a lot of the stories are either based on childhood (“The Black Winter of New England”) or feature characters surrounded by children (“Sunny Talks”). And, you know, despite the fact that many of my own students probably think of me as “old,” I feel personally very lucky to be queer and young in an environment where media and art are trying to portray queer youth with authenticity,  or even glamor. I’m interested in how you feel the stories in Rainbow Rainbow are adding to the conversation about how kids these days are having to reconcile not only with their evolving gender identities, but tackling the confounding nature of getting older in general, which we all do.

LC: I think that the generational divide is really interesting to me, which you can probably see the most in “Sunny Talks.” But also in “The Black Winter of New England,” which you mentioned, and “Ooh, the Suburbs,” too—both of those stories are about sort of proto-queer children. [In the latter] they’re a little more directly facing in it, but it’s this place where they know they’re queer, but they’re not able to fully live in that identity because it’s the ‘90s. I just find it so interesting. Even though I grew up in a liberal town in New England, in high school, there was one “out” kid in a school of almost 2,000 people. People called me names, and my friend who was “out” was pushed down in the quad; if there was anyone who was trans or nonbinary, or was even called that, it would’ve been suicide. But then when I was teaching high school starting in 2013, I taught in this program for young writers, kids were like trans and nonbinary and queer and asexual and all of these different identities that you wouldn’t have ever been able to say aloud even to your best friend when I was in high school. I was just blown away by how fast things had moved. It’s amazing and so heartening, and every summer I would cry tears of joy and relief about it. 

It does come with two caveats. Sometimes it feels like I’m being gaslit by the culture for having suffered in this way about something people would be like, “but this is no big deal!” now. But the other side of it is that it is still a big deal. Kids who were out at fifteen and it would seem [to some] that they’re living this easy life that wasn’t available to me, they actually were [and are] incredibly brave to be out in that identity even now. So they also get gaslit by the culture being like, “oh, well, it’s on TV! It’s cool, it’s sexy now, there’s a whole show!” Really living that identity is still not easy. They dealt with parents who weren’t accepting, barriers to getting treatment, all kinds of things. It’s kind of a weird place that the culture is in. In some ways [being out] is glamorized and okay, and in other ways it’s still deeply messed up. 

JB: Yeah, it does sort of feel like in some ways the “aesthetics” of being trans, or queer in general, are being circulated in media in a way that is certainly great to see representation-wise, but I see what you’re saying. Those practical aspects of being out and young and trans––we’re not quite caught up with what’s going on in Euphoria, obviously.

There is one sort of path to being trans that seems visible for people who are cisgender, and if the character isn’t following that exact path, [the journey] is illegible to the larger culture.

LC: Yeah, exactly. I haven’t actually seen that show, so I can’t speak to it, but I know about it. But I also think there can be a problem, and this is with any non-majority identity, there is a certain story that people want to hear. People who are not part of that identity want to hear ‘that story,’ and if it’s not fitting into the story, then it’s not acceptable. Some people want a certain coming-out narrative and a very clear path. There is one sort of path to being trans that seems visible for people who are cisgender, and if the character isn’t following that exact path, [the journey] is illegible to the larger culture. So, it’s like, “well why isn’t your story doing ‘that’?” I feel like there have to be more complex narratives than the ones that are, so far, being embraced.

JB: And beyond the shows I referenced, it does feel like the literary community, at least in my corners of queer Twitter, are really eager to frame this time in publishing as sort of a trans renaissance. There’s been a lot of mainstream success of trans stories, like Detransition, Baby and The Natural Mother of the Child, and I think as a natural result a lot of conversations about transness are happening at a heightened level. But I wonder if you can speak on whether this perceived representation, especially from the point of view of cis authors—are its trickle down effects even positive? Are they even really felt? I recognize this is like six questions in one. But, what do you think these conversations about being trans and nonbinary are getting right, and what are they still missing? 

LC: Yeah, there’s a lot to say about that. I think one thing that’s a problem in publishing and probably other forms of media, though I’m not as familiar with them: there can be one book that’s like, “this is the book about Black women of this year!” and we aren’t going to entertain any other books. It’s almost like a quota situation. I feel like Detransition, Baby kind of filled that spot, where anyone who is unfamiliar with queer culture is like, “oh, I’ll read this one book and then I’ll know everything.” And it’s an amazing book and I love it, but obviously even Torrey Peters herself wouldn’t say that’s the whole story. But people may read just that book and be like, “I’m done.” It could open up [readers] minds and their interests, which would be ideal but . . . I don’t know. One thing––this is kind of like a pet peeve of mine and I never know how grouchy to be about it––one thing that continues to happen in queer lit: cishet people are still writing queer books, but not really called to task for it. And that’s fine, it’s fiction, you can write whatever you want. If there were rules about what you are allowed to write, we wouldn’t have fantasy, or historical fiction, or science fiction, or anything that is not autobiographical fiction, and that would be horrible. But I feel like there are so many cishet people still writing trans or queer stories that, individually, can be amazing––some of these books are my favorite queer books! But when you look over the broad picture of all of them, sometimes there are disturbing trends that expose what cishet people think a queer narrative is. It’s something I think about. Like, why isn’t this being interrogated? . . . I think it’s because queerness can be less visible in some ways than other identities could be. 

JB: Something that comes to mind was back during the Black Lives Matter protests in summer 2020, there was a book by a white author—I won’t name it because I don’t want to put anyone on blast—people were circulating it as the book that white people needed to read, when so many Black scholars were like, “isn’t it kind of funny how you don’t want to buy any of our books, but you want to buy the white author’s book telling you how to be a better white person?” So I definitely see what you mean, it’s not that [cishet people] are inherently trying to muddy the water, or perpetuate toxic ideas about queer people, but I agree that there’s a lack of visibility in some ways, so it doesn’t come up as often.

Very tangential, but many of the stories have what I would describe as an underlying or unifying theme where most of the nonbinary and trans characters inhabit this Spirit-of-the-Other, if you will. I’ve already mentioned “Pioneer,” where it’s especially pronounced because Coco is forced to cosplay as an ox instead of a boy. There feels like there is this competitive edge, or at least a consciousness of the physical and emotional differences that are separating cis characters and trans characters in the stories. Can you speak to where this sense of “otherness” comes from?

LC: Ooh, yeah. I never drew it out like that. It’s just that feeling when you are living in the wrong body or when you have dysphoria. Especially as a child when you don’t really know what’s going on, something is wrong. And in every moment wrong. It’s not just, oh, I said something wrong in class and now I look like a weirdo, or I can’t make a friend. It’s that moment of physical embodiment, which is all the time, is wrong and messed up and painful and uncomfortable, but you don’t have the tools in any way to understand what it is. Starting from that place—it’s very alienating to people who don’t feel that way. 

I remember when I got top surgery and my cis friend asked how I felt. I said “amazing,” and he was like, “whoa, I wish I could remove a body part and then feel amazing.” And I went, “yeah, but it’s not like I felt good and now I feel amazing; I felt horrible and now I feel normal like you do every day.” I know everyone has some discomfort and bodies are weird. Nobody feels just perfect and wonderful in their body. But it does put you into this very strange “otherness” like you say. It’s very hard to understand for people who haven’t felt it. 

JB: Yeah 100%. I think that’s sort of the disorienting nature of dysphoria, the isolationist nature of it. It’s only really a thing if it’s something you experience. I definitely sense that in a lot of the stories. All of the characters have some sort of perception of it, even if they’ve gotten top surgery or they “pass,” it’s almost ingrained in them how long they’ve lived in that space of separation. I thought that was a really powerful theme throughout.

You were kind of talking about how your friend was mentioning that longing to experience joy with your body—gender euphoria instead of dysphoria. I don’t want to spoil it for people reading, but I do want to talk about one particular moment in “Sunny Talks.” Henry and Emerson are arguing with Wellcamp at the panel, and Henry tells Wellcamp that transness is inherently negative. He says, “You’re born wrong… you want what you’ll never have.” And although the argument is short, Henry says that because Wellcamp discredits gender dysphoria and instead credits their transition to something they’ve done out of joy, they’re discrediting the foundation of the trans community.

I thought this was a really fascinating and also heartbreaking argument. I was wondering: where do you side on this issue? Do you side more with Henry or Wellcamp? Is trans joy the foundation of transness, or is gender dysphoria?

LC: It’s something I think about a lot because when I was kind of figuring out my gender stuff and what I wanted to do, I was watching a lot of trans YouTubers, which was the part of the inspiration for that story. A lot of them were significantly younger than me and are probably now in their early twenties. There is so much in-fighting and tribalism, which of course there is in any small, tight knit community, especially one that is oppressed and has a hard time. Sometimes the fighting turns in on each other.

This was a debate that fascinated me because some people will say, like, “Transness equals gender dysphoria. If you have gender dysphoria, you are trans, whether or not you take action against it.” But there are other people who say, “well what if I just feel better with these interventions, or this transition, but I don’t feel bad about how my body is now?” And I personally think any way you come to it is valid. People are different. I come from more of the dysphoria zone, so at first it was hard for me to understand the euphoria argument. Even though obviously I have felt gender euphoria, it was hard for me to understand at first why you would make these decisions if you didn’t have dysphoria and pain around how your body currently was. Now I’ve met more people who have had that different journey and it makes more sense to me, and I never liked how people were bashing other people for that. Because, like, no one is going to put themselves through surgery, or hormones, or medical treatment, or even a social transition for the hell of it or for a whim. If they want to do it, there’s a reason. Why would you give somebody a hard time for that? But maybe it’s because people are resentful they didn’t have the struggles that they had, I’m not sure.

