Page 334 – Electric Literature

14 Highly Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books Coming This Spring

Posted on March 16, 2020March 20, 2020 by Jess Zimmerman

Spring is coming, which means it’s a new season, which means we’ve got a new crop of LGBTQ+ books sprouting up. While there are never enough books from LGBTQ+ authors (especially from the + side), representation is slowly increasing (though it remains very white). However, 2020 is shaping up to be one of the best years for queer lit maybe ever, so here are 15 of the most anticipated LGBTQ+ books for your blossoming literary heart.

March

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Don’t You Know I Love You by Laura Bogart (3/17)

This debut novel from Laura Bogart, whose essays and criticism around sizeism and body image (among other things) can be found across the internet, is a gut-punch of a book—in a good way. After a car accident leaves Angelina Moltisanti’s wrist fractured and her artist dreams dashed, she must also move back in with her charming and abusive father. When she meets another artist named Janet, she finds her world expanding in ways that help her unsettle the dynamics that keep her tethered to her father. Deftly navigating the hard and soft and complicated aspects of living in a body and feeling broken, Bogart’s lucid writing carries the reader through a story that is both challenging and elegant, and beautifully queer.

Save Yourself by Cameron Esposito (3/24)

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past decade, you know Cameron Esposito as one of our mainstream-famous queers, rocking the world with her innovative standup, her interview podcast Queery, and the tragically short-lived TV show Take My Wife. In Save Yourself, Esposito brings her signature sharp-as-nails humor and deeply resonant insight into a memoir about growing up Catholic, and how that helped her be gay. (Well, sort of.) It’s definitely in line with a lot of celebrity memoirs, in that it’s filled with anecdotes and stories, but Esposito’s voice is singular enough to carry this book right past your ribcage and into your queer heart.

Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby (3/31)

Speaking of comedians, if you haven’t read Samantha Irby’s previous essay collections Meaty (2013) and We Are Never Meeting In Real Life (2017), you’re missing out. She’s one of the wittiest and most incisive essayists out there, writing on everything from Hollywood to animal hospitals to physical illness to lesbian bed death. This latest collection is hilarious, relatable, and surprisingly heartfelt in random corners, just as you’d expect from a writer of this caliber.

April

Diary of a Drag Queen by Crystal Rasmussen and Tom Rasmussen (4/7)

Written by journalist and queer performer Tom Rasmussen and their drag persona Crystal, this book is a fast-paced, humor-laced memoir that reads like an epistolary novel. Charting a year in Tom and Crystal’s life from their birthplace in northern England to London to the fashion industry in New York and back again, this book is a quick jab of sex, playfulness, and in many ways, coming of age as a queer person—again.

How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang (4/7)

This stunning debut novel is not marketed as queer, but it is one of the queerest things I’ve ever read in that it joyfully centers a gender nonconforming character, and in that its writing is absolute fire. Following two pre-adolescent Chinese-American siblings during the Gold Rush somewhere in the southwest United States, the story starts out with the pair hauling a trunk containing their father’s corpse into the desert hills, and goes to the most unexpected and dazzling places that I’m hesitant to say more. Just read this one. When you read it, you’ll know.

Junebat by John Elizabeth Stintzi (4/7)

John Elizabeth Stintzi’s got two books releasing within a month of each other (their novel Vanishing Monuments comes out May 5), and this poetry collection is bound to be a literary north star for nonbinary folks, especially creative ones, who grapple with mental illness. Moving among the various planes of depression and isolation, love and freedom, this book breaks down those gender walls we all find ourselves in sometimes and celebrates self-determination in the form of a mythical creature called a Junebat (but really, we’re all mythical creatures).

Kept Animals by Kate Milliken (4/21)

In 1993, the Old Topanga Canyon fire ravaged 18,000 acres of southern California landscape. Kept Animals takes place in the months leading up to that event, following three teenage girls whose lives orbit a horse ranch. Rory Ramos works as a ranch hand at her stepfather’s stable where June Fisk rides competitively; Vivian Price lives down the hill with her movie-star father. As Rory finds herself increasingly drawn to Vivian, her stepfather gets into a car accident that leaves his body wrecked and Rory, June, and Vivian spinning closer together. This is a coming of age novel with spot-on narrative pacing and intriguing characters, set in a time and a place that are characters in themselves. It’s a thrilling read with a breathless climax.

May

Officer Clemmons: A Memoir by Dr. François S. Clemmons

Officer Clemmons by Dr. François Clemmons (5/5)

Dr. François Clemmons created the role of Officer Clemmons on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the first recurring role for a Black character on a children’s program. A musician by training and trade, Clemmons is also gay and proud. This memoir is a map of a vibrant and complex life told in a vibrant and complex voice, from childhood loss to a moving friendship with Fred Rogers to a career in music that involved global travel and a life marked by creativity. Clemmons is a skilled storyteller, and this memoir sings.

After Rubén by Francisco Aragón (5/5)

For those of us who are into boundary-breaking linguistic fun times, Francisco Aragón is a poet to read. His latest collection translates and plays with the poetry of Spanish-language poet Rubén Darío. Invoking places like Aragón’s native San Francisco and his parents’ native Nicaragua, and traveling through time and across space, After Rubén is an homage, and its own contribution, to queer Latinx poetry.

The Fixed Stars by Molly Wizenberg (5/12)

Molly Wizenberg is best known for her popular food blog, Orangette; for her previous memoirs, A Homemade Life and Delancey; and for the restaurant she opened with her then-husband (also called Delancey). However, The Fixed Stars is not a food book. It’s about evolving, fluid identity, something Wizenberg found herself thinking about for the first time at age 36 when she fell in love with a woman. Wizenberg is an excellent writer; her meditations on what it means to know yourself—or think you know yourself—and how unpredictable and exciting life really is are a joy to read.

The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar (5/19)

The author of 2018’s hit novel The Map of Salt and Stars is back with a book that is pure magic. Centered on a closeted Syrian-American trans boy whose ornithologist mother has died, and who is now his grandmother’s caretaker, this book is bursting at the seams with art, symbolism, mystery, family, secrets, of course, birds. Nadir is one of the most compelling characters to come out of fiction in a long while (see also: Sam from How Much of These Hills is Gold). An unforgettable and queer as hell novel, this one is a must-read.

All My Mother’s Lovers by Ilana Masad (5/26)

In addition to writing fiction and nonfiction, Ilana Masad is one of the best contemporary book critics out there, and her debut novel is evidence that all that reading has done her good. (Brandon Taylor, author of the brand-new Real Life, called her a genius in a recent interview, so that tells you something.) Maggie Krause is 27 when her mother dies in a car crash, pretty much at the moment she’s finally exploring intimacy with a new partner, Lucia. (The book opens with a lesbian sex scene that will suck you right in, no pun intended.) Returning home to her parents’ house, Maggie finds a series of sealed letters to other men who are not her father that her mother left with her will. Over the course of the funeral and shiva, Maggie embarks on a journey to deliver these letters, revealing all kinds of secrets—about everything and everyone. Brimming with enveloping writing, this is another don’t-miss.

June

You Exist Too Much: A Novel by Zaina Arafat

You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat (6/9)

Zaina Arafat has been a prolific writer and teacher for years, and in her debut novel, we follow a queer Palestinian-American protagonist who tries all kinds of (sometimes unexpected, sometimes strange) ways to cope with what she has always been told is too much desire—too much existing. The unnamed narrator is flawed, to be sure, and the story itself plays a little off of bisexual tropes, but the writing here is electric and carries the narrative all the way through. This is an exciting and dynamic book that explores intersectional identity and human longing extremely well.

Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier (6/9)

Another voltaic debut to look out for, Pizza Girl is just the right blend of angst, humor, commentary, vulnerability, and bildungsroman to satisfy a craving for something that’s not actually that cheesy but is very warm and saucy. The protagonist—18 and pregnant, living with her boyfriend and her mom, working at a pizza place—receives a strange order from a new woman in town, Jenny. Jenny is a stay-at-home mom, and quickly becomes the object of fixation as the narrator navigates the rocky terrain of impending motherhood, growing up, and growing into herself. Frazier is an author to watch.

Why Aren’t There More Books About Asian Slackers?

Posted on March 16, 2020March 4, 2020 by Jo Lou

Navigating the internet never used to produce this level of collective anxiety. As early as ten years ago, it still felt like there was a chance that technology could accelerate us into a happier future. The mask has since been ripped off, as targeted advertising follows you wherever you go, trolls are ready to run you offline for expressing any non-normative identity or opinion, and tech companies have sold your privacy for a profit.

Kevin Nguyen’s debut novel, New Waves, is set in the New York startup scene of 2009, during those last days of so-called “tech optimism.” Lucas is a Vietnamese American 23-year-old working a low-level customer service job at a tech company—the kind with foosball tables, free snacks, and no functional HR department. His only highlight is getting drinks after work with his best friend Margo, a brilliant Black engineer who rails against the racism they face as the only people of color at the company.

After Margo gets fired, she and Lucas team up to steal their company’s user database in retaliation. But when she dies suddenly in a car accident, Lucas is left aimless and grieving. He seeks comfort from Jill, a struggling sci-fi writer that Margo had befriended over a semi-anonymous online forum, while also managing the web of privacy violations racking up at his Snapchat-esque employer.

A variety of themes and plot threads compete for your attention in New Waves, but it all manages to come together as an incisive satire of startup culture, an exploration of a life defined by science fiction, and a stirring reflection on how identity is made and unmade online.

I spoke to Kevin Nguyen, features editor at The Verge, about working in tech, finding community on a decentralized internet, and the limits of Asian American representation.

Taylor Moore: What was it like to translate all your experience in the tech world into the novel?

Kevin Nguyen: I started jotting notes that would eventually become the book when I was working at Oyster [a “Netflix for Books” app acquired by Google in 2015], which was a place I liked, but you know, when you’re inside tech, you see a lot of strange things.

From the inside, so many things just felt wrong—not just sexist and racist, but sloppy and inconsiderate. All the incentives just kept demanding that we grow and and it was interesting watching that scramble happen day-in and day-out and how quickly it would erode people’s sense of right and wrong. Everyone was well-meaning; it’s just we had to move so fast on every decision that we made that there wasn’t really time to be thoughtful about it.

It was 2014-2015, and we were in the last days of tech optimism. 2016 was when we finally hit our reckoning with tech companies and the kinds of consequences and harm that they can cause upon people and societies.

TM: What’s something that people who haven’t worked in the startup world don’t understand about that kind of workplace?

