We are the 300-year-old big bois of the sea and we did not come to play

Posted on by Alyssa Songsiridej

In the tidepools we felt an absence. No longer hummed the starfish and anemones, the dumbfounded krill. The shifting, blurred shapes of palm trees loomed out there, on the shore. Their fronds, which sometimes skated on the surface of the water, fell to the sand like the balconies of the condominum towers. When those fell into the water, they sank. The waves still smoothed in over the shore to foam there a moment before they receded. Us, well. We remained.

We are the three-hundred-year-old heckin big bois of the sea, grown larger than any of our kind has ever been before, covered in carapaces made of titanium custom-molded to our bodies, the embodied dreams of our elders who gradually decayed until they collapsed into fleshy heaps on the floor of the sea, fortified with the language we developed to sustain us, suited up in our cyborg flesh probably able to live forever, placed here in the time where we have a fighting chance at taking over the rest of this water planet, kind among our kind, moulting with the assistance of bigboi doctors and bigboi scientists, investigating the future-focused potentialities of telomerase manipulation, well-armored against enemies of any size, and we did not come to play.

We remember when the hands of land mammals came down through the water. A red cloud bloomed in the water. The hands themselves tasted of sand and the tiny bones of the endoskeletons. Sometimes, when we are very hungry, we eat the flesh of land mammals whose bodies sink. Despite knowing their flesh, we have questions. What would it take to have so many bones and so small? How did they regrow them once they got old? Could their flesh wrap around the bones, as ours did? Could they replace their bones with titanium rods and have flesh grow around those? What happened when their outer layer of skin moulted? Do they make telomerase? How do they feel about being soft? Do they feel vulnerable most of the time?

The land mammals up above gather the rock crabs in their nets. When the motors buzz and we detect the stink of their machines, we hide. We are not proud of this. We watch the bodies of the rock crabs sink down toward us through the water, trailing bubbles against the light. Octopuses who wait nearby snatch a few right out of the water and pass them from tentacle to tentacle, tearing their skeletons from their meat and eating as much of them as possible.

When they come back to us—if they come back to us—the rock crabs are missing hands, unable to tell us what happened. Instead, they skitter into crevices and freeze whenever the land mammals glide by at the surface. Sometimes the rock crabs die after anyway. We try to care for them by leaving soft bits of clam outside their dens even though many leave them wholly untouched. Their flesh shrinks inside their hollow shells and their eyestalks rot away.

Us lobster monsters lug our bodies to the shore. Our claws hang heavy from our bodies as we lumber toward the fisheries. When weighed, our claws break three hundred pounds. We do this sometimes. On nights like this one, we snap through the gates that face out to sea. It takes so little pressure from our huge claws—a little snap, maybe two—before the mesh parts and our friends swim out toward us. Some are dazed and some maimed. Before moonset, we walk back all quiet-quiet to the place below the surface where we know we will be safe.

Near our safe place, we smell hybrid beasts and listen to their keening. The silhouettes of their bodies glow against the moonlight. Though the upper halves of their bodies mirrored the land mammals, the lower halves were smooth and gray as the skin of manatees. We have been alive long enough to assume that we have seen it all—the rise and fall of maritime empires, the construction of offshore pleasure islands and their decay—but we have never before seen a beast or being like them. They are something new.

The hybrid beasts came into being in the lagoon by the power plant, after decades of their presence in the coastal waters, infected by the seaweed, attracted by lingering warmth and the force of habit, their bodies gray and smooth as stones, as fluorescent snot trailed from their nose-holes like mucosal wings, as they surfaced to suck at the air in great gulps, breathing radioactive wastewater, slowly adapting the membranes of their bodies, now a viral vector, the nuclear manatees float in the gloaming. 

On the edge of the lagoon, a concrete beach sloped gently down to the water. Land mammals came here. They lay in the water a long while, until their legs closed together, until they grayed out. Gills slice in matching horizontal lines into the sides of their torsos. Though their genitals sense softness, when water rises up over them they redden. They slip into the water with the manatees. Their sideways mouths unnerve us, so we try to avoid looking at them.

When we the heckin big bois next emerge from the sea, we drag deep lines in the wet sand. It’s an inversion of the first night newborn turtles make their way to the sea. The night’s art project looms before us in the empty shells of condos built by land mammals who “invest” in “property” whose “value” might “rise.” We obliterate. Tarps flap with the regularity of waves. We snap our claws all together and the sonic boom when they all go at once shatters the thin panes of the front windows. With the serrated edges of our teeth, we chew on the drywall boards. We decide to call our deconstructive art project THURSDAY FINGERS, after a sign with removable letters we can see from the water. With their high squeaks the dune mice thank us. We retreat.

On some spectrums of light, the land mammals shift entirely to sea creatures; on others, they stay hybrids. Whether wholly mammal or wholly manatee, their physical features blur. Lactation sacs poof and deflate from their chests. By our age, we are used to so much change happening in the sea—change we do not witness.

The manatees travel toward the hybrids, and the hybrids scrub the manatees of the dank algae which collects on their sides. Under their touch, the manatees groan. We sense when the hybrids snot on the manatees and the manatees snot on the hybrids. Where the snot touches, it spreads, and it encloses all of their bodies in a limegreen glowing layer of protection; it heals scarred places on their torsos. From scalpel or motorboat we know not. In the sea, change happens without witnesses, and the continual movement from one state to another is as natural as the tide.

The next darkness, we lurk below the long bridge over the shallows. The concrete pillars which hold it up loom above us. We pound our claws at the base of one, over and over, the vibrations reverberating deep into the earth. With each other we coordinate exactly, as though we were smaller parts of one larger creature. The concrete of the bridge cracks and into the cracks we spew water at high velocity. From the large cracks sprout smaller ones, which spiderweb across the surface of the concrete until pieces fall into the water around us.

We help the hybrids take the land mammals across the gap left after the bridge is gone. The gentle ones, some hairy and some hairless, wear small pieces of fabric on their bodies. They screech as the hybrids lift them across the gap. Most of them shrink back from us like our prey, and so instead of touching them we focus on blocking the worst of the waves so the water near them remains still. We are so close to each other that the plates of our bodies squeak against each other.

The manatees low beside us and their bass vibrations shake up our world. Seven versions of ourselves split off from each one of us, and from them sevenfold more. There are so many antennae that they tangle. Collectively we receive long-wave radio from the last towers. A toothache in land mammal language, mostly messages repeated over and over. Like the stone crabs, sometimes we think that our rage is the only thing keeping us alive.

7 Books About Families in Exile

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

All my life, I heard stories about Cuba. From my father, from mis abuelos on my mother’s side. We made a home in Miami, from stories about the home in Cuba that was lost before I was even born. Our Sunday night dinners, talking about a place where I had never been, where my father and mis abuelos had never been back, felt like home—because I had no home that didn’t include stories of Cuba, a place I wouldn’t see or smell or touch until I was in my 20s. Once I did visit, it became my job to tell the stories to my father and mis abuelos every time I returned, about the home they hadn’t seen, besides in their dreams, for decades.

These stories of home are especially important to the exile. In its most basic form, exile literature focuses on how people cross from one country to another—the physical and emotional toll it takes. But exile literature tells not only the stories of exile, but of homes left behind, and the hope of constructing a new home in the future, safe from the dangers fled. In other words, exile is not a story that can be told through just one generation.. This is true in fiction and in nonfiction.

The books on this list show how stories of the lost homeland affect every one of us who is a product of exile, not only the people who originally left home. They range from stories about the exiles themselves, to those who are generations away from the exile but who still fight with their displacement. (A great example of this dynamic of telling stories between sons and their fathers and mothers would be the recent Recommended Reading story “Pestilence” by Jonathan Escoffery.) These are books that helped shine a light on the importance of these stories to me, to exiles, to everyone.

The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata

In so many ways, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau is a story about stories. It follows two protagonists and goes through multiple storylines and migrations. Saul tries to carry out his grandfather’s dying wish of delivering a manuscript to the long deceased author’s kin. He has to uncover the steps, interviewing people and chasing down their stories. One line in the novel in particular embodies exile literature: “Incan history breathed, and I breathed too because of it. At some point, he said that maybe in a way were both right, that ‘history casts itself across our existence like a shadow of another world.’” The history of these characters breathes into the present, fleshing out the present, for a beautiful climax of intertwined storylines and homes.

Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat

Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat

Brother I’m Dying is a story about two brothers, Danticat’s father and uncle, who take turns raising her. The book starts with one brother calling the other, whispering, “Brother, I’m dying” on the phone. The story follows Danticat from childhood to adulthood, from Haiti to New York and Miami, as she tells her own story, and of the two men who helped raise her. Danticat’s memoir in and of itself is the telling of a story of her family, of their exile. The fact that the brothers write each other notes and send each other letters only makes it more of an act of exile. Danticat writes “Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.” For an exile, there has to be a place, a family, to go back to. A story to be told, from the land left behind, to the land that received you.

The Distant Marvels by Chantel Acevedo

Maria Sirena, the protagonist of Chantel Acevedo’s The Distant Marvels, is a lectora, or a reader of stories to the cigar rollers. The story follows her and a group of women who hide out in a fort during Hurricane Flora near Santiago de Cuba in 1963. Maria Sirena is “a marvelous storyteller, as well, as is true of many Cubans, for whom it seems the knack of weaving a tale comes naturally.” This ability is so important for an exiled people.

Maria Sirena ends up telling stories to the women, about her mother, and about her child, slowly telling more and more of her story that she has hid from the world, and tried to hide from herself. The stories spanning multiple wars and generations. Near the end of the novel, Sirena says “I am dying. The stories will die with me.” By telling the stories, she hopes they can survive another generation, hoping her stories can reach the generations she has lost.

The Veins of the Ocean by Patricia Engel

Patricia Engel’s The Veins of the Ocean: A Novel follows Reina, a Colombian-American, as she tries to keep some semblance of home through stories. She visits her brother Carlito, who is in prison, as she tries to share stories with him so that they can stay as connected as possible. Carlito is the closest to a home Reina has, and telling him stories is her greatest sense of purpose in the beginning of the novel.Stories are also an important part of her relationship with Nesto, who is an exile from Cuba she meets in Florida. They both trade stories of their families, of their homes, before she goes to her home, Cartagena. She then visits Nesto and his family in La Habana. But stories are important to these characters, and vital to the novel, even when they aren’t the most truthful, which becomes apparent when Reina says how her mother talks about “going back to Cartagena to live, as if this North American life were just some interlude and we ended up here by accident.” Even if that story is a retelling of a falsehood, or a half-truth, it is what the mother needed in order to continue on with her story.

The Book of Lost Saints by Daniel José Older

The Book of Lost Saints plays off the ghost story trope, by having the ghost both tell its story, and want to learn more of her own story. Marisol has to haunt Ramon, who has been pushing aside his Cuban heritage, in part because of his own skepticism of the fantastical family histories he was told as a child. It is the only way she can get her story across to him, and get him to investigate the parts of the story that she herself is unsure of. But Older plays off the importance of heritage and family history, as Ramon not only must hear a story told to him by Marisol, but discover a story to tell his own ghost, the story being important to generations in multiple levels.

In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd by Ana Menéndez 

Ana Menéndez’s In Cuba I was a German Shepherd plays off the joke, “Here in America, I may be a short, insignificant mutt, but in Cuba I was a German shepherd.” It’s a common joke among Cuban exiles who live in Miami and elsewhere in the United States, who mostly only have their stories (and sometimes, their embellishments) of who they were and what they had in Cuba. These eleven short stories share the theme of self-mythologizing, and how people can keep a part of their home (and pass on something of their home to the next generation) through stories.

Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Díaz

Jaquira Díaz’s Ordinary Girls follows Diaz and her family as they move within Puerto Rico, and eventually to Miami Beach, after her family deals with some traumatic experiences in their home. Díaz is young when they move, and she idolizes her father. She writes down how when she tries to go back to Puerto Rico as an adult, to her old school and neighborhood, a child tells her to leave, that “You don’t belong here.”

The importance of stories to Diaz is clear to the reader from the beginning, as she fantasizes about her dad telling her “all his secrets, all the stories not meant for children…And I would write it all down, determined to remember. Prohibido olvidar.” Díaz knows this as she says, “how quickly a home can drop you.” So she tells her story, about her family (both blood and chosen), and herself, not only for herself, but for her girls, and the girls to come.