Korean Dramas Saved Me From Grieving Alone

Posted on by Alex Juarez

In February 2021, in the deep winter of quarantine, I wrote to a colleague I was friendly with to ask a work question and to see how her novel was going. She said it had been going well, but in order to get through quarantine she’d abandoned it in the service of watching K-dramas, and that I should watch Crash Landing on You if I hadn’t already. So, I watched Crash Landing on You. In it, a South Korean entrepreneur, Yoon Se-ri, while paragliding to promote her sportswear line, gets whisked away in a tornado. She lands in a tree, dangling over the DMZ in North Korea, where we meet Captain Ri of the Korean People’s Army. Captain Ri, to our relief, decides to save her from being discovered. This show consumed me completely. It was sensational, but also very slow-moving, so the style and logic of the world began to seem realistic. I spent so much time with the characters I saw their faces when I closed my eyes. During the day, I soared with their triumphs and mourned their heartbreaks, and each night, I willingly rejoined the world so perfectly designed to distract and nurture.

Ten months earlier, at the beginning of the pandemic, my 30-year-old friend died of COVID. This is not an essay about who Zoe was or what it means that she’s gone, because even now, I don’t know and can’t conceive of it. What would I do, list the things she liked? Talk about memories we shared? Describe the sound of her laugh? She was a person, whole, and unknowable. It’s also not an essay about the role racism played in her death—not just in the treatment she did and didn’t receive when she had COVID, but in every moment of her life leading up to her final interactions with the people who were supposed to care for her. It’s just an essay about what it was like to lose her in this really particular way, from a distance, and in isolation.

I felt, in the early days of Zoe’s death, closer to her than ever. I dreamed about her at night and all day, I looked at pictures of her. I reread eight years of our texts, her stories, an interview with her, all the books she said she was reading in that interview. I looked at her Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, old emails. I watched videos she’d sent me and listened to her hockey podcast, which I’d never listened to when she was alive. I met friends from other periods of her life when we gathered virtually to remember her. I followed the poet I knew she’d had a crush on on social media. Paradoxically, I felt, at times, euphoric—like I was working on something, like I was in motion, moving away from the fact that her life ended in a facility in New Jersey, and toward her, and the way I felt when I was with her, a feeling I could still summon.

This is not an essay about who Zoe was or what it means that she’s gone, because even now, I don’t know and can’t conceive of it.

Feeling close to Zoe soon gave way to disorienting grief. Grief is disorienting on its own. Extreme sadness, extreme disbelief, extreme anger all tip into fear for me. Fear of the reality that causes the feelings, fear of the intensity of the feelings themselves. At the same time, while I was quarantined inside my house, it was easy to forget for whole strings of moments Zoe was no longer alive in this reality. It was easy to not understand that her death was real when I couldn’t see or touch anyone who knew Zoe or who knew that I knew Zoe. My daily routine was organized around trying to simulate some sort of school environment for my son, without which he showed more physical signs of stress. When I was supposed to be making lunch, I stared out the kitchen window thinking how Zoe’s dogs didn’t know where she was. I laid on the trundle bed attached to my son’s bed while he napped, thinking about the way Zoe’s room looked in graduate school, clothes and makeup and notebooks everywhere. Zoe really liked my son in a way that seemed genuine, different from the way you have to like your friends’ kids. She had a niece the same age and we would send each other videos of their mystifying behavior. She sent a lot of videos of her family, in fact, her mother, sister, nieces, nephew, and dogs, recording sometimes when they didn’t know it. Usually an argument, or Zoe laughing at her mom threatening everyone, or Zoe encouraging her nephew to explain his reasoning behind some outrageous claim. Often in these scenes they were sitting around the kitchen table, eating things Zoe had made. Now, Zoe’s sister, Mia, says her urn sits in the center of the table, so that she’s not lonely. But everyone stays in their own rooms. No more eating together, Mia said. No more laughter in the house. 

After I watched Crash Landing on You, I watched 17 other K-dramas. They were each 16 episodes and between 60-90 minutes per episode, totaling about 340 hours of subtitled romance. When a show ended, I felt a manageable loss, longing for fictional characters. I might think, how could I ever love anyone as much as Se-ri and Captain Ri? And then I’d meet Dal-mi, Do-san, and Mr. Han in Start Up. And Hong Joo, Yoo Beom, and Woo Tak in While You Were Sleeping, Ta Mi and Cha Hyeon in Search WWW, Se Hee in Because This is My First Life, Hwi Oh and Min Kyung in Mad for Each Other. Sometimes I ask my friend Sunmi, also a friend of Zoe’s, for gossip about the actors. She’s from Busan and doesn’t watch K-dramas, or any dramas. She says they’re full of too many people to sympathize with, too many emotions. Which is exactly what I want, to be filled with distracting emotions.

It was easy to forget for whole strings of moments Zoe was no longer alive in this reality.

In Mad for Each Other, No Hwi Oh (Woo Jung) and Lee Min Kyung (Yeon-Seo Oh) meet on their way to see the same therapist. Hwi Oh has just been through a series of frustrating events on the bus and in the rain, and when he loses his slipper, he asks the stranger behind him to toss it over while he holds his bare foot off the wet sidewalk. Min Kyung tries, but accidentally sends it into the street instead where it’s pummeled by traffic. She gets to the building first, and seeing Hwi Oh following her, tries to close the elevator door. Hwi Oh is late for his appointment and asks her to hold the door. But his urgency is threatening, and she hits him over and over with her umbrella. We eventually learn through their adjacent therapy sessions that Hwi Oh is on leave from his job as a detective for beating up a suspected drug dealer. And Min Kyung has recently recovered from an act of dating violence by her ex-boyfriend. Hwi Oh and Min Kyung are, to our delight, unknowingly next-door neighbors. After trying in vain to avoid each other, the two slowly fall in love, and we get to watch Hwi Oh save Min Kyung from being afraid. And Min Kyung saves Hwi Oh from being lonely. And everything ends well.

Min Kyung is admittedly pretty annoying. She’s paranoid and reactive. She peels her address labels off her packages and tears them up. She doesn’t trust that she’s turned off the gas. She seems selfish and alarmist. It isn’t until the end of the series that we see the footage of Min Kyung’s ex-boyfriend beating her in the street, pulling her up and knocking her back down, dragging her around, kicking her and stomping on her. Suddenly it makes sense that Min Kyung is so careful, even about things that seem logically unrelated to her attack. She doesn’t trust herself because she’d made such a huge error in judgment about this man. She doesn’t trust anyone else, potential sources of danger. She doesn’t trust anything because her world changed so suddenly.

When a show ended, I felt a manageable loss, longing for fictional characters. I might think, how could I ever love anyone as much as Se-ri and Captain Ri?

Regarding COVID safety, my friend Caroline, who is also mourning Zoe, and I are still the two most observant people I know. Even if some of our rituals aren’t logical. Even if they make us more isolated and miserable than necessary. In the beginning, when we hung out outside, we sat 20 feet apart and wore masks. If I gave her a book, Caroline would back away from her trunk while I placed it inside, and then she’d leave it there for three days. We’ve now gotten three vaccines each that Zoe didn’t live to see, but we still meet outside at a reservoir halfway between our houses. We don’t share snacks, even though we know COVID doesn’t spread through food. We are aware of who is downwind from who, even though we know wind is not linear. We haven’t hugged each other in two years. Around us, people hold hands, gather for family photos, pile into cars. I watch them laugh and touch and think, fuck you, you’ll probably all be fine. And fuck us, Caroline and I will probably be fine, too.

For a while Caroline and I would Zoom late into the night. I would watch her cook herself dinner, eat, and do the dishes. Or fearfully venture into the basement she shared with her landlord, mask on, to get her laundry out of the dryer and fold it. “Keep talking,” she’d say when she muted her end to pee. We didn’t always talk about Zoe. We talked about her couple’s therapy sessions with her girlfriend. Her girlfriend moving out. Her girlfriend moving back in. Should we keep writing books? What will my son’s generation be like when they grow up? They’ve been taught their most natural impulses, to touch things, to be near other people, to see human faces, are dangerous. We decided to read Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels together. But then the books were over and Zoe was still dead. Caroline’s girlfriend moved back out and Zoe was still dead.

Part of what’s helpful about Korean romances is that they’re foreign. While I’m trapped inside the same four walls month after month, it’s a relief to spend time somewhere effortlessly unfamiliar and interesting. Another part is that these shows are perfectly designed for distraction. In his essay, “The Perfect Gerbil,” George Saunders writes about many of the reasons Donald Barthelme’s story “The School” is so successful, and one of them is the pattern. In “The School,” we see a series of escalating deaths in these poor kids’ classroom: trees, snakes, herb gardens, mice, salamanders, fish, but then, a puppy. When a puppy dies, we think, oh no, what else could happen? Then humans start dying, first ones we don’t know, then ones we do know, but it’s logical, they’re old. But then parents die. And then two students themselves. We get to know this pattern and we get a pleasure burst each time we see our expectations being met. When the pattern is interrupted, when the students ask about the meaning of life in hyperbolic diction, we get another pleasure burst by being surprised: 

“One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of —

I said, yes, maybe.

They said, we don’t like it.” 