KN: It’s actually hard to get across the energy and excitement that is very infectious. And I definitely bought into it. It manifests itself in a bunch of different ways and can be used to take advantage of employees pretty easily, but I don’t know, there’s a part of me that misses that a little bit. It’s a weird experience. People don’t quite expect that. To do these jobs, even though they’re kind of menial, can suddenly feel exciting when you give people a sense of purpose.

TM: Lucas and Margo become close friends in the workplace, but they first came to know each other through an online forum dedicated to archiving obscure music. From what I can tell, those small pockets online have pretty much gone away with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in the past 10 or so years.

I’m curious: what do you think has been lost with the collapse of the decentralized internet?

KN: There’s a sense of community that’s been lost. The communities have moved to those social networks and they’re just too big. I know you can find pockets of Twitter—there’s Book Twitter, right?—but that community is so vast and disparate and disorganized. It’s really hard to form any kind of meaningful connection through that.

These internet forums that used to exist were super niche, and you could really have a healthy internet forum with just 100 people, maybe even less. Posting in a forum just felt more deliberate. The forum that Lucas and Margo meet on is called PORK, which I kind of named in reference to an old torrent site called OiNK that I was actually not part of. It was very exclusive, very elitist, you needed an invite. But you know, it speaks to this era where people were trying to keep communities as small as possible. Whereas now with Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, their goal is to have as many users as possible.

TM: Were these online communities formative for you growing up?

You just don’t read a lot of books where you have an unambitious Asian male.

KN: It was just what I was doing as a middle schooler and part of high school—I was on a bunch of forums. I feel like the closest thing we have to this now, or did have, is Tumblr, because a lot of these forums are where I discovered music and movies and a version of culture that didn’t really exist in my life in the suburbs of Massachusetts. You know, I was learning about all these books and all these old movies and things that were just out of my aesthetic palette that I would encounter on a daily basis on the internet.

TM: Margo says something in the book that I think was really poignant. She says that science fiction makes her feel nostalgic for the future. What about this retro vision of the future is different from how we see the future today?

KN: The funny thing about Margo is she’s very cynical and very skeptical, but at the same time she still embodies that tech optimism. She reminded me of a lot of engineers that I’ve met. Even the very critical ones, at the end of the day, believed in working towards something in the future—that things can be better. That’s the only way you can operate in tech and I don’t think it’s a bad way to operate.

There’s a very strong anti-tech sentiment right now that is not unwarranted, but [tech is] here to stay and you want people that are really thoughtful and skeptical, but also believe in it enough to keep working on it and trying to make it better. I think a lot of those engineers are influenced by the same sci-fi as Margo. I thought it’d be fun to have her be influenced by 60s pulp science fiction. Robert Sheckley is an author who I based a lot of her stories on.

TM: I noticed you’ve written quite a few profiles of Asian American actors and writers and just generally about representation or lack thereof. I was curious: what ways have you tried to avoid stereotypes in your own writing?

KN: This came up a bunch when people were reading the book and I was shopping it around. So, Lucas is kind of a loser, right? He’s bumbly, he’s not particularly smart, not very likable even.

Racism takes stronger forms than who we cast in Hollywood, which is important, but it’s not the only thing.

I had an editor that I started with, she’s Japanese American and feels very strongly about representation. She’s like, “Why did you make Lucas such a loser? There’s so few depictions of Asian men—why did you lean into a negative one?” Which is a really good question. And I was like, “If all the authors I love, like Ben Lerner, can write a bumbly, stupid white guy that drinks too much and walks around Brooklyn, I think I can make an Asian one. I feel like that’s representation.”

It was less my intention from the get-go, but you just don’t read a lot of books where you have an unambitious Asian male. There aren’t a lot of books where an Asian man and a black woman are friends. You don’t even really get a lot of books where an Asian guy is a customer service person. I make that distinction between Lucas and other Asian co-workers who are engineers. I wasn’t trying to do anything weird or radical, but part of writing the book was, subconsciously or consciously, filling in some gaps I felt existed.

TM: A couple months ago, you tweeted: “I would love to read one piece about Asian American racism that does not reference Sixteen Candles. Just once!!!!” How do you think conversations about representation have stalled? And where do you think the conversation should be?

KN: I don’t want to jump too hard on anyone that’s having this conversation because one of the challenges among Asian Americans is just explaining that racism towards Asian Americans exists. Some people just don’t believe it. It exists in a very different form than it does for Black people or Latinx people. In some ways, the perceived proximity to whiteness that Asian Americans have gives them a little bit of a pass on a lot of forms of racism or even convinces them that they themselves are not victims of racism.

I do think that the conversation is so caught up in representation on TV and film. Racism takes stronger forms than who we cast in Hollywood, which is important, but it’s not the only thing. We just keep referencing the same movie from the ’80s. 30 years ago is not that long, but, like, people are being deported. People are dying. You know? The stakes are different. I think that’s where the conversation has stalled. It just feels like the way we talk about the end goal is to have an Asian Marvel hero. That’s great, I’d love to see that. That is just one small piece of a much bigger puzzle.

What It’s Like to Promote a Book in the Middle of a Pandemic

Posted on March 13, 2020April 2, 2020 by Jess Zimmerman

“You’re not going to die,” my husband says to me as we unpack our hoarding grocery shop and try to figure out where to fit in our crowded New York apartment.

“You’re probably not going to get sick—even if you contract the virus,” he reassures me while tunneling into the freezer.

“But what about my book?” I call to him.

“Oh,” he says, pulling his head out of the toppling tower of frozen food. “Yeah, that’s a different story.”

It’s not a different story to me. My book is my only story right now.

Writers with new releases are almost as worried about our books as we are about our personal health.

Like everyone else, I’m worried about my family’s health, the health of vulnerable people, and the health of our troubled medical system under the strain of the coronavirus pandemic. But even in the midst of panic shopping and panic cooking and panic checking school updates about closures, I can’t help but obsess over my book release on April 7. People like me—writers with books that are scheduled to come out or have just come out—are almost as worried about our book babies as we are about our personal health. There are actions I can take to avoid getting sick or becoming a disease vector (or so I tell myself). But with festivals like the London, Paris, and Bologna Book Fairs going dark due to coronavirus and author events being called off, it feels like there’s no control over what first-time authors like me can do to keep our books from languishing.

I know that canceling events and gatherings is one of the best things we can do to flatten the curve of the virus, so I feel guilty (which compounds my anxiety!) about being concerned with my little (400-page) book. But this book has been my life for more than two years. Yes, I’m willing to sacrifice its health if that means protecting the vulnerable—but I also worry about my vulnerable career.

Until a month or two before release, I thought my book was timely. For the last two years, I’ve been working on The Trying Game: Get Through Fertility Treatment and Get Pregnant Without Losing Your Mind. It was pegged to hit stands before National Infertility Awareness Week, April 19–25. But unless you had the uncanny luck to name your book something like How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences, like Sue William Silverman did for her March release, most news pegs have evaporated in the face of a global crisis.

As I watched my April events—a journalist’s party, a bookstore signing, a storytelling show, and a panel—get eliminated like women on The Bachelor, as I heard back from all my editorial contacts that they were only interested in pandemic-related stories, I did what any insane first-time author would do: I wrote to everyone involved in planning National Infertility Awareness Week and asked them to postpone it. (They said no.) Then, with a little bit more restraint, I tried to get my book pub date postponed.

Most news pegs have evaporated in the face of a global crisis.

“Right now, your book has already been printed and shipped, so we can’t move the on-sale date,” said my editor at Ballantine, Sara Weiss. She noted that the timing was “less than ideal,” but reassured me that “the good thing about your book is that it’s not time sensitive—it’s going to be a resource to people who want to get pregnant which (hopefully!) isn’t going to stop anytime soon.”

But with the World Health Organization calling this a pandemic, we have no idea what is going to stop. And for how long.

Publishing, like other businesses, schools, and health organizations, is still uncertain about what the virus could mean. “The problem is that we have no idea yet—all I can tell you is that most of us aren’t submitting books to editors this week,” one agent told me on Wednesday.

“I feel really bad for you—this could not come at a worse time,” said Laura Rossi, a book publicist. She has refused to take on any new clients for now, hoping things will get better in the next month. Rossi said she was having trouble placing her current lifestyle clients. “I cannot get any op-ed editors to focus on anything but politics, the stock market and coronavirus. These are people I’ve known for years.” She actually said she was advised to hold back on pitching. “It’s kind of getting to the point it’s almost in poor taste to be pitching lifestyle.”

Authors with new books are now worrying about the collapse of years of work, compounded by the guilt of worrying about their books as world events escalate. “I had a good bunch of crying bouts—I had all this buildup and expectations,” says Erin Khar, whose addiction memoir Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies that Nearly Killed Me was published on February 25. “Then this ‘act of God’ changed everything.”

Just as she was headed out on book tour, “panic hit,” she says. She was en route to San Francisco as California declared a preemptive state of emergency. After stops in Portland and Los Angeles, she had been planning to head on to AWP, the prestigious annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, held this year March 4–7 in San Antonio Texas. (The co-head of AWP resigned over the decision to continue with the conference.) But after most of Khar’s events were canceled and San Antonio declared a public health emergency, she decided to head back to New York. After that, most of her New York events (including Woodstock Bookfest and Volume Reading Series in Hudson) were canceled.

Authors are now worrying about the collapse of years of work, compounded by the guilt of worrying about their books as world events escalate.

”I feel guilty thinking about my own situation when there are people dealing with far worse; it’s all relative,” she said.

Now she’s reaching for a place of acceptance.

“Books have legs that last longer than two weeks: I have to remember I wrote this book to open up the conversation around addiction—that’s my higher purpose for being here.”

Five-time author Laura Zigman was grateful she got to start book tour for her novel Separation Anxiety before the virus really hit.

“I don’t think of myself as particularly lucky, but I slid under the wire,” she says. At her events last week at Harvard Bookstore and Books are Magic, “everyone was joking ‘we shouldn’t be hugging and kissing’ but we were.”

By the end of this week she believes all her events will be canceled.

What does it mean to her? She’s still not sure.

“You know, there’s always that question in publishing whether these events are useful—sometimes people show up, sometimes they don’t,” she told me. “But whether they come or don’t come there’s still a value for the author and the bookstore: you come sign the book, you meet the bookseller, you connect to independent chains and you have contact with people. I’m glad I got a few of mine in.”

It’s not all dire news. In some ways, the community is coming together—not just to keep people safe by canceling events, but to mitigate the financial and publicity hit of prioritizing public health. Some authors, whether they have books coming out now, in six months, or already debuted, feel like they want to help others.

