This week Recommended Reading published its 500th issue. For 500 Wednesdays in a row since May 23, 2012, we’ve shared extraordinary and innovative fiction from emerging and established writers with heartfelt, personal recommendations. The fiction we publish is not only formally masterful, it’s exciting. We are drawn to stories that usurp expectations: charismatic and troubled narrators, new takes on contemporary topics, inspired flourishes of genre, humor that makes way for deeper revelations. We’re also proud to be one of the largest free online archives of short fiction in existence, especially considering (not to brag) our outstanding ensemble of writers. In 2021 alone, we’ve published work by Brandon Taylor, Hilma Wolitzer, Weike Wang, Elizabeth McCraken, Lily King, Ayşegül Savaş, A.S. Byatt, and 44 others. Today we are sharing our ten most popular stories of the year starting with the most read.
“Great Escape” by Hilma Wolitzer, recommended by Roxana Robinson
After almost two years of Covid, there’s been a lot of pandemic fiction. However, Wolizter handles our new reality with unparalleled grace and wisdom. “Great Escape,” the only new story in her recent collection, Today a Woman Went Mad In the Supermarket (one of EL’s favorites of the year), follows nearly ninety-year-old Paulie and her husband, Howard. After their daughter warns them of a new dangerous virus, the seasoned couple tries to remember to wear a mask and not take the train. Paulie watches her husband in the mornings, “to see if Howard was still alive, holding [her] breath while [she] watched for the shallow rise and fall of his.” That the tragedy that follows was inspired by events in Wolitzer’s own life makes the story all the more powerful.
This genre-bending tale turns the Girl Detective trope on its head. Opening with her death, the Girl Detective must work backwards to solve how she died or who is responsible, and as former senior editor Brandon Taylor puts it in his introduction, “what will she do once she knows?” This inventive story tightropes between the familiar and the uncanny, breaking form and expectations with every new hint.
Perfect for the literary buff, Pauline Melville’s humourous homage opens on the eponymous heroines mid-conversation. Brimming with nods to their stories, creators, and status in the literary canon, “Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary Discuss Their Suicides” is cleverly pokes at the agency of these fictional women. At one key moment, which former senior editor Brandon Taylor notes in his introduction, “Anna asks if Emma would like to read her story, Emma responds, “I don’t think so. Not if it doesn’t have a happy ending.”
“Filthy Animals” by Brandon Taylor, recommended by Calvert Morgan
The silver lining to Brandon Taylor stepping down from his role as senior editor was that we could finally publish his fiction. His debut collection, Filthy Animals (also on our best of the year list) opens with this titular story. Milton and Nolan are two friends headed to one of their last parties before their separation—only Nolan doesn’t know yet. The two boys repel open communication, instead opting for drugs and whichever hands are closest. Executive Editor of Riverhead, Calvert Morgan, sums up the heart of the story, “We wonder not only what he will choose, but how he will learn to live, there or anywhere, and to reckon with the tenderness in his heart.”
“Chance Me” by Caitlin Horrocks, recommended by Ramona Ausubel
After fifteen years of not seeing each other, Harry picks up his son, Just, from the airport. Though he’s in Boston to visit Harvard, MIT, Lesley, and all of the others, Harry can’t tell whether his son is academically accomplished enough for these schools, or if the campus visits are merely an excuse to see each other. The tension is palpable as they shuffle around their estrangement and Harry recalls his origins with Just’s mother in a pseudo-cult in the Arizona desert. If you love this story, read the entire collection, Life Among the Terranauts.
“The Ring” by Pedro Mairal, translated and recommended by Jennifer Croft
In this ribald and satisfying story, Emilio leaves his wife at home to go to friend’s party and pick up women, which doesn’t go entirely to plan. Translator and recommender Jennifer Croft, sums up the genius of the story in her introduction: “Mairal is always able to recruit the characters most suited to a given journey, protagonists both lovable and loathe-able, hilarious and sad. No matter what—no matter how deplorable their actions—we can identify at least a little with the impulse.”
“The Boyish Lover” by Laurie Colwin, recommended by Halimah Marcus
Laurie Colwin passed away in the early 1990’s and was arguably best known for her collection of essays and recipes, Home Cooking. However, this year Vintage Books and Harper Collins republished her entire catalog, including five novels and three short story collections, resparking interest in her fiction. Editor of Recommended Reading, Halimah Marcus,notes in her introduction, “Her stories and novels are crisp and dynamic… Colwin is interested in the topography of happiness. Rather than a flat, unattainable goal, she sees happiness as dynamic and nuanced.” This story from her collection The Lone Pilgrim, traces the relationship of two professors: Jane, a warm and self-assured cosmopolitan woman, and Cordy, a austere and penny-pinching rich kid.
Originally published in the 1910s, Far’s posthumous collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, holds some of the first recorded fiction of the Chinese American experience. “Far’s stories have that speed, that cadence, that resounding thud of a moral message hitting the floor,” notes recommender C Pam Zhang. In this tale, a woman living in San Francisco meddles with the love life of her young neighbor, while her husband frets over a misunderstanding. “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” is sharp with moments that gleam through the decades and utterly electrify.
“Terms of Agreement” by Clare Sestanovich, recommended by Leslie Jamison
It’s been a buzzy year for autofiction and discussions of what to do if you find yourself the main character in someone’s story. In “Terms of Agreement” the main character dissects her friendships with her former lover, You, and their mutual friend, Nicole. Her ex made a habit of picking up details from everyone he encountered, and leaving them to parse themselves out of his work. Now, the narrator is turning this borrowing technique back on him. “Terms of Agreement” is collected in Objects of Desire, which made it on to our list of the best short story collections of the year.
“Fable” by Ethan Rutherford, recommended by Jill Meyers
At a dinner party amongst old friends, the newcomer shakes things up. Karen, Sasha’s third wife, is a translator by trade, but she is introduced as someone who “tells stories.” She weaves a detailed story within a story, a fairytale world of foxes and baby-thievery, which interrupts an otherwise realist scene one might find in a Raymond Carver piece. Jill Meyers notes, “The inside story, with its moral trouble, threatens the frame—it leaks, it skips, it crosses over.” Read more from Ethan Rutherford in his two critically acclaimed short story collections, The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, and Farthest South.
When it comes to great novels, this year felt like an embarrassment of riches. The books collected here are ambitious—in intellect, in scope, in subject matter, and in size. Some are perfect encapsulations of the unique problems of our time, while others illuminate the human threads that connect us through time and space. Novelists often task themselves with these kinds of far reaching goals, and when they are achieved, it’s a bit like catching a shooting star mid-flight: a few parts chance, many more parts hard work and dedication in the form of returning to the page day after day. Each of these writers is a master in their craft. Each of these books deserves a place on your shelves and in your hearts. Electric Literature staff and contributors voted for their favorite novels of the past year. Here are the top three, followed by additional favorites (there were many ties!) in alphabetical order.
In Intimacies, the unnamed protagonist is an interpreter who accepts a job at The Court, an organization tasked with trying men accused of perpetrating large-scale human atrocities. As her work becomes increasingly controversial, the interpreter finds herself pulled between multiple truths, unable to pinpoint her own role in stories defined by moral ambiguity. Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel, which was longlisted for the National Book Award, considers what happens when a woman’s professional commitments require erasure of her personal life. For an interesting discussion of the questions upon which she built her latest novel, check out Electric Lit’s interview with Kitamura.
Detransition, Baby can be accurately described as “funny and gossipy” and “insightful and cutting” in the same breath (indeed, Refinery29’s review of the book did exactly that). The success of Torrey Peters’ debut novel is certainly attributable in some part to its inherent contradictions—it’s a “domestic novel” that eschews heteronormative ideas about domesticity. Detransition, Baby is also an incredible story about two trans women that, as our interviewer noted in a conversation with Peters on Electric Lit earlier this year, “feels simultaneously familiar and utterly new at the same time.”
In an essay on fiction’s recent interest in leveraging horror to make sense of motherhood, Rachel Manns McKenny describes Nightbitch as “a satirical swipe at the failed ‘have it all’ lifestyle that so many Gen X and millennial mothers assumed was possible.” Indeed, Yoder’s protagonist is such a woman, though by the end of the novel she’s less a generational prototype for anytime and more just a burned-out pissed-off mom who turns into a dog. If you’ve ever suspected motherhood had a darker, possibly feral underbelly, you’re sure to enjoy this darkly hilarious debut—and if you still want more, read Electric Lit’s interview with Rachel Yoder and this gorgeous essay on finding your inner wolf.
Matt Bell’s third novel is nothing if not ambitious. Spanning more than one thousand years in time and featuring an eclectic cast of characters, Appleseed is the latest in the quickly expanding genre of climate fiction. The novel is set in three time periods—the 1700s, the near future, and a far-future ice age—and ultimately asks the big question: Is our world worth saving?
Civilizations by Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor
In his third novel in translation, Laurent Binet returns to the form he’s best known for: imaginative historical fiction. Beginning in the Viking Age, Civilizations follows Freydis, a woman warrior leading a band of Vikings that mysteriously disappears without a trace. Fast forward to the late fifteenth century, the story picks up in the journals of Christopher Columbus, as he is exploring a new world and ultimately taken captive by the Incas. The story concludes from the perspective of Atahualpa, the last Incan emperor who arrives in Europe on ships stolen from Columbus.
Broder’s sophomore novel is, arguably, even stronger (but by no means less beguiling) than, The Pisces, her debut. Milk Fedfeatures a memorable protagonist: 24-year-old Rachel is a lapsed Jew struggling with an eating disorder who is, when the story opens, beginning a 30-day detox treatment for her unhealthy codependent relationship with her mother. As she navigates the various toxicities attendant to living a life in Hollywood-adjacent Los Angeles, Rachel unexpectedly falls into a complicated (and hilarious) relationship with Miriam, a young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop. This is a story that truly could not be told by anyone other than Broder—and Electric Lit staffers loved it enough to recommended it in both our 9 Diverse Novels Starring Bisexual+ Main Characters and 10 Books About Alienated Women in Their 20s lists.
Following the conclusion of her Outlinetrilogy, Rachel Cusk’s latest was one of the buzziest books of 2021. In it, a female writer invites a male artist—a painter for whom she harbors a peculiar obsession—to spend the summer in her guesthouse on a remote coast. As time passes, the narrator slowly realizes that her invitation may have unexpected and destabilizing consequences.
Told in the five voices of a Colombian family, Patricia Engel’s third novel spans continents, generations and the consequences of a family in pursuit of safety and opportunity. The first chapter opens with Talia, a 15-year-old girl who escapes from a correctional facility in Bogotá and tries to reunite with her family in the United States. As the story unfolds, often at a breakneck pace, readers are given the family history in a kaleidoscopic tale that is as fractured as the family it centers.
Fernández’s second novel opens during Pinochet’s terrifying reign in 1980s Chile when a man walks into a magazine office and starts talking. Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales is a secret service agent and, as he reels off his ghastly list of state-sponsored murders, his confessions set the stage for what ultimately becomes the narrator’s story and her lifelong obsession with “the man who tortured people.”
In an interview with Electric Lit, Rivka Galchen commented that there’s “something comforting about traveling back in time” to places where horrifying events have ended (unlike current horrifying events, which are ongoing). The events of Galchen’s second novel, set in the 1600s, are certainly horrifying—the narrator is accused of being a witch and faces all the consequences such an accusation entails (i.e., financial ruin, torture, execution)—and yet Galchen manages to infuse the story with a healthy dose of both intrigue and humor.