The students then ask their teacher, the narrator, to make love to the teaching assistant, Helen, so they can see what it’s like. Suddenly all the rules are out the window and we have no idea if the narrator is going to demonstrate sex to school children. Saunders says Barthelme now has his audience right where he wants us, wondering what will happen: “The reader honestly doesn’t know, but does care.”

Korean romances are composed of recognizable blocks but built into intricate and surprising structures. In each narrative, there is almost always a drunk scene, a first kiss, a playful scene, a secondary romance or two, a soon-to-be-discovered childhood connection between the lovers, a scene where one lover almost kisses the other when they’re asleep, sometimes a flatlining scene, depending on the genre, in which a single tear escapes the corner of the dying lover’s eye (before they are revived), a lot of meals at Subway. You feel like a genius insider when you recognize one of these scenes taking shape, but each one is surprising, too, positioned uniquely, doing different work for the narrative, and populated with singular characters. In Because This Is My First Life, the pattern is broken almost immediately when the first kiss happens in Episode 1. Ji-ho kisses Se-hee, a stranger, in an uncharacteristic move to get her first kiss over with. And a proposal of marriage happens in Episode 2 when Se-hee realizes Ji-ho is his roommate he’s never met, and her organizational skills have deeply moved him. There is always a point, sometimes this early, sometimes as late as Episodes 15 or 16, when we don’t know what will happen, but we do care.

In Mad for Each Other, Min Kyung asks Hwi Oh to teach her self-defense. They act out attacks together. She puts her hands on his shoulders. He runs alongside her shouting encouragements. After she graduates, he gives her a whistle to blow if she’s ever in serious trouble. She asks, if I blow on this, will you appear?

You feel like a genius insider when you recognize one of those scenes taking shape, but each one is surprising, too.

I, too, can make Hwi Oh appear. I open Netflix when I want to ask Zoe what to do about Caroline and our friend Jonathan who are in a fight. I turn on Mad for Each Other when I want to read the novel Zoe was writing, or complain about the relative success of our peers. “I want to send Zoe this.” I text Caroline a picture after my sister-in-law did my nails. “I want to send Zoe this,” Caroline texts me when she finds a postcard with the word FORTUNE written in black caps and can’t tell whether she or Zoe wrote it.

One of my first writing teachers said a few years after her dad died, she dreamed of him sitting outside, his body covered in a fine layer of snow. Caroline recently dreamed that Zoe took off in a capsule with her name written in lights. My brain hasn’t done the work of understanding that she’s gone. I can talk about it. I can even talk about it easily, in a practiced way. But when I see a picture of her, there’s a measurable amount of time when I feel like she’s here before I remember. I wonder what Zoe would think of me sitting in bed reading subtitles on my laptop all night, the sound turned down so I can barely hear the characters’ voices. I think she’d like it. She was always up late. She wrote at night. She cooked all night when she was stressed. But her sister Mia reminded us that Zoe said to her, “You know what your problem is? You like to dwell on shit.”

The last time I talked to Mia she said she was feeling a lot of conflicting things: angry, sad, jealous. I know what she means. The world is now talking about how we live with COVID, but Zoe is still dead. I keep thinking, if I never hug Caroline again, if I never go to another restaurant, if I never laugh or hold hands or pile into a car, if I do my best to keep from living, then I won’t have to live without Zoe. But Sunmi pointed out I’m soothing myself by watching shows in which people are near each other. They save each other from grieving alone. They pat each other lovingly on the back. They make each other want to live. 

Recently, Caroline, Sunmi, and I met at the reservoir. By the water, it was bright and freezing, impossible to shield ourselves from the wind. We watched blocks of ice knock into each other in the waves and talked about whether Caroline should try couple’s therapy with her new girlfriend. Sunmi’s and my extended families got COVID in January, but they’re okay now. When we stood by our cars to say goodbye, we hugged each other for a long time.

Dan Chaon Wants to Remind Us That We’re Not Getting Any Younger

Posted on by Alex Juarez

Acclaimed writer Dan Chaon has a new novel, Sleepwalk, published last week by Henry Holt and Co. A few years ago, Chaon stopped commuting to teach—from his home on a tree lined street in Cleveland Heights, one of the city’s eastern ring suburbs to Oberlin College, a storied institution in Northern Ohio carrying an uneasy relationship with the semi-rural communities that surround it. But he took up a road trip in his writing.

Sleepwalk is a literary picaresque full of dark wit and quirky observations set in an alternate America. Mixed in with the purely imagined are characters, technologies, and events that are real, and taken together, demonstrate just how close we are to things getting really weird.

The protagonist, Will Bear, is a middle-aged mercenary more or less content to live in the shadows, on the road, completing a variety of odd jobs, mostly criminal and often violent, for a Company that he tries not to think too hard about. But when someone claiming to be his daughter from a long ago—misguided— sperm donation, tracks him down despite his usual tricks of evasion, he is forced to confront questions of identity, parenthood, and belonging.

On a cold, clear day in what Clevelanders refer to as early spring, but is, in actuality, the third stage of winter, we spoke over tea at my home in Shaker Heights , another ring suburb. The conversation was fun and rich—punctuated frequently by Dan’s airy staccato laugh, a motorcycle engine failing to turnover and mine, instantaneously intense, like pouring out a bowl of marbles.

Lynda Montgomery: Which came first—the protagonist’s many names or the bucket full of unexpectedly ringing burner phones that spook him in Chapter One?

Dan Chaon: Both at the same time. The burner phones were all calling different aliases. Then, I came up with a long list of aliases. That was really fun—all variations on Will Bear.

LM: A lot of puns arise and it looks terrific on the page. The Barely Blur, or Will Bear, covers many miles from where we meet him in Utah to where the novel ends in Alaska. Have you been to many of these places?

DC: One of the Easter eggs that I wanted to have in the book is to mention all fifty states. And it does, I double checked. In my adult life, I’ve traveled a lot by car. I wanted to have these different locales to give a sense of an alternate version of America. Some of the description I did from memory and for some, Google Maps, or YouTube or whatever. It was fun to go on Street View and drive the route to see what the nine-eyed Google car discovered. Some really amazing things became a part of the novel—the burning wind turbine in Texas and the amusement park GATORS AND FRIENDS in Caddo Parish, Louisiana were both internet discoveries.   

LM: I appreciated the verisimilitude of scenes set in  Mississippi and Alabama, because I know those places well. You conveyed a specific quirkiness with such authority that it enhanced my understanding and appreciation of the scenes set in places unfamiliar to me. Creepy Kentucky was also a favorite.

DC: I’ve spent time in the Daniel Boone National Forest. And that’s a fun place to write about because it is spooky, right?

LM: Definitely. You wrote this novel during a particularly interesting time, starting after the election of 45 and finishing during the first global pandemic in a century. Taking aside the very real possibility that we are indeed near the end, how did you write about the United States in a near possible future? Did current events cause any trouble as you drafted the novel?

DC: I made a deliberate decision to play fast and loose with contemporary detail. Things were moving so fast and changing so much that I didn’t feel like I had a real grip on what America would be like when the book was published. I decided to simply create a version and play it out.

Things that I thought were so funny that turned out not to be—like people wearing masks all over the place. There’s a scene where Will’s driven through downtown Chicago and these businessmen are all wearing gas masks. And I wrote about riots and protests right before the protests of summer 2020.  And I was like, I’d have to be careful not to predict anything too dire. Things came true as I was writing, and I was very disappointed in them coming true.      

In my adult life, I’ve traveled a lot by car. I wanted to have these different locales to give a sense of an alternate version of America.

 LM: Sadly, I guess that that’s where we are now. Did that experience inform what you work on now?

DC: Absolutely. I’m doing a historical novel set in 1915, and I’m so thankful to not have to worry. 1915 is far enough away that I can play with what level of historical detail I want.

LM: The protagonist uses some unique diction. Did that come early in your writing process?

DC: I draw on the voice of my biological father, whom I met when I was about thirty. We had a complicated relationship, but we were close. He grew up in Iowa and had a countrified quality to some things that he’d say like, I reckon, but then he moved to LA. I wanted to play with that mix of 60s LA stoner and country boy—the voice of the novel is more stylized than the way my dad talked, but it definitely gets at some of his weirdness.

LM: Ideas about identity, parenthood, and what constitutes parenthood are themes in Sleepwalk, and, often, in your work more broadly.

DC: As somebody who was adopted, and, fairly late in my infancy, it’s always been on my mind and has had a significant impact on my writing.  I’m interested in the nature/nurture dichotomy and what happens to children. Also the idea that children are blank slates, and they’ll soak up whatever you give them. I don’t think that’s true, but it’s built into the way that we think about unwanted children. Though the philosophies behind adoption and foster care have changed over the years, they have continued to be problematic by defining children as possessions that can be traded.

LM: For me, some of the most compelling parts of the novel are when the protagonist imagines his alternative life as a nurturing father. Not only does he father Cammie, the problematic, possible-daughter character, but he does a lot of parenting throughout the novel. He wants to be a good parent, and he sometimes kind of is, but mostly isn’t.

DC: Yeah. He’s also someone who was like, colossally poorly parented himself. That feeds into his desire and his aversion to being a dad.

I’m interested in the nature/nurture dichotomy and what happens to children. Also the idea that children are blank slates.

LM: Let’s talk about process. You, often co-teaching with Lynda Barry, train writers to allow their subconscious to bring forward images in writing. Many of the exercises involve the constraint of chance, pulling a word at random from a bag full of words written on slips of paper, writing in reaction to visual images, using a semi-random title as a starting point. Do you do any of these exercises or variations as you’re starting work or revising a piece?