7 Literary Translators You Need to Know

Posted on by Jo Lou

Imagine bookstores, libraries and life really, without Anne Frank, The Little Prince, the Quran, and Murakami. This is what a world without literary translators would look like—our literary travels would be devoid of global textures and much, much less rich.

Through the work of translators, whose labors are unseen and intensely-detailed, English readers are able to enter the afterlife of a Japanese laborer who toiled for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the complicated family dynamics of Italian immigrants of Somali and Argentine origins, the joys and despairs of queer Indonesians, the dramas of provincial life in northeastern Brazil, to pick just a few of the worlds translators in this list permit us to inhabit. 

In the first part of this list of translators, I spoke to authors who translate and render linguistic, literary, and cultural nuances from Japanese, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Indonesian, Italian, French, Korean, and Thai to English. The list is skewed to emerging translators, women, and people of color, who’ve translated some of the most vibrant of classic and contemporary global literary voices. These elegant and expansive conversations, greatly truncated here for space reasons—translators are very possibly the most thoughtful subset of the literary world!—include their early acts of translation, secret languages of their childhoods, quirks of the languages they work in, and moving meanings between languages.

Morgan Giles: Japanese to English 

Morgan’s Giles’ first book-length translation Tokyo Ueno Station, by the Japanese outsider novelist Yu Miri, debuted in the U.S. on the eve of what was to be the 2020 Tokyo Games, and shortly after landed on the 2020 National Book Award longlist for translated literature. The diaphanous novel features the 1964 Tokyo Olympics from the point of view of a dead laborer. The London-based Giles is taking on another Tokyo Olympics, that of 1944, which was canceled by World War II via Yu Miri’s The End of August, a novel about the author’s grandfather who might have represented Japan as a marathon runner in those games. Considered in Japan to be Yu Miri’s masterwork, the novel is set amid the Japanese occupation of Korea and a mash-up of Japanese and Korean languages. 

A first act of translation: “Putting my thoughts into ‘standard’ English. It’s something that most people from Appalachia learn early on they’ll have to do to get ‘anywhere,’ even from the first day of school. It took me years to perfect; now when I go back people say I don’t sound like I’m from around there, which is painful. I feel like I translated myself out of my home.”

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri

How a girl from Kentucky ended up translating Japanese literature: “There’s a pretty big Japanese community in Kentucky because of the Toyota factory and all the companies that supply it. At the school I went to, students didn’t start learning another language until high school. I was picked to go on a short exchange to Japan due to a Sister Cities relationship and I started learning a little Japanese before I went. After I came back home, I decided to keep studying Japanese and when I finished all the classes that were available, my teacher suggested I pick a Japanese book and read it with her. Reading became translation, as a way to help me understand better, and now here I am today. I don’t know if I chose it or it chose me, but Japanese has been part of my life since I was 13; it’s hard to imagine what my life would be without it.”

Aaron Robertson: Italian to English 

When Aaron Robertson encountered Italian Somali writer Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon in a library in Bologna, Italy, he wasn’t very impressed with the boot illustration on its cover but once he cracked its pages, he was enchanted. The encounter led to him translating the exuberant 400-page book as his undergraduate thesis at Princeton, where he studied with the American literary Italophile, Jhumpa Lahiri. His undertaking is extra impressive because he completed the book’s translation a mere five years after this first-ever Italian lesson. Robertson has also translated Scego’s shorter works and is exploring books by and about Black and POC Italians to translate. Robertson, who is in the midst of writing his own non-fiction book about African American utopianism, was named in September 2020 to the board of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).  

In Detroit, dreaming of Italy: “In middle school, I had a very faint interest in the Italian Renaissance and I just wanted to go to Italy and study art. I had a very mythological view of the country, you know, with statues on every street corner. In college, I studied Italian and African American studies, which connected the language and the African diaspora for me.

I was familiar with Igiaba Scego’s work but I didn’t know about Beyond Babylon. After I read it, I thought that she had echoes of Toni Morrison, but she was doing something that I had always wanted to see someone do. It is similar to what James Baldwin did when he moved to France. He bridged the experiences of Blackness and brought Blackness to a space where traditionally people, in the U.S. anyway, don’t really think that much about, that is what Blackness looks like in France or what it looks like in Italy. Scego bridges not only this experience of being a Black woman in Italy, but she looks at what this experience is like in Argentina, Somalia, and Tunisia. This alone is not necessarily a recipe for a great book, because you could ask, ‘Well, why is she looking at all these places? Isn’t it kind of scattered?’ When I first read the book, I didn’t know exactly why it worked, but I was stunned by it. Only by reading it constantly and by actually translating it, did I start to understand what it was that she was doing that was so effective.”

Translating race: “In Beyond Babylon, Mar talks about being the ‘fruit of the Third World’ where she’s wondering what to call herself like, ‘semi-negress,’ for example. She even uses ‘semi-n****r.’ Scego is constantly questioning the language you use to call yourself. Are you Black? Are you Somali-Italian? Italo-Somali? Afro-Italian? The character of Mar has roots, in a certain sense in the tragic mulatto character, although her end is more optimistic than that trope usually tends to be.

The novel celebrates the ambiguity, but also sees it as something both destabilizing and liberating. Scego uses the plot of her work to reflect on the whole process of translation. There are moments where the characters are talking about the translation of poetry, but there’s also the question, how do you transport who you are across boundaries? In every sense of the word. The inexhaustibility of that question is why the text is so rich, because you can approach that question from so many different angles. 

Scego’s newest novel, which was published in Italian this February, is called The Color Line. It looks very specifically at the intersection of Italian and African American history. The main character is a Black woman abolitionist in the 19th century, who moves to Italy and becomes a painter. Her work has shown me that the points of cultural specificity will always be there. In terms of our experiences, not everything will be on a one-to-one ratio, but if you look, you find links between peoples, cultures, and time periods. In the new novel, she’s saying, ‘Let’s look at an African American woman in the 19th century, and how her story is also kind of the story of the Italian unification process.’ Her nonfiction has dealt with international solidarity too.”

Tiffany Tsao: Indonesian to English 

Indonesian was the language of the elders in Tiffany Tsao’s Chinese Indonesian family. Tsao, who was born in California and grew up in Indonesia and Singapore, reimmersed herself in the language while working on her Ph.D. in English at UC Berkeley. The now Sydney-based Tsao’s translations include Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s poetry collection Sergius Seeks Bacchus, Dee Lestari’s novel Paper Boats, and Laksmi Pamuntjak’s The Birdwoman’s Palate. She’s currently translating a collection of short stories by Budi Darma, called Orang-Orang Bloomington, or The People of Bloomington, set in Bloomington, Indiana (read one of the stories here). Also on the way is a collection of Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s short stories, Happy Stories, Mostly (check out at Catapult and The White Review). After that, Tsao will switch translation seats—her own English-language novel, The Majesties, will be translated into Indonesian by Norman Erikson Pasaribu. 

On the gender-neutral pronouns of Indonesian: “Because translating Sergius Seeks Bacchus made me much more aware of it, nowadays I make much more of a conscious effort to replicate the effect than I did in the past—and if there is a passing ‘someone’ mentioned, I’m much more likely to just refer to them as ‘they/them.’ The gender-neutral pronouns make me realize how language shapes what is important and what is not. It becomes completely irrelevant whether the voice on the phone, or the doctor the protagonist sees, or the person working at the cake shop (just to use examples from The People of Bloomington by Budi Darma, the short-story collection I’m currently translating) is a he or a she or a they—the reader’s imagination doesn’t have to know the gender in order to get a complete and deep grasp of the stories or the scene, even if the author did have a gender in mind but didn’t specifically convey in the story text itself.”

On linguistic relativity: “It is taboo for someone who works with words to say this, but language and the abilities of language don’t always reflect or determine reality. As Norman and I have discussed in a conversation we had for AAWW’s The Margins—“Does A Face Need A Mask?”—assumptions about gender and gender differences obviously are still rife in Indonesia, and often when the gender-neutral pronoun is used ‘dia/ia/-nya,’ a listener or reader will often fill in the gender for themselves, the same way an English speaker might still automatically think ‘man’ when they hear ‘doctor,’ and ‘woman’ when they hear ‘nurse.’ I do think it is really awesome to have a language that easily accommodates inclusivity and gender fluidity. But I don’t think language is the magical antidote in itself—at least not when non-gendered pronouns are already conventional.”

Julia Sanches: Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan to English 

By adulthood, Julia Sanches spoke Portuguese, English, Spanish, and French. During her master’s degree in Barcelona, she added Catalan to the impressive list. The Providence, Rhode Island-based translator worked as a literary agent at the Wylie Agency before switching her talents to translation, and is a founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translators collective. Her recent translations of contemporary Brazilian writing include Twenty After Midnight by Daniel Galera, Amora by Natalia Borges Polesso, and The Sun on My Head by Geovani Martins. She serves the chair of the Translators Group of the Authors Guild.

Early multilingualism with periods of languageless-ness: “I was born in Brazil, and I left when I was three-months-old. We lived in the United States until I was eight. We were lucky in that we were able to go back to Brazil once a year. Around five or six years old, whenever we went to Brazil, I would spend a week without speaking at all. I wouldn’t speak English and I wouldn’t speak Portuguese. And then suddenly I would speak fluent Portuguese, I wouldn’t mix anything, I would just need apparently this period of languageless-ness, a period of emptiness of language to be able to switch from one to the next one. The same thing would happen when I went back to the U.S. I would just sit at my desk in silence as I tried to get used to English again. I don’t have any memory of this, but apparently it happened, according to my mother.” 

Dealing with problematic language: “I translate from a lot of languages that are having similar discussions as we are in the States, but they are at different points in the discussion. I’ve been co-translating this book with a friend and there was a metaphor that we thought was like gratuitously colorist in a way that added nothing to the text. We decided to take it out. I don’t know all the answers and I don’t know what the balance is. The conversation about language in the U.S. is having an influence in Brazil, in the way people talk about race and people talk about gender, which I think is quite positive because in Brazil for the longest time they were selling the story that the country was a racial democracy, which it is certainly not. I think also there’s a lot of danger of looking to the U.S. for moral guidance because of the proxy wars that they fought in Latin America and around the world. 

Translators might know and might see both sides more clearly than other people, but I’m not sure that they’re the best people to be making decisions, especially since most translators are white. Not that many translators are heritage speakers. A grand majority of translators are people who grew up in monolingual families, studied the language at university, spent a year living in that place, and then came home as experts. I feel very uncomfortable with the notion of expertise, especially for a place as complex as Brazil. I’m a white Brazilian. There’s a lot that I don’t know. There’s a lot that I learned from my family that is incorrect because that’s what they learned at school. We’re in an interesting position. I’m not sure we have all the answers. We can mediate the answers but I am not sure if we are correct or incorrect in any given case.”

Emma Ramadan: French to English 

Between them, Emma Ramadan’s parents spoke four languages, but to Emma and her brother, they only spoke in English. When they didn’t want their kids to know what they were saying, they spoke in French. To eavesdrop, Ramadan learned French. The childhood curiosity led her to bring English readers some of the most intriguing of literary works in French, including the much-acclaimed, genderless love tale of Sphinx by Anne F. Garréta and The Shutters, the poetry of Morrocan writer Ahmed Bouanani. Ramadan and her husband (and French translator!) Tom Roberge own Riffraff, the bookstore and bar in Providence, Rhode Island. Together, they’ve also translated a novel, Marcus Malte’s The Boy.

Relating to the struggles of the narrator of Brice Matthieussent’s French novel Revenge of the Translator: “At the end of Revenge of the Translator, the narrator announces that the book has an American translator named Mike Kirkfeld. When I first met Brice Matthieussent, I asked him what he thought about me changing the name of the American translator to my own name, because otherwise the conceit of the book falls apart, doesn’t add up. The American reader needs to realize that they’re holding in their hands the very translation that’s being spoken about. Matthieussent agreed immediately that I should put my own name. And then during an event for the book when Matthieussent was touring the U.S., someone in the audience asked about future translations of the book into other languages and whether the American translator’s name would be left as Mike Kirkfeld or instead changed to Emma Ramadan. Matthieussent insisted it should stay Mike Kirkfeld, but I argued that it should be Emma Ramadan because the book has an actual American translator now! That way the joke of the book keeps proliferating with each new translation. We’ll see what future translators decide to do.”