“Indiebound suggested I reach out to authors who have books coming out around July–August, September, to try to coordinate with bookstores to do Skypes, or videos or something that will safely help both the stores, writers, and readers,” New York Times bestselling author Caroline Leavitt posted on social media, calling it the “Nothing Is Cancelled Virtual Book Tour.” She’s organizing it with book influencer Robin Kall of the Reading with Robin podcast, who is also running the “Authorpalooza” weekend of author interviews, appearances and giveaways.

Some writers are overwhelmed by these kindnesses. “We have big dreams for our books—of course we do!—and the world can be unforgiving to us as we struggle to balance tempering expectation and still dreaming big,” author Lea Page (Parenting in the Here and Now) wrote in response to “Nothing Is Cancelled.” “Generosity, it seems, is really the best response, maybe the only response, and it is reassuring to see so much of that here.”

Many in the writing community are offering to help others out right now.

“Hey y’all, I know many queer writers of color have been impacted by COVID-19, having to cancel readings and book tours and more. It’s devastating and it’s nobody’s fault. So I wanted to help any way I could with this Queer Writers of Color Relief Fund,” Luther Hughes, executive editor of The Offing literary magazine and founder of Shade Literary Arts (a literary organization focused on queer writers of color) posted on Twitter.

Many in the writing community are offering to help others out right now.

Zibby Owens, host of the award-winning podcast “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books,” advises: “Buy books. Send books as gifts. Listen to audiobooks as a family,” the writer and mother of four says. “Post on social about book launches. And spread the word about great reads!” Owens has compiled a list of over 100 March and April releases on Bookshop, a site that also benefits independent stores.

Ultimately, this may not be as devastating for writers—or independent bookstores—as it initially felt to me. Authors can boost themselves, each other, and small bookstores on social media, and reach a captive audience who may be searching for distraction during a socially distant time. For her virtual book tour, Leavitt says, “You can make goofy short videos like this and I will get theme everywhere, or you can do a short blog post where you mention your book, the book of others and you shout out to indie bookstores, too,” she says, noting that small businesses like bookstores will need a boost.

“The more the book and literary community gets together, the better this will be,” says Leavitt, whose novel With or Without You comes out in August. “Especially people who are sequestered at home—they want to read.”

8 Books to Feed Your “Love Is Blind” Obsession

Posted on March 13, 2020March 11, 2020 by Jess Zimmerman

I don’t usually go in for reality TV dating shows. After a few too many “shocking revelations” on The Bachelor, I find it hard to believe in true love—that is, “true love” happening in front of a camera crew. But one night I was in need of comfort television, and Netflix’s Love is Blind came into my life. As reality TV premises go, this one’s a doozy: Fifteen men and fifteen women would speed-date, sight unseen, then decide to propose to one another, then meet in person, then plan a wedding in four weeks.

I binged all eight episodes of this delightful train wreck the way I speed-read a book you just can’t put down: Getting to know the characters’ emotional baggage to the point where I could comment on who their supposed soulmates were “in the pods.” Legitimately tearing up when these affianced folks met in the flesh. Texting my sister “Giannina’s middle name is Milady??” and “Jessica is feeding her dog wine?!” And yelling at the couples who made a mockery of marriage by leaving each other hanging at the altar. What a rush.

But like the whirlwind romances that defined it, Love is Blind was over in a flash, and I can’t be the only one feeling bereft. If you’re not ready to let go, do yourself a favor and spend some quality time with these books that will leave you similarly infatuated. From contemporary romances to social thrillers, they’ll bring back your favorite moments.

For Another “First Comes Marriage, Then Comes Love” Experiment

Love at First Like by Hannah Orenstein

Who amongst us, when besieged by couples’ #blessed engagement posts on Instagram, has not drafted our own fakely preening announcement showing off an obscene rock? But unfortunately for Eliza Roth, co-owner of Brooklyn Jewels, her drunken Instagram draft gets posted—and as the online face of the millennial jewelry shop, she can’t just say “lol jk.” Instead, this #girlboss does the best thing for business: She goes ahead with the fake engagement, which spirals into a sponcon wedding in Williamsburg with a six-month deadline to find a willing (or unwitting) groom. But as Eliza tries to fit the perfect guy into this fantasy, she begins to wonder why a marriage is supposed to be the only thing that gives her life purpose.

If You Were Rooting for Lauren and Cameron the Whole Time

Not the Girl You Marry by Andie J. Christopher

Christopher’s wry, sexy contemporary romance proves that gender-swapping the rom-com classic How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days makes for a radical retelling of two savvy singletons using each other for their respective job promotions. While their intentions are less pure than that of Love is Blind’s most successful couple, protagonist Hannah’s struggles as a biracial woman mirror Lauren’s dating obstacles. What’s more, it’s further proof that not all whirlwind romances end in bitter disaster at the reunion show.

If You Miss Being Back in the Pods

My Favorite Half-Night Stand by Christina Lauren

In real life, Millie is one of the guys—the serial-killer expert in a group of professors, a sisterly presence to her four best guy friends. Except for Reid, after a drunken night that, despite their shocking chemistry, they agree to never speak of again. Online, Millie is Catherine: her online-dating alter ego who doesn’t have to be tough for anyone and can, behind a screen, speak honestly and vulnerably. When Reid and Catherine “meet,” Millie is forced into catfishing her best friend—and then giving him advice IRL, where their half-night stand grows longer and messier with every new message in their inboxes.

If You Goggled at Barnett Taking on Amber’s Debt

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Like the chattery post-date debriefs in the girls’ quarters on Love is Blind, Eugenides’ novel fails the Bechdel Test. Also like the series, however, it interrogates “the marriage plot” of 19th century novels through a contemporary lens: while Austen and Brontë made it so that any woman, regardless of class, could find the financial and emotional stability of marriage… should that be the highest achievement she can attain? And what does the economic reality of marriage mean today for millennials buckling under student loan debt and unable to fathom owning houses, let alone an emergency fund?

For Everyone Screaming Over Jessica’s Baby Voice

Social Creature by Tara Isabella Burton

Whether it was Carlton’s erratic outbursts or Jessica feeding wine to her dog, all the participants seemed interested—possibly more than the whole getting-married bit—in establishing themselves as reality TV personalities. They could have taken some tips from Louise, a 29-year-old writer who failed before she even started, yet finds her most brilliant creation in her wealthy, worldly contemporary Lavinia. When Lavinia takes “you only live once” a little too seriously, Louise takes over her dead friend’s persona. This gender-swapped The Talented Mr. Ripley examines how all it takes to impersonate another charismatic white girl is access to her Instagram and her wardrobe… and a good fake voice.

Seriously, No One Hurt Lauren and Cameron, Their Love is Pure

The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory

Of course there’s a fake-relationship book on this list! Drew asking Alexa, the stranger he has just met in a stalled elevator, to be his date for his ex’s wedding is only slightly less ludicrous than Lauren agreeing to marry Cameron after four days. But as Alexa and Drew actually explore the potential for a relationship, the realities of being an interracial couple threaten the fantasy they’ve constructed at wedding venues and in hotel rooms. Not to mention the long-distance, which is almost as awful as shooting your wedding in 2018 and not being able to go public until 2020. Overcoming all this, both couples give us hope.

When You Want More Stranger-Than-Fiction Stories

Modern Love, Revised and Updated: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption edited by Daniel Jones

Without a doubt, Love is Blind operates on a bonkers premise. And yet, is it any more unbelievable than a woman experiencing the five stages of ghosting grief? Or an older woman confronting her own Mark/Jessica age-gap romance? Or Ayelet Waldman’s viral essay about her love for husband Michael Chabon versus that for her children? This multifaceted collection pulls the best installments from the New York Times’ Modern Love column, yet Jones’s introduction could be describing Love is Blind: “Taken alone, each story marks only a moment, a glimpse behind the curtain of one person’s most pressing romantic or familial drama. Cumulatively, however, they form the arc of a more complex and far richer story: how we seek, find, and hold on to love over the course of a lifetime.”

If You’re Still Not Sure Whether Love is Blind

Flawless by Lara Chapman

In the pods and in the confessionals, familiar refrains had the participants anxious about meeting in-person: What if I’m too old? Too short? Too curvy? Too plain? Cyrano de Bergerac would not be out of place in this experiment—nor would high school senior Sarah, who shares Cyrano’s hangups about her “big” nose. In this YA retelling, Sarah watches helplessly as her beautiful best friend Kristen sparks with heartthrob Rock Conway. And when Kristen begs Sarah to lend her wit via Facebook messenger, she can’t resist the chance to get to know the real Rock. Too bad she’s using another girl’s face to do so. Because as the lovers learn, at some point you have to meet and decide whether to keep moving forward as your true selves.

8 Powerful Women Leaders in Fantasy Novels

Posted on March 12, 2020February 26, 2020 by Jess Zimmerman

By now, the idea of a woman in power shouldn’t even be a point of debate. When I set out to write The Wolf of Oren-yaro¸ I wanted to explore what a traditional hero’s journey looked like from the point of view of a woman, with the same challenges that a man in that position might deal with. I thought it would be easy. I’m a woman. I’ve written about women before.

But there was something about having Queen Talyien in an obvious position of power that seemed to make her situation more potent, rifer for misunderstanding. Women are held to certain standards of behavior, made all the clearer when she is in power. Within the narrative, I found myself having to confront how power and gender intersected—how some of the same things Queen Talyien’s forebears were both feared and respected for were used to tear her down. Named the Bitch Queen to mock the wolf emblem of her clan, there seemed little room for sympathy in her world… a fact that reflected in real life, where some readers found her off-putting for the same sort of character traits that is often celebrated in men.

But if not with cutthroat efficiency and a desire to set things in motion, even when she doesn’t have all the answers, how else do we define women in power? Many other ways, in fact. I’ve gathered a list of women in fantasy literature who show power in many different ways.

Calanthe from The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowsi

Known as the “Lioness of Cintra,” Queen Calanthe won her first major battle at the age of fifteen—a full year after she took the throne upon her father’s death. She continues to be known by her prowess in battle. Later, she marries and has a daughter, Pavetta, who gives birth to Ciri; after Pavetta’s untimely death, Calanthe takes over the care of raising her granddaughter. She dies in battle during a Nilfgaard invasion of her city, though her body is never found.