DC: Pretty much all the way through the draft I’ll do a subconscious free write. Sometimes that will start with drawing a picture. Or sometimes I’ll give myself a title. All the chapters in Sleepwalk have titles. I had a whole drawer full of titles—sometimes it was just because of the title that the chapter got written. The strange one in Daniel Boone National Forest  [titled “RIP in Peace”] is one of those.

LM: Where do expectations come in during the course of a project?

DC: Sometimes you’re competing with yourself in some ways, or you’re challenging yourself. And there were particular things that I wanted to do because they would be fun. One was to write a novel in first person present tense. I liked the voice that I had come up with, and that was a challenge that seemed fun. And I set out to write something that was lighter and funnier than Ill Will. Even people who were extremely complimentary would mention just how dark and depressing that novel was. With Sleepwalk it’s not obviously completely funny. There’s darkness in this too. There’s scary stuff and triggering stuff, but I feel like it is funnier.

LM: What parts of a novel project do you find the most challenging and does that vary from project to project?

DC: No, it’s always the same. The end. I find that when I start novels I have an idea of who the characters are and of what the plot is. Or, I have a general idea of what the last chapter’s going to be, but no idea how to get there. The mechanics of the third act are hard for me and, to some extent, you can see that in all of the novels, because there’s a creaking and shuttering as they try to get over that third act hump.

LM: I think you’re being a little hard on yourself.

DC: Well, I can see it. If you can’t, then hurray. But, the actual mechanics, the pacing, can be hard. Because people want it to go fast, and in order for it to go fast, you need all the dominoes set up. I very rarely do. A lot of times you can see me in the background scampering around.

LM: How about at the sentence level? Do those intuitive techniques work syntactically also?

DC: Yeah. Often, it’s the sound of language or the music of language that will come first for me. When I’m doing free writes, the language play sometimes takes over in a way that other aspects, like describing an action or a scene, come less natural to me. I can describe a static scene fine. And I love, like, language and dialogue, but when it comes to like, somebody is in a gunfight in a gas station, with two other people and a dog—that’s fucking hard. That took forever.

When I’m doing free writes, the language play sometimes takes over in a way that other aspects, like describing an action or a scene, come less natural to me.

LM: Did you draw some of that action?

DC: I had to draw a map of the actual gas station, and lines where people were walking and running. But in the previous chapter I had a wonderful time describing everything that was on the shelves in this gas station. Most of it had to be cut—it was almost a delaying tactic—because I knew there had to be this action scene. Before the action scene, the Barely Blur is walking through the aisles describing every single piece of candy. I tell myself Look, you can do it, but you know you’re gonna have to cut.

LM: I want to talk music. For a bunch of years, you’ve made an annual song list. [e.g. Dan Chaon’s 200 Songs of 2021 ]

DC: Twenty-two years.

LM: I use your lists along with tips from my children to keep my life filled with new and interesting music. Tell us more about your exploration and curation of great music. You were a DJ?

DC: I was a DJ in college and for a couple years afterwards. However, back when my kids were little, during the 90s, I lost track of contemporary music. It made me feel really bad, because music was such an important part of my creative process. Around ‘98 or ‘99 I started scouring. I’d go on the internet, find stuff, go to the library, find stuff, and start making these mixes and lists. It’s a meditative process for me—looking for music, finding music, making a playlist. During that front of the mind process, I’m doing a rote activity, while the back of my mind, or the subconscious, is doing a lot of work.  I’ll find the song and I’ll be like, Oh, that plugs into the emotion that I need right here. The playlists for one reason or another will reflect whatever I’m working on at the time—the mood and even some of the language.

LM: Does this hold for your recent lists and Sleepwalk?

DC: Some songs, yes, they’re absolutely in the book. And then, there are certain kinds of songs that, while not necessarily contemporary, are touchstones for the novel. Like the song “Sleepwalk.”  And Will has an attachment to 60s music and to 60s girl groups in particular, because his mom claimed that she was in a girl group. The song “He’s so fine” has echoes in the novel.

A lot of the exercises and the things that I would work on with students were the same things I was working on as an artist myself.

LM: Are there other forms of art that align with your creative process?

DC: Photography. I look at a lot of images.

LM: Since your last novel, Ill Will, you retired from Oberlin College to write full time. Aside from the stuff you probably don’t miss—the commute, administrative nonsense, office politics—Are there things that you do miss?

[DC] I love working with students and working with people that age. To some extent the relationship between Will and his possible-daughter Cammie comes out of that. She’s definitely got elements of past students.

LM: Did your work as a creative writing professor contribute to your own art making? Or would you  say that your teaching is simply another way that you’re creative? 

DC: What I was doing in the classroom was what I was doing as a writer. I mean, a lot of the exercises and the things that I would work on with students were the same things I was working on as an artist myself. They were interdependent.

LM: Time for the lightning round. What music, movies, shows, literature should fans of Dan Chaon seek out?

DC: I love the new Beach House album that just came out in February. My favorite movie of 2021 was Nightmare Alley.  I also really loved the movie CODA. I feel like there are echoes of both with my work. And a documentary about skateboarding directed by Bing Liu, Minding the Gap (2018.) I loved that movie so much that I gave it a small cameo in Sleepwalk. Three skateboarders who show up [in South Carolina] are a tribute to Bing Liu.

LM: Would you rather shovel your driveway or pull weeds?

DC: Pull weeds.

LM: If forced to attend one, would it be a Browns game with some serious tailgaters or a black tie gala with a bunch of bankers?

DC: I’d go with the tailgate but I wouldn’t go see the game.

LM: No, you have to go.

DC: Well, hopefully I’ll be really drunk. 

LM: Biggest mixed misconception about Cleveland?

DC: I don’t think people realize how comfortable it is to live here. I feel like I’m not missing anything. For a lot of people, there’s something kind of ooky about it right? I mean, the weather’s okay. But everything else is kind of cool.

LM: Best piece of writing advice you’ve gotten or given?

DC: The best advice that I got and the best advice that I give is that you need to be a reader before you’re a writer. And that in your audience are those writers who made you want to read in the first place. Those people are your family.

LM: Best or worst life advice you’ve gotten or given?

 DC: I don’t know if I’ve ever had any life advice to give to anybody. But my dad used to say something I thought it was really stupid at the time, but now I think it’s profound. He used to say, “You never get any younger.” I used to think, of course, but then you get to a point you’re like Oh, my God. That’s not possible

Dumped at Brunch and Too Jaded to Care

Posted on by Alex Juarez

1. 

She’s choking me. She’s really in there, fingers on cartilage, mashing my trachea and I can’t breathe, Maria thinks. She truly can’t breathe, but she can’t bring herself to care. There was a time in her life when this was new, when she was at least as hot for being choked as Steph was for choking her, but now they’ve got an apartment together—a cat, good lighting—and Maria can’t even muster a shiver. 

She acts like she’s into it. She’s thrashing, hands at Steph’s wrists, pulling. Not that hard, although Steph is probably stronger than Maria, so it’s not like Maria could physically make Steph stop if this were for real. And Steph is turned on. She’s pressed up hard on Maria’s leg. Then one of her hands is off Maria’s throat, at her own crotch, and Steph is getting herself off. 

Obviously, there’s an art to faking it. Anybody can tell that a parade of porn star squealing and panting is just acting, but convincing somebody who loves you, who you definitely at least used to love, that you’re present and choking and hot for it, you kind of have to make yourself believe it. So Maria does. 

Her attention is on Steph’s fingers at her throat, Steph’s substantial hips against her own bony ones. On Steph’s face. 

Now Steph’s eyes are closed but you can definitely still fuck this up. You can try to fake it but if you don’t convince anybody, nobody gets off, and then you spend the afternoon talking about your relationship. The end part is great, the wine and cuddling and stuff, but the hours of insecurity and tears and feelings leading up to the reconciliation are totally not worth it. 

Steph is coming. She doesn’t really say anything when she comes, or yell or make noises or anything, but you can feel her shoulders tense and then untense. They tense up really hard. The first time they fucked, Maria was scared that Steph would pull a shoulder muscle. 

Then it’s Maria’s turn. She already knows she’s going to fake it. Maria’s relationship to her body, it’s a mess, she can barely get it together to be naked in front of anybody, much less get off with someone in the room. You’d think it would be impossible to fake it, with junk like Maria’s got, but you can. Maria knows some stuff about faking it. One time somebody told her that when she came in their mouth, they could tell she’d come be cause when that pre-come stuff turned into regular come, it got saltier. But nobody told Steph, because as soon as she’s been going down on Maria long enough for an orgasm to be plausible, Maria tenses up her own shoulders for a second and then releases them. 

Stupid, yeah. And immature. Maria has told Steph that it’s easiest for her to get off from getting head, but the main reason she told Steph that is that when Steph is giving Maria head she can’t tell the embarrassing kinky stories she thinks Maria likes. Which also actually are kind of Maria’s fault. 

This kind of makes Maria sound like an asshole, this manipulative, lying control freak who needs to be in charge of everything, doesn’t have any feelings, hates her girlfriend. But it’s just honesty. You fake orgasms because you want your partner to feel like she’s doing a good job fucking you, because you feel self-conscious about how closed off from your body you are and how hard it is for you to have a real orgasm. You pretend you’re into being choked because she’s into it, and besides, four years ago you established a precedent. And it seems like Steph is still into it. Although, of course, who can tell. 