Translations from the perspective of bookselling: “I think American readers have proven they will embrace translations if they’re not sidelined in a translation section of a bookstore or only spoken about on that level. The success of Elena Ferrante is a perfect example of this. No one cares that those books are translated, they buy them because they’re fantastic reads. And that’s how translations should always be sold, I think: as fantastic reads, just like any other book. In my bookstore we put translations on the tables next to books originally written in English, we recommend them based on a customer’s taste, we treat them like any other book, and we have a very easy time selling them.”

Mui Poopoksakul: Thai to English

While Thai food and culture is beloved around the world, its literary riches are less known due to the dearth of translations of works written in the country’s rich language, which has many-pronged roots in Pali, Sanskrit, and Old Khmer. Enter (to our gratitude!): Mui Poopoksakul who has debuted works by contemporary Thai literary stars, Prabda Yoon and Duanwad Pimwana in English, via the courageous Tilted Axis Press (founded by translator Deborah Smith, who brought us Korean novelist Han Kang’s The Vegetarian). She practiced law in New York City before embarking on an M.A. in cultural translation at the American University of Paris. Her thesis eventually became Prabda Yoon’s The Sad Part Was, which was her first book-length translation. Mui, who guest-edited the Thailand issue of Words Without Borders, speaks fluent English and Thai, French (she reads “decently” in the language), and enough German to get by in Berlin, where she lives. 

A quirk of Thai that is tricky to translate to English: “A term that’s been in the news a lot recently is ‘mob moong ming’ (ม็อบมุ๊งมิ้ง). It was used by a former army spokesperson to disparage pro-democracy student protestors as a ‘cute and cuddly crew’—I tried to replicate the alliteration there, but ‘moong ming’ is a word many people, myself included, weren’t previously familiar with (I’m not sure if the spokesperson newly made it up or if it’s super new slang), though you can sense the meaning from the cutesy sound. Not that I’m endorsing it, but the phrase is catchy for the reasons that make it so hard to translate.”

Contextualizing Prabda Yoon and Duanwad Pimwana and Thai literary movements: “Though they are writers of the same generation, Duanwad is a daughter of Thai social realism, which was a major literary movement in Thailand in the second half of the 20th century. Prabda, on the other hand, was seen as taking Thai literature in the direction of postmodernism when he came onto the scene in the late 90s. Now, given what’s going on in the country, we’re seeing a resurgence of social realist themes, or themes that are progenies of social realism, but narrative modes have become less straightforwardly realist.” 

Padma Viswanathan: Portuguese to English 

Padma Viswanathan

In May 2020, the Canadian novelist and playwright Padma Viswanathan debuted her first full-length translation, the late Brazilian novelist Graciliano Ramos’s São Bernardo, which was originally published in 1934. Viswanathan came to Brazilian Portuguese through the research she did on syncretic religions for her own first novel, The Toss of a Lemon—and then through a series of encounters, including a devotional music radio show she hosted, which brought her to Brazilian music. Viswanathan was mostly raised in English with parents who spoke Tamil as their secret language from their children, this parents-only language tradition was carried on by Viswanathan and her husband, the translator and poet Geoffrey Brock. French was their secret code—until their children picked it up. 

São Bernardo by Graciliano Ramos

Path to Graciliano Ramos and translating São Bernardo: “We had moved to Arkansas and I felt I was losing my Portuguese without opportunities to practice, and my husband recommended I try retranslating something, suggesting that, as a novice, I might look for a book in need of retranslation. My impression of Graciliano Ramos had been that he was a social realist whose claim to fame was a sympathetic portrait of the downtrodden poor in his region. Opening his final and most famous novel, Vidas Secas, I found it to be very different from that: it was a complex portrait of a poor family fleeing drought, but of extraordinarily ambitious in its form and language. I translated and published the first chapter before learning rights to the book were unavailable in the U.S., but by then, I had read São Bernardo, a very different book, tough and ironic and full of incidental poetry, and another that could use a reintroduction into English freshening in various ways. I felt an even greater kinship with this book: one of my books is, as this one is, from the point of view of a relatively unlikeable man; another dives, as this one does, into provincial concerns in a remote and largely invisible region.” 

Only-in-a-translators’-household conversations: “The classic one is watching a foreign film and quibbling with the subtitles. Then there are times when one of us walks into a room with some piece of writing translated by someone else, and says, ‘Look!’ Either the corresponding spouse is in the middle of something else and so passively receives the indignation or puzzlement or admiration, or, in another mood, engages, which means worrying the phrase, its possibilities and limitations, until it’s lying on the page like a dissected caterpillar. My husband is on a panel about retranslation next month with friends who have translated Anna Karenina, The Stranger, and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, works of fiction with some of the most famous first lines ever. Apparently, they might just focus on different renderings of those famous opening lines—the sort of deep nerdiness translators love, and that I love in translators. I’ll be eating it up.”  

Stephen King’s Experiment with Online Self-Publishing Was 20 Years Before Its Time

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Journalists like Anne Helen Petersen, former culture writer at BuzzFeed, and Casey Newton, former tech reporter at The Verge, have recently been making waves in the news industry by ending long-term stints at established publications to focus on subscription email newsletters hosted by Substack. Founded in 2017, Substack is a platform that allows writers to create newsletters delivered directly to subscribers’ email inboxes, either for free or at a price. According to Axios, most writers of subscription newsletters work primarily in technology, business, and political news and analysis — but that’s not to say fiction won’t soon find its place on Substack as well.

Indeed, Stephen King attempted such a gambit with The Plant nearly two decades before Substack was founded. While there was no consensus on the success or failure of King’s experiment in digital self-publishing, the attempt remains valuable for what it can teach Substack’s fiction writers to come.

While there was no consensus on the success or failure of King’s experiment in digital self-publishing, the attempt remains valuable for what it can teach fiction writers to come.

The Plant is a serialized novel about a publishing house whose office plant demands human sacrifice in exchange for financial success. It first germinated as a series of three limited-edition, printed installments that King gave to family and friends for the 1982, ‘83, and ‘85 holiday seasons. According to an interview with The New York Times, King initially discontinued the series due to its coincidental resemblance to Little Shop of Horrors, which hit theaters the following year, in ‘86.

The Plant grew into an experiment in online self-publishing after an incident with King’s e-book debut, the novella Riding the Bullet. Published by Scribner in March of 2000, the novella was encrypted to prevent piracy, but the encryption crashed many would-be readers’ computers — and was broken by hackers anyway. Looking back on both Riding the Bullet and The Plant during an interview with The Paris Review in 2006, King explained:

With “Riding the Bullet” there was all this talk about people trying to hack the system to get it for free. And I thought, Well, yes, this is what these Internet people do. They don’t do it because they want to steal it, they do it because they want to see if they can steal it. It’s a game. And so I thought, Well, if you just say, look, here it is—it’s like a newspaper honor rack. If you really want to be that much of a schmo, that much of a palooka, go ahead and steal it! Hope you feel good about yourself, turkey!

Perhaps just a little peeved at Scribner as well, King also told The Paris Review about his interest in potentially cutting publishers out of publishing: “The Internet publishing experiment was probably a way of saying to the publishers, You know, I don’t necessarily need to go through you.”

With the intent of self-publishing an e-book without encryption, and with readers paying based on the honor system, King re-released The Plant online in installments beginning in July of 2000. Each installment was distributed through King’s website, with the author requesting $1 to $2 per chapter, stipulating that he would only continue writing if at least 75 percent of readers voluntarily paid. Altogether, King released six chapters before announcing the project’s hiatus five months later. The Plant remains unfinished, though free to read on King’s website.

King insisted that his work on The Plant was suspended due to a lack of inspiration, rather than any financial or technical failure. To the contrary, in his conversation with The Paris Review, King estimated that The Plant had brought in almost $200,000, but that “the story was just OK.” Contemporary news coverage, however, was skeptical. King’s introduction to The Plant, which he had also published on his website, included an explicit challenge to publishers — “My friends, we have the chance to become Big Publishing’s worst nightmare” — and critics were not going to let that go. The New York Times announced “Publishers one, authors nothing,” in an article entitled “A Stephen King Online Horror Tale Turns Into a Mini-Disaster,” which claims that King abandoned the project after sales “steadily faded.” Even King’s assistant, Marsha DeFilippo, acknowledged to WIRED that, by The Plant’s fourth chapter, only 46 percent of readers were paying — a technical failure, according to the metrics the author himself had laid out. But both King and DeFilippo have pointed out that The Plant isn’t dead; it remains in hibernation, just as it was between 1985 and 2000.

Social media provides writers with an avenue for self-promotion, but it remains incumbent upon them to do the long-term work of building and engaging with their subscriber base.

Regardless of whether or not The Plant will bloom once more, there are lessons it has to offer fiction writers considering subscription newsletters. When speaking with The New York Times, DeFilippo identified marketing as one of the biggest challenges in self-publishing the serialized novel, which is why “King would never give up traditional publishing. They provide a huge service, actually selling the work.” The modern advent of social media provides writers today with an avenue for self-promotion, but it remains incumbent upon them to do the long-term work of building and engaging with their subscriber base. The other challenge mentioned in all contemporary coverage of The Plant is one of expectations: both what King expected of readers and readers expected of King. Expecting 75 percent of readers to pay seems unrealistic — according to a recent article in The New York Times, even the most popular Substack sees only 18 percent of readers pay — and even if there’s only one paying reader out of a thousand, they’re probably going to expect a completed novel no matter what. In other words: Keep expectations realistic, and commit to delivering.

Lastly, when striking out on a new venture, regardless of how promising or innovative, maybe don’t burn your bridges. Substack is, after all, only the latest email newsletter platform. Founded in 2010, TinyLetter blazed the way for Substack, but was nearly shut down two years ago, illustrating the often fickle nature of tech companies. Their platforms come and go, but the publishing industry remains — thus, it’s wise not to trash one for the other. Otherwise it can be a long walk back from “Big Publishing’s worst nightmare” to “They provide a huge service,” and most of us don’t have assistants to do the trek for us.

7 Essential Works of Punk Rock Literature

Posted on by Jo Lou

From the first time I heard Dee Dee Ramone shout the count-in to “Blitzkrieg Bop,” I was hooked. I couldn’t get my hands on the records fast enough. Soon, I began not only listening to punk music but also creating it myself. Punk became an opportunity to push myself socially and artistically, leading me to spend the better part of 20 years playing in punk bands up and down the East Coast. 

Despite the stereotypes of punks as troglodyte, apathetic, and uneducated, as well as the reputation of punk lyrics as “simple,” punk rock music actually has a strong literary tradition. Early punk artists like Patti Smith, Richard Hell, and Jim Carroll are all deeply connected to the New YorkY school of poetry, and it’s this tradition that I’ve engaged with in my first collection of poems, Count Four. It’s a highly personal book, and I explore not only my time playing punk music but also the liminal spaces on society’s fringe, the people who exist in these spaces, and the ways in which identity is constructed through social experience. The goal of Count Four is to challenge these experiences and identities, and to shine a light on the dangerous hypocrisy that often inhabits our personal and social mythologies. 

However, I am far from the first punker to take a step back and interrogate their surroundings using the written word. With this long tradition in mind, let’s take a look at some of the people who have done it best.

Our Band Could Be Your Life By Michael Azerrad

Michael Azerrad’s book takes its name from the opening line of a Minutemen song called “History Lesson—Part II.” This line, like Azzerad’s stunning chronicle of punk and D.I.Y culture, summarizes the essential spirit of punk music in general—creating art out of necessity, because it is what one needs to do. While many other punk histories focus on the salacious and sordid details of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, Azerrad tells the story of a community of bands who were dedicated to passionate artistic and sonic exploration in order to create meaningful music outside of mainstream conventions. This book is the essential history of the underground that would eventually become the “mainstream.” 

Get in the Van: On the Road With Black Flag by Henry Rollins

This journal-style memoir of Henry Rollins’ time spent on tour as the singer of Black Flag is more than anecdotal reveries of “life on the road.” It is a revealing look into the monotony, the poverty, and the violence that plague this often-idealized wanderlust lifestyle. Get in the Van is filled with Rollins’ trade-mark honesty. Through his candid observations, the book documents Rollins’ metamorphosis from defiant rebel to embittered nihilist. But this memoir is more than just one man’s story. Get in the Van is representative of so many young people’s experiences with the self-fulfilling prophecy of alienation that is often at the core of the punk ethos.   

Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to the Hollywood Stage, A Chicana Punk Story by Alice Bag 

Alice Bag, born Alicia Armendariz, was one of the earliest frontwomen in punk rock. Bag’s memoir chronicles her time in the punk scene and the sexism and violence that she battled, as well as the community that she found in the formation of her band the Bags. On a societal level, it is also the story of how Mexicans and Mexican American culture played an important role in the growth of punk rock, especially on the West Coast.   

American Hardcore: A Tribal History by Steven Blush

Hardcore punk music is a subculture within a subculture. If the intensity of punk rock writ large is the metaphorical equivalent of walking across hot coals with one’s bare feet, hardcore is taking that same walk across hot coals AND razor wire. Contemporary hardcore music is heavier, faster, louder, and more intense than its genus categorization. Steven Blush’s book documents the emergence of this music through interviews, along with his written accounts of first-hand experiences with bands like the Bad Brains and Minor Threat. Hardcore music is one of the most complicated, misunderstood, and controversial genres of music, and this book introduces readers to how and where it all began. 

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus

Riot Grrrl—created in the early 90s and embodied in bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy—was a complicated blend of socio-political awareness, fashion, performance art, journalism, straight-up activism, and musical expression. In her book, Sara Marcus explores the complicated intersections of these different elements within the subgenre. The book is an essential portrait of one of the most largely ignored feminist movements in America, and it is essential reading for a new generation who is facing an arguably even more complicated world of gendered subjugation and exploitation.

Tranny: Confessional of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout by Laura Jane Grace with Dan Ozzi

This memoir explores the musical and personal life of Laura Jane Grace, the lead singer of Against Me! who recently, and very publicly, came out as transgendered. This transition is an essential part of her story, but the power of this narrative to bestow epiphany on readers comes from Grace’s skilled retelling of her journey as a punk musician, and the hypocrisy that she encountered in the scene’s supposed “freedom.” This backdrop of sanctimonious myopia allows Grace to explore her dysphoria in a unique way that illustrates not only personal growth and courage but also the ways in which the constructs of our individual worlds, gender-based or otherwise, hold us back and keep us feeding into the systems that are ultimately put in place to control us. 

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain start at the beginning. This alone is enough to make the book an essential read. They tell the simple story of how a bunch of messed up, unstable people pooled their limited talents to make some noise. Against all odds, these misfits made something beautiful and lasting: punk rock. This book is a portrait of the people behind the punk “movement.” It explores their humanity without the kind of exploitation that led to Sid Vicious’s face being printed on t-shirts and then sold in Hot Topics across America. Instead, this is the often ugly and very unromantic portrayal of, as Richard Hell puts it, the “blank generation,” who can “take it or leave it each time.” These are stories of death, love, friendship, fights, parking tickets, and bodily fluids. This book is, in a word, “authentic,” for better or for worse, and you can’t get much more punk than that.  

If Only Your Life Was as Heroic as Your Novel

Posted on by Alyssa Songsiridej

“There Aren’t Tornados in Brooklyn”
by Kristopher Jansma

Marlene inhaled the final third of a Parliament on the front step of the brownstone. Diane, her six-year-old, wouldn’t let her smoke inside anymore, which meant she now had to do it in full view of the rest of President Street. A mother barreled by in a fuchsia Athletica track suit, pushing a double-jogging stroller, also fuchsia. Her twin infants, strapped down like reluctant parachutists, stared impassively at the never-ending parade: impatient sandaled dog-walkers; tiny young women with thick glasses; dopey young men in skinny jeans carrying skateboards they only ever used to go downslope. One of them now came rolling down the opposite side of the street, generating a low, rumbling noise. Like an airplane coming in low out of the sky. These boys had been in Kindergarten when she’d heard that terrifying noise up close. Nine years ago. Now there was the world before it and the world after it, and she hated them for not knowing the former. All day long, the butts of their crushed Camels piled up on her bottom step.

You’re going to love Park Slope, Jonathan had said when Marlene had first told him of Diane’s impending arrival. It’s a real neighborhood. Perfect for kids. Not like Manhattan. It’s a real—whatsit? Community. Marlene eyed the last millimeter of her cigarette. Some community. A lithe seventy-year-old woman across the street, doing Tai Chi on her rooftop in the same gauzy robes she always wore. Bending and swaying and strutting, as oblivious to everyone else in the world as they were to her. But then looking. They all looked. Everyone. Just little sniping stares, that was all anyone ever risked. Quick sidelong judgments into other galaxies and then—snap—back to their own special spiral of stars.

Gray ashes began to fall over her fingertips and Marlene tossed her Parliament down among the Camels. The air was chilly for mid-September and the skies were a threatening Prussian blue.

Then, finally, she heard Ginny Thompson’s voice coming down the block.

“I wound up on the G train!” Ginny called.

“Gin, that’s impossible.”

But of course it was entirely possible. Ginny still got confused inside the new World Trade Center stop. Her memory had always been atrocious—part of the reason that she’d been fired from Percy, Lowry & Graber, the financial consulting firm where she and Marlene had temped together, nine years ago.

“I swear to God, I was in Queens,” Ginny shouted.

“Goddamn it,” Marlene called back. “You shouldn’t be allowed to cross the street by yourself.”

As Ginny almost lost her breath laughing, Marlene whisked her old friend inside, where Ginny confessed to having been distracted by her Stell Eklünd book—the latest in the seven-book series—and Marlene asked how she could possibly read anything on, “that Kindly-do,” and Ginny admitted that she did sometimes skim whole pages without realizing, partly because it was just too much fun watching the thousand little ink-pixels spinning around to form static, and then divide into new words. The book, she further admitted, was sub–par but sexy, even by murder mystery standards.

Soon they were drinking something called a Bella Noche that involved elderflower and Plymouth gin and since each of them claimed to have eaten something earlier and neither actually had, they got pretty drunk, pretty quickly.

“Will Mr. Wallace be here later?” Ginny asked, flipping through one of his architecture magazines as Marlene poured out more drinks.

“Ginny, you’re not making his copies anymore. You were at our wedding for Christssakes. You can call the man Jonathan.”

She giggled again. “It just doesn’t sound right.”

Marlene rolled her eyes expertly and brought over the two crystal glasses—filled to their brims but not spilling. “He’ll be home whenever,” she said. “He’s always home whenever.”

Ginny, suddenly remembering something, set her drink down on the table. “I saw— on the subway. On the G train. I saw someone reading your book! And I went over to her and said, ‘That’s my dearest, oldest friend’s book.’”

Marlene unsubtly shoved a coaster under Ginny’s glass. She had never been on the G train before, despite having lived in Brooklyn for years. Her husband made her swear to always take a car—to bill it to the firm and not to worry. Jonathan was of that older school for whom the subways would forever be subterranean dens for junkies and rapists. “You don’t survive New York in the seventies,” he used to say at parties, “Without developing some healthy prejudices.”

“And I said, ‘That’s my—’ Well, like I told you. And this woman, she said, ‘It’s just absolutely… Heart. Breaking.’ She said it like that. Like two words like that. Heart. Breaking. ‘I’ve read it a hundred times and I cry every time when that sweet boy dies.’”

Marlene picked at the corner of her eye and said dryly, “Yes, well. That’s just what I wanted, really. For women on G trains everywhere to cry and be heartbroken.”

Marlene’s novel, Stone Towers, was about a firefighter named Stone who saves the lives of eighteen people in the smoldering South Tower. He then rescues his childhood friend, Jerry, before being trapped himself under a toppled filing cabinet and caught in the collapse. In the second-half of the novel, Jerry becomes a school teacher in the Bronx and helps the children band together and raise money to construct a neighborhood 9/11 Memorial Wall and there is a big scene at the end where a little boy is nearly killed during the construction when a piece of the Wall falls onto him, except Jerry lifts this stone off of him and, well, you get it. The book wasn’t very good, Marlene thought, but her editor, a friend of Jonathan, had liked it, and it had sold a number of copies after being mentioned on The View.

There was a little, not-entirely-awkward silence and then the familiar twin rumbling of another pair of skateboarders going down the sidewalk.

“Those kids and their damned—” Marlene scooted to the window, but the kid was gone already. “They’re everywhere. Makes you long for the days when this was a bad neighborhood. I’d take a bunch of roughneck Italians over these gawky wisps any day.”

“You know what I saw when I was walking down here?” Ginny said, “A girl pulling bedsprings out of a mattress someone had left on the street. She almost hit me with one! Anyways, I asked her just what in the hell she was doing, and she said, ‘I’m an artist?’ Like she wasn’t all that sure herself.”

“It is insanity in this place. I’m not even joking. I’m losing my goddamned mind. Diane’s got this older girl tutoring her in Math. And she’s just got this piercing right through where her ear connects to her head. That little bony bit in the middle—”

Ginny dutifully prodded her own ear until Marlene nodded, yes, she had the correct spot.

“And I said to her, ‘B.’—that’s her whole name— ‘B, I love your little ear piercing!’ and B says, ‘That’s my targus, Ms. W… targus piercings are the bomb right now.’”

“‘The bomb,’” Ginny laughed.

“Everything’s ‘the bomb’ with her. She’s twenty and just taking some time off from the New School and she’s into making pictureframes and listening to The Dolls and her friend is in a Renaissance Klezmer band, and she’s very concerned about the planet and utopic formalism and she’s getting a Gerhard Richter tattoo and she’s starting a flashfiction initiative and last week she told me I’m a bigot—very sweetly and all—for being against the mosque downtown.”

Ginny exaggerated a gasp.

Marlene grinned wickedly. “And I told her, ‘Honey, when some Saudi blows up the office that you work in and kills almost everybody you know, then you can talk to me about being a bigot.’”

Ginny was practically off the couch. “What did she say?”

“She goes—” and Marlene laughed despite herself. “She goes. ‘Well. I don’t work in an office.’”

They nearly passed out, they laughed so hard. Marlene surprised herself, for she had been genuinely upset about it, but with Ginny around, her own twenties seemed a little nearer. She’d probably have said the same kind of thing, then.

“So were you there or not last Saturday?” Marlene asked Ginny. “I looked around for you when it was all ending, but it was an absolute madhouse.”

There had been a protest on the proposed mosque site, and Marlene had been there, though she didn’t stay very long, considering that the crowd was mostly too disgusting. Not at all what she’d expected. She’d needed Ginny there, but she hadn’t showed up.

“I got stuck,” Ginny lamented with a prolonged sigh. “On the ferry. For hours and hours. That woman jumped off; didn’t you hear about that?”

Marlene waved her hand around as if swatting flies, her rings catching the daylight coming in the window. “Something about it. But what on earth were you doing on Staten Island? Don’t tell me you were at the prison.”

“Tim asked me. I thought it might be good research for my next Louise Cassidy story—”

Timothy Wales was a boy Ginny had dated during her days at Monsignor Farrell High School who was presently doing ten years at Arthur Kill Correctional Facility for getting drunk and driving his father’s Cadillac into the front window of Thriftway Pharmacy and killing a little girl and her mother. He was due to be freed in December. Not a single one of Ginny’s stories of how he’d quit drinking, found Christ, or taken up writing letters for Amnesty International had chipped off a speck of Marlene’s disapproval and both women quite indelicately barreled on to different subjects at once, like a pair of boats being spun oppositely in the same storm.

“I said to B that if they want to build that damned mosque they’ll have to do it over my exploded corpse.”

“Why would a woman try to drown herself in the East River of all places?”

Both were frozen in these utterances by the sound of the front door opening.

“Is that little Diane?” Ginny shouted.

Diane walked solemnly inside, as if reporting for jury duty. This was how she walked when she came home now. Marlene couldn’t understand it. Behind her, B was carrying Diane’s backpack and a bag of groceries and, for some reason, a telescope.

“I found this in the trash out there,” she announced.

“Don’t bring it in here.”

“Diane wanted to look in it.”

“Diane can look through a telescope that isn’t covered in bed bugs, thank you.”

Ginny laughed and introduced herself to B without getting up. As she did, there was another loud rumble outside.