In Kaitlyn Greenidge’s Libertie, a mother and daughter search for a deeper freedom during the Reconstruction era. The novel follows Dr. Cathy Sampson and her daughter Libertie from free Black spaces in Brooklyn to free Black spaces in Haiti; as much as the novel is about freedom from societal chains, it is also about freedom from the weight of familial expectations. Check out Electric Lit’s interview with Greenidge in which she discusses reimagining what real freedom looks like.
In a departure from previous work set in modern times, Lauren Groff’s fourth novel takes place during the twelfth century. When the novel’s protagonist, Marie de France, is banished from the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine at seventeen, she ends up the prioress of an impoverished abbey populated by starving nuns. Matrix, a National Book Award Finalist, is a surprising and timely portrait of female power in a world that discourages feminine strength.
Klara, the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, is an Artificial Friend (AF), designed to be the perfect companion for the human customer lucky enough to purchase her. That customer, Josie, is unwell, a consequence of the gene editing therapy that, ironically, was meant to “lift” her above her biological constraints. As Klara accompanies Josie through a turbulent childhood she does not fully understand, Klara and the Sun offers insight about the premium placed on able-bodied productivity, as well as sharp commentary on the fantasy of the servant who loves you back.
Robert Jones, Jr.’s debut novel is about a forbidden romantic relationship between two Black men enslaved on a Mississippi plantation during the Antebellum. In exploring queerness through a new lens rarely applied in literature, Jones’ The Prophets delivers a powerful historical novel about Black queer identity.
Calvin Kasulke is a master of the literary stunt (just check out his Literary Stunt Index and list of books that trade on bold conceits). In his debut, a novel that could not be more perfect for a year defined by work from home culture, Kasulke sticks the landing of a trick all his own. Several People Are Typing takes place entirely on Slack (the office messaging system now favored by nearly every remote work-equipped company), and follows Gerald, a hapless worker who gets, literally, trapped inside Slack. For witty banter, fun discussion, and Kasulke’s thoughts on vast and unknowable things, check out this interview.
Patricia Lockwood, one of the hailed “Poet Laureates of Twitter,” Logs On for this experimental and unusual novel. When a woman goes viral for a tweet—“can a dogs be twins”—she begins existing in “the portal,” musing about trivialities and memes. Midway through the narrative (formatted as a series of short paragraphs), the woman is jolted out of the portal, back to reality. Suddenly, the world of the portal and her internet virality don’t matter in the face of personal and familial tragedy.
Sarah Marcus, a once-beloved influencer, gets canceled and left without a career. When she reaches out to her childhood friend, he suggests that she should become the face of his new business venture: The Atmosphere, a cult-like rehab center meant to cure men of toxic masculinity. The two cult leaders now must venture into the desert with a group of misogynists to see if they have the chops to make the world a better place, when they secretly only want attention and praise. The Atmospherians is a funny dystopian fantasy sure to please readers drowning in the depthless waters of social media.
Eliza Bright, a coder at a gaming company and the only woman to have reached elite status, files a sexual harassment report and is subsequently fired. After airing her frustrations to a reporter, she’s doxxed, and becomes a rallying figure for women everywhere. The escalation that follows is a gripping, masterfully told novel that complicates obsession and violence alongside male and female rage. Check out this interview for A. E. Osworth’s thoughts on writing from dueling perspectives in We Are Watching Eliza Bright.
Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are young, but each of them is ready for something more. They desire each other, coming together, breaking apart and obsessing over every step they take. Rooney’s work is as thought-provoking and controversial as any writer of her status: Bekah Waalkes describes her as the “patron saint of the situationship,” while Malavika Kannon reflects on the dissonance of reading and loving Rooney’s work, even as a queer, brown woman of color. No matter how you slice it, Beautiful World, Where Are You is a defining contemporary novel that both reflects the zeitgeist and inspires imitation.
Voiced by Neil—Neeraj when his parents are angry at him—Gold Diggers is set in the Indian American suburbs of Atlanta. Neil, less interested in the outsized ambitions his community and family have thrust upon him, is consumed with his neighbor and childhood friend Anita. When he learns that she and her mother Anjali are using alchemy to brew stolen gold and ensure Anita’s success, Neil wants in: consequences be damned! Read this interview with author Sanjena Sathian to learn more about her unique brand of literary magic.
Marian Graves, rescued from a sinking ocean liner as an infant in 1914, grows up to be a pilot whose greatest ambition is to circumnavigate the globe by flying over the north and south poles. A century later, Hadley Baxter is chosen to play Marian in the film adaptation of her mysterious disappearance. In Great Circle, both women’s interwoven tales unfold over the course of this epic, emotional novel about self-determination and the cult of celebrity.
In Christine Smallwood’s bracingly intelligent debut novel, The Life of the Mind, Dorothy’s recent miscarriage—a tightly kept secret that only her boyfriend knows—haunts her until the very last page. It’s the kind of secret that eats away at her as she tries to make sense of a world she can’t control and a loss that feels like a failure. Read more about how Christine Smallwood approached writing secrecy and grief in this interview.
Lisa Taddeo’s follow up to her New York Times bestselling character study Three Women, Animal is a raw and honest portrayal of Joan, a woman who reaches her breaking point after a lifetime of coping with the cruelty of men. Soaring from New York City to the hills of Los Angeles in the wake of witnessing a violent act, Joan flees in search of Alice, the only woman alive who can help her reckon with her past. Read this interview to learn more about Lisa Taddeo’s approach to writing female rage and depravity.
The first novel in over twenty years from Joy Williams, Harrow is a marvel to behold and tells the story of the end of the world. Known primarily for her short stories, this post-apocalyptic narrative hinges on environmental ruin. The main character, Khirsten’s, eerie statement that “It is too late to be afraid,” echoes throughout, bringing urgency to the question of cause and effect, and as the doers of harm, do we deserve salvation?
Willa Chen never felt like she fit in—not in her family where her parents divorce early, and not in her mostly white school. After drifting through high school and college, she begins working as a nanny for a wealthy white couple—The Adriens—and their daughter, Bijou. Win Me Something, Kyle Lucia Wu’s debut novel, is the stunning coming of age tale of a young woman searching for belonging and finding power in defining herself.
We couldn’t stop chatting (and there are so many interesting characters!) so here is part four featuring seven translators, who work in heritage and non-heritage languages—Nepali, Spanish, Euskara/Basque, French, Indonesian, and Icelandic. Amongst the ways they began translating include telephone conversations with Nepalese aunties in Singapore, by living with ambient sounds of rapidly-changing conversion rates of the U.S. dollar in ’80s Buenos Aires, by falling in love with a language during a layover, and by re-imagining British children’s adventure novels in Indonesian.
The expansiveness of our conversations and the pointed geekiness over comparative grammar points have been condensed for Internet consumption. Buy their books and comics and in one case, pickles!
Muna Gurung: Nepali to English
Based in Kathmandu, Nepal, Muna Gurung’s translations include Night, book of poems by Sulochana Manandhar Dhital. A graduate of the Columbia MFA program, she has also published her own fiction and non-fiction. Gurung is currently working with a local organization called Srijanalaya to bring together Nepali writers and illustrators to create childrens’ books. She also interviews Nepalese writers for her column in the Nepali Times, Lightroom Conversations. In addition to these literary pursuits, Gurung runs ĀMĀKO, a pickle company with her mother, Bhimi Gurung.
Learning Tamu kyi over phone calls: “I grew up in Singapore in a gated community of Nepalis where the men worked for the Singapore Police Force and the women, like my mother, raised children, cooked, cleaned, and took care of the family. As a young girl, I spent a lot of time with my mother and other women her age. Each family lived in small quarters in an area we called “The Camp”, and each living quarter was equipped with a landline.
I remember spending a lot of time on the phone talking to my mother’s girlfriends. I loved the idea of picking up a piece of plastic handle, pressing some buttons and hearing a familiar voice right in my ears! It was magic. This was in the late ’80s and I was five or six years old. And these women I telephoned were not related to me, but I called them chyama or aunty. I remember, I would talk to this one chyama in particular. She was a Gurung woman; so, in addition to the Nepali language, she also spoke Tamu kyi, which is the Gurung language. My parents spoke to each other in Tamu kyi at home and or when they received long distance calls from Nepal, but they always spoke to us in Nepali. So I could understand things for the most part, but I could not roll my tongue to sound out the words in Tamu kyi– I didn’t have any practice. But this chyama would speak to me in Tamu kyi over the phone asking me simple things like, “Did you eat? What did you eat? Where is your mother? Where are your brothers? Do you like to drink water or do you like to drink grape juice?” I remember spending so many afternoons calling her up just to speak to her in a language that was my parents’, and how strange that I learned it from a Gurung woman in Singapore and that too over the telephone!
In school, I struggled with English, but I also felt a lot of shame around not being able to speak or write in “pure” Nepali. I grew up in a household that didn’t speak Sanskritised Nepali—our verbs were never conjugated correctly: we sprinkled Malay and Chinese words we acquired while in Singapore; and we didn’t really use proper honorific terms when speaking with our elders, so we appeared “rude” or “straightforward”. The language—at least in the way that it was taught in schools, and what we were told literature is supposed to be—was not only boring, but also intimidating and very complicated.
What has been so refreshing to see for a while now is Nepali writers breaking away from writing in that “pure” Sanskritised way and instead owning the various kinds of Nepalis that are spoken and used throughout the country. Like any language, Nepali sits differently in different tongues—and the words, cadence, structure changes with the place, people, culture, and climate even. To capture that in English is extremely tricky.”
Pickling as a form of translation: “Pickles and translation most certainly go hand in hand! Ama, my mother, felt like she had no knowledge within her. She thought knowledge was something one acquired at school and as someone who didn’t go to school, it always bugged her that she was “uneducated.” As I write in the essay, we set up the company after Ama shared with me her deep fear of how no one was going to remember her after her death; that she had come into this world and had cooked three meals a day, fed her family, and that was all. We set up the company as a way to say, “Well, that is not all.” That these jars of achar, as they are called in Nepali, is her knowledge translated.
The company has now begun to employ other mothers (“ama” in Nepali means mother; “amako” means “mother’s”) and include their recipes as an act of both translation and preservation of knowledge. You should also check out our labels: we illustrate the source plant of each ingredient that goes into an achar, so the label of each type of achar is different and one can “read” the labels by looking at the images without having to read the words. It’s an act of translation, an act of reaching out towards people like my mother who may not have gone to school, but knows what a turmeric plant looks like, while those of us who have gone to school may not know the difference between ginger and turmeric.”
Megan Matich: Icelandic, German to English
Raised on a pine tree farm in Southwestern Pennsylvania, Megan Matich came to Icelandic on an extended layover in the country on route to Germany to meet a poet she was translating. She struck up a conversation with a woman at a bookstore who told her about Icelandic’s system of inflection, which sounded to Matich a lot like Russian. “Enthralled by the prospect of complication,” Matich, who had already studied German, Russian, and Spanish, ran to the poetry section and discovered of Magnús Sigurðsson’s Tími kaldra mána (Cold Moons). She spent the next year working with Sigurðsson and translating the volume’s poems, slowly learning Icelandic, before taking a formal course in 2013. Matich has since moved to Iceland and hopes to become a citizen.
Working in a “lesser-known” language and Iceland’s Artist Salary Fund: “I think it’s important to steer the conversation toward what can be done, rather than what can’t. As an affluent nation that’s very proud of its language, Iceland has put an astonishing amount of money into the arts and disseminating Icelandic writing because the country views literature as a valuable export.