The short version is that Maria feels hopeless about herself and she’s trying to protect Steph from that. Maria can’t get off with other people. The moment her pants come off, she stops being in her body, and when she’s off in the clouds desperately trying to make an emergency peace with her own junk, trying not to think about how bad her junk has fucked up so much of her life and what can she do about it. Plus, Maria likes Steph’s junk but on some level she kind of hates Steph for just automatically getting that kind of junk just for free. How do you tell your girlfriend that? How do you make that okay? More specifically, how do you make that okay enough to calm down and get off? 

Maria doesn’t know, so she fakes it. She collapses, puts on the relieved face. She says, Oh my god, baby. 

Steph smiles. Crawls up the bed to put her head in the crook of Maria’s shoulder. 

You’re so fuckin hot, Steph says. 

Hold on, Maria says, trying to give the impression that she’s so far gone into the sublime that she can’t even talk. 

Ha. 

2. 

Trans women in real life are different from trans women on television. For one thing, when you take away the mystification, misconceptions and mystery, they’re at least as boring as everybody else. Oh, neurosis! Oh, trauma! Oh, look at me, my past messed me up and I’m still working through it! Despite the impression you might get from daytime talk shows and dumb movies, there isn’t anything particularly interesting there. Although, of course, Maria may be biased. 

She wishes other people could understand that without her having to tell them. It’s always impossible to know what anyone’s assumptions are. People tend to assume that trans women are either drag queens and loads of trashy fun, or else sad, pathetic and deluded pervy straight men—at least, until they save up their money and get their Sex Change Operations, at which point they become just like every other woman. Or something? But Maria is like, Dude, hi. Nobody ever reads me as trans any more. Old straight men hit on me when I’m at work and in all these years of transitioning I haven’t even been able to save up for a decent pair of boots. 

This is what it’s like to be a trans woman: Maria works in an enormous used bookstore in lower Manhattan. It is a terrible place. The owner is this very rich, very mean woman who is perpetually either absent or micromanaging. The managers under her have all been miserable under her for twenty or thirty (or forty or fifty) years, which means they are assholes to Maria and everybody else who works there under them. It’s kind of a famous olde-timey bookstore that’s been around forever. 

Maria’s been working there for something like six years. People quit all the time, because not everybody can deal with the abuse that comes from this job. Maria, though, is so emotionally closed off and has so much trouble having any feelings at all that she’s like, well, it’s union, I’m making enough to afford my apartment, and I know how to get away with pretty much anything I want to get away with. I’m not leaving unless they fire me. But when she started working there, she was like, hello, I’m a dude and my name is the same as the one that’s on my birth certificate. Then, when she had been working there a year or two, she had this kind of intense and scary realization that for a really long time, as boring and clichéd as this is, but for as long as she could remember, she had felt all fucked up. 

So she wrote about it. She laid it out and connected all these dots: the sometimes I want to wear dresses dot, the I am addicted to masturbation dot, the I feel like I have been punched in the stomach when I see an unself conscious pretty girl dot, the I cried a lot when I was little and don’t think I’ve cried at all since puberty dot. Lots of other dots. A constellation of dots. The oh man do I get more fucked up than I mean to, every time I start drinking dot. The I might hate sex dot. So she figured out that she was trans, told people she was changing her name, got on hormones, it was very difficult and re warding and painful. 

Whatever. It was a Very Special Episode. 

The point is just, there are people at her job who remember when she was supposed to be a boy, who remember when she transitioned, and who might at any point tell any of the new people who come to work with her that she is trans, and then she has to do damage control because, remember, how is she supposed to know what weird ideas these people have about trans women? 

Like, what if they are a liberal, and want to show how much compassion they have? ‘I have this trans friend’ instead of ‘Hey trans friend I like you, let’s have a three-dimensional human relationship.’ 

That’s what it’s like to be a trans woman: never being sure who knows you’re trans or what that knowledge would even mean to them. Being on unsure, weird social footing. And it’s not even like it matters if somebody knows you’re trans. Who cares. You just don’t want your hilarious, charming, complicated weirdo self to be erased by ideas people have in their heads that were made up by, like, hack TV writers, or even hackier internet porn writers. It just sucks having to educate people. Sound familiar? Trans women have the same exact shit that everybody else in the world has who isn’t white, het, male, able-bodied or otherwise privileged. It’s not glamorous or mysterious. It’s boring. 

Maria is totally exhausted by it and bored of it, and if you’re not, she is sorry. Terribly, appallingly, sarcastically, uselessly and pointlessly sorry. 

3. 

Maria and Steph get brunch. It’s a Sunday morning and they definitely can’t afford brunch. Maria has been on hormones for four years but she still flinches at best and dissociates completely at worst if somebody touches her below the waist, and she still has to shave every morning. But still, what’s twenty dollars for vegan huevos rancheros and a mimosa? 

Steph is in some kind of bad mood. She’s nervous about something or sad about something. Maria is trying as hard as she can to pay attention, but she’s tired. She can’t stay asleep at night. She wakes up grinding her teeth, or worrying about something totally productive like whether she’s really a straight girl who should be dating straight boys, or else she just wakes up because there’s a cat on her face, purring. Whatever. There are pictures of her from when she was five with bags under her eyes. 

There’s a waiter on the other side of the restaurant. He’s not Maria and Steph’s waiter, but he looks familiar. Maria is trying to place him. The only place she might know him from is the bookstore, but it’s not clicking. 

The tone of Steph’s voice changes and Maria tunes back in. I fucked up, she’s saying. 

You fucked up, Maria asks back. 

I did, Steph says. Do you remember Kieran? 

Maria does remember Kieran. Often. 

Yes, she says, I remember Kieran. 

Remember is kind of a weird word, since he works at the bookstore and Maria sees him most days. 

Steph takes a deep breath, like, I’m just gonna let this all out, and says, I fucked Kieran three nights ago in a broom closet at the Gay Center. 

Three nights ago, Maria repeats. 

Yeah, Steph says. 

Maria still doesn’t feel anything except maybe a little glint in the back of her head that’s like, hey, maybe you can break up over this. She doesn’t acknowledge it. Instead, she’s on autopilot. She can fake it. She’s trying to remember what that waiter bought. Was he in history? Art? 

She asks, You fucked him three nights ago, but you came home and didn’t let on at all for three nights, and you even fucked me this morning without a second thought? 

Look, Steph says, but she doesn’t say anything else. 

Then Maria’s brain goes into full shutdown in this way where she’s still there, still watching, wishing there were something to say, but really all she can think is, okay, whatever. Maybe Irish history? She thinks, maybe I need to leave. But she can’t leave, you can’t just bail on your girlfriend in the middle of brunch. She’s kind of wishing she were on her bike, about to be hit by a bus, swerving heroically out of the way at the last second. She knows, though, that she’s supposed to be thinking about Kieran and Steph in a broom closet. 

A broom closet, she says. 

Are you okay, Steph asks. You’re just being quiet, you’re not even making a face. 

Maria’s brain is shut down because she knows that there are things she’s supposed to be thinking and feeling: betrayal, anger, sadness—but it’s like she’s just watching herself, thinking, hey, you stupid boy-looking girl, why aren’t you having any feelings? 

It’s a familiar sense of removal that has bothered the hell out of every partner she’s ever had. I’m sorry, she always thinks, I learned to police myself pretty fiercely when I was a tiny little baby, internalizing social norms and trying to keep myself safe from them at the same time. I’m pretty astute with the keeping myself safe. 

Steph is staring at Maria, Maria is staring at her plate, Steph takes a sip from her mimosa, Maria sips from her own, and then Maria is tearing up, which is new. It’s about self-pity, though, not about caring about Steph cheating. She could give a fuck who her girlfriend fucks. It’s herself she’s sad about. Mopey ol’ lonely Maria, the little kid with the bags under her eyes, the lonesome romantic bike fucker, the girl who likes books better than people. It’s an easy automatic go-to to characterize things as boring but it is boring to have the same exact things come up whenever anything comes up: poor me. If she were a goth she’d tell you about how broken she is, but since she’s an indie-punk DIY book snob, like, here we are. 

A tear drips down her nose and then that’s it. She wipes her eye near the tear duct, where there isn’t any eyeliner, and asks, Okay, so what do we do? 

What do you mean, Steph says. 

I mean, you boned Kieran, Maria says, enjoying Steph’s flinch. 

Yeah, Steph says. 

Well, do you want to date Kieran? Do you want to be with me? Do we work this out between us? 

You’re so weird, Steph mutters loudly enough that Maria is probably supposed to hear it. 

I’m so weird? 

You’re so weird! she says again, louder. Are you upset? I know, oh, you don’t have access to your feelings, you’re all shut down, if you were a goth you’d say you’re broken—I know you, Maria, but it still freaks me out, the way you deal with things. 

So you’re mad at me, Maria asks. 

I am mad at you! I’m sorry I fucked Kieran but it would be nice if I could get a response to that. It would be nice if I felt like you cared at all. 

Cool, Maria says. You fucked Kieran and you’re mad at me about it. 

She lines up five black beans in a row on her fork and puts them in her mouth. That waiter was definitely in Irish history. He’s sitting at a table across the restaurant, folding forks and knives into paper napkins. 

Steph is crying and Maria is eating. Calm. 