“Are those skateboarders still out there?” Marlene interrupted.

“They’re leaving now, Ms. L. Don’t worry. I told them to fu— to get off your step,” came the high and confident voice of B.

“They were on my step?” Marlene shouted.

B did not reply, and there was the sound of a great struggle from the foyer, and then Diane raced into the room to greet Ginny before her nylon windbreaker had hit the ground.

“Aunt Gin!” she yelled. Her bear hug sent half a Bella Noche flying onto the carpet.

“Diane!” scolded Ginny.

“B!” called Marlene.

“Aunt Gin!” sang Diane again. “Aunt Gin, I’ve got to tell you about Samuel and Abraham and Emmanuel and—”

“That’s a lot of people to tell me about!” Ginny said. “With such funny names!”

“They’re all made-up,” Marlene explained. “She dreams up these people she thinks live upstairs with her.”

“They’re ghost people,” Diane whispered loudly. “They all lived in our attic, which is my room, and they were hiding up there from the Nazis because they were all Jew people—”

“Diane, I told you,” B said, coming in to mop up the spilled gin with a rag. “Say Jewish people or just Jews.”

B looked apologetically at the two women, who could not have cared less. “They did Anne Frank last week at school.”

“—and they were all in my room behind a fake door and the Nazis kicked it open and hung everybody up from nooses and then put their heads into Fed Ex boxes and sent them around to all the houses in Brooklyn like a warning and then—”

“You’re too much.” Ginny patted her straight blonde hair, which was held back by a small red headband with a perfectly cock-eyed bow. “What a little brain in there!”

Her mother didn’t seem to think so. “Diane, that’s enough! Go on up and start your homework. B’s only here for another hour.”

B tried to clear the young one out, but Diane seemed aware this was her only chance to make an entertaining impression upon her Aunt Gin—who might not be back for months again—and so she wriggled free and swirled around her mother.

“Momm-o, Momm-o there’s going to be a tornado!” she sang. “At school, they said. Like in Dorothy.”

“There aren’t tornados in Brooklyn.”

“But Momm-oooo—”

“That’s why we live here and not in Kansas!” Ginny chirped.

Marlene’s family was, actually, from Kansas—there were two stepbrothers living in Lawrence, last she’d heard, which had been quite a long time ago. But Diane didn’t know about them.

“But Aunt Gin—”

Marlene swatted playfully at Diane. “Go on up and do your math before B has to go!”

The girl bounded up the stairs, calling out as she rose to her invisible friends. “Emmanuel, Abraham! There’s going to be a tornado!”

It was several minutes before the women had settled down with fresh drinks, because there was a rumble again of skateboarders outside and Marlene flung open the window to yell at them to fuck off and then gave the finger to a stroller mother who had the gall to look affronted. Then Marlene forgot to shut the window and even though the air outside was starting to smell sharp, like rain, Marlene declared that it seemed like a lot of trouble to get up and so she didn’t.

“You’re such a character,” Ginny sighed, pulling her little ratty Moleskine from her purse and making some cursory scribbles. Marlene never minded this—in fact she rather liked it—for as unpublishable as all of Ginny’s ridiculous detective novellas were, Marlene always felt a warmth at recognizing one of her own marvelous quips coming out of the mouth of their protagonist: Louise Cassidy, Private Investigations. No crime too big. “And no man too small,” Ginny liked to joke loudly in the wine bars where they met every other month, more or less, usually less, for their writing group.

Louise Cassidy did have quite a lot of sex, for a Private Investigator, and it was a bit remarkable that any crimes ever got solved between all the “quickening pulses” and “dastardly grinning” and the “throbbings” and “stirrings” that Louise tended to feel “deep-down inside.”

Everything that Ginny wrote was dreadful, and Marlene told her so, and Ginny nodded agreeably and jotted Marlene’s comments down as if they were Commandments. Everything that Marlene wrote was phenomenal, and Ginny told her so, and Marlene wrote none of it down because she knew it was bullshit and this only made Ginny adore her more.

“How is the new book coming?” she asked.

“I can’t,” Marlene said irritably. “You know I can’t discuss it until it’s on the page.”

Ginny giggled and they each had a fourth drink and at last Ginny reached the familiar, pleasant point where she forgot the little difference there ever was between the things she thought and the things she said out loud.

“Do you ever run into Susan Dunby anymore around here?”

Marlene picked at the corner of her eye again. There was something, an eyelash, in there.

“She left Park Slope years ago. She couldn’t afford it even then.”

Ginny nodded knowingly. “I thought maybe with David’s pension.”

“Ugh,” Marlene said, rubbing her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. Whatever it was, wouldn’t come out. “Those a-holes at UPS never paid. Can you believe it? They said because he wasn’t actually in the towers to deliver anything that day. I made all these calls to MetLife or whatever and told them he was coming to pick something up from me, but they don’t have it in their records.”

“He wasn’t really though, was he? Picking something up, I mean.”

“No of course not,” Marlene said dryly. “He was coming to bang me in the supply closet again.”

Ginny more-or-less swooned, spilling the remainder of her fourth drink onto her own dress. But it was hardly enough to worry about.

“He hated living here,” Marlene sighed. “You know what he told me once? This place was originally called Solipsist Slope. Back in ancient Brooklyn. Isn’t that hysterical? Did I ever tell you that?”

Marlene leaned into the great cloudlike pillow of her couch and closed her eyes. “David said it’s from a Lenape Indian myth—this is what he said. This guy named Solipsissus, who was a complete and utter charmer, was walking along by the big lake in Prospect Park. And then Crazy Jack, he’s like a mischievous kind of spirit, flies by and shoots him right in the ass with one of these little arrows that make people fall in love with the next person they see. Like Cupid.”

Marlene mimed the shooting with dramatic poise.

“So Solipcissus is like, ‘Ow. Damnation and tar feathers! Whooooooo shot me?’ That’s just how David said it exactly. And so, he drops his trousers and bends over the lake to see if he’s all right and then bam. Falls in love.”

“With his—” Ginny was shaking, she was laughing so hard. “With his own—?”

Marlene thought again that she ought to get up and close the window, because the wind was really picking up out on the curb. She could even hear the trash cans blowing over and she didn’t want the mess but she also didn’t really care.

“He said— he said— ‘You’ve heard of naval-gazers? Well. Around here we’ve got that beat.’”

Ginny was still laughing. “He should have been the writer.”

“David should have been a lot of things,” Marlene said, shutting her eyes and wishing it wasn’t absolutely howling outside now. The brocade curtains her mother-in-law had picked out without permission were beginning to whip around. She wanted a cigarette straight away. “I told him that once. I said, ‘David! You should be a writer’. We were all down there at Mexicana Mama. You remember—’”

Finally, Ginny stopped laughing. Marlene was relieved. In nine years, they’d never spoken about this.

“David took me there all the time. Mexicana Mama. Only place downtown you could get sangria any time, day or night. That’s how I knew, that morning, that’s how I knew we should go there to get plastered when Jonathan fired you.”

Marlene could still picture it. Sitting there, at a waist-high counter covered in old tequila bottle labels. Sipping peach sangria at 8:45 in the morning. Ginny sobbing about how she was going to pay her rent and that she was going to have to move home with her mother. And then it had all happened. Then it had all really happened. That whole horrible, bright morning turned black, in an instant.

“We were there at Mexicana Mama,” Marlene started over. “And I was telling David all about taking that class in college and John Irving came, and then David was staring out the window at these guys hauling trash bags off this dumpster. Big black bags. They were sort of steaming in the cool air. They were loading them into a big truck and he said, ‘That Irving guy’s a hack,’ and I said, ‘Well let’s see you write something,’ and he said, ‘I’d rather be a garbageman than a writer. Selling everybody else’s secrets. That’s no way to live.’”

There in the living room, Ginny started to cry, and Marlene shouted, “Oh now what are you crying for?” and got up to console her friend.

But before Marlene had staggered even two steps across the room, the world outside the window went inky black and a spiral of wet wind exploded into the room.

Marlene heard a scream from upstairs. Ginny fell over. The two emptied crystal glasses sailed halfway to the door and smashed into pieces. A porcelain lamp toppled and the bulb inside popped with a flash and the air was filled with architecture magazines and Ginny howled and covered her mouth with her sleeve and Marlene looked all around but couldn’t find the stairs, and then it was done.

Outside Marlene could hear a great cry of car alarms—everywhere, car alarms. She rushed to the open window and saw the whole sidewalk had been ripped up by the tree out front, uprooted and then dropped back down again onto a station wagon.

Ginny was yelling but Marlene didn’t help her up. She was hurrying to Diane’s bedroom. Stairs, two at a time. With each step she was surer and surer that when she got there her daughter would be—she couldn’t even think it, but of course she was always thinking it. She was always waiting for it to happen and now it had. This was how she’d lost the first thing she’d ever loved, and this was how she imagined losing the rest, all the time. She tried, so hard, not to love them so much, but there she was anyway, hardly breathing at all and wondering why there was no more screaming. Only the sound of her own shins hitting the steps when she missed. Her own hands grabbing the bannisters to stay upright.

At last she got to the door, got it open, and saw the window open behind B on the bed. She was holding a squirming Diane.

“Let me go!” Diane yelled, as she clawed at B’s arms. Marlene saw that the older girl was frozen solid, totally paralyzed.

“Honey. Let her go,” Marlene said, leaning above her to shut the window. “Let her go, honey.”

Now that she could see they were alive, she was suddenly incredibly calm. She felt like she was floating an inch in the air. She coolly pulled the teenage girl’s hands off her daughter and lifted Diane away. The girl was still shouting something, trying to get away, and Marlene couldn’t see why. She kept pointing to her dresser, which had toppled onto the floor. Marlene had asked Jonathan to secure it a hundred times; it had such spindly little legs.

“I’m going to throw up,” B said in a high voice. “I’m pretty dizzy.”

Marlene told B to stay on the bed, “Go splash some water on your face. It’s just shock. It’s fine.”

B’s mouth moved a few more times but nothing came out.

“Do you always get like this? When these things happen?”

B blinked twice and swallowed roughly. “When what things happen, Ms. W?”

“Come on, let’s go splash some water on your face. Come on.”

And she set her squirming daughter down at last and helped B to her feet. And it was then that Marlene noticed that on the floor, just knocked off her daughter’s nightstand, was a copy of Stone Towers. Marlene picked it up and turned it over in her hands. It was not one of the hardcover remainders that she kept in the basement. It had a little public library call number on the edge.

Marlene turned and saw her daughter, now trying to lift the fallen dresser, which was at least three times her size.

“Where did you get this?” Marlene asked. “B did you check this out for her?”

B shook her head, still looking bloodless.

“Momm-o, Momm-o, he’s stuck under there!” Diane was crying.

“Young lady, you tell me where you got this!” Marlene said. She dropped the book so that the barrel-chested fireman on the front cover was facing the rug.

“David got it for me!” Diane sobbed. “Momm-o help.”

Marlene’s eyes narrowed. She wrenched her daughter away from the dresser, and Diane wailed, because she’d wedged her fingers tightly underneath. Marlene kissed them in apology. She didn’t know what was happening.

“David who?” Marlene shouted. “Who is David?”

“David’s my friend. He’s one of the Jew— the Jewish people who hides up here.”

“Diane, stop it right now.”

“He reads it to me at bedtime!” Diane tried to get free of her mother. Her cheeks were shot crimson with tear stains. “He’s stuck. He was hiding from the Nazis.”

“Listen to me. No one’s under there!”

But she let Diane go, and her daughter ran back again to try to pick the dresser up. She squeezed her tiny hands underneath, but she could not budge it even an inch. Marlene stared at her daughter, who looked as if she would surely disjoint her own fingers before she’d stop. Marlene felt as if her still-quick heartbeat had just propelled her into another world, the old one falling down behind her.

It’s real to her, she thought. He’s real to her.

Marlene steadied herself and squeezed past her daughter beside the dresser. She eased both of her hands under the front end and heaved up. It was so heavy that it began to fall again, and she screamed at Diane to keep away, and then Ginny was there and they were lifting it up together.

At last the dresser was back up against the wall where it belonged.

“Would you believe a tornado!” Ginny was shouting. “Diane! You were right!”

B sat down on the bed again. She still looked like she’d seen a ghost.