When I speak with translators of other languages, I often find that they’re surprised by the minimum rates that the Icelandic Writer’s Union (of which I am a member) sets for translation. That’s one example. Another is Iceland’s competitive Artist’s Salary Fund which, although it has problems of its own, supports many artists’ projects, offering about US$3,250 per month across artistic disciplines. Iceland injects money into the arts rather than curtailing what can be made, and that (e)valuation of art as more than a leisure occupation fuels creation and translation.
Almost every work I’ve translated has received funding from the Icelandic Literature Centre, even though novels and books of poetry don’t fit within the tidy schematics of a global economy that’s biased toward STEM. I suspect that this isn’t unrelated to the number of speakers of Icelandic and the limited number of translators; it’s a small country with an enormous, complex, surprising, joyful language and an unwavering belief in the possibilities of literature.”
A primer on contemporary Icelandic literature: “Gerður Kristný is an otherworldly and dexterous poet whom I deeply admire. The third work in her poetry trilogy (all translated by Rory McTurk), Reykjavik Requiem, gives voice to the bewildering story of a woman who died before she could tell her story of abuse, and leads us to question the limitations and permissions that we/sociopolitical forces place on storytelling and, by extension, language. Kristnýuses the form of the saga, I think, to reclaim and comment on the nature of articulation, the nature of literature.
Magma, my most recent translation, aligns quite closely with some of my own experiences. In episodic vignettes, author Þóra Hjörleifsdóttir explores escalating partner violence against a young woman while highlighting the progressive harm caused by even the most subtle of aggressions. I believe that this novel will help young women who may not understand, or even recognize, what has happened to them, to give voice to their experiences inside of a deeply fragmented culture, and by extension empower them to put it into words, to see it for what it is, to identify it, to talk about how bad things really are, and to take action, to change them. Magma is itself an “infinitive marker”—the percussive to, to, to that situates infinite action.
I’d also like to call out Steinunn G. Helgadóttir, who Larissa Kyzer is translating. Steinunn writes polyphonic novels-in-stories that infuse everyday family life with literal magic. A poet and visual artist, she turned to prose with her instant classic, Voices from the Radio Operator’s House. Her latest novel, The Strongest Woman in the World, stars Gunnhildur, a funeral beautician and Houdini-esque escape artist who not only possesses superhuman strength but can also speak to the dead.
Other writers to keep an eye out for: award-winning Auður Jónsdóttir, who explores the physical and reciprocal relationship between body, pain, and trauma in her work of autofiction Quake, which is forthcoming in my translation from Dottir Press. The novel follows Saga, who suffers from a series of epileptic seizures that silence significant parts of her memory (she doesn‘t remember, for example, that she is divorced). As she struggles to reclaim her agency, she finds that her repression has deep roots—that, as Bessel van der Kolk puts it, “the body keeps the score“.
I‘ve been on a bit of a hiatus from poetry while I‘ve been working on novels, but let‘s talk about poets to look out for! Elías Knörr, a queer poet of Galician origin writing in Icelandic, is at the top of my list, and will hopefully have work out in English next year (fingers crossed!). He is a funambulist of etymology and imagination. A number of poets were published in Words Without Borders, translated by me and Larissa Kyzer—including Kári Tulinius, Haukur Ingvarsson, and Bergrún Anna. Haukur explores climate change in his most recent work, Ecostentialism. Over the past few years, I’ve returned time and again to Gýrðir Elíasson’s ecopoetry, which demands environmental responsibility and the ethical treatment of both animals and the wider world.”
Amaia Gabantxo: Euskara/Basque to English
Amaia Gabantxo is the world’s foremost translator of Basque literature. She is also a flamenco singer and released the album KANTUZ: 1931. She is currently at work on three titles: Old Dogs and Old Bones by Unai Elorriaga, Burning Bones by Miren Agur Meabe, and, an anthology of Basque female poets—which she is editing as well as translating. She has crafted a set of hybrid pieces (fiction, memoir, literary translation and essay writing) in TheMassachusetts Review.
On language erasure and speaking an endangered language as a form of rebellion: “There was the way in which my fishing village’s songs would switch between Basque and Spanish for humorous effect—always at the expense of Spanish. It made me realize the beautiful possibilities of playing with languages, of hiding revolt within lyrics, of the subversive power that could be exercised through the use of a language deemed “useless,” “less-than.” The power resided in the inversion of power that took place in the songs, the “less-than” language having a laugh at the “superior” language in plain sight. It turned the mere act of listening and understanding into an act of rebellion. I internalized that there was something very powerful in being able to navigate languages—especially endangered ones like ours.
I grew up speaking Euskara—it was my mother tongue—and acquired Spanish when I started to go to school. The use of Basque had been forbidden throughout the years of Franco’s dictatorship, we lost a lot of speakers. Children were punished at school when they were caught speaking Euskara. With the arrival of democracy in Spain, eventually (it took a few years), laws were put in place that allowed schooling in the other languages of the state: Basque, Catalan and Galician (there are more, like Asturian or Valencian or Aragonese, but those haven’t been recognized with “official” status and as a result aren’t afforded the same protections and governamental investment, which leads us to a whole other conversation about how key it is for endangered languages to have official status). For the first time, too, we had radio and TV stations broadcasting in Basque, Catalan, and Galician, and newspapers in those languages.
So when the time came to switch from primary to secondary school, I made the decision to continue my schooling in Basque—since it had become possible. My primary schooling had been carried out entirely in Spanish, and switching to Basque would mean Math in Basque, Chemistry in Basque, learning Latin and Greek in Basque, Philosophy in Basque. My teachers thought I was crazy and tried to dissuade me; my parents were worried too, thinking my grades would tank. But I felt a burning need to do this for my mother tongue. It rankled with me that I was a very good writer in Spanish, but didn’t have the same literary dexterity in Basque. I only had oral knowledge of my language, and a very basic knowledge of the grammar rules of the newly minted standard Basque, Euskara Batua. I owed a debt to my language, and I was going to pay it. Thinking back now, it almost feels as if something in me knew I needed this for my future, and I’m thankful to 13 year-old me for being so headstrong and undissuadable.
After secondary school, I did a BA in English and Irish Literature at Ulster University, in Northern Ireland. How I ended up doing that is a whole other mad story that also feels very fated now. In my last year, I had the incredible luck of having Robert (Bob) Welch as a mentor after I joined his Modern Irish Literature class. He took an interest in this Basque alien from outer space who had landed on his class (I was the only foreigner in my year) and, while supervising my thesis, planted into my head the idea that I could become a translator of Basque literature (he had translated extensively from Gaelic himself, and authored works in Gaelic as well as in English). This hadn’t occurred to me, but seemed incredibly obvious when he suggested it. It felt like everything in my life until then had led up to that decision: my primary schooling in Spanish, my secondary schooling in Basque, and my higher education in English, added to a lifetime reading literature in all three languages, and a realization, while writing my thesis with Bob Welch, that no one was translating Basque literature directly into English. That every translation that existed had been carried out using a bridge language, Spanish or French: the very languages that had oppressed and almost disappeared Euskara. There seemed to be a deep injustice in that fact that I could try to remedy. So I leaped. And here I am.”
Seeing the big picture: “One beautiful difference about Basque is that as a language, it organizes its perception of reality in an inverse order to all other languages I know. Euskara pans in, whereas most other languages pan out. In English you’d go from the concrete to the general: there’s a bird on a branch of that oak tree at the bottom of the hill. It’s the same in Spanish or all other Romance languages. In Euskara, you’d start with the big picture and progressively zoom in: there’s a hill and on its bottom there’s an oak tree and in the oak tree there’s a branch and on the branch there’s a bird.
A couple of years ago I gave a talk at the Chicago Planetarium after they projected the film Arrival. They’d hired me as the closest thing they could find to a speaker of an alien language, I suspect. They’d asked me to talk about linguistic determinism, about how the language you speak influences the way you see the world, which is the theory—the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—underpinning the narrative of the film. Does it matter, the order in which your language leads you to perceive reality? I asked my audience, as I told them about the Basque case. I don’t know, ultimately, whether it does or not, but I do sometimes wonder if the Basque language and the Basque people have survived the odds for such a long time, precisely because we have this built-in ability to see the big picture, which comes to us through Euskara. Because, through our language, we’ve learnt to consider the whole before we focus on the detail. And maybe, just maybe, this is the key to our survival.”
Eliza Vitri Handayani: Indonesian to English
Eliza Vitri Handayani learned English from popular songs, starting around age six, and learned spelling by watching the texts in karaoke versions. She began her study of Norwegian when she moved to Oslo with her Norwegian husband. She began translating with her own writing in order to submit to American publications.
In 2012, she founded InterSastra, a platform that publishes stories and poems in Indonesian with English translations as well as producing “collaborative art events and performances, and programs for creatives and marginalized individuals to develop their voice and capacity for self-expression.” She launched a new art initiative called Eliza Vitri & Infinity, which offers which offers workshops with marginalized groups. She works with transwomen in Jakarta for the storytelling project CERITRANS.
On her alter ago Alyssa: “Throughout elementary school I was reading the Famous Five and Three Investigators series, but I would superimpose my own original characters and settings over the books’. Period books to me were like portals to escape my own life and enter a more exciting one where I was free to go places and outsmart grown-ups. I was still choosing my own adventures, translating Eliza into Alyssa—my alter ego who was tough and sharp, and had blue eyes and long blond hair.
Was I already fleeing myself, by projecting myself not only as the heroine of stories, as children often do, but as someone from another race? Was it because I was fed up with the people around me and their fear of anything slightly out of the ordinary? Or was it because the stories took place abroad that I had to transform myself into someone from abroad?
Even though I altered the characters, I didn’t localize the settings. I invented new settings in made-up places that looked similar to those I’d seen in American TV shows or movies. I can understand if I had thought crime-solving children could only exist in make-believe cities, but why did I insist that those cities had to be foreign? The Indonesian stories I’d read never had any characters that went on great adventures overcoming slick criminals and created their own secret high-tech underground base camp, instead they obediently went to school or to the market, and played and fought with other children. I didn’t want that everyday life, I wanted to be one of the adventurers. Thus, I identified with the children in the translated books—foreign in origin, but closer to my desires. Or perhaps I didn’t think Indonesians could be leading characters in books? As my father used to say, “Don’t get your head up in the clouds, we’re just sand on the shore.”
Whereas there were no discussions in our home, in Western movies and TV shows characters were pouring out their hearts and having intimate conversations, which I first understood by subtitles. I especially loved films and TV shows whose main characters were oddballs or underdogs, yet they turned out to be heroes in the end. I used to feel lonely, but Matilda showed me how to be my own friend; “Tomorrow is another day” played in my ear whenever I was feeling discouraged; a Jackson Five biopic made me see how one could become a diamond even though born as sand on the shore. What’s more, they showed me that there were places and people who could understand me, and someday I could find those places, those people.
Nevertheless, I managed to grow up insulated in a provincialism of the big city—my cultural environment was limited to Western popular culture. Our family never went to the theater, concerts, or dances, let alone literary events. We watched television and saw blockbuster movies.
Now that I know where to look, I would come across an Indonesian book or film that made me think, “If only I had discovered this while I was growing up, I would not have felt so lonely, so out of place, all the time.” I lived in Indonesia until I was 18, but I had given up on Indonesians long before that. Based on what I encountered in my family, relatives, and schools I’d concluded that all Indonesians were the same. I stopped reading the news (“politics were all a sham and the media were full of lies”), the magazines (“the stories were all about boring moral lessons”), and stopped watching Indonesian films and TV shows (“the quality was so bad anyway”). I barricaded myself inside my own misery.