Image result for george rr martin a game of thrones book

Catelyn Stark from A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

Wife of Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfall, mother of Robb, Sansa, Arya, Brandon, and Rickon, Catelyn Stark (nee Tully)’s journey sees her wading through the brutal land of Westeros in an attempt to protect her family and bring them back together. Proud, honorable, and wise, she persists with her mission even seemingly past death, where she comes back as Lady Stoneheart.

Ista dy Chalion from The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold

Ista dy Chalion marries into a family with a curse and becomes queen of Chalion. She has the ability to see the curse, but the people around her chalk it up to insanity. Despite being set aside after she was widowed, relegated from queen of Chalion to “mad Ista,” she persists in her belief in order to protect her children. She eventually implores the help of Cazaril, her daughter’s tutor, to help break the curse, and he believes her. In the sequel, Ista’s gifts propels her into a new journey that involves ridding the land of demons.

Zezili from The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley

A Captain General who reflects many of the traits seen in complex male characters, Zezili has a sense of love verging on cruelty and sadism, and shows a casual indifference to violence, rape, and murder. The character reflects a shatteringly unapologetic portrayal of a woman in a culture where the brutality she displays towards men—and her husband in particular—is the norm in a matriarchal society built in response to oppression. She invites the audience to rethink how they sympathize with male heroes who reflect many of the same traits but are somehow not vilified for them.

Sigourney Rose from Queen of the Conquered by Kacen Callender

Born in an island where her mother’s people has been colonized, Sigourney Rose lost her family to a brutal murder at a young age and has been fixated on nothing but vengeance since. She shows ruthless cunning as she climbs her way up the ranks in court, hoping to be chosen Queen by the end of it. But the uncompromising decisions she sees as a necessity in a sea of white faces are viewed as a privilege by those beneath her, her own people in whose enslavement she is also complicit.

The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Draupadi from Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

This account of the Hindu epic the Mahabharata is told from the perspective of Draupadi as a woman instead of as a mythical princess. Draupadi resents the restrictions imposed on her by her position, especially those brought on by womanhood. In this novel, Draupadi is injected with agency, weaving through a complex web of politics that in all other accounts have only been interested in the doings of men.

Image result for jy yang the black tides of heaven

Sanao Hekate from The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang

Lady Sanao Hekate is the Protector, who rules a land filled with magic. Drought and civil disorder lead Sanao to promise one of her children as a blood price to the Grand Monastery in exchange for their help. She has twins, a boy and a girl, and both are offered up as payment, though Sanao is not happy with the arrangement. The girl is able to see the future with visions. The boy is not as fortunate, but Sanao later uses her son in her political scheming. A brutal leader who doesn’t give a second thought to mass murder, Lady Sanao defies gender roles and amasses immense power along the way.

Anyanwu from Wild Seed by Octavia Butler

The immortal and shapeshifting Anywanwu isn’t a leader by the traditional sense, but she is a matriarch of generations of children and grandchildren. She is originally drawn to another immortal, Doro, for his promise of children who will never die. Later, she goes to great lengths to protect her descendants and kin, including weathering Doro’s abuse. The strength and resilience Anyanwu shows is remarkable and highlights how power can be found in silence and the willingness to endure, until finally she finds an opportunity to stand her ground and break away.

The Urethra-Crushing Meaninglessness of Death

Posted on March 12, 2020January 16, 2024 by Jess Zimmerman

At the end of last summer, I inherited a piece of my dead friend’s library. Books—words, poetry, ideas—had formed the nucleus of our friendship. They sustained us as Natalie gradually succumbed to the cancer that began to take over her body just a few weeks after we first met. And they were still there at her memorial service, at a funeral home in Brooklyn. Her husband and family brought stacks of them so that each of us could have a piece of Natalie, each one containing a small bookplate with her name, the day she was born, the day she died, and a quote from Susan Orlean:

Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve catalogued and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.

A few weeks later, I picked up even more of Natalie’s books from her husband, who was packing up their apartment and moving out of New York. In her absence, the words, poetry, and ideas that shaped her were still everywhere. In particular, I noted a print in their kitchen that Natalie had gotten when she learned that her UTI was in fact bladder cancer. The quote was from BoJack Horseman: “Life is just one long, hard kick in the urethra.”

Natalie and I had initially bonded in our divinity school cohort. We were both there, in part, to study death: how do we make sense of it, and how do we continue living in the wake of loss? Up until that point, our lives had both been dotted by moments that placed us in the same room as those questions, and we’d both reached the point in our lives and careers where we wanted to weave some meaning out of the myriad of possible answers.

Natalie’s books begged for me to find meaning—if not a grand, unifying meaning, then at least a sliver of it.

In the penultimate episode of BoJack Horseman, Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s characters refute the idea of meaning. In a scene set in BoJack’s subconscious as he faces death, the Byronic bronco has a conversation with his dead father, Butterscotch (in the body of racehorse legend Secretariat). The idea of inner peace comes up, and Butterscotch-slash-Secretariat scoffs: “Peace? That’s someone trying to convince himself of something.”

“Of what?” asks BoJack.

“That life has meaning, or purpose. That if you check the right boxes and do the dance, then you get a little parting gift at the end—a framed certificate that says, ‘Congratulations, you’ve got peace.’… But guess what? All the time those people spent, trying to do good or help people or be something? I did none of that shit, and yet here I am, same as them.”

Natalie preemptively echoed this a few weeks before she went into the hospital and, eventually, into hospice. “There is no philosophizing,” she wrote. “There will be no meaning to make of my death, no reason for me dying before I had the chance to grow old with the people I love.”

But Natalie’s books begged for me to find meaning—if not a grand, unifying meaning, then at least a sliver of it. Many of the books I inherited from her were dotted with white Post-it flags, each one marking a sentence or passage she found particularly resonant. In this way, reading Natalie’s books became an oblique way of reading Natalie herself. One example, from Jessa Crispin’s The Dead Ladies Project:

The mob sorts itself out into individual people with their own hopes and needs and routines, each contained by their own reality. And moving between these units is not a linear act but an act of stepping from one parallel universe into another. And each moment has to be considered and understood, and the person who follows behind you, that person travels through their own moments.

Stepping from one parallel universe into another, this act of reading Natalie—an act of divining—began to feel like another book that we referenced throughout our friendship, the novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin.

After Pushkin’s eponymous character leaves the countryside and returns to St. Petersburg, his lovesick heroine Tatyana goes to his abandoned dacha. There, she combs through his library, analyzing every title, every thumbnail imprint in the pages, every scrap of marginalia. Through this, she begins to understand more fully the dissolute, enigmatic man whom she once followed around like a cocker spaniel.

Eugene Onegin isn’t unlike BoJack Horseman: Solipsistic and self-destructive, both tread the well-worn path of the Byronic hero (Onegin even has a portrait of Lord Byron in his study). Through their respective character arcs, they remain mostly static. BoJack even romanticizes the predictability of inertia (epitomized by the bland-but-harmonious pace in the world of his ‘90s sitcom), as opposed to the urethra-crushing pain of the unknown. In the end, both are left alone to figure out how to move on when all of the other people (and animals) in their lives have changed and drifted away.

BoJack has his own parallel to Tatyana in Diane Nguyen, who initially enters his orbit as the ghostwriter for his memoir. Because writing a memoir requires a degree of reflection BoJack is incapable of accessing, that project turns into an uncompromising biography, presenting BoJack as what Pushkin might have termed “a child of heaven, of hell perchance. / Devil and god of arrogance.”

It’s in tandem with, rather than in spite of, the comedy of BoJack (which is, in and of itself, a Russian doll of references, cross-references, double and triple entendres) that the biggest gut-punches are delivered. I think that may have been one of the reasons that Natalie and I enjoyed it so much: It brought us up close with the shit of human existence, but it couched that shit in a way that offered, if not meaning, at least camaraderie. (As BoJack’s man-bunned Judah Mannowdog says of a Stephen King musical opening on the same night as a Stephen Sondheim musical, “Misery loves Company.”)

As much as BoJack seemed to speak to our lived experiences, it also kept them in perspective. Animation means you can explore multiple worst-case scenarios without any real sense of risk to your characters. They can drive their cars into swimming pools and emerge without a scratch. The animators and writers can, as the official BoJack coffee table book suggests, put the art before the horse.

When the fifth season of BoJack Horseman was released in September of 2018, Natalie was just finishing up a round of chemotherapy. She had a Sinead O’Connor fuzz of hair, but her eyebrows and eyelashes were starting to plan their comeback. She was still iffy on alcohol, but had enough of an appetite for apple fritters and bourbon donuts. That winter, she would be declared tumor-free. Art had created a safe space for catastrophe to spin out as normal life continued in a relatively calmer cadence. The fear of burying someone my age seemed to subside.

Less than a year later, Natalie was gone. A month after her positive scans, she was back in the hospital for what she initially thought was a flu-like virus. A brain scan revealed a lesion that was incurable.

Grief isn’t logical. When Natalie died, after nearly eight months of seizures, treatments, and hospitalizations, I was, in part, relieved. The last time I saw her, I only caught glimpses of her as she periodically latched onto lucidity. I was trying to find her in the margins of morphine drips and breathing tubes.

Grief isn’t linear, either. It’s an act of stepping from one parallel universe into another. I initially skipped denial, anger, bargaining, and depression like a superfluous opening credits sequence, immediately going for acceptance. But at some point, I had my inevitable crossover episode with anger.

The bridge between the two, incongruously, became the final season trailer for BoJack Horseman, which came out a few weeks after the memorial service, after I got my new books. My anger all funneled into the fact that Natalie would never see the series conclude. We’d never be able to analyze it together, finding every hidden bit of meaning. Adding insult to injury was Bob-Waksberg’s revelation that he’d hoped for two final seasons versus the one that he’d been given by Netflix, meaning that the pre-orchestrated end for Hollywoo would be accelerated, truncated.

Living in the wake of loss means one can’t help but try to seek out some meaning. Natalie’s insistence that there was no meaning to find in her death didn’t mean that she hadn’t accepted her prognosis. But rather than spend the remaining time she had trying to tack a meaning onto her death, she focused on adding more meaning to the rest of her life. For those of us left behind, though—like Tatyana in the wake of Onegin, like Diane in the wake of BoJack, and, ultimately, like BoJack in the wake of everyone else—the idea of finding meaning gives us something to cling to amid the nonlinear mess of grief. Even if it’s not the end goal of grieving and processing loss, it’s something we can work with to escape inertia.

For those of us left behind, the idea of finding meaning gives us something to cling to.

While closure isn’t a guarantee, the project of meaning-making can also help us move towards a kind of (sorry, BoJack) peace—or at least habituation. Every loss we can begin to process gives us more to work with for the next inevitable loss. It’s a card catalog for our private library of grief.