A Lighthouse Keeper Faces an Uncertain Choice When A Stranger Washes Up Ashore

Posted on by Jo Lou

When another body washes ashore, Samuel—the sole resident and lighthouse keeper of an unnamed island—already knows the solemn duty that is required of him: pulling the body clear, before he can bury it beneath a mound of stones. It falls to Samuel every-so-often to receive the drowned refugees that wash up, shattering his already fraught peace. The latest arrival however, if not quite alive, is not yet dead. Samuel must contend with the man—victim or interloper?—as he battles his own legacy and that of his country as he recalls its transition from colonialism to an elusive freedom as an independent nation.

An Island by Karen Jennings

This is the crux of An Island by South African author, Karen Jennings. In her engrossing, yet meditative fourth novel, Jennings examines the ongoing ravages of colonialism on (and off) the African continent. At least, we assume the titular island is just off the African coast. There is much else that is left unsaid in An Island; silences which the author has become adept at offering her readers in her morally complex, always humane, works of literature.

Jennings—who I caught up with in Cape Town, South Africa where she is based—has published an impressive list of six books, while not even 40-years-old, producing one almost every year since 2013. Despite this prolific output, Jennings remains somewhat of an outsider, with her books rarely receiving the sort of attention they deserve, even in her home country of South Africa. That changed in 2021 when An Island was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

I spoke to Jennings, a former editor of mine, about living in isolation, the financial impact of being longlisted, and the universal trend towards far-right conservatism.

C. A. Davids: Congratulations on your newest novel, An Island, and that it was longlisted for the Booker in 2021. How has it felt for your writing to be recognised in this way? 

Karen Jennings: It has been an unusual time—mostly good, of course, but there are aspects that have been more challenging. While I am glad for the book to be given attention, it does also mean that I am receiving attention. That isn’t always easy for a hermit such as myself! Moreover, due to circumstances, I spent the last six years in Brazil, living a very isolated life. I didn’t have a job or friends. I didn’t go anywhere other than the supermarket. It was quite jarring suddenly to find myself with a full inbox and with people wanting to call or Zoom or meet. 

CAD: Now that you mention that you lived an isolated life in Brazil, it brings to mind Samuel, the main protagonist in An Island, and his solitary existence. Do you think that personal experience influenced the novel or developing the main character?

KJ: It really did. Although I had already imagined or started creating the character before I moved to Brazil, it really helped me to understand him. We lived on the 17th floor of a high rise building and I was advised not to go out except to walk the dogs, or to the supermarket on the corner, because it was supposed to be too dangerous for me to be out by myself. I didn’t have friends or speak the language, and so I didn’t have any kind of life there. For that reason you could say that I really do know what it is like to spend hours—not quite like Samuel who was alone for weeks at a time—but to spend hours alone, with not a word passing my lips. 

CAD: I imagine since the Booker news, that sense of feeling left-out has dissipated. Tell me a bit about the impact of the long listing?

KJ: A few things stand out. I am receiving some recognition in South Africa. This is important to me as I consider myself a South African author. Also, I have been incredibly touched by the warmth and support that I have received from writers across Africa (and the diaspora). I am glad that my experiences can bring some joy and hope to others. As I mentioned, I was living in Brazil for 6 years. I was unhappy, and had no prospects and no money of my own. I wanted to return home but didn’t see how it would be possible—coming home includes shipping my belongings and bringing my dogs over too. The financial impact of being longlisted has meant that I have been able to move back to South Africa. This is where I want to be and I am so grateful to be here.

CAD: Damon Galgut, another South African writer recognised by the Booker Prize in 2021 and who went on to win it, commented recently that it was somewhat bemusing (I’m paraphrasing) that the situation still exists where one is given the nod by the establishment (from somewhere up North) and only then are your talents fully acknowledged. For me, such recognition is also practical. What do you think?

KJ: I would agree with Damon. An Island is my fourth novel and sixth book. I was never able to get a South African publisher (Karavan Press, my South African publisher, was only established later and I was so pleased when they agreed to publish as it has always been my dream to be published in my own country). I was lucky if my previous publications received a single review in South Africa. Very few people knew about my books. Since the longlisting, there have been various interviews, reviews and articles.

I must admit to feeling some frustration with the way in which this still happens throughout Africa. We wait for the UK or America to tell us which of our own people are worth reading. In my experience, there is a certain view of Africa and of the stories that can be told and sold that dominates amongst overseas publishers. If those same people are telling us who to read, what to read, what to write, who we are, then we lose authenticity. 

Does that mean that recognition from outside is not useful, that it should be eschewed? No, of course not. As you said, it is practical. It offers a valuable step towards getting people from outside of Africa to pay more attention to what is coming from within Africa. The hope is that the more Africa is being seen, the more open publishers and readers will be to reading its authors. This is one of the reasons why my UK publisher, Robert Peett of Holland House Books, and I decided to start The Island Prize. It is a prize for a debut novel by an African author. Its goal is to serve as a platform from which African authors can let themselves be seen and heard. This is the first year— we have just announced the shortlist and hope to announce the winners in early May. You can read more about the prize here.

CAD: Why do you think there hasn’t been much reception for your work in South Africa, this echoes what I have heard other authors saying here, especially those who do have readers in the rest of the world.

There is a certain view of Africa and of the stories that can be told and sold that dominates amongst overseas publishers.

KJ: I think part of it is the type of books that I write. I don’t write happy (popular) stories. I always get, even from my own family, this question: when is there going to be a happy ending? We are quite disillusioned in South Africa generally, because of the economy, the failures of the government, and so on. That probably translates into people wanting to spend their spare time doing things that are uplifting, rather than reading books that can be quite uncomfortable and upsetting. I think that is part of it, but I also think it is because I write literary fiction, which is not as popular globally. It’s true that there is quite a lot of snobbery around literary fiction, but it also has the perception of being more elitist: that you have to be educated or thinking and living a certain way. That has never been my intention. I want to tell a story in a simple way so that anyone can read it; I do not mean that I am speaking down to my reader, but rather that I want my writing to be accessible and understandable so that it can resonate with anyone. You don’t have to sit with a dictionary to try and decipher what is being said.

CAD: I’m currently reading a novel that I loved at first because of the style, but now that I am a third of the way, I keep thinking ”how pretentious,” mainly because the author is clearly writing for a middle class that she believes the world has been made by and for. I’m now quite disillusioned by a book that has some beautiful writing.

KJ: Yes, I know what you mean. When I think about writing, I think about words as stones and the end product as being a dry-stone wall or maybe a path made with stones. That is how the word should be; a path or a wall that everyone needs and everyone can use. You’re not picking up diamonds and creating a tiara for a few. This is the basic stuff of life: words and communicating.  

CAD: That’s an interesting metaphor. 

Your novel feels in part as if it’s dystopian, but in fact, it is rooted in reality, drawing together multiple crisis: refugees fleeing their homes on overcrowded boats, climate change, racism, poverty, dictatorship, state failure. As beautiful as it is as a work, it is a difficult, complex read. And I wondered, given a general sense of hopelessness in the world, especially because of climate change, what is the place of fiction today?

KJ: There are many periods in history which have seen a sense of fear of the end of the world or about the state of things. One thing that we have now is a wider variety of genres in conveying that. Often people tend to dismiss genres like science fiction, or the increasingly popular ecofiction, yet look at award-winning works like Margaret Atwood’s speculative Oryx and Crake and Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road. Perhaps the greatest contributor to ecofiction in recent years has been the subgenre of cli-fi—fiction that engages with real ecological issues and has the purpose and intention of revealing what the world might be like if mankind does not consider the ethical consequences of its destructive ways. This is more than just escapism. Another recent subgenre is First Impact Fiction which, rather than exploring possible outcomes in the future, is engaging with the current and emerging impacts of runaway climate change, such as droughts or extreme heat, or changing migration patterns. 

The fact is that we need art to mediate the environmental threats that the world is facing. Art allows us to bridge the gap between knowledge and knowing, where knowledge is depersonalised, abstract science, and knowing is our own subjective understanding. 

CAD: A major theme in the story is about liberatory movements turning to dictatorship and betraying initial convictions. This is not a new theme, and yet, it felt also as if there were a warning: portent of things to still come. This feels quite political. Did you intend it to be so?

KJ: Africa has a long history of military coups and dictatorships, but these largely seemed to have ended by the turn of the century. Yet since 2018 there have been something like five military coups. What has caused this resurgence? Part of the problem is the failure of democracy. Those in power call themselves representatives of the people and promise to be working in their best interests. In the meantime, they are filling their own coffers and are involved in state capture where they appropriate resources for themselves and their cronies. Often these people in power have military affiliations. With the country suffering and people unhappy, they say, “We, the military, must take over or the state will collapse. We will bring stability.” People are desperate and think this is a necessary next step—the only thing that will help them. Of course, there is also a universal trend towards far-right conservatism and totalitarianism. I saw something similar in Brazil with the election of pro-military, pro-dictatorship, misogynistic, homophobic Bolsonaro. Let’s not even get started on Trump and Erdogan. In short, people feel disappointed by democracy in various ways. Often this can lead to a more violent and aggressive attitude.

CAD: You lived in Brazil in a fascinating era, fascinating in the worst way with Bolsonaro recreating elements of a fascist society—a terrible reality but also in a sense, a novelist’s dreamscape.

Art allows us to bridge the gap between knowledge and knowing, where knowledge is depersonalised, abstract science, and knowing is our own subjective understanding.