While I doubted that great societal change could happen around me, I did believe that individuals could achieve great things. That was why the setting of the books remained far away, but the characters became me and my two friends from school. To take part in adventures we had to be translated. Someone who pretended he was someone else to take part in adventures—wasn’t that Don Quixote? Whoever he had been before, he became Don Quixote, and as Don Quixote he was himself, and he was free.”
The gracefulness of Indonesian: “Indonesian is a very supple and poetic language—sometimes the translated version can use words or sentences that literally mean something completely different, yet as a whole both versions still have the same meaning, more or less. If you’re used to the gendered and time-based grammar of English, it may take you some time to fully appreciate the gracefulness of Indonesian. Some examples of the poetic-ness of Indonesian:to learn = menimba ilmu (drawing knowledge from a well) and thank you = terima kasih (I/we accept your love/caring).”
Edward Gauvin: French to English
Edward Gauvin has translated over 400 graphic novels from French. The contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders, Gauvin has translated literary fiction, but has become known, in his words, as “the comics guy” likely due to this intense output. In the works are a Uyghur memoir and a Baudelaire comic. The range of Gauvin’s translation subjects is equally impressive—mountain climbing, the events of Tiananmen Square, a cat called Rascal, and a graphic history of wine, amongst many others. In 2021, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Choosing French as a first-generation Asian American: “I have enough Mandarin for home life, but not for reading a menu, much less a newspaper. What predisposed me to choose French—returning to or preferring it several times over, at different junctures—and what that means for a literary-minded first-generation Asian American with a middle-class upbringing (as opposed to the mainland Chinese person I am by default mistaken for in France), bringing into play the very separate histories of American francophilia vs. the longstanding affinities of France and China (declining cultural power, communist sympathies)… these are things I’ve been pondering a lot lately. My middle school offered your stock American menu of the Western European trinity. German was for masochists and iconoclasts. Spanish promised the lyrics to “La Bamba” (which should date me rather precisely). French tendered sophistication, cultural insiderhood, and pain au chocolat: aspirational, for an immigrant child too suburban at the time to detect the whiff of faded empire.
Later, I suppose I wanted a France to call my own—not that of oenophiles, or the Lost Generation, but a France that had not been staked out, even if that meant Americans might not recognize it as France. And found it, I suppose, in comics and in the intersection of Surrealism and speculative fiction. But there’s always enough to go around.”
The misconception of comics as a genre only for kids: “People tend to think translating comics means dealing with more wordplay and humor, and in a lower register. This misconception may be rooted in conceiving of comics as a genre (for kids!) and not a medium (in which any number of genres can be expressed).
One thing that has emerged for me only over time, and partly because the Francophone comics in translation scene has so greatly diversified, is that working in comics has allowed me to translate across more genres—westerns, epic fantasy, science fiction, biography, reportage, memoir, chick lit, children’s, war, noir—than I might have encountered in prose, simply because the selection of French prose we get to see here lacks the same breadth.
The late translator, teacher, and benefactor Michael Henry Heim said that you’re ready to start translating when you can tell what the language is doing (convention) from what the author is doing with it (idiolect). To this I’d add, from what the genre is doing with it. Genre has been defined, usually on a more narrative level, as a set of expectations and rules that govern both author and audience; I’d argue that these expectations extend to language (lexicon, register) and that more market categories than those we regularly recognize as genres (science fiction, thriller) have such expectations. That is, the language we’d expect to encounter in work labeled ‘literary’ is similarly if perhaps more tacitly circumscribed by expectation, especially when contextualized in period.”
Kaiama L. Glover: French to English
Kaiama L. Glover began with French in high school and then continued with the language during her undergraduate study. She came to it through “the somewhat clichéd experience of studying the Harlem Renaissance and discovering the connections between so many of the African American writers and artists I admired and the city of Paris.” But then she became more interested in complicating that very narrative by considering the French language in a broader context.
Translating Haitian French: “I’ve written about the difficulty of cultural translation, especially when it comes to the idiosyncrasies of Haitian culture. Specifically, the matter of Vodou and attendant phenomena like zombification require delicacy and care when rendering the Franco-Caribbean context into the Anglosphere, because non-Haitian audiences have been so primed by global popular and news media to associate Haitian spiritual practices with savagery, primitivity, and other racist tropes. For example, even though the term “voodoo” has been challenged, and the religion it supposedly references carefully studied and theorized by scholars, the term persists in many English language translations—this despite the fact is that “voodoo” is not the translation of “Vodou” into English, nor is it merely the “US American” spelling of Vodou. On the contrary, it is a troubling insistence on a stereotype that dates back to the US marine occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934. Stereotypes like this one leave Haiti not just lost in but victimized by translation.”
Lesson of translation: “I think more than anything else translation has taught me to read more slowly, to savor the choices writers make in deciding on the words required to best tell their stories. As someone who reads a lot “professionally”—that is, for research and teaching, translating is a crucial reminder for me to savor literature in a different kind of way.”
Ezequiel Zaidenwerg: English to Spanish
Brooklyn-based Argentine poet and translator Ezequiel Zaidenwerg’s most recent book is50 estados: 13 poetas contemporáneos de Estados Unidos, a genre-promiscuous book, which zigzags between the expanses of fiction and reality, and presents an experimental complication of the idea of America. It includes interviews with American poets and “Declaration of Independence,” a piece with words from the original document reconstituted by Zaidenwerg (in English and translated by Mexican writer and translator Hernán Bravo Varela).
Zaidenwerg is currently working on a book of “original” poems called Rimas. Of which he says: “I’m trying to use rhyme in less traditional ways, including some phonetic explorations, i.e. coming up with choreographies for the mouth.” He also translates American poets (translations include works by Mary Oliver, Yoko Ono, and Victoria Chang) to Spanish every day on his site.
Money and language as powerful tools for the creation of value: “I was born in Argentina in 1981, at the early stages of neoliberalization, and was raised in a tacitly bimonetary system where US dollars were seen as an amulet or fetish that protected people’s savings from the inescapable devaluation of the local currency. In hindsight, I think that learning dramatically shifting conversion rates from a very early age prepared and equipped me for becoming a translator: money and language are indeed two very powerful tools for the creation of value.”
Rendering the idea of America through 50 estados: “There are more than enough American cultural products in circulation, and that creates an illusion of higher quality or merit that is actually only backed by political, institutional and market logics. It will take even more discipline, but I’d like to find ways to translate mostly works from less hegemonic parts of the world. 50 estados—being a fictional, novelized anthology, with American authors and artists role-playing the interviews based on the poems I wrote— is more an attempt to destabilize the idea of “American poetry” than a way to peddle it. I was trying to play with the fascination we all have for American cultural products, which we’ve acquired through geopolitical and cultural training, to actually undermine it.”
1. Introduction: A fish. She called me a fish. I have no idea what she meant.
2. Description: I should say first that we had been fighting: indeed, there had been a dispute; let us leave it at that. She was hot-tempered, and so when she approached me, her face enlarged and enflamed with tears, I was not overwhelmingly surprised, since, as I said, we had done this sort of thing before. I tried to comfort her and put my hands on her bare shoulders as she beat me. Her hands were open and thumped heavily on my chest. I must admit that I experienced desire as she hit me—not so much from the violence itself as from its consequence: the thin strap of her dress had fallen from her shoulder, leaving her right breast—my favorite—exposed and sweating. I stared. I may have licked my lips. She did not notice; her eyes were shut like clams, and she was clutching at my hair. I tried to comfort her: “Come,” I said, stroking her hair which, to be honest, looked angry and, worse, smelled strangely—not clean or feminine, but like Chinese food. Her hair was like very thin lo mein noodles. In the still air, the smell wavered and clung. I felt hungry for the wrong foods.
And it was at that point that what happened happened. She pulled herself away from me, throwing off my arms and my gaze from her breast and headed full-steam for the door. She turned, her face flushed and drained, her lips clamped so tight that when she opened them to speak her mouth tore a gash; she turned to me, her sweaty hand fumbling with the door knob and said, “You—” she looked up and to her left without focusing; her face was sour—” You…fish.”
A fish. She called me a fish. I have no idea what she meant.
3. Detail: Her pronunciation of the word fish. There was a great deal of stress on the f. As if out of fear or embarrassment she needed to pause before saying the word. A windup. Perhaps she was fumbling. In her memory the words, farmer, fathead, fungus, fanny, fool, were all highlighted but not chosen. For some reason the word fish was. But these are all speculations, what is more certain is the windup. Like a child saying fuck.
4. Correction(s): In fact, I have many theories about what she meant.
5. Theories: i)the metaphorical: That I am in some way like a fish, that is, that I possess the properties of a fish. Properties (fish): scaly, slimy, coldblooded, smelly, edible, with a ridiculous appearance, and finally, perhaps most importantly, aquatic. Aquatic—we have gone swimming together once or twice, bur I do not recall ever spending too much time in the water. Alternative (a.): that I am as dependent on water as a fish. A sweeping indictment of society at large and its dependence on the toilet, the faucet, the bath, the outdoor shower, the hose, etc. Alternative (b.): minor properties of fish, i.e., that I am slimy and coldblooded, perhaps a liar; or scaly—I have had dry skin recently. Resolution: All possible, but I don’t see why she wouldn’t have chosen to call me a snake or a reptile instead.
ii)the reference: Gertrude Stein: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” A reversal of roles. Perhaps she holds the masculine role in our relationship, i.e., wears the pants, and that l am, as is often said in schoolyards and in prisons, her bitch. An aggression—not weak at all as I had first imagined, but, in that way is it not the more weak for it, for, considering her condition, was not her attempt at domination merely a pathetic gesture, and in being so, a cry for help? Very clever.
iii)the absurd: My search for meaning in fish may be in vain; she could have meant nothing at all, or more precisely, an absolute lack of meaning. If so, fish was chosen not for the properties associated with the word or for any connotation or reference, but for its inappropriateness, its very inapplicableness to the situation. A gesture aimed at the absurdity of our condition, and in a more general way, of the human condition.
iv)the acronym: Consider the letters themselves. Suppose that their sum, fish, was incidental. E.g.: Fucking Insane Selfish Human, Fibbing Incompetent Showoff Hedonist, Faintly Intelligible Stupid Head, Fabricated Incorrigible Sex Half, Filial Implied Supportive Help, Fecund Insufficient Sweat Harness, Fun Is Still Hunger. A great many possibilities.
v) the Mafiosi: A threat in Mafia code. “You fish,” she says, meaning, “You’ll be sleeping withthe fishes.” We once watched TheGodfather together.
vi)the misunderstanding: That I misheard what she said.
vii) the verb: “You fish,” she says, as in: “You go fishing.” Problem: I don’t fish. At least not as a habit. I think I went once as a child. I caught an oyster cracker. Resolution: She knows that I don’t fish. Thus she means, “That’s the problem with our relationship: we assume intimacy, yet don’t know each other.”
viii) the ce n’est pas le mot juste: (Slightly different from Theory iii) That she meant nothing by the word fish itself, that is, she could not find the right word for what I was, the right diagnosis for the failure our relationship. Metaphor: She searched for it in a barrel of words, paused throwing out the curses lying loosely on top, rifled through the easy ones like man or boy, dumped out the nonsensical ones like Ferrari and major motion picture, she thought she had it when she began with f but then realized she’d lost it; she searched again and gave up, settling for the only word that came to mind, the word stewing at the bottom of the barrel: fish.
6. Complaint: I have heard people say “Theories, theories, theories, but what of action?” I find that to be a very odd sentence construction. Still, the complaint may be valid.