BoJack faces his own backlog of overdue processing head-on in the penultimate episode of the series. It’s a setup straight out of another acerbic ode to show business, Bob Fosse’s 1979 movie All That Jazz: BoJack’s subconscious goes into overdrive as his brain shuts down following a bender that may prove fatal.

The characters whose death permeate the series—BoJack’s uncle Crackerjack, his Secretariat costar Corduroy Jackson Jackson, his Horsin’ Around showrunner and former best friend Herb Kazzaz, his father-Secretariat hybrid, his mother, and, of course, Sarah Lynn—come together for a dinner party. This culminates in a variety show in which, one by one, each character gives their final performance, before entering a door that leads to an unknowable void. (“Blest he who leaves a little early/Life’s banquet without eating up,” Pushkin writes at the end of Onegin.)

It’s during this sequence that BoJack’s father-slash-Secretariat rejects the idea that life has meaning. It’s as cynical a moment as any like it in Russian literature (or in a Bob Fosse musical, for that matter). But BoJack doesn’t suggest that there’s meaning in death, either. Moments after this conversation, BoJack is saying goodbye to Herb.

“Is it terrifying?” he asks as Herb stands on the threshold.

“No, I don’t think so,” Herb responds. “It’s the way it is, you know? Everything must come to an end. The drip finally stops.”

When BoJack says he’ll see Herb on the other side, Herb’s thoughtfulness turns to disappointment. “Oh no, BoJack,” he murmurs. “There is no other side. This is it.”

It’s not necessarily a relief to see, in the next and final episode, that BoJack lives. He’s arrested for breaking and entering into his former home and sentenced to 14 months in a maximum-security prison. His friends move away and move on, leaving him to reconnect with them at Princess Carolyn’s wedding one year into his term, on a prison furlough. Each conversation, whether it is indeed their last or not, feels like a goodbye—a way of making peace. But, like Onegin, they’re not necessarily satisfying.

Despite BoJack’s urethra theorem (which, parenthetically, is the name of my new riot grrrl band), Natalie wrote last May, “We don’t really have cultural stories to tell about the bladder.… This, to me, is generally a relief.” For her, this meant that there were no metaphors to ascribe to the part of her body where the cancer originated. There is no bladder equivalent to being lily-livered or anal-retentive.

Meaninglessness, while a relief, is also a vacuum.

But meaninglessness, while a relief, is also a vacuum. Natalie had no family history of bladder cancer, wasn’t exposed to any of the known risk factors, and took care of her body, with caffeine being her biggest vice. As a result, she wrote, it was hard “not to feel betrayed and alienated by this inarticulate organism that carries me around each day while allowing cancer cells to proliferate.” Her disease wasn’t metaphorically overburdened, but that lack of metaphor also meant there was no easy or comforting way to fit it into the rest of her life’s narrative.

In the finale of BoJack Horseman, Todd posits that, if art has a point, it’s less about what people put into it and more of what people get out of it. It’s an absolution to those of us who—like BoJack, like Tatyana—keep searching for meaning even in the meaningless. After I finished the series finale, I revisited Natalie’s post about how the bladder has no cultural weight. I forgot that, amid feeling betrayed by her body, and trying to separate her imagination, her metaphors and emotions, from the realities of her body and treatment plans, that she made an about face. No, her body wasn’t betraying her. It was, against all odds, trying to sustain her as she navigated the changes caused by tumors and treatments.

“There is, in fact, no place of retreat from my body, no safe space where I can memorize drug names and compile dispassionate to-do-lists,” she concluded. “My body and mind are not just connected, we are—and will only ever be—inescapably and incredibly whole.”

There’s no right or wrong answer in the end. Fully aware of her own mortality, not just as an abstract concept but as an imminent eventuality, Natalie wasn’t responsible for telling us what her death meant in the grand scheme of things. She was shaping and re-shaping her own sense of meaning in real time, along with the rest of us—but unlike the rest of us, she had a deadline.

I thought of Natalie the hardest during the final lines of the last episode. Echoing a bumper-sticker platitude that he could have just as easily said at the beginning of season one, BoJack sighs, “Life’s a bitch and then you die.”

Diane concedes that, sometimes, this is true. But she doesn’t let him stop there. “Sometimes,” she adds, “life’s a bitch, and then you keep living.”

We keep living among the marginalia. We continue to collect the notes and the Post-it flags, but not to find meaning, or to come up with a grand unifying theory. Instead, we move between the marginalia, like parallel universes, until the meanings present themselves, changing over time as we continue from one universe to the next. The good-bad news is that there’s no closure, just more questions. But it’s those questions that keep us going.

Everyone On the Moon Is Essential Personnel

Posted on March 11, 2020May 18, 2023 by Erin Bartnett

“Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel” (Excerpt)
by Julian Jarboe

The full moon is rising over an endless expanse of barbed wire and electric fences. They sit atop the city’s dark horizon of high walls, district and ward borders, checkpoints, gated neighborhoods, and private estates. Even the gardens of Stella Maris are jagged: armored groves and greenhouses of fruiting Scrub Nut and Atlantic Palm encased in wrought iron, the decorative Treacher Fern and Wandering Wasp collared in shrapnel. Sebastian would like to slide between the bars, over the bricks, and past the security cameras as easy as a shadow, let his dusk-tan skin turn gray-blue in silhouette, his shade-tree stature camouflage him among the delicate vines of Prophet’s Hand and fickle-twisted wands of Rare Pear on the branch, the temperamental nightshades, the sugar tubers. Root himself to the Earth’s surface.

His stomach whines like an obstructed garbage disposal and Yonatan says, “girl, same.” Yonatan promises to buy them both a late dinner when they get to Omens and Pour Tends. The moon looms above them all, flashes through their imaginations in panoramic view of the commercial compound and industrial complex on its surface. Everybody knows all the shitty jobs are headed to space. Sebastian knows he’s headed there eventually, inevitably, running out of earthbound dead ends, spinning in stasis and self-sabotage, though hardly losing the strength to deny and delay again; procrastination as the only working perpetual-motion machine.

“Whatever happened to applying to—what’s it called—seminary?” Yonatan asks. “I can’t believe that’s really the word for it. Still sounds like some weird sort of… cum thing.”

“Uhhhh, so,” Sebastian demurs. “I actually got pretty far in the process! They didn’t really tell me why it stopped, but it stopped after the psychological exam.”

“Oh.” Yonatan sounds a little insulted to not have heard this news sooner. “Shit. Did you literally fail an ink blot test? Is that even possible?”

“Yes? I mean, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure.”

Sebastian tries to keep a diary, but he has never been the type to recount what is happening, how he feels about it, or one moment’s connection with any previous or upcoming moments. Instead, he uses a Daily Examen app on his phone to keep lists of words. Each evening the app prompts him to review the day in the presence of God through five steps and input a short response for each:

Ask God for light.
Give thanks.
Review the day honestly, without delusions.
Face your shortcomings.
Look toward tomorrow and the days to come.

The program also displays his stats and leaderboard compared to other users, how many decades of the Holy Rosary everyone is praying and how many days since his last Confession and so on, but he skips these. Instead he records words he sees, reads, hears, writes, says, sings, or repeats. What difference between them is there, anyway? Slogans, idioms, quotes, allusions, prayers, marketing campaigns: anchors to the delicate vessel of his memory, some heaviness, a weight not unlike certainty, sequence, and significance.

Omens and Pour Tends is a long room in the basement of an old six-story row house, and Sebastian and his friends prefer to meet at the loudest, darkest corner of it. The booth seating along the tin-tiled walls is comprised of antique oak pews surrounding scavenged work benches, discarded kitchen counter tops, and one foosball table that the owner insists is from a genuine Two-Thousand-And-Ought-Naught era tech startup, but Yonatan and the other servers suspect it’s just from the owner’s old fraternity house where some of his roommates happened to work in tech startups.

Kero is already there when they arrive, her piles of impractical novelty backpacks and totes stuffed onto one side of their usual booth while she sets up her DJ rig on the platform of shipping crates and road cases that designates the “stage.”

“Love the new hardware,” Yonatan remarks on Kero’s robotic left arm, where tonight she’s switched out her usual claw for a flayed and circuit-bent Furby.

“Thanks dude,” she says, and uses the terrible little beak on the toy to pincer audio cables and records.

Yonatan brings them all dandelion toddies and places down a caddy on the center of their table crowded with bottles of hot sauce, packets of tapioca pearls, salt, utensils, and miniature divination games: a pocket-sized magic eight ball, a fold-out Ouija board, a scattering of fortune cookies, dice and cards and so forth that all came standard with a table at Omens.

Usually the friends read their paper cookie fortunes aloud to each other, always adding “but at what cost?” to the end of the fortune. If you performed the whole thing with high-volume melodrama it was called “fortune yelling” and whoever else laughed first had to give you their fries.

Sebastian cracks a cookie open and announces its contents to Yonatan, waiting for a grin of recognition, but Yonatan’s attention has already shifted to the televisions above the bar.

Sebastian itches on the inside of his stomach as he watches his friend entranced by some pointless commercial. Yonatan’s eyes are deep hazel flecked like bloodstones, armored by dark lids, broad brown cheeks, and eyebrows thick enough that Sebastian could take shelter from a rainstorm beneath them, and Yonatan might say, “my goodness, you’re soaked through, let’s get you out of these clothes before you catch your death a cold,” because for some reason, in this fantasy, Yonatan talks like a cross between a simple country nurse gone to tend the wounded soldiers on the field and a Byronic anti-hero finally deciding to sow tenderness upon his vast estate.

Kero dims the overhead lamps and sets off a chase of small rainbow pin-lights around the room, and there’s a moment, right as everything is ready to go but nothing is happening, where time pauses entirely.

Sebastian has—or had, or will have—a difficult time with time. Sometimes it moves in a different direction or not at all, he was sure of that much, or it was naked anticipation. He could lay down and live there.

Witching hour comes and the room packs with late-night regulars, mostly older goths and punks, some of the Jesuit brothers from the nearby parish, the community college theater club, and a handful of that particular kind of tourist who pride themselves on seeking “authenticity” in their travels. Omens and Pour Tends is not on any visitor’s guide, which is precisely its appeal for this type, usually single white dudes in their twenties and thirties, but also hippy couples, awkward graduate students of all stripes conspicuously looking for a narrative in their observations. Sometimes, even poets come, already three sheets to the wind and clearly hoping for something violent to occur so they can possess and decorate it, but there’s rarely fights. There’s never sports on the televisions. The staff are fearless, the regulars are friendly, and the rowdiest it ever gets is when the theater club kids bring new members to initiate and think everyone else is their captive audience. But nobody minds, really. One of the Jesuits always claps politely for the singers.