“Oh, Gin,” Marlene whispered, turning to lay her head onto her friend’s shoulder.

Marlene thought, as she often thought, that if it hadn’t been for Ginny getting fired—

“I called him,” she sniffed. “You know? I told him to come pick something up.”

Ginny stopped her smiling and sat down, totally serious, beside her friend.

“Hey. Come on. That’s not important,” she said.

“I didn’t have anything to pick up.”

“That’s not important,” she said again.

“He’s all right,” Diane shouted happily, “Momm-o. Aunt Gin. He’s all right!”

Together, the two women watched as the girl closed her eyes and squeezed at the thin air just in front of her.

Our Favorite Essays About Radicalism and Resistance

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

I’m writing this before knowing the results of the American election—and depending on how long things take, you may be reading it before knowing the results, too. But in the midst (or, hopefully, towards the end) of a season of unprecedented uncertainty, there’s one thing we can say for sure: we will need courage, action, and resistance in the months and years to come, no matter who wins, no matter what else happens. Here are some of our favorite essays celebrating radical thought and action on and off the page.

“50 Years Later, the Demands of ‘The Black Manifesto’ Are Still Unmet” by Carla Bell

In a guerrilla address to the congregation of the Riverside Church in 1969, civil rights activist James Forman demanded that white Americans recognize and re-enfranchise the Black Americans they’d been exploiting for generations. People weren’t ready to hear it—and they’re still not, writes Carla Bell.

The Manifesto is symbolic of America’s accruing and compounding indebtedness to black people, a stolen people, who built the nation and its economy through generations of labor, whose blood is in the soil. 

“Writing Behind My Country’s Back” by YZ Chin

The characters in YZ Chin’s Though I Get Home deal with censorship in Malaysia, but in this essay, Chin breaks down what that censorship meant to her personally.

I have no exact memory of my first realization that I live in a censored world. It is hard to be aware that a thing you have never seen is missing. But I imagine it had something to do with watching choppy programs on state TV, and seeing one scene blink into a totally different one with no semblance of transition.

“Czech Dissident Writers Can Teach Us How to Protect Language from Lies” by Erica Eisen

State control over communication doesn’t only take the form of censorship. Sometimes those in power break down language by reducing it to absurdity—say, by lying so flagrantly that words cease to carry meaning. Czech political dissidents had some experience in writing about this kind of collapse, writes Erica Eisen.

With the current global rise of the far right, when phrases like “post-truth” and “fake news” are uttered by pundits and plutocrats alike without so much as the bat of an eyelash, the literary investigations of writers from the Eastern Bloc can take on an eerie second life, like Cassandra’s prophecies recollected as Troy burns.

“Oscar Wilde’s Gay Socialist Vision” by Arvind Dilawar

Do you think of Oscar Wilde as an aristocratic dandy? You’re not wrong—but, says Arvind Dilawar, he was also a committed libertarian socialist.

In libertarian socialism, Wilde not only saw the potential for his realization as an artist, but his liberation as a gay man.

“The Poetry of Black Women Shows Us How to Move Forward” by Patricia Spears Jones

Change doesn’t just come from the strength to fight—it comes from the compassion and vision to see a way forward, says poet Patricia Spears Jones in her closing address from the 2019 LitTAP conference.

If a new world is coming, then let us use our power to shape it and the privilege to leave those forms to those who follow. As we take the outrage, the anguish and the joy, that these and other revolutionary poets have given us. This has been your time to feast on the power of language and the people who make best use of it. It is a privilege to engage with this world in thoughtful, ethical and caring ways.

“How Austrian Literature Taught Me to Stop Worrying and Hate America” by Jeffrey Arlo Brown

If your country has done terrible things, shouldn’t you have the guts to call it terrible? Jeffrey Arlo Brown admires Austrian writers who treat their country’s Nazi past with frank disgust.

I’ve been immersing myself in Austrian literature while watching America’s shift to the far right. The artists’ anger makes a different kind of sense to me now. In recent years, as America lurches from black sites and torture to drone strikes on civilians to the abuse of Central American children, I find the relentless negativity of Austrian literature consoling. At least it’s honest. The terrible truth is better than a balanced lie.

“The Children of Latinx Immigrants Need a New American Dream” by Ruby Mora

In this essay, Ruby Mora explores what how the American Dream has failed the children of Latinx immigrants, while she reads My Time Among the Whites by Jennine Capó Crucet.

For her, and other immigrants of her generation, that’s what the American Dream meant: financial stability, no stress, the ability to provide for her family. But for the first-generation children of these true believers, it’s becoming clear that the dream is more complicated.

Orchard House. (Photo by Smart Destinations)

“The Politically Radical Family That Inspired ‘Little Women’” by Rebecca Long

Louisa May Alcott created one of literature’s best-known families—but the family that created her was no less remarkable. Rebecca Long takes the reader on a tour through Orchard House, birthplace of Louisa’s books and her parents’ revolutionary ideas.

Bronson was a teacher, philosopher, educational reformer, and failed-utopian-commune founder; he was the first educator in Boston to admit a Black student into his class, and we have him to thank for inventing recess. Abigail was one of the first paid social workers in Massachusetts, as well as a passionate suffragist. Both were Christians, transcendentalists, abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, and vegetarians; it was with these beliefs that Bronson and Abigail raised their four daughters, affording them much more freedom and agency than young women at the time were generally given.

Large sculptural quotation marks
Photo by Quinn Dombrowski

“The Words That Will Bring Us Through the Chaos” by Michelle Chikaonda

Reading Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild and Other Stories got Michelle Chikaonda through her father’s death. During a summer of protests in Philadelphia, she realizes that the story “Speech Sounds” has more to teach her about what it means to be heard.

In these protests it is not that people have finally spoken: some of them have, certainly, but most have been speaking for a long time, and some for their whole lives. It is that this particular death—which happened in the eye of an unprecedented countrywide shutdown for which the entire country was brought to a standstill, and in that national silence was forced to finally see truth—shattered the comprehension barrier between speakers and their willfully unhearing audience.

“The Antifascist Message Hidden in This Greek Coming-of-Age Novel” by Niko Maragos

Three Summers looks like a conspicuously apolitical novel, the story of teenage sisters growing up in the suburbs of Athens in the mid-1930s. But in fact, says Niko Maragos, the novel puts bourgeois complacency in the crosshairs.

Yes, this book is a chronicle of both a girl’s coming of age and an artist’s development. But in the context of post-war Greece, such a book was political. Beyond being an Arcadian withdrawal to better times, Three Summers is a bittersweet indictment of a culture’s reluctance to confront its own pathologies—and each individual’s complicity in it. 

“Confederate Statues are History — So is Taking Them Down” by Rebekkah Rubin

Does toppling a confederate statue mean destroying history—or creating it? Historian Rebekkah Rubin talks about how we can read and, crucially, revise the statues and their place in our communities.

Statues can tell us how the past was remembered by some, but they don’t tell us that the statue was privately funded by a few supporters. They don’t tell us about those who resisted and opposed the building of the statues. A statue only tells part of the story, amplifying the voices of the few.

Our Favorite Essays and Stories About Comforting Things

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

There are some days when nothing’s really going to fix your anxiety. Still, minor indulgences and self-soothing mechanisms can at least help. Here are some of our favorite Electric Literature pieces celebrating the ways we make ourselves feel better—or at least less worse—for a little while.

Cooking and eating

“Learning to Cook for One” by Gina Mei

It’s hard to cook for yourself. It’s probably never been harder—unless you’ve gone through a period of intense personal grief, as Gina Mei did. Here, she writes about the book that taught her to feed herself again—but if you need to just shove bread in your mouth over the sink, we won’t judge.

We rarely discuss the less sexy side of self-care: cleaning your apartment, drinking enough water, remembering to shower. At a time when self-care has been marketed as a luxury and a commodity, the act of feeding yourself is, comparatively, less exciting. But it doesn’t have to be — and as far as self-care goes, cooking for one just might be the most accessible starting point.

“This Cookbook from 1942 Is a Textbook for Making a Better World” by Abby Walthausen

M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf is more than a cooking manual, says Abby Walthausen. It’s a crash course in conservation, a handbook for how to survive and even thrive under conditions of scarcity and crisis. That’s something we may need sooner rather than later.

Though the book takes its title from the idea of fending off hunger or “the wolf at the door,” the wolf is whimsical and comic enough that we know it to be written by someone privileged enough to have avoided true hunger. But it serves a purpose here, a nemesis keeping the writer (and the chef) on her toes. It is just as much about the threat of scarcity as it is about the internal drive of appetite.

Weed

Photo by Donn Gabriel Baleva on Unsplash

“Pineapple Crush” by Etgar Keret

Etgar Keret’s short stories are always a little trippy, and this one centers on the pleasures of getting high. “His voice is infused with dark humor, and his wry observations charmed me even as I despaired at his actions,” writes Helen Phillips, recommending the story for Recommended Reading.

The first hit of the day is like a childhood friend, a first love, a commercial for life. But it’s different from life itself, which is something that, if I could have, I would have returned to the store ages ago. In the commercial it’s made-to-order, all inclusive, finger-licking, carefree living. After that first one, more hits will come along to help you soften reality and make the day tolerable, but they won’t feel the same.

Revisiting YA fantasy novels

“There Has Never Been a Better Time to Read Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Earthsea’ Books” by Juan Michael Porter II

Ursula K. Le Guin has always been pretty prescient, and Juan Michael Porter II argues that this summer’s social justice uprisings make the perfect backdrop for her Earthsea series.

To white protestors and accomplices, who say that they want to listen but are fearful of giving up some power so that we can all heal, I suggest you read the Earthsea cycle. You will need to learn to step away from the center to build a new world, and the Black majority in this fantasy series offers a better model than any white history. I encourage Black people to read Earthsea too, if only to remind yourselves that once upon a time a white woman in Portland saw us, recognized us as beautiful, and built an entire world where we had the privilege to decide that we could share our power.

“How a Book Trilogy About Killing God Helped Restore My Faith” by Isabel Cole

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy highlights the dangers of dogmatic, cultish thinking, and encourages attacking and dethroning god. Isabel Cole talks about what that meant to her as a teen who had lost her faith.

Lyra complements her talents by using a golden disc named the alethiometer, from a Greek word sometimes translated as “truth,” which answers honestly any question posed by one who can read its complex symbolic system. Will bears a knife which can cut not only any physical substance but the space between atoms that opens a door between dimensions. Taken as a pair, these fantastical items offer exactly what I was craving so desperately when I found them: a path to a deeper truth, and the sharpness it takes to undo your reality and leave the world you know behind.

Video games

“How Playing ‘Myst’ Taught Me to Write Fiction” by Blair Hurley

There’s little more soothing than fully immersing yourself in the world of a video game—even if that world is a little spooky. Blair Hurley writes about what she learned from the dreamlike puzzle games Myst and Riven and their descendants.

I felt myself entering a trance of discovery. Surely there were more secrets—locked rooms and hidden basement stairs, pathways through the cricket-keening forest, other houses that would open to my knock. I spent so many hours of my childhood in this quiet, thrilling discovery mode. The games were not at all the flashing lights and shoot-em-ups that non-gamers sometimes imagine. They were an escape, a place to explore the boundaries of a fictional world, a daydream.

Baking shows

A row of frosted cupcakes on a table against a pastel blue wall
Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

“Baking Shows Are Secretly Reality TV for Frustrated Writers” by Manuel Betancourt

What can Gourmet Makes teach us about the creative process? For Betancourt, it’s a lesson in loving the journey. For you, perhaps it’s just something to stare at glassy-eyed and not have to think about the future.

It’s a show that asks us to relish the process more than the final result. Even with all the roadblocks that the show depicts, its playful core offers a crucial reminder: no matter the anxieties that baking—or writing—may elicit, there’s value in the act of creation, no matter how improbable or impractical it may seem.

“Everything I Know About Writing a Novel I Learned from Watching British People Bake” by Becky Mandelbaum

Yes, I know: people aren’t as into The Great British Baking Show this year. I agree but I don’t want to hear about it because with all its flaws this show is still the most soothing thing going. Watch old seasons if you have to. You might even learn something about writing, says Mandelbaum:

At the end of each challenge, they’re covered in flour and chocolate, their cooking areas a mess of dirtied spoons and orange peels. Then, one by one, they are forced to approach the judges bearing the fruits of their labors, vulnerable to ridicule and eager for praise. They then wait patiently as their superiors literally tear their creation into pieces before determining their worth as an artist. Whatever the contestants have baked, it’s the best they can do, and yet they understand that sometimes the best is still not enough.