7. Theoretical Responses To Theories: i)the metaphorical: Alternative (a): Stop bathing. Alternative (b): Bathe often, apply lotion as needed.
ii)the reference: The Offensive: Ride to her on a bicycle. Take her pants off. Comfort her. The Appeasement: Ask her to take you swimming on her bicycle. Purchase a book of quotes.
iii)the absurd: Send her a note:
Dear Prod,
The duck in the mangrove—Who; tung?—wore red geets can the right/bite? In the mid nacht between you I provence. Oysters.
—Teston
If she does nor respond, appear to her in a cape with the numbers 4, 5, and 7 arranged in numerical order around your genitals. Holding rightly to the nape of her neck, coax her in Spanish to feed the dog bananas.
iv) the acronym: Send her a regressive acronymic note:
FISH. FOOL IS STILL HUMAN. FEELINGS ON OUR LOVE: IF SOMEHOW SHE TRIES INSTEAD LEAVING LOVE, HIS UNDERSTANDING MUST APPROACH NIL.
etc.
v) the Mafiosi: Take her out to a nice restaurant. Make sure she wears a long red dress and a wide-brimmed hat. Speak coarsely to the waiters, but tip heavily. On the way our of the restaurant, kiss her passionately, leaning her onto a nearby table. Pull up her legs roughly and sit her on the table. Avoid forks. Pull up her dress and make love to her then and there on the table. Leave money for the inconvenience, also her hat. On the way home shoot her three times in the back of the head. Dump her in the river. Wear a nice suit.
vi) the misunderstanding: Ask her what she said.
vii) the verb: Begin by saying, “I don’t fish.” Then if she looks surprised, say, “But I’m perfectly willing to if it’s important to you.” If she does not look surprised, say, “But that’s what you meant, isn’t it?” If she concedes, pursue the point, e.g., via the gentle reversal: “‘Why do you think we don’t know each ocher well?” or request assistance: “How can we better get to know each ocher?”
viii) the ce n’est pas le mot juste: Give her a dictionary. Read to her from it until she is tired. Then kiss her neck slowly. Make love to her sweetly, on top of the dictionary. Make it a red one and surround it with white satin pillows for comfort. Preferably a very large dictionary. Better to leave the dust jacket on.
8. Closing: Leaving, she had some difficulty with the door, which is to say, she couldn’t open it. When she did, it came abruptly, swung too fast—so fast it might have hit her face had she not jerked back. She paused in the doorway as her hand slipped off the knob—she paused only for a moment, a film still: her head was turned towards me, though not enough for her to see over her shoulder. I could see her face silhouetted by the light coming in through the open door and the air of the small, closed room leaving with her. Then she turned her back and walked away. The heavy door swung behind her, blowing hot air back into the room.
Theories, theories, theories, but what of action?
9. Addenda to Theoretical Responses (a back-up, for it may be best not to readdress the issue, but to surprise her; i.e., to take her from above, to overcome):
ix) the country song: Become a small-time country singer. Sing songs about her on the sidewalks of famous bars, empty cafes, in stadium parking lots,
e.g:
Verse I Sitting by the river Drinking my cod liver I’m still fishing for my missing family I got a Smith and Wesson A Chrysler and a Stetson But none of them can bring her back to me
Chorus She left me in the shallows Lonely at the gallows Thinking about the one that got away I dream of sleeping fishes Full of silent wishes, Still hungry for the one that got away
Verse 2 Now there’s many types of fish Might end up on your dish Anything that’s caught upon your hook Don’t need no fancy spices Don’t matter what the price is Hunger is the heart’s greatest cook
(Repeat Chorus)
Bridge
The one that got away, the one that got away, Can’t bear the taste of the one that got away.
(Chorus Out)
x) the postcard: Send her a postcard: ”Wish you were here.”
l0. Finale: After the door closed, when I imagine she was taking wobbly steps down the stairs outside, there was the sound of the door closing officially, the lock filling the slot in the frame.
11. Citations: From 25 lessons far the Novice Fisherman: drawing of a man fly fishing on the cover, pages for notes in back. Since master fisherman, Frank Hillman, believes no one can learn the rod sitting in his smoking jacket, he attempted to publish the book with waterproof pages. He offers these simple lessons to read the night before:
Lesson I: You need the right bait… Lesson 15: Beware of too much slack in the line.
From Animals in Captivity, Vol. II, by Col. F.S. Lloyd. The most important text by the professional big game hunter and the father of modern animal husbandry. A quotation from the author’s gun holder serves as an example of native superstition (p.1147):
A bird will die if she does not realize the glass is solid. A fish will die if she does not pretend that it isn’t.
From The Proper Care for Gold Fish: A pet store manual: Caution: Don’t feed them too often
12. Fish In Digest
i. Thrown off of soft breast, a fish is used to confuse. The search is humid.
ii. Shaking in the still’d air, she walls herself in white the mystery of red.
iii. Perhaps in vain, I strive to understand a girl with hair of lo mein
iv. I have heard people say, “Theories, theories, theories, but what of action?”
v. Above all action I hover like a mallard before wet-landing.
vi. Words fall like Autumn from a hot-temper’d woman; Hand struggles with knob.
vii. A white ocean swarms with red fish, I dip my toes and sing country songs.
viii. Between her and me the key moment is the shut— perhaps the locking.
ix. The oceans dry up, leaving the sleeping fishes to wake up gasping.
x. Meditating after, I’m hungry like a loose strap— Fish Inedible.
13. Conclusion: After she left, I dreamt that I had followed her to the grounds of a Japanese castle. The castle had been rebuilt and renovated, a museum reproduction recently occupied by yakuza. Despite their absence, I felt like an intruder. A museum-goer handling the statues. The halls of the castle held an impossible, inert atmosphere; dust hung perfectly motionless in the air, reflecting the light corning through the arrow slits in the walls. I went into a white room looking for her. I felt as if I were underwater. The room was refrigerated; against the far wall an aquarium sat on a cable beside two food canisters. The fish had been left for dead, and I knew they must be starving. I rapped out the flakes and bits of mulch from the two containers, but none of the food broke the surface tension of the water, and none of the fish noticed. They swam along the blue rocks at the bottom of the tank, darting back and forth through the plastic castle. “Come,” I said, but the fish were unreachable. They swam below the surface, stopping occasionally to open their mouths without significance.
I left the room and continued to search the hallway. At the entrance to a room around the corner was the body of a man in a black suit, his leather shoes pointing towards the ceiling accusingly. Behind him were racks of swords. A museum collection of valuable and historically important weapons. I had always wanted to hold one of the swords and did not hesitate. Reaching over the body, my foot stepped on a stiff hand. I picked what I thought was a covered sword, but the sword was not inside; I was holding only the leather sheath.
If there’s one thing to note about the tremendous story collections on this year’s list, it’s the global terrain these stories cover. There’s the wide-ranging geography—from China to Florida, Argentina to New Orleans—but there’s also the questions each story asks. Diving deep into queries of desire and hunger, memory and politics, and much more, each collection blisters with stories and characters that remind us of who we are—at our best, and our worst. Electric Literature staff and contributors voted for their favorite story collections of the past year. Here are the top three, followed by additional favorites (there were many ties!) in alphabetical order.
Moniz’s debut collection, Milk Blood Heat, is about life in Florida—but more than that, it’s about life in a body. From estranged siblings reuniting to scatter their father’s ashes, to a young girl who is terrorized for resisting the church, violence and tragedy haunt these characters in their most stark moments of personal reckoning. Read Moniz’s discussion with Jennifer Baker on the connective threads throughout these stories, her creative approach to writing characters free of judgment, and her writing process in general.
Veasna So’s short story collection Afterparties explores the lives of Cambodian Americans, portraying the realities of queer and immigrant communities without sacrificing a comic voice or emotional intimacy. Hear from Veasna So in conversation with other Cambodian American writers on complicating the trauma narrative into which Cambodian diaspora literature frequently falls.
Filthy Animals is Brandon Taylor’s follow-up to his acclaimed debut novel, Real Life, which was a finalist for the Booker Prize. Introducing the title story, about longing, desire, and violence among a group of young adults growing up in the Midwest, Calvert Morgan writes that “Taylor’s gift is his ability to hold you in that now, like a dragster gunning against the brake until the rubber starts to smoke.” In addition to that story, you can also check out Taylor’s discussion of his affinity for the genre in his interview with Greg Mania. (Brandon Taylor is an editor-at-large and former senior editor for Electric Literature.)
In “Once Nothing, Twice Shatter,” an exemplary story from Barton’s fragmented, strange, and vulnerable debut collection, Eternal Night at the Nature Museum, the narrator slams a sledgehammer into a Toyota windshield. He is a desperate character seeking salvation before landing himself in an unusually tight-knit demolition derby. “I think I’m in a cult,” Barton writes. “But I still feel alone.” Recommender T Kira Māhealani Madden notes that all of Barton’s stories “…run a fever. Everyone misbehaves, but they do so seeking grace, humility. Reaching, reaching.”
The title Land of Big Numbers refers to the highly populous nation of China, and Te-Ping Chen’s stories within this collection both celebrate and critique the people and institutions shaping China throughout history. Read Chen’s perspective on what it means to commemorate a sense of place in fiction in an interview with Mimi Wong.
In Hao, YeChun explores migration and motherhood through the lens of Chinese women in their homeland and in foreign spaces, interrogating the power of silence and language along the way. “Ye’s writing taps into that same current of electricity, reminding you that at its best, writing can at once make you forget yourself and feel more alive to the world and its possibilities” writes Te-Ping Chen, recommending Ye’s short story “Stars” about an immigrant student suffering from a painful, pulsing brain injury.
Featuring sociopolitical horror stories set in modern-day Argentina, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed viscerally brings madness, cannibalism, and cruelty to the page. Learn about Instagram witches, Argentina’s very real and horrific past, and passing the blame for collective responsibility in an interview with JR Ramakrishnan and author, Mariana Enriquez.
If you’re unfamiliar with genre-master Brian Evenson, now is the time to discover his magical, sharp, destabilizing writing in his most recent collection, The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell. Mona Awad, who is well-renowned for her own somewhat horrific short stories, turns her attention to Evenson in her introduction to “The Shimmering Wall,” featured in Recommended Reading, noting his “ability to conjure the uncanny.” These stories will terrify and haunt you, but in a good way.
Queer, fat, Puerto Rican men hunger for food and friendship alike in Gonzalez’s highly-anticipated short story collection I’m Not Hungry But I Could Eat. Read his interview with Matthew Mastricova about the relationship between identity and desire, hookup apps, and the responsibilities of personal growth.
With stories from thirteen renowned authors including Roxane Gay, Alexander Chee, Melissa Febos, and Carmen Maria Machado, Kink tackles intimacy and desire across the sexual spectrum. Read editor Garth Greenwell in conversation with Aaron Hamburger about his own novel on gay sex, Cleanness, or check out some of editor R.O. Kwon’s recommendations for books by women.
Vast in both genre and style, the stories in Lucy Ives’ debut collection Cosmogony animate the little, off the beaten path moments that make up everyday life. Recommending “The Volunteer,” a story about memory, time traveling, multiple worlds, and romance, Tracy O’Neill argues that “Ives takes an interest in the story as a puzzle.” The intricacies and cleverness of Ives’ writing extend throughout the collection, where everyday life clashes with the surreal to unpack and explore the nature of human existence.
Although set in the near future, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s debut collection, My Monticello, reminds readers that history is alive and well, particularly when it comes to people of color and the legacies from which they descend in America. Her fiction asks, what does it mean to find a home in a country antagonistic to one’s own survival? And her relentless, original stories—about a professor studying racism by observing his own son or a single mother buying a home on the brink of the apocalypse—answer.