KJ: I lived in Sao Paolo for six months, then four years in Goiania, and then during the pandemic in Sao Paolo again. It was challenging and a little frightening because I didn’t know what to expect. Would there be a military takeover? Goiania is a conservative area and there were many supporters around there who would blast music and wear military outfits. Our neighbors did that, for example. I had one friend in the lead up to the elections and she became obsessed with Bolsonaro: She was pro violence, pro-military, homophobic, misogynistic and believed that they needed to shoot drug dealers or anyone who looked like a foreigner. I said but I am a foreigner and she replied, yes but it’s ok, because you’re white. So, there was no going forward with that friendship. There was too much that separated our values and ways of viewing others. 

CAD: That brings to mind the conflict in An Island, actually. Two men are fighting over resources and they revert to these base prejudices, which perhaps are always there, under the skin, but heightened when there isn’t enough to go around. It’s a war of two men.

KJ: I think so. When people feel threatened, like Samuel does; whether it is imagined or a genuine threat, but what is certain is that he feels under threat.

CAD: Tell me about the new book that you’re writing, Crooked Seeds? 

KJ: I will be publishing again with Holland House and Karavan Press because they have been loyal and good to me. They saw the value of An Island when no one else did. Crooked Seeds is set in Cape Town in the suburb where I currently live: it is 2028 and it’s a future in which there is a massive drought and people have to queue every morning for their water. It’s speculative, in a way, of course, but not strongly dystopian or post-apocalyptic novel. It’s an ordinary suburban life, with the added frustration of rationed water.

CAD: Were you in Cape Town when we had the massive drought, two years ago, when the city was fast approaching Day Zero, where we would have run out of water entirely?

KJ: I spent some time in Cape Town then, and I was also in Sao Paulo when there was a drought there. So, I did experience drought in both places and I’ve done quite a bit of research into what people were doing here in South Africa to save water. But the drought is really only the backdrop of the novel, not the main focus. One of the key concerns is the way in which certain people in South Africa have felt that they were handicapped by the end of apartheid, by the new South Africa, and the excuse they hold on to that the new South Africa worked against them. 

7 Books to Help You Resist Productivity Culture

Posted on by Jo Lou

How many things can you use a bullet journal for?  

Paid work. Creative projects. Household tasks. Grocery shopping. Exercise goals. Meditation routines. Expenses. Glasses of water. The list is endless, with the journal (or journals, for the truly committed) serving as a washi-taped repository of large and small tasks. An archive of a life well spent—or, at the very least, spent. 

The impetus behind bullet journals, including my pink notepad with the word “checklist” printed atop each perforated sheet, is to gain a sense of control over what is inherently uncontrollable: life. By tracking what we need, wish and hope to do, we take a stand against unpredictability. We declare, in the face of the unknown, that we will get shit done

But what shit? And why?

Productivity, an economic term that measures the effectiveness of workers by their output, has become an ethical measure for our non-working lives, too. There is an ethos of “usefulness” that permeates contemporary culture, and in our personal lives, this often takes the form of organization. Whether it’s to-do lists, step trackers, meal prep charts, or the behemoth bullet journal pulling everything together, the underlying principle of productivity declares that human lives can and should be organized. 

This principle dates back to industrialization. According to Karl Marx, the exploitative condition of factory work meant (and still means) that people were unable to fully inhabit their personhood. With the nature and profits of work removed from people’s control into the hands of a few, factory workers felt alienated from what they did, who they worked with, and ultimately, from themselves. 

In today’s neoliberal brand of capitalism, the relentless drive towards getting shit done turns life itself into work. As we check off items on our to-do lists, fill a growing stack of accomplished bullet journals, and strive towards Inbox Zero, we experience an increasing sense of alienation from our lived experience. Or, at least, I do. I feel more legible to myself on paper, on email, on Instagram than I do as a person inhabiting embodied, physical space. 

These seven authors know what’s up. 

From sleeping away one’s life to orienting ourselves to the rhythms of the nonhuman world, here are some of my favorite books exploring the alienation produced by capitalist society; texts that resist productivity culture at every turn. 

How To Be Human by Paula Cocozza

Mary works for a university department “in shambles,” where she is facing disciplinary action for, among others sins, “entrenched lateness” and “a disappointing attitude.”  She feels “herself irresistibly stepping into the footprints of long term failure” (“[i]t was a delusion to think that working in HR…was stimulating”), when she encounters a fox in her London garden. His keen eyes, auburn pelt and unlikely presence capture her attention day after day, especially once he begins bringing what she believes are presents: a pair of boxers, a single gardening glove. As Mary enters into a sustained encounter with this singular creature, the rhythms of her life come loose from the job and life that held her before. How to Be Human is a beautiful novel about the wildness inside each of us. It is also a story of how much exists in the world — even just in our gardens — when HR and the world of work recede from our lives. 

There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumara, translated by Polly Barton

What is an easy job? Suffering from “burnout syndrome”, the unnamed thirty-something narrator of Kikuko Tsumara’s novel There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job (translated by my favorite Japanese-English translator Polly Barton) embarks on a hesitant quest to find out. She explains:

“I’d left my previous job because it sucked up every scrap of energy I had until there was not a shred left, but…I sensed that hanging around doing nothing forever probably wasn’t the answer either.”

Guided by a surprisingly empathetic recruiter, Tsumara’s narrator accepts a series of entry-level jobs—each with a surreal twist of their own. The Surveillance Job, the Cracker Packet job, the Bus Advertising job, the Postering Job, and the Easy Job in the Hut in the Big Forest comprise little magic realist worlds, woven together by a quiet, awkward woman trying to avoid the devastating psychological effects of a culture devoted to work. I loved this novel so much—perhaps more so because unlike most millennial burnout narratives, Tsumara’s doesn’t have whiteness at its heart.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

Next to my bed is a scrap of lined paper that reads, “My year of rest and relaxation—Sept 2019” : a testament to the fact that I read Ottessa Moshfegh’s runaway bestseller at the right time. I was very sick that monsoon, and everything I had planned or hoped for the year had fallen apart. So when Moshfegh’s narrator decides to cope with alienation and grief by getting incredibly fucked up on prescription drugs and effectively sleeping away a year, it read to me less like satire and more like a solid plan. At least the part where sleep feels like a reasonable response and resistance to a world that wants you to keep doing things, to keep performing your self without pause.

I almost immediately gave away my copy of My Year of Rest and Relaxation to another chronically sick friend who I thought would also appreciate this determined and deranged pursuit of sleep (she did). Nearly two and a half years after I taped it up in a haze of desperation, that note remains stuck to my bedside wall. A reminder that rest isn’t just a deep tissue massage, but a drastic response to the equally drastic demands made by contemporary culture on our lives. 

Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit

Best known for her feminist work, Rebecca Solnit is, for me, the most compelling living writer on ecology, place and hope. Her work draws attention—both hers and the reader’s—away from the relentlessness of technology and its attendant busyness, and towards the rhythms of human and nonhuman interactions and lives.

In Orwell’s Roses—Solnit’s book on George Orwell, gardening, refuge, and resistance—we encounter the vast timescale of trees, mutual aid as “inter-species cooperation”, and an Orwell whose pleasures in the natural world informed his resistance to control and power. Just as 18th-century labor struggles advocated “Bread for all, and roses too,” Solnit writes, “you could argue that any or every evasion of quantifiability and commodifiability is a victory against assembly lines [and] authorities.” Productivity culture is built on quantifying output, tasks and time —and like much of her writing, Solnit’s newest book serves as both antidote and balm. 

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

“I was a tool for the town’s good, in two senses. Firstly, I had to study hard to become a work tool. Secondly, I had to be a good girl, so that I could become a reproductive organ for the town. I would probably be a failure on both counts…”

Natsuki, the narrator of Earthlings has spent life with her head down, trying to slip by unnoticed in a society that demands from her roles of productivity she cannot fulfill. Spanning childhood summers with her cousin Yuu — with whom Natsuki dreamt of a spaceship coming to take them to their “real” home — and an adulthood living with buried trauma, Earthlings is Murata at her trademark best: a radical, surreal excavation of society’s unquestioned structures and their impact on people unable to fit in. As children, Yuu and Natsuki make a pact: “Survive, no matter what.” In a system that sees individuals as tools, as means to an end, what shapes can survival take? And what happens when people stop trying to pass as acceptable, productive earthlings?

Bird Cottage by Eva Meijer, translated by Antoinette Fawcett

In 1937, at 40-years-old, Len Howard left her city life and career as a violinist in an orchestra to study birds. She moved to a small cottage in the South of England where she lived the rest of her long life alongside a variety of birds: Great Tits, Magpies, Blackbirds, Sparrows.

Bird Cottage, Eva Meijers’s fictionalized account of Howard’s life, may not seem like a resistance to productivity culture at first glance. But as Meijer skillfully intersperses her narrator’s rejection of the life she was trained for with the real Howard’s observations of the birds she loved (these were among the first non-lab studies of birds conducted and widely declared unscientific at the time), the reader, too, is asked to retrain their eyes and attention: to look away from what we “should” do towards beings who are indifferent to our ideas of timekeeping and success. The birds that visit my garden were infinitely more alive as I read Bird Cottage — a redirecting of my attention so complete that I’m sure I will return to this graceful, charming novel time and again. 

How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

Speaking of returning to a book as a means to redirecting my attention, a friend recently wondered if I’d ever write an essay that didn’t quote Jenny Odell (as it stands, that seems unlikely). No book has influenced me so deeply as How To Do Nothing, which has served, among myriad purposes, as a guide to disentangling myself from my Type A personality (a direction my chronically sick body very much appreciates).