Funny TV

“Why the ‘Good Place’ Personality Test Is Better than the Myers-Briggs” by Sulagna Misra

Remember when everyone was trying to figure out which two characters from The Good Place they were? Let’s go back to that usage of social media, man. Sulagna Misra breaks it down for you—and shows why this semi-joking personality test is actually better than some “real” evaluations.

Because The Good Place is a show about bad people getting better, relating to a character means not only relating to her flaws but relating to her struggle. That’s not something that’s usually reflected in personality tests, which purport to tell you who you are, not who you’re trying to be. But lots of people struggle to be good, and it’s the struggle that defines them. They don’t necessarily identify with good or evil, but with trying and failing. They understand morality is important, but to actually aim to be moral all the time is daunting at best, paralyzing at worst.

Soothing podcasts

“Could a Daily Poetry Podcast Save Your Mental Health?” by Eric Silver

Poet laureate Tracy K. Smith’s podcast The Slowdown aims for exactly that: a moment of slowdown, in the form of a poem. And it might be the best thing you can do for your brain.

By taking time to do one thing for five minutes, we can reorient our brains to focus on one thing for a little while. There is mounting evidence that mindfulness and meditative thinking — let’s say, about one topic or feeling, like in a short poem — can contribute to future health and mental state. And a few minutes is all you need.

Pizza

An excerpt from Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier

Sometimes only the exact junk food you want will make you happy. Sometimes that’s pickle and pepperoni pizza. “Frazier’s prose is full of gleeful dark humor and wry observations, and this novel is like the moody rollercoaster of adolescence itself,” writes Kimberly King Parsons in her recommendation.

They looked at each other, shrugged, and started pulling the dough. I chopped a couple pickles into uneven slices and wedged myself between the cooks, sprinkled the pickles over the sauce, cheese, and meat. I told myself that it only looked off because it was raw, but the cooks didn’t seem to know what to make of it either. 

Dogs being fine

“Books Where the Dog Dies, Rewritten So the Dog Doesn’t Die” by Riane Konc

Riane Konc has finally made it safe to read Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows. This may still make you cry, but with relief. At least something can be fixed!

The big cat hissed, and my dogs howled. I strained my eyes to see higher in the tree, gauging our danger. The mountain lion and I locked eyes. She kept her eyes locked on mine while she slowly reached her paw across the branch, farther than I would have thought she could have reached, and while still staring directly at me, batted a full glass of water off the branch of the tree. It crashed to the ground next to me, right where a red fern was growing.

Hiding in the bathroom

Photo by Emanuela Franchini

“We’re All Living in the Bathroom Now” by Annabel Paulsen

The early days of lockdown reminded Paulsen of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s first novel The Bathroom, in which the narrator moves permanently into the smallest room in his house. The novel helped her make sense of the feeling of stasis—and now, moving into the bathroom honestly sounds pretty good.

The novel presses on the illusion that life gets you somewhere—and behind it we find the reality that life leads only to death, that existence eventually hits up against its opposite. We move like raindrops, hurtling toward the ground, and end in immobility. Whatever meaning exists is our own creation, and we can choose whether or not to worship it.

Can You Care for Others Without Destroying Yourself?

Posted on by Jo Lou

Women providing care––and the ways in which care can be made murky by expectations related to gender, religion, and tied unfairly at times to a means of proving love—is a significant theme in Lynn Coady’s latest novel, Watching You Without Me.

Watching You Without Me by Lynn Coady

After Karen’s mother Irene passes away, Karen returns to her childhood home in order to process the complicated relationship she had with her mother, sift through the detritus of her former life, and make decisions about how best to support her sister Kelli, who is disabled. These reckonings lead to questions, both for Karen and the reader: How much can –– and should –– we care for others without losing ourselves in the process? What happens when caregivers burn out? What lines can and should exist between caregivers and the people they care for, and what harms are caused when these lines are blurred? 

In our current climate, one in which women are shouldering childcare duties while also attempting to maintain work (spoiler: it’s impossible), and parents are being told they are no longer allowed to care for children at home while they work (a policy arguably disproportionately affecting women), Coady’s book, one unapologetically written about women’s lives, for women, serves both as a balm and guide. And while the characters do grapple with significant issues related to self-preservation and complicated familial relationships, there’s also a compelling note of tension that rises to crescendo, rendering this a deliciously layered read.

Over the phone, I spoke with Lynn Coady about the link between gender and guilt, the significance of writing for women, care as a practice, and the ways in which silence can be insidious. 

Jacqueline Alnes: A big theme in the novel is caregiving. Care as a practice often seems gendered, at least historically, and the women in this book struggle with feelings of guilt when they choose to ensure their own wellbeing over providing for others. What was important to you when writing about care? 

Lynn Coady: I wanted to underscore the generational difference between Karen and Irene. They are only one generation removed, but there is this influx of feminist thought that has taken place and it has opened up a huge chasm. In a way, Irene is a woman with one foot in the past—in women’s pasts, with all of the stereotypes, misogyny, and circumscribed roles that that implied—whereas Karen is a person with her foot in the future. Karen is a product of feminism and a supposedly more progressive society. 

I think the crucial difference between them, if I were to boil it down to one idea, is Irene comes from a generation that thinks it’s one hundred percent good for a woman to completely devote her life to the care of others as opposed Karen’s generation, which believes in a woman needing balance in her life, a woman looking out for herself first. 

JA: There is an interesting line that links Irene’s caregiving to faith:

It was like faith. It was exactly like faith in that you had to stop futzing around and let it take you over…it was a small world, a circumscribed world, but it was your world and you did what you could to make it beautiful.

There is a thread of religion throughout, and ideas of martyrdom. Religion also seems to offer a way for the characters to find beauty. How do you see religion or faith and caregiving intersecting?

LC: Catholicism is such a significant influence on Irene’s thinking. She comes from a very sexist world but also a Catholic tradition, which really teaches women the best thing they can do is to devote themselves to the care of others. Irene, as many women do, believed she could get a sense of purpose and satisfaction through care. 

JA: That makes a lot of sense. One other scene related to religion is one where Irene wants to join choir but she is in the front row with her two daughters so she is viscerally stuck; she can’t get up to sing because she can’t leave them. I felt like it was such an interesting metaphor for voicelessness or the constraints of motherhood. 

LC: She’s stuck and she’s looking for ways to express herself that are allowed to her. She can tell herself that singing in the choir is another form of service. She’s participating in her church; she’s praising the Lord in song. Irene has the right to her own pleasure, but she doesn’t allow herself to go after what she wants unless she can justify it through the lens of what is good and holy. 

JA: Ah, I hadn’t considered it that way. You mention in the afterword that you researched a lot about caregiving and there’s a lot in the book where we learn about some of the faults within the system. What did you find while researching that interested you?

LC: I knew a bit about social services going into it because I had a student job with social services and children’s aid in Nova Scotia when I was in my 20s, and I knew that people will report other people if they think they’re not looking after their children, or if they think their elderly parents or dependents aren’t being cared for. But the big thing I learned was that these caregiving organizations didn’t have any kind of government regulation or oversight, and that blew my mind. 

JA: The lack of oversight almost makes Irene’s obsession with caring for Kelli herself more understandable. If the system is not regulated, then you don’t know who’s coming to care for your loved one.

LC: Yes. What happens with Karen—and I think this happens with a lot of people—is that if someone is struggling and social services are alerted, that can be really bad, but also it can be a point of finding help. When the social worker arrives, you realize that you have resources you can rely on. But entering into that system and negotiating that system and talking to various offices is daunting. 

JA: And learning the language of it too. 

LC: Exactly.

JA: If you don’t know what to ask for, how are you supposed to have the language for it?

LC: Yeah, and if you feel like there’s a threat of your loved one being taken away because you don’t know how to negotiate that system, that can be really intimidating. 

JA: In thinking about women and voices, there are quite a few scenes of women choosing to speak out or not and that affecting them in significant ways. In some instances in the novel, women protect other people with their silence. Society, in many ways, conditions women to be polite or quiet—what about that interests you?

I just said fuck it, I’m just going to write something for women. All about women. I don’t care if male readers are into it or not. 

LC: I think what interests me about it is the instinct of it. It’s a thing that we all have been taught—not overtly, but we have absorbed through osmosis our entire lives. As I was writing the book, I was interested in the way Karen instinctively negotiated Trevor, who is one of Kelli’s caregivers. It wasn’t something I sat down and intended necessarily, but I was just putting Karen in these situations where Trevor seems a little bit annoyed or Trevor seems a little bit disapproving or he was pushing her in some way or he was being a little bit hostile. Karen would always deke off to the side a little bit. She always had a move that was never overtly pushing back. Instead, she’d intuit what he needed to hear and she would do that. Karen is instinctively negotiating Trevor’s moods and his potential anger.

I think that’s something women do. I don’t know if this happens to you, but every once in a while I’ll be talking to a man who is in a position of authority and my voice will be high. I’m like, why did I pitch my voice to this level? What’s going on? And I realize I’m talking a couple octaves higher than I usually do. I realize I’m making myself smaller, in a way, or making my voice sound more innocent or softer.

JA: I start my orders at restaurants with “I’m sorry, could I have…” and my friends always remind me that I can just ask. I don’t have to apologize for asking for a drink.

LC: Right, you don’t have to apologize. 

JA: Within the book, there are allusions to future listeners. For example, Karen says she shakes her head “along with all the people I tell this story to.” There seems to be power there, in that Karen has survived this ordeal and can tell her narrative how she chooses. And of course, this exists within the larger frame of the novel, which is also a story being told. What, for you, is the power of story? 

LC: I’m always preoccupied with the question of why a given narrator is telling a story. I always find that I need to know before I write, even if it’s a third-person narrator. I need to have some rationale for why a particular story is being told by someone. What’s the subjectivity at play here? With Karen, I feel like what I wanted to get across was that she’s talking about a time in her life that was really difficult and where she made some of the biggest mistakes of her life. We get the sense that she has told and retold this story. It’s been a dinner party anecdote and something she’s talked about with friends and I’m sure she has a million versions of it—a really short one, a long one, one she tells potential lovers. 

I think ultimately she realizes that the reason she’s been telling this story over and over and over again is because she still hasn’t learned the lessons she should have learned, so this novel is her telling the story to herself. She’s going through it in ruthless detail and examines all of her flaws and misapprehensions and asks herself: should I hate myself for letting all that happen as much as I do?

When she gets to the end of that story, having told the story in this way has been a process of forgiving herself for that period of her life.

JA: Guilt comes up again. Her mother experiences guilt, she experiences guilt, and both of them for things that honestly they shouldn’t feel bad about. That also seems gendered. 

LC: Very much so. Guilt is huge. It is a gendered guilt. Karen learned from Irene that women are supposed to live a certain way and want certain things, and if they don’t look after their loved ones in the prescribed way, then they’re not doing womanhood right. Trevor comes along and completely underlines all that. He affirms that Karen isn’t doing womanhood right, and insinuates that she has let everyone down. He plays on all these subconscious fears that Karen has. It’s very gendered and it’s also Catholic at the same time.

JA: This novel contains so many smaller insidious moments that seem like they hold potential for violence or harm of some sort to happen. Was there something about our current climate that was an impetus for you to write this book?

LC: I started writing this book in 2016, so before #MeToo got started, but even then there was something in the air. A lot of my books before this have had male protagonists. I have always felt like my books have had a feminist perspective but I was being sly about it. It was fun to try to write these male characters in male worlds as a feminist; showing the effects of patriarchy on men is one of the things I like to do. But when I sat down to write this book, I just said fuck it, I’m just going to write something for women. All about women. Women at middle-age, when you sort of deal with all your shit and look at the shit you’ve been through. I just had the feeling that this book is about women. I don’t care if male readers are into it or not. 

JA: I thought you did such valuable work with Trevor in that aspect. After I read, I found myself going back to the beginning, at least in my mind, and remembering that he seemed so harmless. At the end, it escalates. Trevor obviously has issues, but he’s also part of this patriarchal society, and the ways he expresses himself, through anger, are the ways that men are often trained to express their emotions.