From gender and ethnicity to one’s given role in a family, the characters in Walking on Cowrie Shells toe the line between wanting to meet and subvert the expectations associated with their various identities. Michelle Chikaonda discusses Nana Nkweti’s exploration of the multiplicity of African womanhood in these playful stories, as well the author’s knack for experimenting with genre.
Brenda Peynado writes about politics and racism through the lens of fabulism in her debut collection. Find her in discussion with Deirdre Coyle on how a pre-teen headspace lends itself to fabulism or how anger and love can co-exist in storytelling. Peynado also recommended political stories that similarly wrestle with revenge and justice, kindness and complicity.
In his interview with Whiting Award Winner Brontez Purnell for Electric Literature, Greg Mania writes that Prunell’s characters “are a manic melee, each flirting with disaster, each resplendent in their own magnificence.” Read their conversation on gay dysfunction and run, don’t walk, to read 100 Boyfriends, a striking short story collection that magnificently unpacks desire, loneliness, and giving in to the urge to self-sabotage.
In stories chock full of New Orleanian charm, Maurice Carlos Ruffin navigates the intricacies of a region while commenting on life more generally. Find yourself in the heat of one such self-reflective space, a Louisiana courtroom in the 1800s, in “Caesara Pittman, or a Negress of God.” This auspicious debut, The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, is a spitfire of a collection.
This debut collection has been highly anticipated ever since Clare Sestanovich appeared in TheNew Yorker. Introducing the short story “Terms of Agreement” in Recommended Reading, Leslie Jamison says that in Sestanovich’s stories, “characters are stumbling, clawing, tripping backwards into new ways of seeing themselves and the undisclosed selves of their fellows.” “Terms of Agreement” offers a tender, thoughtful take on women’s lives, and “Make Believe,” also published in Recommended Reading, gives a sharp exploration of loneliness, from the perspective of a nanny working for a wealthy family.
Strongly rooted in contemporary Tennessee, We Imagined It Was Rain is stoic, gothic, and atmospheric as it places readers on a mountaintop, in the rain, or in the midst of profound human heartbreak. A masterful demonstration of detail and imagery, these timeless stories speak to the human condition today, a hundred years ago, and far into the future. Siegrist also recommended eight other books that capture the essence of Tennessee.
Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket is 91-year old Hilma Wolitzer’s first book in nearly a decade, and the first short story collection of her much-lauded career. Roxana Robinson recommends Wolitzer’s “Great Escape” as a kind of master class in writing about human connection, noting that the married couple at the heart of the story “are deeply connected to each other, in ways that can be created only through decades.” With sweeping strokes, Wolitzer crafts tender, telling stories about the intangible moments that bind people together.
From searing critiques of colonialism to exhortations of Black joy; from meditations on art and grief to the origin story of American chattel slavery and its long-lasting legacy, the books on this year’s list demand to be read. They are vast and wide-ranging, yet deeply personal and profoundly reflective—a worthy gold standard in any year. Electric Literature staff and contributors voted for their favorite nonfiction titles of the past year. Here are the top three, followed by additional favorites (there were many ties!) in alphabetical order.
Elissa Washuta’s latest essay collection White Magic covers everything from land and colonization, to video games and Twin Peaks, to spells, tarot, and witchery. Described by fellow nonfiction favorite Melissa Febos as “a bracingly original work,” Washuta’s unpacking of personal pain, also discussed in an interview with Electric Literature and live in our virtual salon on magical feminism, is not to be missed.
Also known as the indie rock star behind Japanese Breakfast, Michelle Zauner has written a memoir about food, mourning, race, music, and what it means to be Korean. From the first sentence and the title, the reader knows that Zauner’s mother will die and that Zauner will “cry in H Mart,” but the loss stings on every page. This memoir highlights themes like alienation in youth, and food as an expression of loveand grief. Plus, in addition to gorgeous writing, Zauner’s book cover (designed by Na Kim) made it to the semi-finals of Electric Lit’s annual Book Cover of the Year Tournament.
Hanif Abdurraqib is no stranger to our Best of the Year lists. In his latest work, A Little Devil in America, a National Book Award Finalist, Abdurraqib celebrates Black performance and Black joy in a collection that the author himself thinks pairs especially well with other art forms, including the music of Merry Clayton and the performance of a good game of basketball.
Skateboarding is, perhaps, a historically underexplored topic in literary circles. In The Most Fun Thing, Kyle Beachy does for skate culture what William Finnegan’s Barbarian Daysdid for surf culture, addressing both specific questions about the history of the sport’s development and broad theoretical questions like, “How does one live authentically as an adult while staying true to a passion cemented in childhood?”
In his debut memoir Punch Me Up to the Gods, Brian Broome recounts his childhood growing up Black and queer in a community that endorsed racial divides and narratives built upon shame. In unpacking the ripple effects of his early education, Broome considers the impact of teaching young boys formulaic “lessons” about masculinity epitomized by adages like “walk it off” and “rub some dirt in it.” This electrifying memoir pulls no punches—but it’s worth every second of heartbreak.
Victoria Chang is, first and foremost, a poet, and Dear Memory rings with lyrical prose. In collecting letters written to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, Chang delivers a collage in which the pieces, though only fragments of a narrative, ultimately deliver a gorgeous approximation of a “whole” ancestral history.
In her essay essay collection Southbound, activist and organizer Anjali Enjeti writes about developing and claiming her identity as a mixed-race woman in the Deep South. For further discussion of South Asian identity and definitions of heritage, check out an interview with Enjeti. (And, if you really can’t get enough, Enjeti acted as the interviewer in another great conversation about cultural appropriation and racial identities with Ladee Hubbard.)
Ashley C. Ford isn’t a new name in writing circles—her resume boasts bylines in just about every news and culture outlet you might think of, from The Guardian and the New York Times to Slate and Marie Claire. Still, for a first book, Ford truly knocked it out of the park. Somebody’s Daughter is a memoir about a childhood marked by racism, rape, incarceration, and—above all—complicated love.
In this experimental memoir, Marcos Gonsalez tells the stories of multiple Pedros, some real, some imagined, some replicas of Gonsalez himself. In all of these tellings, Pedro traverses a specific environment: an elementary school, a queer club, the streets in a small town, higher. But in every setting of Pedro’s Theory, Pedro is looking for the same thing—the Promised Land—and finding something else. Read an interview with Gonsalez here.
Whether most appropriately categorized as a work of history, journalism, or something more experimental, this collection of 18 essays, 36 poems, and selected short fiction is, at the very least, a dynamic reframing of the American origins story. From the opening Pulitzer Prize-winning essay penned by editor Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project is filled with eminent literary voices, including Ibram X. Kendi, Claudia Rankine, Wesley Morris, Yaa Gyasi, Jesmyn Ward, and ZZ Packer.
Have you ever secretly loved something profoundly uncool? If your answer is no, you’re lying—but this debut essay collection is perfect for everyone, even those not yet ready to confess. And, when you’re done reading Rax King’s absorbing thoughts about Creed, The Cheesecake Factory, and Guy Fieri, check out our incredibly fun interview with King here.
In this collection, pulled from an archive of over 20 years worth of writing, Rachel Kushner’s latest demonstrates again her respectable writing chops. The Hard Crowd has all the subversive political flavor readers will remember from previous work; fans of The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers will not be disappointed.
In twenty-six essays and accompanying recipes, Kate Lebo’s genre-bending book—is it a memoir? A cookbook? Food writing?—draws inspiration from 26 different fruits, one for every letter of the alphabet. From aronia to zucchini, The Book of Difficult Fruit takes readers on a journey across medicinal, aromatic, historical, cosmetic, culinary, and cultural borders.
In her memoir, Nadia Owusu, a Ghanian-Armenian-American, examines the aftershocks of her global upbringing. Beginning with a childhood spent following her father, a Ghanian civil servant with the United Nations, across Africa and Europe, and ultimately covering her coming-of-age and adulthood in the United States, Aftershocks does for racial identity what Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts did for gender identity. Owusu’s memoir, and this interview with the author discussing its inception and continuing relevance, are not to be missed.
Pop Song centers love and art, and features the work of, among others, Anne Carson, Frank Ocean, and Agnes Martin. Larissa Pham’s breakout might be described as a memoir-in-essays, but it’s probably more accurate to describe it as a love song—to intimacy, restlessness, vulnerability, heartache, and cultural connection.
In the midst of a pandemic caused by a virus, Kristen Radtke takes a close look at a quieter disease ravaging the American public: loneliness. In graphic novel form, Seek You searches for an explanation as well as an antidote to societal isolation. Radtke’s interview on Electric Lit about the very Americanness of being lonely, the special brand of pandemic loneliness, and her buoyant hopes for the world’s reconnection post-pandemic is also worth checking out.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the traditional writing workshop was designed by white men for white men. In his investigation into the history of craft—and his prescription for rethinking today’s literary landscape, Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World unpacks a series of important questions: How can we better reach writers with diverse backgrounds? How can we better include diverse storytelling traditions? In short: how can the writing workshop be better?
With a journalist’s keen eye and an immigrant’s unique perspective, Albert Samaha’s Concepcion examines centuries of family history from pre-colonial Philippines to Trump-era America. This Filipino American memoir confronts privilege, sacrifice, and the legacy of colonialism. For further discussion of the book’s main question—i.e., how to balance current prosperity against the sacrifices of previous generations—read an interview with Samaha on Electric Lit.
One of two texts on craft featured on this list, George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain encapsulates a course on the Russian short story that he’s been teaching to his MFA students at Syracuse University for two decades. Each of the seven essays is paired with an iconic story and, as a whole, the text offers a technical and engaging approach to what makes for “great” writing.
After twenty years spent writing, Sarah Schulman’s effort has been hailed as the most comprehensive political history ever assembled of ACT UP and American AIDS activism. Let the Record Show features more than 200 interviews and provides an unvarnished look at an exceedingly controversial group. Be sure to also check out our conversation with Schulman about AIDS narratives, grassroots organizing, and the political use of anger.
How should we have, talk, and think about sex? These are the central questions of Amia Srinivasan’s debut work The Right to Sex, which contemplates not only the act itself, but the limitations and consequences of the act on both an individual and societal level. Drawing on her expertise in political philosophy and feminist theory (Srinivasan is a professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford), each of the collection’s six essays are characterized by a deep and careful intellectualism.
Suchitra Vijayan’s Midnight’s Borders offers a modern view of India in a form reflective of its writer. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister by training, an award-winning photographer, and the founder of a hybrid research and journalism organization. Unsurprisingly, then, her work of narrative reportage is genre-bending, following the lives of India’s displaced and stateless with an amalgam of stories, encounters, vignettes, and photographs. Read an interview with Vijayan discussing the seven-year, 9,000-mile journey that went into the making of this work of novelistic nonfiction here.
The only biography on this list, Richard Zenith’s Pessoa is an in-depth (the book clocks in at over 1,000 pages) look at the life of Fernando Pessoa, one of the world’s most enigmatic poets. As an acclaimed translator of Pessoa’s work—for which Zenith won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation—and the recipient of Portugal’s Pessoa Prize, Zenith is undoubtedly the perfect biographer to unravel the poet’s dozens of alter egos and imagined personalities.
Jess Zimmerman’s Women and Other Monsters analyzes 11 iconic female monsters, offering a fresh and celebratory spin on the outdated belief that monstrosity is something to be feared. In considering closely the “engine of Greek mythology,” Zimmerman makes an argument for rebuilding and repurposing myths for the twenty-first century. For further discussion of monsters (and culture, the Male Gaze, and topless murder), check out an interview with former Electric Lit editor-in-chief Zimmerman here.
Claire Luchette‘s novel Agatha of Little Neonpacks a suckerpunch beyond its bold pink cover. At first it is unassuming, as a woman in a habit can be. The story opens with four sisters who are being removed from their home near Buffalo to be put in charge of running a halfway house in Rhode Island, Little Neon. The four blend together at first, having spent the last nine years in unison. However, after the move, the youngest nun Agatha is slowly peeled from the comfort of anonymity and constancy and into interrogating her own wants.
Tension builds throughout this novel in vignettes. At the start, when the sisters prepare to leave their home of nine years, they pray in the front pew and Agatha recounts the grandiose beauty of the church:
“There was nothing new for us in that basilica, only things that had always been there, and though we could not admit it to each other, that’s what we wanted, too: to always be there, in the place we’d become sisters. Remain, remain, remain.”
Then quickly they are transported to another world of graffiti of men’s genitalia, discount groceries, and a halfway home painted neon green. And inside the home are people that the Church says, ”need God and prayer and mercy.” But it doesn’t seem like enough. Not for the people who have tangible needs and hardships at odds with the Church’s creed. For Agatha, recognizing that gap comes with the larger stake of ending the bond she has with her fellow sisters. If she leaves, she is alone.
I am a generation removed from Catholicism. I was baptized at seven at the behest of my great aunt, who was also my father’s Godmother. My mother was taught by her grandmother that only a priest could truly interpret the Bible. But, my home is littered with crosses and angels. I suppressed my sexuality until I was in college because I was afraid of disappointing my loved ones. After seeing many family members struggle with addiction, I’ve seen how the church is one of the only places offering support.
I talked on the phone with Claire Luchette about a quiet, queer interior, the rare beauty of Fleabag season two, and how to write men in a story of sisterhood.
Alex Juarez: One of the main things that I immediately noticed and that stuck with me the entire book is that it’s such a relationship-oriented story. Between the sisters, between the sisters and Mother Roberta, between the Neons, and even the girls at school. But at the same time, so much of the book is focused solely on Agatha and her interior. How did you manage to balance which parts of the story were about groups and which were about the singular?
Claire Luchette: The story started as an exploration of group dynamics. I was writing early drafts through the first person plural, but that didn’t really allow me to get into any of the interesting stuff that goes on between groups of people and like the strange power dynamics that exist in any group. And so Agatha came much later in the process. Once I was able to picture this narrator and think about her role in this group, you know what she wants for herself or what she lacks for herself, that made it much easier to kind of figure out what was at stake for her in this story. Putting her in this situation in Rhode Island in which she is totally out of her depth, I’m just far more interested in populated stories in which a lot of people show up and kind of filter in and out of the world than I am any like one character or portrait.
AJ: I feel like there’s been a big increase in like stories that are very much about one lone woman like My Year of Rest and Relaxation where she’s just in her apartment and there’s two other characters.
CL: Right? Yeah. No, it’s so true. And Rachel Cusk, for me, was a big inspiration as to how you can turn that gaze outward and put your character in the world and have them bump up against other people in it rather than just giving us a static situation. That’s way more interesting to me.
AJ: I really enjoyed the societal expectations that you were addressing about being a nun. You see that in the scene with the truck driver where he’s initially very aggressive but when he sees that they’re sisters and then he apologizes and leaves. And simultaneously having the sisters be caretakers for this group of addicts that are almost all older than them.
The nuns exist in their own world and determine their own rules, but they’re also still liable to this stringent and regimented, broader world of the Catholic Church.
CL: I’m so interested in caretaking as a story concept. I think what’s interesting to me about the nuns is that they kind of exist in their own world and determine their own rules, but they’re also still liable to this extremely stringent and regimented, broader world of the Catholic Church. So they can’t really excuse themselves from clericalism and the idea that they are of a different moral sphere than everyone else. But in this actual vocation in which they’re taking care of other people, and I think they find that physically demarking themselves and culturally and morally demarking themselves isn’t to anyone’s benefit and that it really gets in the way of the work that they’re trying to do.
AJ: Sexuality is mentioned throughout the book, but often in like very tiny revealing snippets. And I was incredibly charmed by how much you learned from these short sentences here and there. You mentioned that Agatha was a later addition, but since you thought of Agatha, was she always queer?
CL: Yes. I actually met a nun while I was researching this book. And the sister said, “I’m a lesbian, but it’s just something that I have to do away with.” And that’s self-knowledge I found really fascinating. And I wanted to figure out what it meant for someone to hold that truth in their head but live without letting it be true. Agatha was always clear in my head, and but I think like for me, the hard part in writing this book was figuring out ways to make it clear that her queerness is palpable and present, but not to be homophobic in the way that I wrote about repression.
AJ: Have you seen season two of Fleabag, The L Word: Generation Q, or Midnight Mass?
CL: I’ve seen season two of Fleabag. I have not seen the L Word or Midnight Mass.
AJ: I feel like there’s been a big spike in three dimensional and devout clergymen, who are also very queer-accepting friendly, loving figures. And I don’t seem to remember that happening prior to a few years ago. Do you have any thoughts on like the rise of queer friendly figures on-screen, like Catholic or otherwise?
So many of my relationships with clergy have been with sisters. They are the real workhorses of the church and the people who are bringing God to the suffering.
CL: Yeah, I love this question. I remember watching Sex and the City, and Samantha has a fling with a priest. That was the first time that I saw a priest breaking the rules on screen. I think some of it has to do with the quote unquote Cool Pope, and what Pope Francis seemed to represent to a lot of progressive Catholics. It seemed like he was going to bring about all this change. But I think people are finding that like no one pope, it sounds ridiculous but no one pope can change the Church.
I think what’s really interesting to me about the Hot Priest is he’s a really good priest. He sees himself as an instrument of God. He wants to bring God to the people of the world and the Church. He’s not someone who sees himself above the lay people or beyond reproach in some way. But we see that clericalism still hurts him because he’s forced to desexualize himself. And yeah, I think anytime you have a character who exists inside a hierarchy of power, that character automatically becomes a shorthand almost for readers or viewers, right? It signifies something. And I think lately, the role of a clergyman in a story signifies something really complicated and a lot more interesting than maybe in decades past.
AJ: It was really interesting to see the role of men in the story, especially because it’s very much a tale of sisterhood. And the men in the story are the priests and the Fathers who are less than stellar: how they weaponize power over the sisters for being women or like the principal at the school. And then you have the Neons who are such a vital part of the story. And very quickly the Neons are only men who are incredibly tragic and very human characters. Was it important to you to give the sympathetic role to men outside of the church?
CL: In earlier drafts, the men in the story were either extremely evil or extremely wounded, and for whatever reason, could not strike a balance between the two. I wanted to draw a line between the emotional stuntedness of the men of the church and the ways that the men that live in Little Neon aren’t afforded the same ways of doing away with their problems. There’s no rule for them to cling to as a means of hiding their pain.
I’m sure that there exist some priests that that are good priests, like the Hot Priest, but I’ve never gotten to know them or I’ve never met them, because so many of my relationships with clergy have been with sisters. They are the real workhorses of the church and the people who are bringing God to the suffering. And so I wanted to show that in the story, which required me to keep the man of the church at a bit of a remove.
Missing Woman Unwittingly Joins Search Party Looking for Herself
They had water. They suckled canteens, wiping their mouths with the backs of their wrists. When I say they, I mean for days all I saw were walking lampposts. Then, them: a crowd in red shirts, “so as to be visible in shrubbery,” I was later told. They had dogs, who sniffed everything in sight, often leaping up at nothing. The walking lampposts were a mirage, I was later told, even though they had feet and burned no matter the hour. The moment I found the crowd, I couldn’t find my words. My mouth so dry I wretched. A man tossed me a red shirt, called me “Kathy,” so I became her. They fed me peanut-butter bars and soon, my legs jelled. I started to skip, skip, skip down the path. My hearing returned. The air blurred with crickets. “I found her!” I yelled into a blackberry bush or was it a fox filled in with flies? They tore me from the woman I found. Locked me in the backseat of a squad car, pressed wet washcloths to my forehead. I could hear them whispering beyond the zipped up windows. A man shone flashlights in my eyes. It took three sedatives to bring me down. I was later told that I was later told that I was. “Where is she?” I demanded. Clouds ate my vision. Sleep forced her fingers down my throat. “We found her,” a cop barked into his walkie-talkie, eyes fixated on my dirty ankles. I threw my arms around my own shoulders, “Thank heavens, I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” Once they knew I was me, they fed me orange slices. I’ve never been loved like that before. Everyone calling my name with such desperate attention. Even me.
The Symphonic One
For a wedding present, my husband gave me a cello. From the beginning, I was afraid of it. It hulked in the corner of our new bedroom in our new house, huge and lumbering. I knew it would tear our marriage apart. The first time I played it, Timothy wept. He said all the secret notes that were in his body were coming out of the instrument. I knew right then that my gift would make me famous beyond compare. At Timothy’s urging I joined the local chamber orchestra. The effects were disastrous. The violinist swore off ever playing again. The pianist cut off her thumb to prove a point. Soon, the media got a hold of what was happening. I was asked to join the Symphonic Four, a nationally touring ensemble of great prestige. I had only been playing for a few months; my skill was unfounded. But it was more than that. I was doing things skill could not account for. Soon it became the Symphonic One. The other musicians were admitted to various institutions for their overwhelming joy. The instrument beckoned desire and blood. I remained untouched. When in the night I would return to my hotel room to find silence I would have to fill it and the filling would leave me empty. The low notes rumbled the room. My hotel neighbors ceased making love to knock on my door in their bathrobes. They sat on my bed while I played. Across the country Timothy was asleep and I wondered if this would wake him. “Every time you play, even if I can’t hear it,” he once told me, “I feel the bow against my heart.” He was not simply being romantic. One night I was playing in France. It was the largest crowd I had ever played for. In the midst of the last movement, the cello snapped in half. I sat there in that crowded theater, with a thousand faces looking at me. No one applauded. No one got up. It was clear I would never play again. When I got to the hotel, I ran the bath and filled it with turquoise hotel soaps shaped like stars and fish. I put my head completely underwater and opened my eyes. Bubbles filled my ears. I saw the moon floating above me, leaking silver-green smoke, and tried to remember what his voice sounded like. I stood up in the bath and dried myself with a towel that smelled of stale cigarette smoke. I knew that to step out of the bathtub would be to step into an unfathomable life. I counted to three. In my new, unfathomable life I was a woman who would never again hear her husband’s voice and the bathmat I stepped onto was not a real bathmat but a thin towel laid on the bathroom floor.
Despite its setbacks, this year has been an abundant year in poetry. Throughout 2021, we read lyrical, rhythmic, political work that spoke to our collective horrors, as well as our collective joys. The poets on this list battled at the cross-roads of their internal and external lives. Through them, we traveled across space and time, and at every turn, there was another poet, a prophet whose words reminded us that through our journeys, we were never—not for one moment—alone. Electric Literature staff and contributors voted for their favorite poetry collections of the past year, and here are the top two, followed by additional favorites (there were many ties!) in alphabetical order.
Kaveh Akbar’s linguistic precision is crucial to his sophomore collection, Pilgrim Bell. One of literature’s most exciting contemporary poets, Akbar explores deeply personal themes surrounding his family’s immigrant experience, being Muslim in America, and his quest to stay sobor. Akbar is a consummate wordsmith, shaping and molding language to embody the spiritual landscape his poetry traverses. Pilgrim Bell was a highly anticipated 2021 collection, and it more than fulfills its immense promise.