The tourists stick out by how they carry their assumptions. Sebastian can always tell when someone comes to bask in the atmosphere of the dive. Their faces curl and glint with the masochism of standing too close to the blown-out speaker, finishing the odorous well draught, earning themselves a little bit of damage to escape their own minds, but with a wink, like they were regular people trapped in the onslaughts of their daily lives and not jerks on vacation.

It gets later and then too late. Sebastian misses the last bus home until morning. His friends are busy during these peak hours, of course, so Sebastian has a lot of time to eat fried food and gently disassociate, or to watch who in the crowd watches him, and to contemplate the way his presence becomes the subject of other’s contemplation.

Some part of Sebastian wants to tell these people, “I have nothing against you, but other sorts of people, who are not here, would steal your wallet and kick your butt all the way to Pizza Hut if they were. I just think you should know that. Maybe you can put it in your autobiographical road novel? But I don’t know anything, really. I’m only a local character. I’m the atmosphere. I’m the vibe. By my very definition, I’m somewhat naive. Not creative in any way. Not like you.”

A scruffy, kind of waxy-looking guy with his collared shirt tucked in and a yellow lanyard hanging from his back pocket comes in and half-waves at Yonatan, orders an expensive sake. The man is unfamiliar, but carries himself with less transience than tourists, so must be new to the city for an office job that keeps him long hours. Something thin, hard, and rectangular sits at the end of the lanyard, an ID card for the job most likely, but Sebastian doesn’t need to see what it says to know the company. The shade of yellow is trademarked. The color belongs to the same people, or entity, or whatever they are, who are running the recruitment ads for the moon, looking to staff it with the huddled masses yearning to break into the bourgeoise.

Their logo is everywhere. Their name is a household one. But Sebastian resists speaking or writing it as much as he can. Power that omnipresent should not be permitted something as volatile as a name, not even a codename meant in parody. Taking God’s name in vain was one thing. But there is no safety in naming mortal power, least of all to satirize it, when all the good that does is inspire the power to take you at your word, enact your dystopian exaggeration as their next move, turn your hell into your next reality.

Here is what to do instead:

Write down the longest verb you can spell, in any language, without a dictionary: __________.
Write down the last, family, or formal name of the worst boss you’ve ever had. Or if you, like Sebastian, have never been employed, choose any other authority figure who sticks in your memory like thorns through the palms of your hands; one who lacerated your motivation, you idealism, or your benefit of the doubt: __________.
Now take (a.) a syllable of choice from each word and write them together as a single bicapitalized word, or, (b.) if you’re feeling that big pharma energy, with a hyphen, or, (c.) for a dash of software-as-a-service, drop consonants and swap vowels for emoji. Whatever it is your decide, write it down but keep it secret: __________.

And if you cannot keep a secret, you may still write it down, but then you must—you simply must—erase it immediately.

Give it a try in this following paragraph: __________ (fill in the blank) are establishing their second North American headquarters in Stella Maris following a years-long bidding war between cities across the continent, the governing bodies of each locale genuflecting before the promise of “jobs,” courting with tax incentives and exemptions, ceding public lands, extending eminent domain to cede more than a few private ones as well.

Most people in Stella Maris are as surprised as anyone else to be the chosen site. Some are very angry. Some are very excited. And enough are trying to find hope and positivity in their lives to tune out the anger and ride the excitement instead.

It doesn’t seem to matter what else __________ produces if it produces jobs; it started as an online-only clearinghouse for novelty infomercial products and light consumer gadgets, then it had outposts nationally, then globally, now extra-terrestrially, expanding to include a private mail service, a coffee shop franchise, a bank chain, weapons manufacturing, raw materials speculation, and a popular subscription box of shelf-stable food and nutrition supplements. Their business on the moon is vaguely described as “research.”

But it also doesn’t seem to matter to most people in Stella Maris what manner or quality of jobs this development entails, if there are a high enough quantity of them. Technically, thousands of jobs appeared virtually overnight for the fancy, lucrative positions, but if Lanyard Guy is any indication, they were just as quickly filled by internal transfers. What’s left are the contracts, the subcontracts, temping and testing and data entry and other garbage gigs, also some literal garbage gigs.

Sebastian thinks, hello, yes, his skills and qualifications are that he knows how to cross a floor of any material without making a sound. That he is quite adept at evading blows, for example to the face, for example he can cross his arms over his face in such a way that bruises can be hidden by long sleeves. That he is proficient at being anywhere and feeling like a visitor to a distant relative and that he should not touch anything. That he is an expert at crying for no reason, or used to be, though he hasn’t cried at all in a long, long, long, long time but that he is confident he could pick it back up again at any time, like riding a bicycle, as they say, though he wouldn’t know, as he never learned to ride a bicycle. Or drive a car. Or swim. Since he’s not supposed to go in the ocean past his chin, he’s probably not allowed in space, either, at least not into the sky past the top floor of a building, really, and even then, only if he leaves enough room for the Holy Spirit between his restless, impulsive body and any open windows.

The moon has always been there as a motif in art or a glow sticker on his bedroom ceiling, but now it grows, becomes the distant shore of his impending future, and he understands that the walls of Stella Maris are his mother. The border is her body. “Here” and “her” lose all meaningful distinction. Is he trapped? Could leaving a place ever really be an escape from it? Is what happened before still happening and will it happen again?

Time forms a circle, and then another circle along a different axis, and then another, until time is a mesh sphere pulsing through darkness to synthesizer arpeggios, a crude computer model on an old tape about the future, but the future in the video is from the past, and so everything collapses, flattens, and tomorrow and the days to come are already here, and you are certain of three fates at once:

You never leave home and never defy your mother.
You leave the entire planet in defiance of your mother.
Your mother is waiting for you on the moon when you arrive. She is in her pajamas and raises one of her slippers, hurls it at your head, and the slipper thwacks you in the face as she shouts about how dangerous this is, that you will definitely, absolutely die if she doesn’t kill you first, how since she made you that she can unmake you, how she saw you before you saw yourself, and meanwhile the slipper ricochets off your forehead and twirls off beyond the ends of the solar system, until aliens find it and study it to better understand human kind. And you cry out, please, yes, hello, your skills and qualifications for this exciting and rewarding opportunity are that you still have a pulse, and you excel at forgetting entire years of your life, and laying in bed any time of day, and laying awake any time of night.

Are you there Sebastian?

It’s me.

Sorry I’ve been kind of distant lately. The reason for that is that I’ve been kind of distant lately.

Follow my instructions. Message one of the contact codes from the recruitment materials. A billboard, a targeted ad, a commercial, it doesn’t matter. They all take you to the same inbox. Receive the automated response with the link that says “get started.”

Get started. Install their proprietary software. It’s a personality assessment. It really is that long. Maybe the duration screens out anyone who isn’t serious about serving a global community for flexible pay. Maybe it’s just a way for them to better understand your judgment and ability to sort important information from unimportant information.

Press “acknowledge.” The light on your phone’s camera and microphone pulse blue. They are recording you taking the test, to ensure that you don’t cheat by looking up answers about your own judgment and ability to sort important information from unimportant information. Maybe they analyze the feed in real time. Maybe they have those graphics analysis A.I.s that can tell them about your vital statistics, or if your face matches the face on any watch-list, or what your expression implies about your intentions.

NOTE: You may now begin.

NOTE: Check all that apply.

Q: What is your age?

Like, twelve.
Youth.
Old enough to know better.
Vanishing into obscurity.

Q: Are you a robot?

No, I am not a robot.
I’m unsure.
Cyborg (Registered).
Cyborg (Unregistered).
Android, Virtual Assistant, or Electronic Companion.

Q: What is your race?

Passively invested in structural inequality through ethno-nationalism.
Actively invested in structural inequality through ethno-nationalism.
Passively resistant to structural inequality through ethno-nationalism.
Actively resistant to structural inequality through ethno-nationalism.
Guilty, confused, opportunistic, and/or defensive about this question.
Actually, it’s about fairness in video games journalism.

Q. Optional but strongly encouraged: How do you identify?

Goth.
Prep.
Jock.
Nerd.
Top.
Bottom.
Verse.
Sefile.
Cranky.
Furry.
Hexagon.
Everything but rap and country.
Womxn, womyn, fem/me (including fatal-spectrum), bimb@, or sugar baby.
Call me Cis Male. Some years ago—a lady never tells—having no cash, no class, and neither gas, ass, nor grass to pay my way around the old count-ray, I went to sea for a fee and to see if the sea would agree with me. Anchors a-weigh for pay; it is a way I have of driving off panic attacks and a very long list of other ailments and self-diagnoses. Anyway, I got gone; I prayed, got paid; I did not get laid. With a philosophical flourish, I sashayed to the ship. If they but knew it, almost all men, women, enbees, robots, and probably dogs, in their degree, some time or other, are horny for the ocean, which is our collective wife. This is also the extent of my bisexuality.

Q. Suppose that an explorer boards a galleon headed west across the Atlantic, at a maximum speed of nine knots but an average speed of five knots. Suppose he possesses an outdated map which indicates the trajectory of a floating island off the coast of the New World, somewhere between the Chesapeake Bay and the Saint Lawrence River.

The island is said to have black sand and lost treasures from every sea-faring civilization. The island is said to be strewn, as well, with skeletons. Among the pebbles and the gold are the blanching bones of men and women who followed the call of sirens or mermaids or their own death wish, or so it is said. It may also be said that they are the bones of those who have been kidnapped, enslaved, thrown or leapt overboard, those who drowned in failed expeditions, forgotten would-be conquerors, pilgrims and pioneers, whalers, sailors, pirates.

And growing in the black soil, thriving on the constant fertilization by human remains, is every manner of vegetation: taro and pineapple and pumpkin and corn and saffron and cocoa and tea, lush and wild as mud boils in a hot spring.

Suppose the explorer’s ships are wrecked along seven treacherous rocks in a gulf, a body of water he dubs The Sorrows, where he establishes a village which grows into a fortress which assimilates, eventually, into the American empire. Suppose, in letters, the explorer claims to have discovered the island he sought after all. Arguably, his star-shaped fortress comes to hold many of the world’s wonders within, especially beautiful gardens and orchards, and in the ground beneath it and in the sand all around it, just the same, lay the bones of the less fortunate. Assuming the above statements are true, which of the conclusions follow logically for why the explorer claims to believe in his own folly?