LC: I appreciate you saying that. People have said to me that as soon as you meet Trevor, you know something really bad is going to happen. I think he’s a little off from the start, but I’ve known so many men like Trevor who have the attitudes that they do and behave in harmful ways, but don’t become psycho stalkers. They are who they are. On some level, they are healthy, the way Trevor sometimes can be. Trevor wants to help and he’s kind of a goofball—in some ways, he’s a very typical guy.

JA: And he’s a caregiver, which is something that has not always been considered “masculine.” In the novel, Jessica brings up that Trevor caring for Kelli is strange because male caregivers often aren’t paired with female clients. 

LC: I thought it was interesting to think about how Trevor performs masculinity in this role—caregiver—that’s not coded as masculine. His way of caring for people is being pushy and bullying them. 

JA: Was there anything you read throughout this process that helped inform your process of writing? 

It takes decades for women to shake off all the bullshit social conditioning they get and start to feel like confident, competent human beings.

LC: I used an epigram from Alice Munro at the beginning of the book and I was reading a lot of her work at the time just because the way she writes about women’s lives is so inspiring. She does not give a shit. She writes what she wants to write. I posted a thing on Twitter recently, it was just a joke piece listing all the one-star reviews for Alice Munro on Amazon. They were hilarious because they were totally true. People were saying things like “Ugh, it’s just a boring story about another Canadian woman’s life, or somebody else said that “nothing ever happens” in her stories. And it’s like yeah, that’s Alice Munro—she writes about “boring” women’s lives and they somehow feel so riveting and relevant and engaging. 

JA: That relates what you mentioned earlier, too, when you said something like, “fuck it, I’m going to write a book for women.” There are interesting things happening in domestic spheres and there are complicated things happening for women. 

LC: These stories are really human and crucial. It felt to me to write from the perspective of a middle-aged woman because, being at this age myself, I feel like it takes actual decades for women to shake off all the bullshit social conditioning they get and start to feel like confident, competent human beings who know their own minds and know their shit. But there’s always going to be a Trevor out there trying to undermine your confidence and make you feel small. At the same time, there’s also an element of disillusion that comes into play when you start to deeply understand how much of what you’ve been told and taught about yourself was garbage meant to keep you down. And it’s difficult to have to reckon, as Karen does, with the fact that you bought into all that garbage, and invested in it, for so much of your life.

What Do We Owe Our Community in a Time of Crisis?

Posted on by Jo Lou

In her first novel published in 14 years, author Julia Alvarez explores grief, isolation, and sisterhood.

Afterlife follows Antonia, a writer and retiring English professor, who has just lost her husband Sam. As she reimagines what her life will be without her husband, Antonia also struggles with considering who she wants to be in his absence, as he was often the one pushing her to be more open, more considerate, and more caring of others. She takes it upon herself to provide aid to Mario, an undocumented worker who works for her neighbor on a dairy farm in rural Vermont, so he can bring his pregnant girlfriend to live with him. On top of this, she must navigate her relationship with her three sisters who are both pushing her to be more social during this time of upheaval, but must also contend another blow when their sister Izzy goes missing. 

I recently spoke with Julia Alvarez about being an elder storyteller, not knowing what our new lives are going to be after the pandemic, and her creative protest project.

Leticia Urieta: Why was this the book you needed to write right now?

Julia Alvarez: By the time the book comes out there will be a time lag, so who knows what I would write right now. It has struck me how prescient the book is to the present situation. I felt like I was living in elegiac times even before this (the pandemic). We were seeing the extinction of species from climate change, whole coastal areas under water, terrible storms, gun violence in schools, violence against communities of color (which of course did not begin with George Floyd), divisiveness, draconian immigration laws; this felt like the end of so many things.

I come from a Latina family, my father is the youngest of 25 kids, so I grew up with a clan. I grew up with all of these storytellers and cuentos, with all of these other mothers and fathers, abuelitas, godmothers, and cousins. The bad part of this is that when a generation starts dying, you don’t just lose one uncle or your grandparents, you’re losing a whole phalanx of people. And so I felt that I was living in some kind of end time. For me, narrative is a way to navigate a situation using story and make meaning, not so much searching for answers but in understanding the questions that I am asking. This was also the first novel that I feel like I’ve written as an elder storyteller. I was no longer interested in repeating things I knew how to do; I could tell a certain kind of story at different points of my life. Writing is a calling for me, and I had to understand this period in my life as an elder and to integrate it to create a character that was as complex as this stage of life asks of us. I was asking myself as an elder storyteller, “what are the stories left in me to tell before I go?” 

LU: I appreciate that because I know that when a book comes out is not necessarily when it began for you. 

JA: It’s interesting because this book is about a character who we meet when her life has just come completely apart. Everything that she had put together was secure, she had her way of life and her certainties, and we meet her just as everything comes apart. And that is what it feels like has happened to us in the last few months—a way of life that we knew is over and we don’t yet know what our new lives are going to be like, and neither does Antonia.   

LU: Would this book look different if you had written it in quarantine?

JA: We really are living in a mythic time. I know a lot of writer friends who are getting down on themselves for not being productive and I tell them, be gentle with yourself. Let this moment not be lost on us. We need to be present to it. The novels after the Vietnam war came a decade later because people needed time to write about it successfully. My neighbors were farmers and they were acutely aware of the weather, and I do think that writers and artists have an attunement to the zeitgeist and to what is out there that is present but yet unnamed and beyond the borders of our words. They pick it up and it finds its way into the work. 

A way of life that we knew is over and we don’t yet know what our new lives are going to be like.

I have friends who have books coming out that they wrote a year ago and are realizing how their work speaks to this moment. But then I also think that the best writing can be picked up and understood at any time. Czesław Miłosz was asked if he was a political poet, and he said that it isn’t that you have to write to address a particular political issue or paradigm, but that writers cannot think below a certain level of awareness of their times, or the work they make is not useful to us. I’ve started to keep a journal again after a long time for this reason. A journal allows for that scatteredness of recording luminous pieces to connect these pieces. 

LU: There is a line towards the beginning of the book where Antonia thinks about grief: ”The landscape of grief is not very inviting.” Antonia is living in the isolation of grief but is also not afforded the peace of this isolation because of her familial obligations. Right now, we are all searching for a way to connect and create in a time of extreme disconnection and extreme grief. And even though Antonio is not living in our current situation, like you said, she is experiencing that upheaval.

JA: One thing that I found challenging with this narrative was asking, how do we live in a broken time and not shut down? How do we keep faith in the people we’ve loved and the things that we believe in? How do you give them an afterlife when the life that grew them is over?

I have said about this book that it is a spin on the Book of Job story with a sense of humor, because everything hits Antonia all at once. By that I mean, how can you have a Latina woman with three sisters in full manic mode, and not have humor in it? Instead of a biblical patriarch, we have a Latina sisterhood. Many times I think of my novels as having a soundtrack and for me the song for this novel was Leonard Cohen’s song (“Anthem”) when he says “There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” That is a feeling I was trying to embody. People say that when you read a book that you are changed by it, but I think that when you write a book, you are changed by it too. This book was the hard work I was doing that prepared me, as much as we can be prepared for this moment.

LU: Do you carry the voices and stories of people you have lost that inform who you are now? 

How do we live in a broken time and not shut down? How do we keep faith in the people we’ve loved and the things that we believe in?

JA: Definitely. The cultura I come from contains a lot of connections to your antepasados. They are always present and a part of you. You are not just an “I,” you’re a “we.” Sometimes I say something and I think, oh my abuelita would have said that, I must be channeling her. There is always a sense that you are not just a single bead, you are a part of the entire necklace of the generations. When you get to my age at 70, you’ve already died a lot of little deaths. You’ve died from being a ten-year-old, you died when you lost certain certainties, you died when you didn’t realize your dream of being a dancer. When I started losing loved ones as I got older, I struggled not just with losing that person but what they brought into the world. And I thought, the only way to not lose someone completely is to give them an afterlife inside yourself. That is why the title for this book meant so much to me. The thing that I wanted to emphasize is that if you remain open and don’t shut down, there are afterlives after the specific life that you imagined is over. 

LU: I would argue that you are a part of this too, as an elder, but I like to call them “creative ancestors,” and I love the idea of honoring the people that inform us and speak to us over time. 

JA: Right! We just lost Rudolfo Anaya, who was really a literary grandfather. Sometimes we don’t even know whose shoulders we have stood on but we have ancestors who have helped us. 

LU: I appreciated that Antonia’s character, as an English professor who is also bilingual, is often preoccupied with finding the right words to name her experiences. Why did this feel important for her as a character navigating grief, to name things in her particular way? 

JA: It’s interesting because I have two sisters who are therapists and one of them worked with refugees from Central America in the ’70s and ’80s who had witnessed horrible things and were traumatized. She started a Latino practice because she found that a lot of therapy was Eurocentric. She informs one of the characters in the novel, Izzy. But one of the things that she told me is that some of her patients were so traumatized that they came in and were wordless. And she said that she knew that they were beginning to heal when they could tell the stories of what happened to them. The testimonio is part of our Latin American tradition, that after something horrible happens, the story must be told. At first, grief takes all of your words. Once you find the right words, you can communicate and feel less alone and can return to community and love.   

LU: One of the things that Antonia struggles with most in the book is her feeling of responsibility: to her sisters, to Mario, and to other undocumented people in need while also navigating her own needs in grief. This is a struggle that I think many people have, especially in the U.S. capitalist system where people are encouraged to take what they can for themselves, while others, who have had to struggle the most, see the need to aid others. Antonia is a Domincan woman who is working with undocumented immigrants who are Mexican and Central American. 

Was there a solidarity that you were hoping to capture among Latinos or in the immigrant experience?

What are the stories left in me to tell before I go?

JA: There is a sense of responsibility to your community if you have any measure of success. To quote Toni Morrison, “the function of freedom is to free someone else.” If you have had that privilege, and often luck, there is that need to pay it back, but you can’t pay it back, you can only pay it forward. When you come from these communities, there is a kind of bond because you can’t forget that that was you. It’s why I wrote about the Mirabal sisters because I felt like my sisters and I were the lucky ones who got out, and here were the Mirabal sisters who did not get out, who were slaughtered. It was part of my work to tell that story. And for those people that believe that “I’ve got mine” mentality, well, hello virus! No one is going to survive unless we take care of each other. Viruses know no borders, no desperation, no indignation and frustration. It behooves people who believe that they can stay in their gated communities of privilege and power to understand that that ain’t the way it works. If everything is falling apart, can we find a way to put it back together in a way that is just? Rebecca Solnit writes, “out of the word emergency comes the word ‘emerge.’” 

LU: Absolutely. That speaks to the interconnectedness, that grief comes for all of us. There are certain things you can’t protect yourself from no matter how much power and privilege you have. 

JA: Yes, and we have to push against our own borders and our own walls. 

LU: I wondered how your view of sisterhood and connection looks different now as you are in a different place in your life than how you have written about it in your previous novels? 

JA: One of the reasons that I wrote How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is because there weren’t those books on the shelves and I wrote those books for myself and my sisters to understand the world from our points of view. One of the reasons that I wanted to write this novel is because I was longing for more work about an elder, and an elder Latina that is not just an abuelita or a wise old woman or other stereotypes or cliches like that. And I wanted to explore sisterhood as an adult where the sisters no longer live in a nuclear family and sometimes have very divergent lives from each other and who may have had horrible conflicts and don’t always talk with one another. I am interested in the sisterhood that comes with blood, but also the sisterhood of women. I was interested in exploring how women come together and nurture each other. 

As a matter of fact, one of the projects that I started with some of my friends and other women artists is inspired by my love of Scherezade from One Thousand and One Nights, who survived by telling stories. It’s not often highlighted that she asks if she can bring her sister Dunyazad, who is the one who sets up the whole trick. It’s always inspiring to think about women who are storytellers who tell stories to help other women. We are actually starting a project where one woman artist will perform in front of the White House from July until the November election as a creative protest in front of “the Sultan’s palace.” This has had to change to become virtual performances, but I am excited by all of the wonderful poets, writers, dancers, and artists who have signed up to perform in a creative sisterhood. The arts have the power to nurture our souls and have the power to save us as a people.