Donika Kelly’s sophomore collection lives inside some of the darkest traumas a person can face: child abuse, racial violence, the dissolution of a marriage. Kelly blends formal structure with more liminal elements of human survival like memory, employing lyrical virtuosity to explore the pain of the most intimate relationships—how familial harm spans generations—and how a person must shapeshift in order to survive. Kelly’s resilience is at the heart of these poems. Read more about The Renunciations, and other queer poetry collections here.
Threa Almontaser’s critically acclaimed debut, The Wild Fox of Yemen, questions language, voice, translation, and how these basic elements of communication are formed and maintained by imperial violence. Alternating between English and Arabic, readers might want to keep their phones handy to translate a few words. This collection thrives at the intersection of dualities—New York and Yemen, English and Arabic, foreigner and native. Almontaser brings us Muslim girlhood in the wake of 9/11 but never loses herself or her centrality as she meditates on the fox: a dream creature representing both sacrifice and scavenger—perhaps the most visceral of all dualities at the heart of this collection.
Doppelgangbanger invites readers to time travel with Cortnet Lamar Charleston back to the 90s, when hip-hop was king, to the streets of Chicago’s South Side. Charleston’s poems explore a Black boy’s struggle with destructive definitions of masculinity and the conflict between inner and outer life. Charleston’s playful, musical language creates a foundation upon which honesty and self-discovery soars. This highly anticipated collection is a journey from performative self to authentic self, and an ode to Black boys in urban cities everywhere.
This timely collection, inspired by the A&E docuseries, soars where the docuseries fails. The poems in Hoarders are an exercise in empathy, telling the story of a person and the beloved items they hoard. Kate Durbin then complicates this narrative by examining the larger context: a society beleaguered by gross consumerism. Durbins gives voice to her characters, using surrealism to inject humanity and tenderness into lives and stories that are often treated with disdain. Durbin reminds us that life under late capitalism is complicated. In 2021, who doesn’t need that?
Both dazzling and devastating, Sho, Douglas Kearney’s seventh collection is a literary high-wire act that both employs Black vernacular strategies and uses various modes of performance to examine history and current events. These poems are wildly sonic, musical in their construction, and Kearney’s linguistic virtuosity creates a memorable all-sensory reading experience. Kearney dances at the intersection of entertainment and violence, and a good reader is left wondering where one starts and the other ends.
This much-lauded debut collection, My Darling from the Lions, tells a story of Black girlhood through the complicated lens of sexual politics and familial inheritance. Black identity is the geography of the book, which is divided into three sections, but additional recurring themes explore femininity, divinity, and familial shame, all in the context of modern culture. If it sounds as though this collection is uniquely wide-ranging, it’s because of Rachel Long’s ability to emphasize the power of every single word in every single poem, facilitating a collective impact that lingers long after a reader has put the book down.
A searing sense of longing permeates Black Girl, Call Home. Written by a renowned spoken word artist, it is an ideal literary companion for any woman wandering the annals of her mind, her life, or the collective experiences that have shaped her. A love letter to Black queer womanhood, Jasmine Mans’ poems are lush, free, and meditative, lucid and lyrical. They don’t shy away from difficult questions. The reader will be reminded of Mans’ spoken word roots, just as the book calls for Black women to find their paths home.
The Sunflower Casts a Spell to Save us From the Void, a 2021 National Book Award Finalist, is an amalgamation of dreams shaped and molded into poems—itself an act of literary translation spanning multiple realms. Jackie Wang dreams and writes of solidarity and resistance, individual and collective conflict. These concepts are vehicles to portray historical trauma and communal memory, and the way these collective forces seep themselves into our collective and individual psyches. Ultimately, Wang’s ethereal poetry bridges the gap between the spiritual realm and real life.
Jane Wong describes the feeling of her sophomore collection, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, as “That turning around when I walk down the street, always feeling like I have to look behind me.” These quiet poems burrow under a readers’ skin, yielding small, intensely physical responses—fists curling and uncurling, a sharp intake of breath or an inability to look someone in the eye. The fear Wong’s collection addresses is the kind that calcifies into rage. These poems are a warning: America might not expect anger from a Chinese American woman, but you never know when her rage might release, when her fist might curl.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Tolstoy’s famed opening line from Anna Karenina is never far from my mind whenever I tune in to watch my favorite white TV family, the Roys of HBO’s Succession, who run an enormous Fox/Disney-like media and entertainment conglomerate. In addition to its razor-sharp wit (seen in its portrayal of the characters’ many flaws and neuroses, as well as their delightfully deranged and hyper-specific insults for one another), Succession is famed for its frank examination of corporate and family power dynamics and the funhouse mirror-like quality with which it satirizes and reflects our own world. While a good portion of the show’s appeal lies in getting to watch a set of ultrarich and deeply unlikable characters being nasty to one another and engaging in various corporate hijinks, its depiction of the real pain, suffering, and emotional rot at the core of the Roy family is startlingly poignant. The Roys’ surface problems are not relatable in the least for most viewers, but the specific dysfunction and unhappiness of each individual character collide to form a potent, combustible cocktail of misery that keeps me coming back again and again.
At the heart of the Roys’ particular brand of family dysfunction is, of course, everyone’s deeply entrenched daddy issues. “I love him, I hate him, I’m gonna outsource it to my therapist,” says once-de facto company heir and now disgraced son Kendall Roy about his father, the domineering and tyrannical Logan Roy. Kendall and his siblings—deluded outsider Connor, self-righteous girlboss Shiv, and enfant terrible Roman—can’t help but revolve around their father in search of his approval, like wobbly planets around a withholding sun. Logan, in turn, plays his children off one another like a seasoned conductor cuing an orchestra, knowing exactly which of their weaknesses to exploit and which of their strengths to cultivate and praise in his never-ending quest for power and control. At the same time, part of the brilliance in Brian Cox’s portrayal of Logan is that we don’t doubt that Logan loves his children, in his own way. But love is besides the point in the world of Succession—an inconvenience at best and a tool to be weaponized at worst.
Power, the lies we tell ourselves and others, and the family ties that both bind and blind us are all things that deeply interest me as a writer and a reader, especially when humor is involved. Succession is a show in which laughter, usually at the expense of others, keeps the pain at bay, and in which none of the characters want to give away their hands, even as they lose game after game. The books below offer their own takes on family dysfunction, daddy issues, and familial power dynamics and how quickly they can change.
Shipstead’s novel is a gently satirical account of a patrician New England wedding weekend gone wrong, seen primarily through the eyes of Winn Van Meter, the embittered father of the bride whose feelings of confused lust (for one of his daughter’s bridesmaids) and social discontent (for a club that won’t accept his membership application) threaten to occlude the success of the wedding.
At its heart, the novel is also a send-up of masculinity, snobbery, and what Succession’s Roy siblings would call “sad sack wasp traps”—social affairs convened by the moneyed and/or titled primarily for the goal of seeing and being seen. Elegantly written, with a keen eye for the quirks and customs of New England WASP families, Seating Arrangements is perfect entertainment for anyone who enjoys watching rich white people behaving badly.
Kathy Wang’s Family Trust is an exploration of the lives of a Chinese American immigrant family in Silicon Valley, in the wake of the news that their wealthy patriarch, Stanley Huang, is dying. As they prepare for the details of his estate to be revealed, each family member—his son Fred, a Harvard MBA grad convinced that he is meant for loftier things than his mid-level corporate investment job; his daughter Kate, who supports her family while her entrepreneur husband struggles to get his start-up off the ground; his much-younger second wife, Mary, who is beginning to chafe under the demands of his care; and his tough, pragmatic first wife Linda, who has begun dating again in her 70s—must grapple with the long-simmering tensions, envy, and unspoken resentments that have built up around their lives. Wang’s novel shines in its description of not only the family’s dynamics, but also its depiction of Silicon Valley, where fortunes can be made and lost seemingly overnight and an outward indifference to appearances masks an obsession with status.
Patricia Lockwood’s memoir, a coming-of-age story and a portrait of a most unusual family, is as unforgettable as it is funny. Lockwood writes deftly and hilariously about her father, a former Lutheran pastor turned married Catholic priest with many eccentric habits, including wearing only underwear (or full priest regalia) at home, drinking cream liqueurs throughout the day, and bellowing nonsequiturs at his television. She presents these foibles alongside his more troubling flaws, including his domineering nature and selfishness, without malice or judgment, while also assessing the very real trauma of growing up in a conservative, highly patriarchal childhood:
“Sometimes, when the ceiling seems especially low and the past especially close, I think to myself, I did not make it out. I am still there in that place of diminishment, where that voice an octave deeper than mine is telling me what I am.”
Much like Connell’s 1959 novel, Mrs. Bridge, a quietly stunning character study about a timid upper-middle-class Kansas City housewife, Mr. Bridge—a companion novel published ten years later—is about the big little moments of life, the seemingly insignificant hinges upon which a life can turn, or turn in on itself. Mr. Bridge, an ambitious lawyer whose work ethic assures his family’s prosperity, hides from his wife and children behind a newspaper and a veneer of conservative respectability, barely responding to their bids for his attention while simultaneously yearning for their approval and love. Connell’s touch is light, but the impact of all these little moments is weighty. Mr. Bridge vacillates between moments of humor and pain, showing us an emotionally stunted man who is convinced that material success as a provider takes precedence over connecting with the people around him.
In CJ Hauser’s novel, two estranged adult siblings must come together in the aftermath of their biologist father’s accidental death to collect his belongings from his research station off the Gulf Coast. Elsa and Nolan Grey’s father was a once-revered scientist whose professional reputation went south after he aligned himself with the Reversalists, a ragtag group of scientists who believe that evolution is now going backwards.
As the siblings come to terms with their complicated feelings about their brilliant, emotionally distant father, they too find themselves going backwards, revisiting their shared memories and trying to determine where it all went wrong. “They were fondlers of old grudges and conjurers of childhood Band-Aid smells,” Hauser writes of the Greys. “They were rescripters of ancient fights and relitigators of the past. They were scab-pickers and dead-horse-beaters and wallowers of the first order.”
Written in an incantatory, otherworldly style that is reflective of its child protagonist’s perspective, We the Animals is a deeply felt novel about childhood joys and traumas, as well as the powerful hold that our families can have on us long after we’ve left them or they’ve left us. Told in vignettes from the perspective of a young half-white, half-Puerto Rican boy growing up in rural upstate New York with his two older brothers and his troubled parents, who married in their teens and have a tumultuous relationship with each other and with their children, Torres’s novel reads like a series of snapshots that leave nothing out—some blurry, some beautiful, some excruciating. The first time I read it, I was particularly moved by Torres’s description of the complexities of brotherly bonds:
“They hated me for my good grades, for my white ways. All at once they were disgusted, and jealous, and deeply protective, and deeply proud. Look at us, our last night together, when we were brothers still.”
After being unceremoniously broken up with by her fiance, Goodbye Vitamin’s Ruth comes home for Christmas for the first time in years to find that her father Howard, a history professor, is losing his memory and has become increasingly erratic, and, consequently, has been fired from his teaching position. Ruth’s mother asks her to move back home for a year to help care for him. Excerpts from Howard’s old journal entries, in which he recorded things Ruth said as a child, are peppered throughout the novel. Ruth in turn begins cataloguing her father’s days with tender precision, noting his good and bad moments.
As the novel continues, she recalls the ways in which her father’s failings—alcoholism, past affairs with other professors and grad students—mirror her own inability to face life’s realities and truths. Ironically, it’s in lying to her father that Ruth begins to find purpose as his caregiver, when one of his former graduate students comes to her with the idea to stage pretend classes for her father to teach, in order to give shape to his days. While the ruse doesn’t last, the wisdom and tenderness of this slim novel lingers long after its last page, as do the questions it asks us about memory, forgiveness, and what is passed down within families.
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