It will increase profits.
It will encourage everyone to work harder.
It will support the spread of common values.

Q. When you consider your earliest memories, whose love ensures survival and whose attention is a force to be dodged?

Childhood is a void to be approached and circled but never ventured into.
Recovered memories come back emptier and more fragmented than when you started.
None of the above. Childhood is a myth invented by the Victorians.

Q. When you consider that the responses and habits of trauma can be passed down for generations without conscious knowledge of their origins, whose fear is it when your throat shuts and your joints lock?

Cold sweat (a plague permitted to ravage, for you are undesirable).
Night terrors (a destructive dynamic that goes excused and normalized).
Black out (taken by force, taken by night, suppressed by law, by drink, by your own hand).
White out (a language and a custom eradicated softly by means of conversion, re-education, love and marriage and sex and family where blending means blending away your distinguishing features).

Q. Who by fire and who by flood?

Learning to burn.
Learning to drown.

Q. Whose words do you hear long after they are spoken? Whose opinion of yourself do you hold to be true? Whose fault is it this time? Who is going to pick up the tab? Who is going to fix this? Whose walls protect them and whose walls confine? Who has the luxury to worry about the future? Whose homeland and whose frontier? Whose natural resource and whose unmarked grave? Whose memory of a motherland and whose mother? Whose extermination, whose relocation, and whose assimilation is written on your body but redacted from the records? Who wanders and who is lost? Who is willing to accept pain and who is unwilling to acknowledge their power because of their pain?

Ask God for delusions.
Give up.
Review what is at stake.
Face your light.
Look toward tomorrow and its shortcomings.

Q. If you take tomorrow as a true statement, which of the conclusions follow logically?

There is no such thing as the end of the world, but this also implies that there is no such thing as saving the world, either.
There are no open spaces in North America, only opened spaces.
All times are troubled times, troubled differently.
Delusion is the true nature of evil.
Hope is a delusion. It will encourage everyone to work harder.
Despair is a delusion. It will increase profits.
Not by faith alone are we saved but through Good Works on Earth.
Not by faith alone are we saved by through Good Works in outer space.
Aliens might be more likely to find you if you are in space already and some of them could be good looking.
Slap yourself across the face where your mom can’t reach to do it anymore and cut this out, drama queen.
Focus!
God’s light might also be found staying in bed and having a robust panic attack.
Jesus H. Christ himself is not administering this assessment.
When the moon is out, clap for it. Tell everyone to applaud. Shout, “ladies and maties, tonight’s entertainment!” Tell everyone that’s where you’re going. It will support the spread of common values.

Q. Look at the shape of your city’s outermost walls. Trace the fortified star. Star like a distant sun, like a compass rose, like the Queen of Heaven, like the fruit of salvation missing from her outstretched hand, the apple sliced lengthwise revealing five seeds arranged in five points. Look at her tin crown of seven stars with five points each, atop her painted head, above her painted feet, pressed onto the silver face of a crescent moon.

Look at the cold-cold moon over the burning Earth. Look at the rockets that go to the cold-cold moon from the burning Earth. Visualize yourself strapped into a window seat. Accept the chances of critical malfunction and fatal catastrophe in any form of travel but most of all the kind beyond the atmosphere. Decide that you will definitely, absolutely die and make a sign of the cross that turns into a shrug halfway through.

Look for trouble and find it. Look at the word “revolution” in every advertisement for soft drinks and sneakers, at “compassion” contained in a forty-five-minute weeknight yoga class with the pretense of spiritual practice. Look at these promises accumulate onto your body and then be ritually shed from it. Look at the world outside your body, and remain the same, regardless.

Look at your mother’s limp and your city’s plans for redevelopment. Look at the places along her kneecaps and her spine where the revolution failed. Look at the places along the side of the road where compassion has died on a night with record freezing temperatures.

Look at yourself in the surveillance video and compare it to the last picture you took of yourself: defiant, “reclaiming” your beauty and your presence against the advertisements for soft drinks and sneakers that would have you feel ugly, against the weeknight yoga class that would have you remain absent. Look at the filter that produces an algorithmic light leak and the suggestion of grease on the lens. Look at how it has lightened your skin and widened your eyes and narrowed your nose. Look at how it memorizes and recognizes you and how well it looks out for you by knowing where you have been and where you are going. The bars close and your friends go home but you stay downtown. God has granted you free will, but the police tell you otherwise. They think you loiter too long outside a bodega, so you buy a juice barrel with your bus money and walk home. It’s sunrise when you return. Your feet are blistered over and bleeding with free will. Your mother may not ask where you’ve been all night, but she already knows. There are eyes on the back of her head.

Look how fondly you take to your childhood bed even though your childhood was anxious and unhappy. Look at yourself in the mirror constantly or not for weeks on end. It is possible to be conscious of the myriad overlapping systems of oppression that are against you and still be wrong. It is possible for one’s anger to be justified and one still to be a jerk. It is possible to learn the less humane lessons from so-called practicality, to fall in love with your own sadness even as you long for relief. Look how nostalgia appears to give meaning to this tragedy, give purpose even to despondency. Look for salvation in personal liberation and a revolution of the spirit. The cyberpunks lost, and all that remains is nostalgia, which is an acid that eats meaning.

Your deity rolls back her eyes in every icon and statuary. Look at her from the periphery of your faith so that she can see you in return. Do you love her, or, are you so desperate for recognition that you will seek it even when it destroys you? Stand behind your mother when you decide to leave here—her—and look into the eyes on the back of her head. Tell her where you’re going and break her heart.

Look to the stars. Look at how the winners get history and the losers get culture. Close your eyes and ask God for light and look for it.

Press “save.” Press “submit.” Press “submit” again to confirm. Submit as in send, submit as in surrender. Confirm as in verify, confirm as in initiate.

Hello?

Are you there?

Are you still there?

Are you still with me?

Can you hear me now?

Come back, Sebastian. You are shaking. That is not a productive movement. It’s time to hold still again, to quiet our body, and give it over wholly to the future.

10 Books About Model Minorities Behaving Badly

Posted on March 11, 2020March 9, 2020 by Jo Lou

Q. What’s an Asian F?

A. An A-.

Q. What’s the Asian Triple threat?

A. Medical doctor, researcher, and professor

When people have asked me about my short story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities, I’ve joked it’s about “model minorities behaving badly.” My characters—immigrants and the children of immigrants—attempt to fake it until they make it, to hold together their family and their identity. The secrets and lies are a mechanism not only for harmony, but also for survival.

Model minorities are said to achieve a higher degree of socioeconomic success than average. For decades, white conservatives have used the perceived success of Asian Americans as a racial wedge, to minimize the impact of structural racism on blacks and Latinos. See: Harvard admissions lawsuit. See: admissions to elite public high schools in New York.

The myth also turns Asian Americans into a monolith, masking huge variations in language, culture, and educational and economic status within the community.

My collection—now reissued with additional new stories—subverts these stereotypes and expectations. What follows here are books that shatter such myths in ways poignant and funny, dark and light.

We Should Never Meet by Aimee Phan

This stunning linked short collection moves between Vietnam and Orange County, following the troubled fates of children evacuated in Operation Babylift. I’m still haunted by the robbery gone wrong between the elderly Bac Nguyen and the hoodlum Vinh. Their interiority, histories, and actions belie easy labels.

No Good Very Bad Asian by Leland Cheuk

In this darkly funny novel, a Chinese American comedian pens a letter to his daughter to explain how race and class have warped him—and his sense of humor. You’ll laugh so hard you’ll cry, and then your heart will break.

Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets & Advice for Living Your Best Life by Ali Wong

Also written in the form of a letter to her daughters, the memoir is hilarious, revealing and inspiring, as Wong shares her struggles and victories. The comedian turns the final chapter over to her husband—whom she’s mentioned often in her routine—and he offers a touching coda of his own.

The Farm by Joanne Ramos

In this dystopian novel, the scheming Asian American striver Mae dreams up a “gestational retreat” that all but imprisons mostly working-class immigrant surrogates. A scathing satire as frightening as it is funny.

Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine

Hilarious and poignant, with spot on observations about inter-ethnic and interracial dating, the East Bay versus New York, and stifled aspirations. I kept snapping photos of the comic panels to friends, and handed the book to my husband to read as soon as I finished it.

Problems by Jade Sharma

Vulnerable and biting, this novel about a troubled young heroin addict is unforgettable. Sharma’s untimely death has left many mourning her and the untold stories she might have written.

All That Work and Still No Boys by Kathryn Ma

The ten short stories in this moving debut collection travel the Chinese diaspora. Told with grace and humor, the stories challenge expectations at every turn.

Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee

Casey Han—new Princeton grad and daughter of Korean dry cleaners—is figuring out what to make of her life. It’s witty and wry, with sharp observations of New York in the 1990s.

Re Jane by Patricia Park

In this witty and fun retelling of Jane Eyre, the half-Korean heroine travels from Queens to Brooklyn to Seoul and back in search of love—and self-discovery. The cultural insights are fascinating.

The Crazy Rich Asians Trilogy Box Set by Kevin Kwan

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

Breezy and engrossing, this novel kicked off the trilogy that has launched acting careers and a film franchise. A satirical, page-turning romp.

Family Trust by Kathy Wang

As the patriarch lays dying in Silicon Valley, his children, ex-wife, and second wife contemplate what his will has in store for them. A page-turner, by turns comic and poignant.

Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li

This sprawling debut is poignant, big-hearted, funny and insightful. You can’t help but root for different characters at this Chinese family restaurant, even as they bungle their way into ever more trouble.

12 Books About Pandemics

Posted on March 10, 2020April 2, 2020 by Jo Lou

As the world struggles to come to terms with the growing COVID-19 crisis, many of us are turning to fiction as a way of understanding the scope of the danger—and, perhaps paradoxically, a way of finding comfort. If the last thing you want to think about right now is global epidemic disease, we get that! But novels can also help people wrap their heads around something that may seem too big and scary to process. If you feel like you’re living in the first pages of a post-apocalyptic story, these books about historical and speculative future pandemics might help you feel less alone. Pick one up, and then wash your hands.

Severance by Ling Ma

Candace Chen has resigned herself to a soul-crushing 9-to-5 job at a Manhattan publishing house that produces novelty Bibles embellished with semi-precious stones (tacky, but important for later on in the novel). The company outsources the manufacturing to a factory in China whose workers are dying from lung disease because of the dangerous working conditions mining the semi-precious stones. Soon the Shen Fever spreads through the world via the mass-produced cheap junk produced in Chinese factories, turning the population into zombies who are doomed to repeat the same actions until they die. Candace and her band of millennials find refuge in a mall, turning to Google to figure out how to survive the apocalypse (until the internet dies, that is). Sure, Severance is a pandemic-zombie-dystopian-novel, but it’s also a relatable millennial coming-of-age story and an intelligent critique of exploitative capitalism, mindless consumerism, and the drudgery of bullshit jobs.

Image result for dreamers karen thompson walker

The Dreamers by Karen Thomas

A plague has taken over a small college town in the middle of nowhere SoCal: “The first stage of sleep is the lightest, the brief letting go, like the skipping of a stone across the water.” One by one, the college students fall asleep into a heightened state of dreaming, but… they don’t wake up. The survivors are forced into quarantine on campus and forbidden from leaving in case they spread the illness to the wider population (sounds familiar?). The Dreamers is a propulsive novel about the lengths we will go to in order to survive.

They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell

Novels about what life might be like in the grips of a global epidemic don’t have to be speculative fiction—we’ve already had widespread and deadly worldwide diseases, like the 1918 Spanish flu. They Came Like Swallows is a finely-crafted, understated novel about family dynamics set against a backdrop of illness and fear, as influenza rages through a Midwestern town.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

A viral pandemic, the Georgia Flu, has exploded “like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth,” wiping out 99% of the global population. The Travelling Symphony, made up of musicians and actors, roam from small town to small town (all that remains of North America) in horse-drawn wagons to entertain survivors with concerts and theatrical performances. At one of their stops, their hopes to reunite with two members of their troupe and their newborn baby are dashed when they discover that the town is under the sway of a cult controlled by “The Prophet.” Weaving in flashbacks, Station Eleven is a quietly haunting novel about nostalgia and survival.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

This novel is a sequel to Oryx and Crake, which is perhaps better-known (it was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 2003). But where Oryx and Crake mostly sets up the circumstances leading up to the “Waterless Flood,” a manmade disease that decimated humanity, The Year of the Flood zeroes in on life after the devastation. How did people try to survive the plague? How do they rebuild, physically and emotionally? Unlike many post-apocalyptic novels (including Oryx and Crake), this one focuses on the experiences of women.

Blindness by Jose Saramago

In this haunting, disorienting novel, a city suffers a mysterious epidemic that leaves its victims blind. Quarantined in an empty mental hospital, the sightless patients are subject to violence, exploitation, and fear; the group at the center of the story bands together to escape their confinement, but they can’t escape the collapse of society due to panic and government mishandling.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

A plague has transformed the infected population into “skeletons.” The military has purged Zone One of Lower Manhattan of the living dead and now they are attempting to restore civilization through propaganda (American Phoenix Rising) and a cheesy anthem (“Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? ‘Theme from Reconstruction’”). The novel follows the very passive Mark Spitz, a former social media manager turned zombie-sweeper (both of which he’s just mediocre at), as he narrates his post-apocalyptic life into a non-functional Bluetooth. A dense and darkly humorous novel, Zone One leaves readers questioning “who are the real zombies?”

Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels by Katherine Anne Porter

Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter

Pale Horse, Pale Rider was written by 1918–19 flu pandemic survivor Katherine Anne Porter. A bittersweet romance that will make you cry, this short novel revolves around a doomed love set amidst WWI and the outbreak of the Spanish flu.

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

The Dog Stars is set 10 years after a flu epidemic has decimated most of the American population. Hig, his dog Jasper, and a sardonic old man with a stock-pile of weapons live in an abandoned airport. The trio spend their days barricading themselves against violent bandits (who, for some unfathomable reason, wear necklaces made out of vaginas???). When Hig receives an unexpected transmission through the radio of his plane, it sparks hope in him that there is still civilization outside of their compound.

Wilder Girls by Rory Power

A body horror coming-of-age novel, Wilder Girls is set at an all-girls boarding school on an isolated island that is under quarantine. A year and a half ago, a disease called “The Tox” spread through the school; those who survived grew second spines or scales on their skin or turned luminescence. Not even the wildlife is immune from the epidemic as the animals mutate and stalk the school’s gates. One by one, the girls disappear and it’s up to their friends to find out what has happened to them.

The Last Town on Earth by Thomas Mullen

The Last Town on Earth is about a small mill town, Commonwealth, in the Pacific Northwest who have voted to quarantine themselves against the Spanish flu. No one in and no one out. Philip Worthy assigned to guard the one road that leads in and out of the town when he has to decide whether to allow a weary refuge-seeking soldier into Commonwealth.

The Last Man by Mary Shelley

We all know that Mary Shelley pioneered the science-fiction genre, but did you know that she also invented the apocalypse novel? Published in 1826, The Last Man is set in 2100 England where a plague has left only one man alive, Lionel Verney.

7 Solitary Residencies for Writers Who Are Hermits

Posted on March 10, 2020November 10, 2021 by Jess Zimmerman

Some writers thrive at conferences and colonies where there are communal meals, informal after-dinner salons, and opportunities to network and perhaps even fall for a soulmate. But, if you’re someone for whom a residency is to eliminate as many distractions as possible, including the temptation to be a social butterfly, and thus get as much work done in the precious hours stolen away from everyday life, you may be called to a more hermit-like retreat. Here’s a list of some opportunities to hunker down solo, from urban islands to the most remote escapes.

Photo via The Kerouac Project on Facebook

Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence Project of Orlando, Orlando, Florida

This residency is located in the heart of Orlando, where the selected writer resides alone for three months in the bungalow where Jack Kerouac wrote The Dharma Bums and was living when On the Road was published to critical acclaim. Social obligations are minimal; the writer participates in a Welcome Potluck at the start of the residency and a Farewell Reading at the end, with further opportunities for community outreach on a volunteer basis. As resident, you’ll have plenty of alone time to write on the porch or explore the streets and cafes of College Park, the sleepy neighborhood where the bungalow is tucked away. At the same time, the writer-in-residence can take advantage of exploring all that the fast-growing cosmopolitan center of Orlando has to offer—from craft breweries and foodie spots, to reading series and world-class music acts—if one so desires.

Fairhope, Alabama. (Photo by GPA Photo Archive)

Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts, Wolff Cottage, Fairhope, Alabama

Similar to The Kerouac Project although more under-the-radar, this solo residency also takes place in a historic 1920’s bungalow. But what makes this stay in Wolff Cottage unique is its location in Fairhope, a small town on Mobile Bay that began in the 19th century as a utopian experiment and single-tax community that has drawn artists and out-of-the-box thinkers ever since. The cottage is located right beside the library, an airy, state-of-the-art facility, and one block away from charming Main Street. As writer-in-residence, you can walk to restaurants, a pharmacy and grocery, to Page and Palette, the well-known independent bookstore and coffee shop, and down to the Fairhope Pier at sunset. Other than an author reception, you’ll be blissfully left alone for the month to write your heart out.

Photo via Soaring Gardens Artists Retreat‘s website

Soaring Gardens/Ora Lerman Charitable Trust, Laceyville, Pennsylvania

In the rolling hills of north-central Pennsylvania you’ll find a serene oasis in this residency, where you have no obligations for public receptions or outreach and can deeply immerse yourself in your project. Residencies take place in either a farmhouse or country church, with a maximum of four or five residents at the house and two at the church. During my stay two summers ago, I was given the good fortune of five weeks at the church, with three of those weeks to myself and two shared with a poet. The rural setting is tranquil but not remote wilderness, with access to amenities about fifteen to thirty minutes away, and several state parks nearby that boast hikes to some of the most gorgeous waterfalls on the East Coast.

Photo via Sitka Center for Art & Ecology on Facebook

Sitka Center for Art & Ecology, Otis, Oregon

For writers with an environmentally themed project, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast outside Lincoln City offers hermitage-like accommodations amongst breathtaking scenery. Residencies take place from October until May and include a few scheduled gatherings and outreach events with fellow artists-in-residence. However, for the vast amount of time, you’re on your own in a cozy, comfortable cabin where you live and work, surrounded by enormous Sitka spruce and quiet. On daily walks you may encounter the elk herd that grazes near campus, and the hike to Cascade Head offers spectacular vistas of the estuary and crashing surf. This residency belongs on any writer’s “dream list.”

This IS a photo of Alaskan wilderness but not where you’ll be staying. (Photo by Joris Beugels)

Voices of the Wilderness, Alaska

Sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service & the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, this summer residency sends grantees into the Alaskan wilderness, paired with a park ranger and/or research specialist. You may find yourself staying a remote cabin or camping, kayaking, collecting samples, and helping with educational outreach. So although this residency may not entirely be for curmudgeons, the remote locations offered throughout Alaska (often in grizzly bear country), and requirements for physical condition and training (including aviation and boat safety, use of radio and satellite phones, experience and ability to camp, kayak, and otherwise keep up with a ranger) make this a wilderness residency not for the faint of heart. The intent is to provide participants with an inspired, extraordinary wilderness experience, which he or she will then write about after the residency and donate a piece back to the park service.

Dry Tortugas National Park. (Photo by Thomas James Caldwell)

Dry Tortugas National Park and Loggerhead Key, Florida Keys

This is a unique opportunity for artist couples who embrace rugged adventure—to spend one month at the longtime research facility and lighthouse of Loggerhead Key, in the remote Dry Tortugas National Park near Key West. A $2000 stipend is provided, the couple must bring all food and supplies with them for the entire month and have insurance. A satellite phone is recommended. For those who are highly self-sufficient and up for an entirely “off-grid” experience of briefly dropping out of civilization, and plunging deeply into a largely untouched island wilderness, this residency may be for you—and with your partner, sure to make the memories of a lifetime.

Photo via the MacDowell Colony on Facebook

The MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire

Although the MacDowell Colony hosts a cohort of talented fellows across disciplines who come together in the evenings for group dinners and gatherings, this esteemed colony may offer the best of both worlds—and moreover, a great deal of seclusion for hunkering down and making strides on a manuscript. If you’re among the lucky few selected from its extremely competitive applicant pool, you’ll be given one of thirty-two cabins nestled upon the wooded New Hampshire acreage. Staff will deliver lunch to your cabin’s doorstep, thus not interrupting the flow of your artistic process. When at last you’re restless for a break, downtown Peterborough is just a few minutes away and a picturesque respite. The inspiration for the famous play “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder, Peterborough still beckons with pubs and restaurants, its warm and well-stocked indie bookstore, the Toadstool Bookshop, and delicious organic sandwiches and soups at Nature’s Green Grocer Market and Café.