Through her text that spans “surviving” a culture of usefulness, the impossibility of retreating to a commune, and a reciprocal relationship with nature, Odell seeks to “draw us… out of a worldview in which everything exists for us.” Productivity, in all its goal-based glory, spins on an axis that holds human advancements and progress at its center. For Odell, what matters instead of constant newness and achievements are as slower acts of restoration—of ecology, context, thought, and our sense of place in the face of the internet’s “placelessness”. How To Do Nothing questions where our endless productivity goals come from, and what might open up in their stead if, as Odell suggests, we responded to them in the words of Melville’s Bartleby: “I would prefer not to.” 

A Cairo Meet Cute That’s More Than it Seems

Posted on by Jo Lou

Two people cross paths and their lives are changed forever. It is the oldest and perhaps most universal story. If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English begins when Noor, an Egyptian American returning to Egypt in search of meaning and culture, meets an unnamed Egyptian man whose hopes and dreams have been all but decimated by political turmoil and a worsening drug addiction. 

Filled with imagery and prose that can only be achieved by a brilliant poet like Noor Naga, it is a novel aimed at asking questions (sometimes directly) rather than providing answers. At first, the questions are political— centered around class, identity, culture, globalism—but as the novel carries on (and reveals its metafictionality), it abandon politics and become philosophical and existential, specifically focusing on perception and the act of writing: What do you know? Where do you know it from? Why? What are the moral implications of pretending, as writers do, to know what someone else’s experience of the world is like?

Doma Mahmoud: I love the title of this book. As I read it, these different variations of it kept popping into my head. If an Egyptian cannot speak English, or cannot speak Arabic, or cannot speak either as fluently as others, and all the implications of each of those scenarios. I also thought. If an Egyptian writer cannot write in Arabic, who is she writing for?

Moral questions are my favorite. Who’s in the wrong? What could people have done better?

Noor Naga: I sort of think it in two ways. There is the book that I’m writing and there’s the book the American girl is writing in the book. In many ways, her text is meant to be presented to an American English-speaking audience. In the third part, you realize it’s a memoir and written not just for a general American audience but for this particular group of student-writers. They’re young and steeped in politics they imagine to be universal, but which are actually very culturally specific. I tried to problematize this as much as possible, to pit their value system against a foreign environment where it both fits and doesn’t fit. The character of Noor is telling a story which erases another story as it’s being told. It was very difficult to do that. I was trying to give space to this male character while also making the point that the filter you’re getting even his parts through is fundamentally skewed. And that in some ways you can’t trust this character of Noor or even me, the author of the book. 

DM: I want to ask you about this point about the filter. That point really came through in the book and it was actually quite disorienting because it put in question the trust I had for the story I was reading. I’m sure that was intentional on your part, so I’m wondering what the reason for that choice was.

NN: Originally, I was trying to write both POVs, the boy’s and the girl’s, and giving them equal weight. It was only when I was midway through the book that I realized it wasn’t actually possible for me, as Noor, to write his perspective convincingly. And that it would make more sense to only have one perspective: the American writer. I’m very suspicious of myself and I suppose I wanted the reader to be uncomfortable and suspicious too. That was the whole point for me. To force the reader, in the third part, to question this experience we are creating together, as author and reader, of bringing a fiction to life.  

DM: This book certainly did that to me. I wanted to ask you about the male character. How did you keep a balance between making this point about the limitations and biases of fiction and maintaining the integrity of the male character. To me, it didn’t feel like I was supposed to distrust what I had read about him just because it had been put through this filter. 

It made me think a lot about the Anglophone publishing industry and how it seeks out certain narratives and negates others.

NN: I certainly didn’t want the third part to come across as this deflating revelation that the reader had been tricked into believing this complete lie all along. That’s why the workshop at the end is a memoir writing workshop, not a fiction workshop. We’re familiar with what it means to have an unreliable narrator, but it’s easy to dismiss how unreliable all writers are. The character of Noor is really trying to be honest in her representation, but that doesn’t mean we can trust her. The point of highlighting her limitations and biases was not to paint her as dishonest or malicious. On the contrary, the point was to create a writer character who was aware of her limitations but still trapped by them. 

DM: It was refreshing to read something I walked away from with more questions than answers. In your acknowledgements you thank someone for teaching you to prize a beautiful question over a beautiful answer. That really came through in this novel. Each chapter of Part One begins with a question. I certainly finished the novel with so many questions. I wonder if that was the case for you after completing it. Which question/s remained with you after finishing? And what makes a question beautiful?

NN: Well that’s a really beautiful question! I think I like questions that are really balanced, where there is enough force behind different answers to make things decidedly inconclusive. Moral questions are my favorite. Who’s in the wrong? What could people have done better? For me, there were a lot of driving questions in this book. I’m not sure which I’m left with in the end. Because in a way writing the book was a way of purging the questions out of my system and then no longer being haunted by them. It’s a way of me saying: “I don’t know. But you guys can read it and let me know if you have answers.” One question that remains with me is the question of: who do you feel for? Do you feel more for her or for him? And why? It’s so interesting how people respond depending on who and where they are. So far, many of my friends who were born and raised in Egypt are more sympathetic with the girl than I thought they’d be. They don’t have the same complex in relation to nationhood, they don’t feel threatened in their claim to belonging. In contrast, friends of mine in the diaspora tend to be much harder on the American girl and it seems so obvious that this is a function of their own insecurities. They dislike her because they identify with her or recognize her on some level, and so it’s really a way of punishing the self.

DM: One of the central elements of the book is the power dynamics between the two main characters. The power transforms and mutates constantly depending on where they are, what they’re doing, what they’re talking about. Do you feel that one of the characters ultimately holds the ultimate power over the other? Why?

NN: They do pass the power back and forth between them. Ultimately, though, only one character survives and goes on to tell the story. And it says a lot.

I always wondered what this book would have been like had it been written in Arabic and directed at an Arabic-speaking readership. It made me think a lot about the Anglophone publishing industry and how it seeks out certain narratives and negates others. And the power inherent in participating in that. A lot of my writing of this novel was influenced by my hyper-awareness of my own position. I’m Egyptian but I was also born in the US and hold the US passport. I was raised in Dubai which is sort of an Arab country but also not at all an Arab country. Part of the reason I was able to publish this book is because I tick certain boxes that Egyptians born and raised in Egypt maybe don’t tick, even if they’re writing in English. I have access and currency. So this novel was my way of thinking about that and incriminating myself almost. 

DM: The character of Noor is named after you. That seems to me like a decision you probably spent a good number of hours on. Take me through that. 

NN: Well in the original draft that’s how I had it. Then I changed it because I thought it might distract the reader or that it might be too gimmicky. Too many tricks layered on top of each other. I also wondered if readers who aren’t familiar with metafiction would immediately think that this is autobiographical and I would have to explain, over and over again (to people like my mother and my neighbors!) that it’s still fiction.

Ultimately though I decided to name her Noor because I wanted to make the point that the author of this book is not exempt from the criticisms targeted at the American writer in the novel. It’s certainly a guilt-driven book. I wrote and published the thing. I have benefited from it. But at least I’m aware of it? Maybe that’s a copout but I wanted to highlight all the inherent problems in taking a truth from one world and then publishing and profiting from it in another world. And I wanted to do it playfully. There are so many writers I love who write author characters for this exact purpose. César Aira, Alan Hollinghurst, Youssef Rakha, Ruth Ozeki… I just sort of thought: I can have some fun too! And then hope that the satire comes through.

Sasquatch at the End of the World

Posted on by Alex Juarez

Bigfoot Loses Heart

When berries were scarce
I ate the chipmunk who 
ate the berries. 

When my fur made fingers of ice down my back,
I told myself stories of what it must be 
to wake inside the sun. 

When rain would not stop
I waded into the river. I sat on a boulder and spat 
where the current parted around me. 

All was as I wished it to be.  
The notes I scrawled in the mud each sunset
were happy notes. Day this. Day that. 

But now I do not know where I have put those fingers. 
Now I’ve lost the hole inside the hole.

A Meditation

The snow makes some things clear: the deer
has been up before me, as has the fox

            is what I spoke into my phone’s voice-to-text.

No Mike I’m waiting for your call: the beer
has an offer for me, as has the fuck

            is what it heard.  

I wanted to consider how snow compresses time
by showing tracks, one moment layered over the next,

            to visit the waste of each footfall I had stacked 

invisible along a circled path these twenty years—
but I was made instead to wonder 

            where Mike had gone, why he didn’t 

call, what the beer was truly offering, 
and what, the fuck.

Can You Guess These Book Titles From Just the Emojis?

Posted on by Jo Lou

Annnddddd we’re back with another round of guessing the book titles using only emojis. Show off your booksmarts with our quiz, compiled by editors Jo Lou, Kelly Luce, Alex Juarez, and intern extraordinaire Lauren Hutton.

Stumped? The answers are at the bottom!

Can’t get enough? Click here for the first round of guessing the book title and here for more literary trivia.

Answers:

  1. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne 
  2. Charlie and The Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl 
  3. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf 
  4. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern 
  5. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis 
  6. Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White 
  7. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien 
  8. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck 
  9. Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner 
  10. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell 
  11. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini 
  12. Lord of the Flies by William Golding 
  13. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens 
  14. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon 
  15. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel 
  16. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck 
  17. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen 
  18. White Teeth by Zadie Smith 
  19. Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella 
  20. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig 
  21. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones 
  22. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro 
  23. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh 
  24. Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce 
  25. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers 
  26. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
  27. A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas 
  28. Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney 
  29. Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield 
  30. Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz