Emotions Are Like Little Gremlins

Posted on by Jo Lou

There are very few Etgar Kerets in the world. I mean this literally. At the end of our conversation on his new book Fly Already, Etgar Keret explained to me why this is so. Keret, his last name, means “urban,” and was chosen by his father when no one could pronounce his last name. In Hebrew, names are imbued with meaning. His wife is Poetry. His son is Heart. And Etgar? Etgar is Challenge. So his name is Urban Challenge. “Which is a fucked up name to give to a child,” he said. We both laughed. 

Fly Already by Etgar Keret
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But also, of course, this makes sense. Etgar Keret’s stories are, in one way, about the challenges of language. His stories, which are often short but never thin, are filled with the robust ways language, that duplicitous partner we go through life with, cheats on us and lies to us and confuses the hell out of us. But we depended on it. And love it, even. In the titular story “Fly Already,” for example, a man and his son are on their way to play catch when the son spots a man, standing on the edge of a tall building. The father immediately knows what the man’s actions communicate. “He wants to fly,” the son says. The father screams up at the man “Don’t do it!” And the son screams back “Fly already!” But the man on the ledge can’t quite hear what either of them are saying. It’s funny and horrifying. Both statements, of course, are ridiculous prayers up into an impossibly complicated situation. Neither statement will properly address the man’s suffering. And yet. Could either push him off the ledge? 

Fly Already is a collection that pinpoints that triangulation, again and again, between hope, horror, and humor in our everyday lives. It’s a dynamic collection of stories that will make you laugh, gasp, and cringe. It is a collection filled with all the mystery, devastation, and collective rewards of being human and trying to explain it to one another. 

Over the course of a WhatsApp conversation, Etgar Keret and I discussed the “usefulness” of stories, how he writes them, and why his readers in Mexico truly understand what his stories are about.  

Erin Bartnett: I wanted to start off by talking about the writers in your stories. Whether it’s a writer held hostage by people who want him to tell a story (which is the case in the title story of your collection Suddenly, a Knock at the Door) or a story about a writer whose friend wants him to write a story that will get him laid (in “Todd” from this collection) there’s definitely a tension between the writer and reader.

So I’m curious: what do you think is the relationship between why you write stories, and why people read them? Are they operating at opposing purposes? Or are both experiences about trying to figure something out? 

Etgar Keret: When I sit down to write, I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, how I am feeling, where this story is heading. Many times when I write stories, one of the main questions I raise is “why in the hell am I doing it?” There is something very weird about writing stories. It’s kind of a greed around words, that people can sit down and say “there was a guy” when there was never a guy, and “he went to work” when he never did, and at the end something kind of happens but nothing ever really happened. I could be doing something useful. I could be watering the garden, I could be making myself a scrambled egg. Why am I sitting down and writing stuff that isn’t real? So I think that in many of my stories, at some kind of a deep layer, they are about the function of story in our lives. Stories can do so many things. In a story you can figure out what you’re feeling, you can yearn for something. You can admit something shameful that you’ve had on your mind. You can empathize with somebody who isn’t like you. 

I think that both in “Todd” and “Suddenly, a Knock at the Door” there’s an interaction between a writer and a potential reader—or, not even readers—“the market.” They demand that you manufacture something for them. But like everything, this can also be seen as some kind of an internal dialogue; it’s the relationship between writer and reader, but also the relationship between a guy and a part of the guy that demands that he write. When “Todd” was published (in Electric Literature!) I was told then it resonated a lot with people who write. I think that story for me, is about the functionless nature of story. Stories have no angle. When you write them, you don’t get anything out of them. I think that’s the nature of fiction. You cannot harness the energies. You cannot channel them. You cannot make the story go where you think it will be beneficial for it to go. 

EB: Another way I saw that question being investigated was in stories that had to do with these “useful” technological innovations in your stories. In “Tabula Rosa,” “Window,” and “GooDeed” especially, there’s a blurring of the line between a person and a commodity. The question of what we are “worth” to one another. What inspired these stories? 

EK: Well, I think that there are two contradictory answers.  I think that through technology you can actually create analogies for things that already exist in our lives. I wrote stories about clones or androids, but basically those stories are really about how people will always try to feel good about people who are like them, but they feel it’s okay to exploit them, too. So if write a story about people who are mean to clones or mean to androids, it could be very relevant to the region I live in, where there are occupied territories in which so many people have liberties and protections that others don’t. So technology helps you make the story more into a fable and less politically-specific—which is something that tends to put the reader in a certain mode I don’t like. 

I really feel like I understand less and less the dynamics of the world. It’s the elderly writer syndrome. 

The other answer is I feel that I come from a very specific generation. When I was in high school there were already very slow and bad personal computers. I played Atari. So many pixels. I would make fun of elderly people who couldn’t use ATM machines properly. (I really lived in a time when ATMS were introduced to my town.) I had been in the “before” and “after” for this kind of technology, but at the same time, I now have an elderly-person mode, because when I was young, when technology was introduced, it was there to stay. ATM machines, microwaves—you learned it, and you knew that for the next 60 years, you’re going to defrost vegetarian schnitzel with it. While, for example, my son already lives in a world where he’s already learned apps and things that he knows in a couple of years will become obsolete. 

I really feel like I understand less and less the dynamics of the world. Not just the technical aspects of it, but in general the way that things go. There used to be some kind of level to the amount of bullshit that people could put out in the world. There was a threshold. I admit when I saw my Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying on election day the Arabs are going on buses and Israel is under threat—when 20% of our population in Israel is Arab? I said “Okay, this is not going to slide, this guy is finished. Nobody in the world will shake his hand.” And then you see that nothing really happens and you realize that you don’t totally understand the ropes. The world has changed. And you’re not really on top of things. 

So in my stories, to talk about technology is really to talk about characters who live in a world that they don’t totally figure out, not because they don’t know how to press the buttons, but because they can’t understand how the social structure has evolved. How the right and wrongs of what you can do and what you can’t do evolved. I must say that I feel in this position a lot. I feel I am less in touch with the world around me. It’s the elderly writer syndrome. 

EB:  So do you think this kind of alienation from the present affected your writing? What changed for you while writing this collection? 

EK: One change that I see in my book is that my stories take place in different continents and different times in a way that seems very natural to me now. I think that in the past, it would feel strange to write stories that took place in the Midwest. Now, even though I’ve been to the Midwest and I was in Iowa City for 8 months, I think that even the stuff that I don’t know—nothing seems distant, in a sense. And it’s not only geographic, it’s the future that doesn’t feel that distant. You know you just type “www.future.com” and you see the future! And if you pay for the prime subscription, then you’ll even see the distant future! 

EB: Children, particularly in the stories “Fly Already,” and “Dad with Mashed Potatoes” present these simultaneous and totally different realities in language. They aren’t any less “real” or “true” than the realities of the adults in the stories. Where do you find this language? What do children’s perspectives lend to a story’s truth that an adult cannot? 

EK: Well, I think that for me, in a strange way, it’s not only as natural but more natural to write from a child’s perspective than from an adult’s. In my earlier collection I would write many stories from children’s perspectives, and I have urged myself to do so less because I wanted to write from adults to be closer to my own problems. But still, I get along with children much better than I get along with other adults. When you’re a child, if you go into a kindergarten you’ll see like 30 crazy little guys running around and they’re all kind of extreme, and they’re overly individualistic. And then they’re indoctrinated. You learn that if you take a poop on your table, then it gets you into trouble and you stop doing that. And the kids who aren’t doing that as much look normal now. There is something about that indoctrination that is bubbling up. You are less what you feel like doing and less your imagination and less stuff that doesn’t make any sense and more studying to be a dentist. 

My emotions are like the gremlins. They hide down in the sofa, but sometimes you see cookie crumbs. Evidence that they’re there, but you’re not sure.

I’m almost 52 years old but when I wake up most days I don’t even know what I’m going to do. Which is not a very grownup kind of life. I feel like this five-year-old guy who got away. The one who got under the kindergarten fence and went outside and grew a beard and a mustache and he’s 52 years old and he’s still in kindergarten. 

I think that it is even justified biographically by my parents, who are both Holocaust survivors. My mother lost her parents in the war and my father said he never had a normal childhood, so when they raised us, my mother always said that she didn’t know how to raise children because as a child she grew up in an orphanage where all the grownups were trying to steal her food and sell it in the black market, so the grownups were enemies. I think the way that our parents raised us, was also a very child-like way. The idea was “you be a good person, and if the school gives you trouble, I will come and you tell me what to say and I’ll lie to the teacher and everything will be okay.” In my family there was a rule that if it rained, we didn’t go to school. My mother said “with all due respect, they don’t teach you anything important enough to get wet for.” So I would stay home and do all kinds of stuff and then my mother would write me a note. It was really standard procedure. 

EB: Yeah, I read in an interview you did with Words Without Borders in which you said that “there is something about the beauty of childhood: you either get stuck in it or get detached from it. Childhood is something that cannot survive.” 

EK: You know, my father had a rule that, every seven years max, he changed his profession. And sometimes during my life we’ve been bankrupt and we’ve been pretty rich and we’ve been poor. When we would go out and I would see a pair of shoes I would say “Mother, are we rich now?” And my mother would say “No, actually, this year we’re poor.” But the reason my father did it is because he said he survived the Holocaust. And he was so grateful for that. He said “I don’t want to live one life, I want to live many lives. I want to do stuff that I want to do, I want to fail, I want to do stuff I’m not good at, too. I want a taste of everything.” And when you grow up like this, it’s very difficult for you to accept one career. When I went to university, they asked me what do you want to learn, I said “everything.” And actually, I spent five years in university and I learned math and I learned biology and I would go to history class. When people said “Yeah, but what are you going to do when you grow up?” I said, I don’t know, maybe some rich guy will give me money.” So I moved to plan B. 

EB: I am reading these stories in English translation. I wonder, the longer your stories have been circulating around the world (now in 45 languages) are there things you’ve noticed that get lost in particular languages? Or found in others? Concepts, sure, but emotional truths, too? How do you work with your translators? 

EK: Well first, I try to communicate with my translator as much as they have the patience to communicate with me. I think it’s very individualistic in that way. Some translators are more into asking questions and others don’t want to communicate too much. I think that translation is really kind of co-writing in a sense because languages don’t function the same way. It’s very strange. I can give you all kinds of examples. You want an example?

EB: Yeah, sure!

EK: So I have a story about a real estate guy this woman comes to and she says I want to buy an apartment because I am asking for a divorce from my husband because I caught him cheating on me. And he goes around and shows her apartments, but as he goes, he realizes that she didn’t randomly reach him, she came to him because apparently he’s the guy who found the apartment that was the love nest of the young woman and her husband. So she comes and sees apartments but at the same time she wants to get some information about this girl. And the real estate agent wants to be polite and nice and discreet, so there is a struggle between them. And now I’ll teach you something about the Hebrew language. In Hebrew, we don’t have an “it” form—everything is either masculine or feminine. So as they go she says to him “Is she beautiful?” And he says “Not only is she beautiful, you’ll have your own parking.” Because an apartment in Hebrew is feminine. So how do you translate that to English? You can’t! You need to reinvent it. 

You don’t have the ‘craft’ of telling a story– it’s like the ‘craft’ of farting. We’re born with it.

We have this notion that we have language and content and language is like a glass and we can pour content from one glass to another and it’s fine. But it’s not this way. I know that when my stories go to another language, they’re very dependent on translation. My mother, for example, feels really strongly and truly believes that my works in Polish are funnier and more emotional. And I wouldn’t be surprised because my Polish translator, she’s an amazing person. Just the fact that the stories go through her veins makes them better. And I can tell you that of the countries that I’ve been published in, the ones that are most successful are the ones with translators who were the most open to dialogue. 

I think for me the interesting thing is the meetings with the audiences that can be very very different. One of the countries I’m most successful in is Mexico. And my Mexican publishers are very good friends, I really like them. When I went to Mexico, I did a book signing. And I think the third person who came was this big guy with a big moustache and I signed his book and he asked me something in Spanish. And I understood the basic kind of “May I do this…” question. And I always say “Si.” Because you don’t think someone’s going to say anything like “May I hit you on the head” or something… So I was standing and said, “Yeah, sure.” And he hugged me! And it was very nice, a very nice hug. And then as people got in line, every few people, they would ask me and hug me. I said sure because I really like to be hugged. And I did readings in other places in Mexico, and the readers hugged me after the reading, too. So I said to my publisher, “You know, it’s a very beautiful cultural thing. In the U.S. they would ask me how much money I made out of the book or did I sell the film rights, and here people really just want to hug me! It’s really beautiful that Mexican readers have these kind of traditions.” He said “No, it’s not a tradition. They only hug you! They don’t hug any of our other writers…” So I said “Why do you think they hug me?” He said, “Maybe because they feel like you need a hug.” And I thought to myself, you know, it makes sense. I think that if there is one thing that my stories have in common, if you put them next to a candle, the words “I need a hug, desperately” would appear. In all of them. But this is something that only happened in Mexico. 

It is kind of amazing that I can write a story about something that happened to me when I was ten years old in a town in Israel, and somebody in China will say I read this story, I cried and told my boss I quit my job. Whoa. These emotions and energies that move through channels to all kinds of places in such a unique and weird way, but nevertheless a truthful one. Because when I was ten years old in my hometown, I wanted to quit my job, too. [Laughs.] No. But I really wanted to leave school and this guy who read it in China, he got it. So I think there is something really beautiful and comforting—to go back to the hugs—because I’m afraid to say, I really don’t think it gets any better than getting a hug. It’s not as if we’re going to live forever. 

EB: When you write a story, you’ve explained in previous interviews, that you want the labor to be submerged. So, maybe this is an American-y craft question that’s inherently contradictory, but how do you go about doing that? 

EK: You know again, I think that for me, writing is better than doing nothing. I mean in the sense that I like doing nothing, but writing is even better. Because I think that for me, when I write those stories, it’s really a feeling of weightlessness. When you talk about “craft,” it sounds like a very responsible word. Everything that I do in life, I do responsibly. There’s always some kind of built-in anxiety in life experiences. It doesn’t matter if you’re crossing the street or you’re scrambling an egg or you’re trying to explain to your child what transgender is. You always know you can fuck up. You know you can do something that will not work well, that will be misinterpreted. But when you write stories, you’re safe. You’re safe. You just write stuff that you feel and that doesn’t seem to make any sense but sometimes you’re lucky and at the end it does make sense. So the act of writing for me, is more like sitting in a jacuzzi. I’ve never sat in a jacuzzi. But it kind of feels like sitting in a jacuzzi, I think. 

EB: Okay but so what happens if you end up somewhere in the middle and it doesn’t make any sense? Do you ever get lost in the middle? What do you do when that happens? How do you find your way again? 

EK: My emotions are like the little creatures, the gremlins. All the time they hide down in the sofa, but sometimes you see cookie crumbs. Evidence that they’re there, but you’re not even sure that they are really there. And so the beginning of the story is like, you see this creature, and you grab it by its tail. And then it starts running around and you hope it will stay and the shape that you make in your house, the trail of broken furniture—that is basically the story. So you grab it by the tail, but many times it’s too quick or it goes under the piano and you hit your head on the piano and you let go. And I think that this happens more often than the times where you’re really able to hold onto it. 

I have a bunch of stories that, when I’m unable to realize or figure out what it’s about, I give up! That’s what I do! I’m a quitter. I say “Fuck it. You don’t want to be written? I won’t write you! Go find another poor bastard who will write you.” And I totally forget about them because in the fit of writing I don’t know how to sweat and struggle. When I edit, it’s a different story. But when I write I say, “Okay! It’s no fun, I’ll go and watch Family Guy instead.” 

But some of those stories that you lose somewhere in the middle, they kind of reemerge years later. You try to write something else and you say “Ah! You know I’m actually trying to write that old story.” Some kind of character or a phrase that you had and suddenly it reappears in this setting and now it does make sense and it has this kind of old wine or old cheese quality that it’s really suddenly matured. And it falls into place. 

What I’m really saying is that I think the most important thing for me in the writing is to have no feeling of attachment or ownership. I think that there is something about accepting the fact that you are not in control and accepting the fact that there are times when you sit at the computer that will just count as time that you didn’t watch crappy TV or eat things that aren’t good for you, so it’s good anyway. But you will not have anything to show, and you accept that that’s okay. 

That’s why I really don’t like terms like “writer’s block.” When people say “writer’s block,” it’s kind of like “Excuse me. This Tuesday I did not write. I want to speak to the people in charge. It’s outrageous. It’s all because Donald Trump is president. If Obama was president I would write every day.” Like, who the fuck ever promised you that you’d be able to write? Say thank you, kiss the keyboard and bow. You didn’t write? Go and do something useful with your life. 

Storytelling for me is not a craft, because every person you know, everyone who lied to you has told you a story. And so many people have lied to you. You will never figure out how many. And so, you don’t have the “craft” of telling a story—it’s like the “craft” of farting. We’re born with it. The great storytellers and writers in the world never learned craft. They just had a strong urge to tell a story. And it was so strong that they forced people around them to listen. And this urge was contagious. Many times, this kind of creative writing class process replaces that urge with some kind of professional certificate. Writing is like making love. Who wants to make love to a professional? 

EB: Well, I mean knowledge is good in both, for sure. But that idea seems liberating in a lot of ways, too. 

EK: Yeah, but for me writing should be liberating! Like the idea of the suffering artist? No, it’s the suffering human being. And the only difference between an artist and a human being is that maybe an artist is a human being who is a little bit more aware. When you realize that all people are suffering, then there is something actually liberating, that makes you suffer less about it. It’s like those people who say “I hate writing, I hate it…” You hate writing? Go sell something useful like most people on this earth. Nobody forces you to write. 

Ann Patchett Gets Inside a Man’s Head

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Ann Patchett’s 13th book is a testament to building a life under adverse circumstances. The Dutch House follows the lives of siblings Danny and Maeve Conroy, starting in the late 1960s when their relatively poor family moved into what was called The Dutch House with their parents, Cyril and Elna. The book’s title comes from the prominence and importance of the house, outside of which Maeve and Danny regularly sit to reminisce about their lives. It’s these conversations that drive the narrative forward, as does the twist of an ending.

For the Conroy family the house itself comes to them lavishly furnished, complete with portraits of the previous owners’ ancestors and with hired help, Jocelyn, who had been looking after the property since the previous owner died. Unfortunately, Elna leaves not long after they move in because she’s uncomfortable amongst such luxury and would rather help the poor in India. After she leaves, it’s just Cyril, Danny, and Maeve, plus Jocelyn and her sister Sandy. The three women become Danny’s surrogate mothers, and this caretaker role of women to Danny is central to the way Patchett looks at relationships, family, and the privileges afforded men. 

Ann and I chatted about The Dutch House, the choice to write from Danny’s perspective, and the ways in which car conversations differ from face-to-face conversations. We also discussed the way Danny is catered to by all of the women in his life. 

Sarah Boon: Your press release focuses heavily on the fact that The Dutch House is written in first person, and I’m curious about the emphasis on this and why you chose to write as Danny, not as Maeve.

Ann Patchett: My decision has a lot to do with [my previous book] Commonwealth, and the fact that it was an autobiographical novel. I’d always said that I’d never write an autobiographical novel, but it went really well and I really enjoyed it. So I thought, “what else did I say I’d never do?” I said I’d never write another first-person novel because I did that when I was young and didn’t want to go back to it. I’m always looking for something challenging, and I had it in my mind that first-person was really easy because that was where I’d started. But that was a long time ago, and now it’s really hard. I hadn’t done it since 1993. Everything is a muscle: you use it or lose it, and it took me some time to get it back.

Plus, the book really lent itself to first-person, and it never occurred to me to write it in the first person of Maeve. I mean, it really is a book about Maeve as seen by Danny. And since it’s a first-person novel narrated by a man, the male gaze was all I had to work with.  

SB: It’s fascinating to me that the Conroys buy this house but they keep everything in it from the previous owners—including the portraits. I got the sense that they were squatting until the real owners returned. What was your rationale for having them keep the house as it was when the previous owners lived in it?

Since it’s a first-person novel narrated by a man, the male gaze was all I had to work with.

AP: The Conroys were so poor at this time, it wasn’t as if they had their own stuff. Cyril walks into this house that’s completely furnished and gorgeous. He wouldn’t know anything about putting a house together, so I think for him it was just wonderful. It was a whole ready-made package and way of life, including wealthy ancestors. The portraits were quite beautiful, they were very well painted. I don’t think that Cyril would look at such beautiful paintings and say “oh, I have to get rid of those.” He does have the idea that he’s going to have his and his wife’s portraits painted. Of course, it doesn’t work out, and he ends up with only a portrait of Maeve.

SB: A lot of the action in the book revolves around Danny and Maeve sitting in a car outside the house. How did you keep the narrative moving forward when every time they come back and sit in the same place in front of the house?

AP: Because they’re reminiscing or talking about ideas. When they’re young [and poor] they’re almost stalking the house, they’re hurt and angry [at having been kicked out]. But as they get older, and their lives get more full, parking in front of the house becomes a space in which they can relax, let down their guard, and talk about what they really want to talk about. At one point Danny says “I’m not from the Dutch House, I’m from the street outside of that house. That’s where my life has really consistently taken place.” So it doesn’t strike me as strange that the story would move forward easily while two people are sitting in a car talking because they’re talking about things that really matter to them. 

When you’re in a car and you’re talking, you’re not looking at one another. It’s like therapists always say, if you want to have a really important conversation with someone, go for a walk. It apparently is the least threatening way to have a conversation because you’re both looking forward but you’re also engaged in another activity. Of course, being in a car is not going on a walk, but there is that side by side and you’re stuck in place and you know what the rules are…it’s a good place to talk.

When I first started writing this book I started with a scene of Danny and Maeve in their 20s sitting in a parked car in front of the Dutch House. I didn’t keep the scene and I didn’t write the book that way. But after I wrote it, I thought “oh this really works, I like them here. I’m going to keep coming around and using this as a motif.”

SB: Much happens in the late 1960s/early 1970s, though the book also covers the present day. During this time, Maeve hides her diabetes, doesn’t admit to her formidable math talents, and works at a frozen foods company. She’s fierce and focused, but she works behind-the-scenes to help Danny. Was it difficult to write such a strong character who sublimates her own desires to help her brother? 

AP: It’s funny, because now that you’re saying this I’m thinking that really is my sister. I didn’t base Maeve on my sister, but your description of Maeve would be a good description of my sister. She is smarter than I am, she has way more talent than I do. She always puts her energy into promoting other people. She used to work on political campaigns, which to me is the ultimate in putting your intelligence behind somebody else. She puts an awful lot of time into her kids and into other people. But when you think about it, most people do. If you’re working in a law firm, you’re working on other people’s problems and issues, if you’re a doctor you’re helping other people, etc.

In my life, all of my intelligence, talent, and energy goes into something that’s completely me. I also put all of my energy into one thing as opposed to 20 different things. I never for a moment questioned that someone who was smart and opinionated and independent, like Maeve, would work on behalf of other people. 

SB: Danny is fairly oblivious. He doesn’t realize that Sandy and Jocelyn are sisters. He treats his wife carelessly, and is happy as long as she’s there to make his life easier in some way. Like his father, he buys her a house she doesn’t like. Was that intentional, to make Danny into a younger version of his father—so much so that, when he sees his stepmother again, she thinks he is his father?

AP: Yes, on all counts. Danny is like so many men that I know, and really like and care for. He’s smart, he’s happy, he’s a pleasure to be around, and he’s a good guy. But he is oblivious. He has no idea that his world has been built on the foundation of these women who support him. 

Danny is like so many men that I know. He has no idea that his world has been built on the foundation of these women who support him. 

There’s a terrible sentence near the end of the book, when Danny’s back at the Dutch House and he’s in the kitchen with Sandy, and he says something like “it was so nice to be back here with the table and the clock and Sandy and the coffee.” And that’s what it’s like for him, Sandy might as well be the table or the clock, as he expects her to be in that landscape. But he doesn’t understand that there’s anything wrong with thinking like that. 

SB: He’s the main male character in the book since his father dies early. And it’s all the women around him who are helping him, propping him up, pushing him forward, etc. 

AP: Yes, and everybody is thinking how wonderful he is. And he is! But I also just put a lot of my general annoyance into his character. 

SB: I’m thinking about when Jocelyn/Sandy/Fluffy look after Celeste and her kids, they constantly tell stories about the Dutch House, and it turns out that everyone has a different perspective on the same events. Do person-specific stories run through your books? That everyone has a story to tell about the same event, and that story might differ depending on who’s telling it?

AP: That certainly is something that’s very interesting to me. It’s also interesting how I can misremember something. I’ll be so sure about something that happened, and then I’ll get some piece of evidence—a letter, a photograph from childhood—and I’ll think “oh, I didn’t remember it that way.” 

I was in downtown New York on September 11 with a very good friend, and years later we talked about that day. But it was as if one of us had been in Iowa and the other in Arizona, as our memories were completely different. We were side by side all day long, seeing exactly the same things, but it was such a traumatic day, and trauma really messes with your head and your ability to see things clearly and to remember. And so the answer is you never know—you never really do know what happened.

Danny is very interested in that—he’s always trying to dig into stories and figure out what the real story was, even though he doesn’t have any more access to it than anyone else. He’s oblivious in some ways but he’s also very smart. He learns things like chemistry. Then he moves on to buildings, auctions, and property rights. He’s very good at things that are important to him. He can figure out how to make money without having any money—it’s extremely clever and it took him years to work it out. 

But in terms of emotional, interpersonal relationships he’s clueless. And yet, how many men do you know that you could say that about? “Oh, he’s really good at business and the things he’s interested in, but he’s not so great at reading the emotions of the person who’s in the room with him.” That’s pretty standard for a lot of men. I don’t think Danny’s in any way exceptional, I don’t in any way think he’s a bad man or just an oblivious man. I just think he’s a man. 

The 20 Best Debuts of the Second Half of 2019

Posted on by Jo Lou

It is next to impossible to read every debut book that comes out in a single year. Even for me, a person who has dedicated the year to reading as many debuts as humanly possible and interviewing newly-published authors for my website Debutiful. Every month, my to-be-read pile grows larger and larger, teetering precariously on my side table. 

On that note, let me start with a mea culpa: last time I curated this list I left off a book that has turned out to be one of my absolute favorites of the year. I hadn’t yet read In West Mills by De’Shawn Charles Winslow, an extremely well-written book that also featured one of the most memorable characters of 2019.

All of this is to say, that this reading list may have gaps, but it is a starting point. Here you’ll find emerging writers whose books promise illustrious careers to come. From novels and memoirs to short stories to essay collections, these are the books I can’t stop talking about with friends, writers, librarians, and booksellers.

Here are the 20 best debut books of the second half of 2019.

July

A Prayer for Travelers by Ruchika Tomar

A Prayer for Travelers by Ruchika Tomar

On the surface, Tomar’s story is about a missing woman in the Nevada desert. The book shifts back and forth in time to weave secrets and truths into a gripping plot about the quest to find a friend who has mysteriously vanished. A Prayer for Travelers digs beneath the surface to explore the harshness of living in a suffocatingly small desert town.

Marilou Is Everywhere by Sarah Elaine Smith

Marilou is Everywhere by Sarah Elaine Smith

Another story about a missing girl, yet this one takes a completely different angle. In Smith’s debut, a young girl named Jude disappears and her alcoholic mother mistakes another girl named Cindy for her daughter. Alone and seeking attachment, Cindy slips into the role and loses herself in this new world. Hauntingly bleak, sure, but there’s an underlying hopefulness in Marilou is Everywhere. 

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We Love Anderson Cooper by R.L. Maizes

Funny and quirky. Those are the best words to describe the debut collection from Maizes. The collection is about the everyday lives of characters who are outsiders. The excitement in this short story collection doesn’t come from explosive plots; instead, they come from the quiet day-to-day decisions the characters make. (Read an excerpt here.)

August

A Particular Kind of Black Man

A Particular Kind of Black Man by Tope Folarin

A Particular Kind of Black Man is a coming-of-age story about a Nigerian American who grows up in Mormon country Utah (a state with a grand total of 1.12% African Americans residents). The novel explores the unreliability of memory and the inheritance of mental illness, and questions what it means to be “the perfect black man” in America.

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The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

Broom, an acclaimed journalist, turns her pen on her own family history. The story begins with a yellow house in the 1960s where a prosperous life was all but guaranteed. It ends on land the house stood now, now deserted and devastated after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans. But, as Broom writes, it wasn’t just Katrina’s doing that upended the yellow house. It was also years of systematic failure at the hands of the city, the state, and the country.

Hard Mouth by Amanda Goldblatt

Goldblatt’s introspective novel is for those wishing Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Henry David Thoreau were friends. In Hard Mouth, a snarky woman retreats into the woods after her father announces that he will not seek treatment for his terminal cancer. In a ramshackled cabin in the mountains, she struggles to survive in the wilderness, alone only with the company with an imaginary friend. Hilarious and thought-provoking, Goldblatt’s debut offers a dark twist on the search for escape.

Black Light by Kimberly King Parsons

Black Light by Kimberly King Parsons

The stories that fill this collection are spellbinding. Parsons finds something off-kilter in the mundane and runs with it. Black Light is a lot like Texas: everything is big, bright, and bold. (Read an excerpt here.)

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

The New Yorker writer is already well-known for her sharp observations on, well, everything—whether it’s the epidemic of high schoolers juuling or exploring the cult of athleisure brand Outdoor Voices. This collection of essays takes a magnifying glass to self-delusion from unpacking why we love consuming grifter stories to analyzing the performative identity of being on the internet. Jia Tolentino’s wit and self -reflection shines through her writing.

The Other's Gold

The Other’s Gold by Elizabeth Ames

Ames’s debut is a welcome addition to the canon of novels that begins with friends meeting in college and then continues to follow their ever-changing relationships with each other at as they enter different stages of their lives. Each chapter of the novel is dedicated to one of the quartet’s mistakes (the Accident, the Accusation, the Kiss, and the Bite) and explores how our lives collide with force and meander away from one another; sometimes with an explosion.

September

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Bloomland by John Englehardt

Since I first read Englehardt’s book about a fictional mass shooting at a college, there have been at least a half-dozen mass shootings in America. I say at least because we’ve become numb to these tragedies. The novel takes that numbness head on as it follows characters affected by the shooting in second-person chapters. Englehardt deconstructs the aftermath of a mass shooting and analyzes America’s gun epidemic with a keen eye.

The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott

The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott

It has been quite the year for the literary spy novel. The year kicked off with Barack Obama-approved American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson. Months later, Prescott uses the true story of a CIA plot to use Doctor Zhivago to influence Soviet Russian citizens to reconstruct the spy genre once more. Prescott takes history and turns it into something new and exciting. 

October

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Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Díaz 

In Diaz’s memoir (it shifts tenses and uses flashback almost like a novel), you’ll find an almost too-Hollywood-to-be-true story. Ordinary Girls chronicles Jaquira Diaz’s coming-of age as her family who moves from Puerto Rico to Miami. “A closeted queer girl in a homophobic place,” her unstable life and drug use led to juvenile detention. Upon release she drops out of school and marries before enlisting in the military. Through it all, you’ll read a queer biracial woman’s quest to discover her place in the world.

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There You Are by Mathea Morais

There You Are is a romantic ode to music and how it shapes us. The novel takes place in the 1980s and 1990s and uses two strangers’ shared love of music to explore race and history as they fall in love. This charming book is perfect for those who like a story driven by the complexities of a relationship without getting too cheesy. 

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Holding On To Nothing by Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne

The characters in this debut are flawed and complex. Set in the Appalachian, these characters want nothing more than to escape their unfulfilled lives. However, mistake after mistake keeps them stuck in their rural Tennessee town where they learn to cope with their realities. There is a sense of grime and grit on every page of Shelburne’s work. 

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Wild Game by Adrienne Brodeur

I have never been so captivated by so many memoirs in a single year. All stuck with me for many different reasons. This one because of the twists and turns that makes it read like a bone-chilling thriller. A teenage Brodeur becomes a confidante for her mother, who begins an affair with a family friend. The romance has tragic consequences that an older Brodeur must grapple with years later. Wild Game is a breathless story about love, lies, secrets, and destruction.

November

On Swift Horses by Shannon Pufahl

On Swift Horses by Shannon Pufahl

Pufahl’s period novel explores the queerness of 1950s American West. She provides a new insight into a period often nostalgically retold over and over (mostly by and about straight, white men). On Swift Horses follows Muriel, a  young wife who secretly works as a waitress at a horse-racing track and Julius, her gay brother-in-law, who goes on a quest to find his lover.

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American Grief in Four Stages by Sadie Hoagland

The sadness in Hoagland’s debut story collection is both reassuring and jarring. Some say it is comforting to know others are going through what you’re experiencing yourself. But maybe it’s just painful. In these 15 stories, Hoagland offers these intimate moments of trauma, fear, loneliness, and lusts. 

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Jakarta by Rodrigo Márquez Tizano, translated by Thomas Bunstead

Short and anything but sweet. Set in a post apocalyptic society devastated by a viral epidemic, this dystopian novel hecks in under 160 pages and can easily be read in a day but don’t expect a light read

December

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Africaville by Jeffrey Colvin

This novel follows three generations of a family who live in Africaville, a Canadian town settled by former slaves. Spanning the Great Depression to the 1980s, Africaville shines a light on the lives of Black Canadians.

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

This novel about race and privilege is the book we all need to read as the 2020 election years approaches. Such a Fun Age follows Emira, a young black woman who is accused by a security guard at an expensive grocery store of kidnapping the white toddler that she was babysitting.

William Wordsworth Saves the Internet

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

About the year 1700, in London and other spots in the West, there was a lot of excitement about a new mode of communication, where information came so rapidly that people imagined they were interacting with each other in a virtual space. Fueled by new technologies of cheap paper-making and mass printing, and enabled by laws that permitted the spread of information, hundreds of newspapers, broadsheets, magazines, and little bound books were suddenly on offer. In this world of print, people could interact freely on topics ranging from politics to winemaking to books they liked. There were many names for that imagined space, and one really good one that eventually emerged was the beautiful-sounding phrase, the republic of letters. 

For the people of this time, the word “republic” was understood in its original Latin meaning—literally “thing” belonging to the “people”—but in an age of ever-stronger monarchies, the word had a sense of rebellion and subversion to it, too. As some modern social historians, such as Jurgen Habermas, have said, the imagined democracy of talkers eventually produced actual ones. But these virtual spaces also invited all sorts of ways to waste time, share rumors about celebrities, and make nasty comments about other members of this republic. In other words, this was the beginning of the internet—not the internet of wires, wireless signals, HTML interfaces, and screens, but the internet of information and interactivity. Habermas, as well as dozens of cutting edge social scientists and theorists of mediated communication, would say that in fact the older virtual space of the 18th century was not only as fully interactive as it is today, but actually had a bigger impact on politics and society. 

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Information in the 1700s could spread incredibly quickly, and there was almost no limit on the sorts of things you could read about.  For instance, in the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1736, there were stock prices, death notices, weather, ship landings and details on their cargo, high tide, low tide, news, speeches in Parliament (transcribed from memory!), and most popular of all, tales of domestic disputes, adultery, murder and the adventures of handsome highwaymen upon the public roads. All this in one paper, and usually within mere days of the event, sometimes hours. If that wasn’t fast enough, you could get news of a fire at midnight, or a shipwreck of the morning earlier by means of broadsheets, large single sheets of the hottest, latest news hawked by young boys roaming the streets of London at all hours. And the reach of the virtual space may have been broader than it is today.

The reach of the virtual space may have been broader than it is today.

The accessibility to information was widespread, reaching all social classes (including illiterate people—who made up about 40% of the population).  If you couldn’t afford a broadsheet or you couldn’t read, often someone from your family or neighborhood would bring a Gentleman’s Magazine or Spectator home and would read it out loud and in public places. Locals grew fond of those readouts and went to certain spots in the city to hear the latest.  In Paris, as the historian Robert Darnton has shown, the news was sung daily under the famous Tree of Cracow, and so both literate and illiterate were caught up every day. And in comparison to today’s short-form communication, which both caters to and creates ever-shorter attention spans, conversations did not just come in the form of sniping, but also in vigorous discussions in salons and coffeehouses, in a bewildering range of genres. Looking in the Gentleman’s Magazine or the Female Spectator (published by the leading critic and torrid romance novelist Eliza Haywood), you see political and social commentary in poetry, songs, limericks, articles, dialogues, and letters to the editor numbering in the hundreds. Many of the debates—say, over whether Shakespeare was appropriate for children, or whether slavery was a sin upon all of society, or the growing scourge of addiction to gin, or election tampering—were quickly adapted in different forms, including children’s books, abridged and simplified editions sold for pennies, or lurid visual prints. Just take a look at the open-air bribing going on in William Hogarth’s hugely popular artworks, “Gin Lane” and “Canvassing for Votes”:

Hogarth's "Gin Lane," an engraving of a chaotic urban street scene
William Hogarth's "Canvassing for Votes," a painting showing opposing politicians both trying to bribe the same man

As the 18th century went on, the stream of information got faster but it also got deeper, as conversations along the virtual highways and byways became more serious and more substantial. Following the major periodicals of the time (which numbered in the thousands), you see fewer death row confessions, fewer tales of insane asylums and highwaymen, and more theorists, critics, scientists and philosophers taking to the new medium. People like Benjamin Franklin, and the philosopher and cultural critic David Hume appeared in the pages of these publications, followed by the philosopher of “sentiments” and economics Adam Smith, the brilliant educator and women’s advocate Mary Wollstonecraft, and her friend Thomas Paine, and even neo-conservatives like Edmund Burke. They all wrote their books and did it well, but they also went directly to the public by publishing in periodicals, writing neat little essays, publishing life hacks (Franklin’s almanacs), and writing hundreds of opinion pieces and reviews (Wollstonecraft’s day job). These publications could be in the public’s hands within days, and that included writing, typesetting, illustrating, printing, advertising, and finally selling. The turnaround time for an idea to become published writing beat most print matter today, and the spread of news through yelling, singing, gossiping added another dimension of speed, urgency, and drama to the words sent around. 

But as the stream became a river and the river became a torrent, people were seriously starting to worry. By the 19th century there were concerns about the spiritual and physiological effects of getting too much information too quickly. For instance, Henry David Thoreau wrote this in his famous book On Walden Pond: 

Hardly a man takes a half-hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, “What’s the news?” as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. After a night’s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. “Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe” — and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.

This sort of thing is what drew him to his refuge in the cabin by the pond. People were plugged into the global torrent of information but missing out on the voices of actual streams, rivers, and lakes, the deep and rich voice of a forest breeze, and the chance to have a conversation that didn’t have something to do with the war we were in at the moment or the daily foibles of whatever city, state, or federal administration was in power.  

The best lines that I have read about the issue are by William Wordsworth, in his tremendous poem, The Prelude, an endless piece which traces how the young boy gathers a lifetime’s worth of strength and wonder, first by wandering in nature, then by understanding the deep generosity of friends and a brilliant sister, and finally by heeding the lyric of his own mind. At one point Wordsworth is reminiscing about the early years of the French Revolution, after the first flush of excitement and possibility. In his recollections, he had begun to lose faith, as early excitement about the fall of the ancient system turned to anxiety about the increasingly violent politics of Paris. Wordsworth remembers one fellow in particular, whose life was in disarray, and perhaps in danger, too, but in his quandary, he wasted even more time, so to speak, online:

His temper was quite mastered by the times, 
And they had blighted him, had eat away
The beauty of his person, doing wrong 
Alike to body and to mind: 
[…]
A ravage out of season, made by thoughts
Unhealthy and vexatious. At the hour, 
The most important of each day, in which 
The public news was read, the fever came, 
A punctual visitant, to shake this man, 
Disarmed his voice and fanned his yellow cheek
Into a thousand colours, While he read,
Or mused, his sword was haunted by his touch
Continually, like an uneasy place
In his own body. 

The pathetic fellow he’s talking about is a royalist who’s been sidelined by the Revolution of 1789, waiting at an undisclosed location with his other friends, yearning for a chance to go back into Paris and do something, anything to stop the course of this chaotic revolution. The young men hang on all the latest news, which is delivered daily by a messenger. All he can do while listening is finger the butt of his sword. Being exposed to the news daily, and then subject to the feelings that the news arouses in him has altered his face, his posture, and his mind. He is visibly changing before Wordsworth’s eyes. He is obsessed by the information, and as he ingests it, he diddles his sword, a metaphor for the potential snuffed out by an obsession with information rather than a commitment to action. 

It is an internet beneath the internet, the space of cultural memory and its primary vehicle, poetry.

But what is Wordsworth’s alternative? Strolling through the forest and dreaming about lyrical things? This would be the clichéd version of Wordsworth, the quintessential Romantic, a version that is so wrong in so many ways. I think Wordsworth is leaving another alternative on the table, a kind of access to another web, a deeper web, the oldest virtual space of all. It is an internet beneath the internet, the space of cultural memory and its primary vehicle, poetry. But rather than use poetry in its classical function, Wordsworth intended to create a poetry of the people, listening to common folk and attempting to capture their accents and stories in a stripped down, sweetened poetry. Lots of scholars and others in the expert class say he failed at this, and that all he did was rarefy what was already a rich and colorful canvas handed to him by the brilliant, contentious, visceral eighteenth century. Maybe yes, maybe no. But Wordsworth and poets like him, including William Blake, Charlotte Smith, and Coleridge, did show a way forward for the internet of their time—a way of listening hyper-attentively to what was local, different, and personal and letting those voices crowd out the automatic, the updated, and the urgent. In The Prelude, Wordsworth has a grand vision of what poetry can be, and that’s certainly not a droopy, musing, self-indulgent expression of “feelings,” in which people with the strongest feelings make the strongest poetry, which is utter nonsense. Poetry for Wordsworth is the exercise of the body and mind, where words embody exploration and then words become the chunks of sound and sense that the poet sculpts into everlasting, lovely shape. All through The Prelude, William is climbing, swimming, horseback riding, chatting all night with strangers, walking the charged air of Paris during the Revolution, crowding the entrance to Parliament at a protest, walking the long sands of Wales and Cornwall, reading with a mind on fire, and thinking deeply about how all this can bring him into communion with us as we read him. That’s what he brings to the table in contrast to a resentful young man playing with the handle of his saber. 

Wordsworth wasn’t the only one to attempt to save the public space for richer conversations, nor was he the most committed to following the truer voices of the people. Poets such as William Crabbe, who had spent their lives ministering to the working classes out in the sticks, dedicated long, beautifully wrought work to their experiences. A poem like The Village shows the possibilities of talking very concretely about lives far outside the glamour of London society: 

Thus groan the old, till, by disease oppressed,
They taste a final woe, and then they rest.
Theirs is yon house that holds the parish poor,
Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;
There children dwell, who know no parents’ care,
Parents, who know no children’s love, dwell there;
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed;
Dejected widows with unheeded tears,
And crippled age with more than childhood-fears;

It’s not just that Crabbe’s poetry proudly avoids the musing, lazing, privileged perspectives of the famous Romantics, nor that he’s writing about the poor. Plenty of people wrote about the poor and, to keep on my rant about the power of the 18th-century “internet,” plenty of working class people were read very widely in British and American magazines. Crabbe, writing late in the century, still expected there to be the virtual space of The Gentleman’s Magazine and the periodicals by freshly minted commentators like Eliza Haywood in 1750, or in the vein of the bold new political writers like Mary Wollstonecraft in her two Vindications, one for “men” (1790) and one for “woman” (1792). The implication of Crabbe’s literary labor and well-wrought address to readers is that a social message could be couched in the form most attractive to the people of his time, and might change things. But Crabbe could only do this because he himself had been in these spaces, and had felt those feelings, been with those people. Of course, such writers are with us today as well, and they are also available on the internet, but I guess Wordsworth’s and Thoreau’s point was that these voices are always in danger of being crowded out, displaced. None of these worries are new, nor is it new to tell someone to take a break, walk in the woods, talk to real people, unplug. But what is valuable about the first internet is a vision of how complete, how imbued with power and substance it could yet be.

The Women Who Write Themselves Out of the Story

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

The narrator of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble (2019) first reveals herself, briefly, thirteen pages into the novel. Our protagonist Toby Fleishman—newly-divorced in New York City, encroaching on middle age, fielding an onslaught of dating app messages— discovers that without his ex-wife Rachel he no longer has “a natural first person to tell” the monumental and mundane details of his life. When Toby receives news at work, then, “he thought about calling me or Seth” instead, says our narrator—who turns out to be Libby Epstein, a friend of Toby’s from a semester abroad in college. The dip into first person catches the reader off guard: That “me” —weighty and metallic—hooks into the framework of the novel, anchoring Toby’s story to a specific, subjective presence.

Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Brodesser-Akner’s Libby exists within a tradition of effaced first-person observer-narrators: Nellie of Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy (1926), the collective chorus of Jeffery Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1993), and— perhaps most famously— Nick Carraway of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), to name a few. More specifically, though, she exists within a tradition of writer-narrators who are described as documenting the stories they report, rather than merely speaking out into the ether. Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) features such a narrator, as does James Alan McPherson’s wonderfully complex titular story from his 1977 collection Elbow Room. These narrators are working: Jewett’s Bostonian narrator relocates to coastal Maine to write sketches of the town’s residents; McPherson’s narrator endeavors to report a story about an interracial couple in the wake of Loving v. Virginia. In having specific writing projects, these narrators slyly assert their productive power. They spin other characters’ narratives, refashioning them until the stories inhabit new mediums. The texts become textiles. Look what I made, these narrators whisper to the reader from behind the page. Look how craftily I tied these threads together.

Libby, we learn, formerly worked at a men’s magazine before acquiescing to stay-at-home motherhood. She stands to the side for most of the novel’s beginning, allowing us to become wholly immersed in Toby’s crisis. Gradually though, her own project becomes clear. She describes a famous story written by the men’s magazine’s “in-house legend” Archer Sylvan, one that she regarded as seminal in her journalist days. The story, titled Decoupling, details the dissolution of a marriage, and we come to understand Fleishman is in Trouble as a reimagining of this fictional text. Libby describes the challenge Archer has posed for her, one that haunts her writerly ambitions:

When I became a professional writer, I tried to write like Archer: that way he had of releasing the valve of his anger slowly, tensely, beautifully so that his vortex of empathy, when sent through the prism of the anger, created a generalized disgust for the state of the world that seemed like the only conclusion a smart, thinking person could come to. 

Libby laments her failure to filter her own empathy through such a prism of anger. “I never landed on anger—” she explains,

I never ended a story there—and I think maybe that was where I failed. My empathy only created more empathy, which sounds good, yes, but was born of inherent cowardice. I was too scared to finish with anger. I was too scared to be wholly disgusted with my subjects… I was afraid to stay angry, to leave it all hanging out there with no resolution. I was afraid of seeming too hateful… only I knew it was actually a failure of bravery and will to be as compassionate as I was. 

Compassion, when saturated to such a degree, can have the effect of both absolving and obscuring a novel’s narrator. Like Libby, the writer-narrator of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy (unnamed until the novel’s final pages) tends toward obsessive empathy. In the trilogy’s first book, Outline (2014), the narrator sits on a plane bound for Athens, where she is to teach a writing course. She lingers over the flight attendants’ warning about securing one’s own oxygen mask before helping others: “No one protested, or spoke up to disagree with this commandment that one should take care of others only after taking care of oneself,” she observes. “Yet I wasn’t sure it was altogether true.” The metaphor goes on to govern the remainder of the novel: The narrator privileges her colleagues’ stories over her own, her patience and earnest interest luring their confessions to the surface. Meanwhile, she safeguards the story of her own marital collapse, rarely offering up details unprovoked.

Outline

Through their narrators, Brodesser-Akner and Cusk explore a type of empathy that is perhaps—historically, over-simplistically, binarily—specific to women. It’s an empathy that borders on martyrdom. Should a mother really leave a child or husband gasping for air as she fiddles with her own mask? It’s a test, isn’t it? The worlds of these novels, their authors seem to argue, expect these women to self-sacrifice in the end, to place the masks—doubling as megaphones—around others first. The men cannot be left to suffocate; the things they have left to say are too important. Fleishman’s Libby narrates a scene where Toby’s ex-wife tells him a story of her experience of workplace harassment, and Toby bristles—not at the injustice Rachel has suffered, but at “how not a part of this story he was.” He itches to reclaim his role as protagonist, and for the majority of the novel, Libby lets him. The vortex of empathy exerts its indomitable force.

I go on a date with a conventionally-attractive soil ecologist. The fact that being hot doesn’t gain him anything in his line of work—the fact that he spends his time out in fields alone, his head inclined down toward the earth as though in prayer, the poetry of it all—renders him all the hotter. I imagine he’s aware of his looks, how they chip against stereotype. I imagine it is this knowledge that lends him a sort of stunning confidence. He smooths his facial hair as he tells me about Iowa. He tells me about his lapsed Catholicism. He tells me about his ex-girlfriend in Mexico. He left his bicycle at her place, near where he conducts his fieldwork, and now he cannot reclaim it without risking a confrontation. I listen closely and am not annoyed by any of it. (I’m shocked by how I’m not annoyed by any of it.) He is generous, I decide, holding a magnifying glass up to himself. He invites me to consider him closely, as I would a specimen, and I oblige. 

The man Cusk’s narrator sits next to on her transnational flight is generous in this same way. He tells her about his first wife; he tells her about his second wife. She listens with an near-pathological degree of attention, and she’s caught off guard when, after much pontificating, he turns the conversation over to her. He asks what work she has brought with her to Athens. “I felt the conscious effort in his enquiry,” the narrator explains, “as though he had trained himself in the recovery of objects that were falling from his grasp.”

How freeing, though: to be an object falling from the grasp of a man. 

How freeing, to be an object falling from the grasp of a man. 

The ecologist describes to me the microorganisms present in Mexican topsoil. He explains their massive implications for our greater ecosystem. His work is meaningful, and I am—blessedly—off the hook. I need not flail around for reasons as to why what I do, why my writing, is important. Through his sermonizing, I come to believe that the story of topsoil is the story of all of us. I want to hold a megaphone up to him, to give his words more oxygen. We’re onto our second round of drinks before he flinches in recognition. He’s realized how little he’s asked me and is just the slightest bit ashamed. He tries to recover me as I fall from his grasp. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I’ve been blabbering. What is your relationship to soil?” 

Later in Outline, when the narrator’s seatmate invites her to spend the afternoon on his boat, she leaves him to swim out into the ocean alone. Freed from the threat of enquiry, she articulates the feeling of leaving the rocky shores of her past—the ruins of self-narration—behind:

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape what I had. The thread led nowhere, except into ever-expanding wastes of anonymity.

I, too, have felt that there is something soothing and thrilling in anonymity, in one-sided observation, in hoarding the stories of others. It’s this instinct that has led me to seek solace behind the scrim of fiction-writing. When I took a nonfiction workshop to fulfill my MFA program’s “out-of-genre” requirement, I found myself stunned by the courage of my peers. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to manage it, I thought to myself. This confessionalism. So allergic was I to the idea of writing about my own experiences, I wound up taking various interviews I’d conducted and collaging them into a theatrical script. Perhaps the project was a “failure of bravery,” to borrow Libby’s words, or perhaps it was something more dignified. I’m still not sure. I’m still anxious over what would happen if I were to write about myself. If I were to remain an object held within grasp, orbiting, recursive, every facet reflecting the same dumb parts of myself I’ve come to know too well. How to reorient myself around some foreign axis? I wonder. How to tilt myself so that I resemble something new?

Over the course of Fleishman is in Trouble, Libby struggles to regard her own ambitions as anything worth documenting. “God, what a fucking idiot I was,” she says. “My dreams were so small. My desires were so basic and showed such a lack of imagination… I had been so creative in every other aspect of my life; how I’d turned out so conventional and so very establishment was bewildering.” It’s this paradox that antagonizes the effaced narrator: Is it enough to be a sharp mind and keen eye if every other part of you remains unremarkable? “The women wear these yoga pants instead of regular pants and they yell at their children,” Libby tells her friends, describing moms at Disney World. “And then you realize you’re wearing yoga pants.” Can a narrator justifiably take up space in a story if she’s no less vapid than the subjects she skewers?

I’m still anxious over what would happen if I were to write about myself. If I were to remain an object held within grasp.

Libby’s solution to her basicness is to do away completely with the reductive shell of her body—the athleisure-clad body that resembles every other woman’s athleisure-clad body—and to “[impose her] narrative onto [the narratives of men], like in one of those biology textbooks where you can place the musculature picture over the bone picture of the human body.”

“Trojan horse yourself into a man,” she suggests, mutating the analogy slightly, “and people will give a shit about you.” 

In the last third of the novel, Libby indeed ends up Trojan-horsing not only her story, but also Rachel Fleishman’s into Toby’s narrative. It is important, though, that Libby doesn’t manage to build and utilize Archer Sylvan’s prism of anger; this narrative move is not a mean trick. No tunic-clad soldiers burst out from a wooden abdomen to attack Toby Fleishman. Libby’s choice to cede the last portion of the novel to Toby’s ex-wife Rachel isn’t an act of spite. It is important to acknowledge that Libby and Toby remain friends, that her final act— caring enough about Toby to prophesize his ending— is in fact an act born of compassion. 

It is important to know that I enjoy the company of the soil ecologist. That though we don’t end up together, we do go out again. What is my relationship to soil? I say something about neglecting to wash my carrots well. How I’ve heard it’s good for the microbiome. He nods in approval. It does not matter that this is the closest we might come to understanding one another, to finding common ground. In our own private ways, we’ve both made something meaningful of the encounter—he in the moment, recounting the minutiae of his life to a willing listener, and me, after the fact, spinning the threads of his narration into something new. Something warm that fits me and that I can wear long into the winter. 

“I would start to try again,” Libby promises herself at the novel’s end. “I would sit next to my children while they watched inane television shows and I would smell their heads and allow the hormones inherent to motherhood to wash through me.” In relinquishing her insecurities of sameness, Libby proves her own method of writerly empathy has paid off. She’s managed to let Toby remain a compelling protagonist, do justice to Rachel’s side of the story, and reveal that she herself isn’t as boring as she purports to be. “I would try to find peace with my regular life,” she vows. “Or maybe I would one day see that the regularness was actually quite extraordinary.”

We All Want Ma’s Oven Pan When She Dies

Posted on by Kelly Luce

Wishbone

The wishbone would be left to dry on a paper towel by the sink. Visual examination was permitted, but it was agreed one’s back should be against the kitchen island at all times. There would be no touching.

These rules alone took an hour to hash out. Joyce, the eldest of the East Coast siblings, thought they should be allowed to handle the bone under reasonable supervision from the opposing side. She came up with an elaborate schedule of handlers and supervisors, but Lee Kwang, the youngest of the West Coasters, insisted it would be too easy for a supervisor to accuse a handler of having broken the rules. Here the discussion was sidetracked by Betty—East—remarking it was unsurprising Lee Kwang would think that way, given her history of rule-breaking. Voices grew heated, the issue of Ma’s crystal swan figurine with the broken wing raised yet again, the old argument repeated.

She gave it to me, Lee Kwang said. It was a gift.

The East Coasters did not agree. Lee Kwang had broken the swan by accident when she was a child and had felt entitled to it ever since, just because Ma had told her it didn’t matter because she would have it ‘one day.’ When the swan disappeared from Ma’s display cabinets a year into her illness, there was uproar. The East Coast siblings guessed what happened at once, Joyce storming into Lee Kwang’s home uninvited, finding the incriminating swan on her kitchen table. The West Coast siblings defended Lee Kwang’s right to the swan, Ah Boon claiming he had been there when Ma bequeathed it to her.

You would say that, Betty said. We all know you’ve got your eye on the crystal poodle.

Other objects began disappearing from Ma’s flat: the faded watercolour of Venetian canals, a saucepot of delicate porcelain, an old, dusty Turkish lamp. Then things of greater consequence: lacquered side tables, Pa’s calligraphy brushes from when he was a boy, the ancient jumbo rice cooker that no longer worked but which Ma had kept for sentimental value.

The seeds of the rift had been sowed decades ago, before any of them had been born. The year was 1965. Singapore, independent at last. The newly installed government was on a spree, shutting down Chinese vernacular schools under the guise of beating Communism, setting up new English-medium ones in the name of new a nationalism. Ma and Pa were practical about things. Half of any children they had would be sent to the former, half to the latter. They would alternate: English, Chinese, English, Chinese, and so on. Six children later, the family was evenly split down the middle. And so, the East and West Coast divide was born. It would only be decades later that the divide would be named as such, the English-educated siblings having left their childhood neighborhood and moved to wealthier enclaves by the sea.

As they squabbled over weddings and money and perceived slights, the siblings still gathered each Sunday in Ma’s flat, the one-bedroom she’d moved into after Pa had died. For a couple of hours, they’d put their differences aside, sit around the large circular table laden with garlicky greens, fish steamed in chili and ginger, strips of pork belly that dissolved obscenely on the tongue. The siblings sat at their usual seats, steaming mounds of rice before them. They waited. Then, Ma would emerge with the oven pan, hands enormous in padded oven gloves, small biceps straining. It was her signature dish: a perfect, golden chicken. Skin done to a salty crisp that crackled between the teeth, tender white flesh that yielded its juices when prodded with a fork. The oven pan—red, cast iron, painted with scorch marks from years of chickens—was the very item the siblings were arguing over now, now Ma was far enough gone she no longer remembered their names or how to operate the stove.

The wishbone was dry and the visual examinations complete. It had come from a store-bought chicken they’d shared in surly silence. Each side picked their representatives: Joyce for the East, Lee Kwang for the West. Whoever won would get to choose first, thereby carrying off the the oven pan, the ultimate prize. The oven pan, of course, wasn’t the only thing up for grabs. From then on they would alternate: Ma’s favorite mug, the apron she wore when cooking, her gold reading glasses on a chain. Chairs with their threadbare seats. The stained dining table itself. The whole flat needed to be cleared out.

Joyce and Lee Kwang took up the bone. A shiver went through them. Reminded of all the times in their childhood they had assumed these very positions, arms outstretched, linked by the fragile joint. Reminded of what Ma had once told them: the wishbone held a bird’s clavicle together, pliable but strong, essential for flight.

Leslie Jamison Is Hauling Out Her Emotional Baggage

Posted on by Jo Lou

In Make it Scream, Make it Burn, Leslie Jamison returns to the essay form that first brought her to literary fame.

Buy the book

After graduating from the Iowa Writers Workshop, Jamison published a novel The Gin Closet. But it was her second book, The Empathy Exams, that won Jamison widespread acclaim. Debuting on the New York Times bestseller list, the collection of essays was praised for its unique blend of memoir, journalistic writing and criticism. Her follow-up memoir, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, explored her alcoholism and sobriety alongside popular narratives of recovery.

The 14 essays in her most recent collection reflect evolutions in Jamison’s interests and personal life. The subjects of the essays range from reincarnation to visiting post-war Sri Lanka to marriage and pregnancy. But across them all, Jamison returns to what anthropologists would call a stance of “self reflexivity.” Her book constantly asks what is the relationship of the researcher (or writer) to her subject? How does this relationship act upon and inform the subject, the writer and the writing itself?

In our email exchange, we dove into how the tools of fiction shape her essays and how profound meaning can—and indeed must—be found in the day-to-day.

Raksha Vasudevan: The book is divided into three parts: “Longing,” “Looking,” and “Dwelling.” As the book progresses, the essays become much more personal, with the last section exploring your grandfather’s death, your marriage, and pregnancy. How and why did you decide this time to begin with phenomena in the larger world, and then turn towards your own life?

Leslie Jamison: The flip cocktail-party answer to that question is that I was sick of myself and wanted a break from my own life—or at least, my life as material. But whenever I teach, I tell my students to dig beneath the topsoil of their cocktail-party answers (I also tell them not to mix metaphors!) and find the messier truth lurking underneath. So here I go, digging: I think that turning from introspection to the world beyond (as I did in The Empathy Exams), turning from the external world back to the self (as I do in this book), or shuttling back and forth between them (as I did in The Recovering, exploring addiction and sobriety) are all ways of illuminating the ways we bring our emotional baggage to the world, and bring the world back to our baggage—the ways we are always seeing other people, other art, even nature itself through the cracked lenses of our aches and longings. 

I tell my students to dig beneath the topsoil of their cocktail-party answers and find the messier truth lurking underneath.

In this book, it felt like a fruitful experiment to begin the collection with some of the longform reportage I’ve been doing for the past five years, and then confess some of the personal reckonings that were informing my reportorial obsessions: How was my interest in digital avatars as a form of escape connected to my feelings about domesticity and starting a family? How was my investigation of reincarnation connected to my broader obsession with the “past lives” of former relationships and the residue of breakups? 

Part of the pleasure of a collection is that you don’t need to spell out all these collections; you can let them live—and remain multiple, generative, simultaneous—in the arrangement itself. For the essays that were previously published, almost all of which were substantively revised anyway, I believe they become something differently layered when they are put in the echo chamber of the collection—in conversation with other pieces in this way. 

RV: The essay from which the collection takes its name focuses on James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” a book about tenant farmers during the Great Depression. You remark that the author himself “is tormented about what it finds beautiful”—something that could be said of you, the narrator in this book, whether you’re writing about your own body, a woman you meet on a layover who at turns irritates and moves you, or a museum dedicated to objects from failed relationships. Is it possible, in your opinion, to find (and write about) something beautiful without feeling some torment or ambiguity about it? 

LJ: It’s funny; I’m typing my answer to this (very smart!) question as I sit in a park near my home, with my first childcare in a week, watching a man slowly unfurl and then fly a kite bearing the Jamaican flag—green and yellow and black and red—with a long trail spelling J-A-M-A-I-C-A, and I was freshly struck by the primal awe of a kite: how it satisfies some deep human impulse, something slightly beyond language, to make something FLY. It does what we can’t.

I found myself speculating about this man’s story—fiction-writer at heart, always, I’d rather wonder than ask him—and whether he misses home, whether that’s why he’s flying this kite; why he’s alone on a Sunday afternoon (as I am, too). Point being: I can’t seem to find a way of encountering or writing about this beauty without somehow providing the chiaroscuro of darker tones: homesickness, aloneness. Why is that? Why does beauty invite torment or ambiguity? There’s an aesthetic imperative here, sure, some version of Newton’s Third Law of Motion: For every beauty, there exists an equal and opposite force…That somehow it would be unsatisfying or too easy to simply let beauty stand unencumbered; that it requires some darkness to be compelling. But I think it’s ultimately about honesty rather than aesthetics.

When I’m finding the pain in the beauty—the heartbreak underneath the beautiful relics of love, the difficult and messy real lives behind the glossy online paradise, the residue of civil war lurking behind the Sri Lankan tourism industry—it’s less about craft, and more about recognizing that essential truth: No beauty exists in isolation. It’s all dappled with pain like shadows on grass. 

RV: In the essay about Annie Appel, who kept returning to Mexico to photograph a family over 25 years, you make this observation about artists like her: “photographers who take ordinary people as their subjects and insist on the importance of their ordinary lives.” Was that also a guideline for choosing the subjects of this collection? Has this imperative—to center “the importance of ordinary lives”—changed over the past few years, in light of recent political events (where “extreme” characters and views garner much of the attention)?

LJ: It’s certainly part of what compelled me about Annie’s work—that her photographs document an ordinary family, and that everything that feels infinite about her work is a testament to the infinitude of any given ordinary life. I believe in that infinitude absolutely. That’s certainly part of why I find myself documenting regular folks—regular folks obsessed with a whale, regular folks creating online lives, regular folks donating their toasters to a Croatian breakup museum. It’s an idea that was at the core of my last book, too: The Recovering explores how “ordinary” stories help people stay sober not despite their ordinariness but because of it.

It seems like we’ve accepted the premise that fiction can be about ordinary lives—and still hold meaning, profundity, etc.—much more readily than we’ve accepted it in nonfiction, where there’s still some idea that it’s hubristic to write about your life if you haven’t, like, died in six car crashes. I think it’s fascinating to put this idea—about the significance of ordinary lives—into a political context: so many politicians appeal to the “common man,” or position themselves as his advocate, but you are absolutely right that the news cycle inevitably caters toward extremity. Maybe this is part of the role literary writing can play in the ecosystem of all our cultural narratives: it can direct its gaze toward quieter lives, for more sustained periods, and find their truths, too. 

RV: Another recurring theme in this collection is letting your subjects—even yourself—subvert the narrative you anticipated they would slot into. Consistently, you anticipate certain reactions from yourself and others, and end up with quite different ones. Is this for you the most exciting thing —this subversion of expectations—that an essay can do?  

LJ: I love surprise. I used to struggle with the fact that an ex-boyfriend told me he was “rarely surprised by anything,” which made me insane because I wanted to surprise him AND because it felt like such a cloistered way to live. The comedian Kyle Kinane has a great bit about burning his own laundry and not even knowing it was possible to burn his own laundry, and partway through he tosses off this little bit of earnest profundity that most comedians wouldn’t be caught keeping hidden in their pockets but he just openly owns: “All a miracle is the world letting you know it can still surprise you.” (h/t Mishka Shubaly, a wonderful writer and another guy breaking down boundaries between funny and profound…). It’s so beautiful! And so true! And such a weird, optimistic thing for a comedian to say! In a weird way, the fact that it’s surprising to hear him say it makes it an enactment of precisely what he’s describing. 

In any case, as a writer, surprise is one of my holy grails. I know I’m on the right track when I surprise myself during the course of my reporting/remembering/revising. Often, I like to keep the fossils of my own expectations layered into the piece, so that the surprise is something that the text actually dramatizes, rather than simply a secret history buried inside of it. I like the essay to confess that I thought it was going to be an essay all about my drunk air force pilot grandfather, but it ended up becoming about my suburban father/brother instead…or that I thought I was going to be ruthlessly skeptical about folks with past life memories, but ended up feeling a kind of tenderness toward their beliefs. Illuminating the arc of surprise across a piece is one of the most satisfying intellectual plotlines available to the essay, I think. 

And now the Jamaican kite has fallen to the grass! The man is struggling to make it fly it again, but it keeps falling down—and this, of course, is where the heart of the essay lives: in the falling kite, rather than the flying kite; in the ways the story takes another turn. 

RV: Pain is another theme of both your last essay collection and this one: the ways we bear it, try to escape or ignore it, and sometimes even long for it. In the essay on Second Life, for example, you write about a woman with multiple sclerosis who rides waterslides and another with bipolar illness who rides horses through a virtual Yosemite. But in writing about your eating disorder and your pregnancy, you discuss the relief that these particular types of suffering both induced. What fuels your ongoing urge to write about pain? And what is it, in your opinion, about the nature of pain that births all these diverse reactions or emotions?  

No beauty exists in isolation. It’s all dappled with pain like shadows on grass.

LJ: Yes! This is a beautiful observation. We seek ways to escape pain, but it also—often—offers an ineffable kind of relief. It can consolidate us. Part of that consolidation resides in the fact that we get a sense of ourselves and our edges from pain; we exist in it. But I think it’s naïve and sort of blind to talk too much about what’s generative or appealing about pain without acknowledging that most of the time—and certainly in the most extreme cases—it’s just painful. Randall Jarrell said it pretty well in 90 North: “Pain comes from the darkness / And we call it wisdom. It is pain.” So sometimes you just want to build an online world and ride its waterslides. Or go skinny-dipping at night.

In an essay called “Young Adult Cancer Story,” the wonderful writer (and my dear friend!) Briallen Hopper writes, “pain makes demands, but being felt is not always one of them.” This is an essay about taking care of a good friend with terminal cancer, and living through what they called “The Summer of Care and Delight,” just after her diagnosis: drinking vinho verde, re-watching Mystic Pizza, driving down Alabama backroads with an open bag of hot Atomic Fireballs between them…I love that notion, as a writer and a human being, that we can document pain not only in terms of the price it exacts from us, but in terms of the beauty it inspires us toward. 

RV: Part of what makes your writing so compelling is that you are comprehensively honest about your judgements and thoughts towards situations and characters, especially when those reactions might be considered shameful. Do you think this can ever go too far? That is to say, can an essayist ever be too honest?

LJ: There’s a brief scene in the final essay in the collection—“The Quickening,” which is a piece about pregnancy and anorexia but really about longing and expansion, how and when we permit ourselves those states—where I recount a man in my first nonfiction workshop who said, in response to one of my pieces, “Is there such a thing as too much honesty? I find it incredibly difficult to like the narrator of this essay?” In the piece, I’m using this comment to explore the divide between the “unlikable” woman who is too obsessed with her own pain, and the “likable” woman who is gracefully gestating another life. But it’s also a way of thinking about the shame of being “too much,” a shame that the essay is reckoning with from a thousand directions, and one of the things I’ve been trying to reckon with my whole life: the fear of having too much body, too much need, too much pain on the page. Part of what was fascinating to me about pregnancy was that it felt like a state in which the cultural script finally—for once—not just accepted but mandated that I be “too much”: that I eat as much as I wanted, that I make my body large.

Which is all to say: I’m quite interested in the dynamics of excess, and what it even means to call a narrator or an essayist “too honest.” What veins of discomfort inspire that critique? I’m suspicious of the sweet spot of honesty that grants the texture of revelation without really risking anything. I like Phillip Lopate’s dictum on confessional writing: “the trouble with most confessional writing is that it doesn’t confess enough.” I think often, for me, the material or judgments that feel shameful also hold important truths—which doesn’t mean you disclose them for the sake of disclosing them, but you might be able to follow them to generative insights. 

RV: In all of your writing, your recall of detail—around setting, what you ate, what you and others looked like—is remarkable. Do you keep a diary? Do you keep it with the intention or potential for using the details in your essays?

LJ: Whenever I’m reporting, I take meticulous notes. This partially comes from my background as a fiction writer: I’m obsessed with world-building, visceral specificity, and the small details that pull together a scene or a character: the purple hair scrunchies and bent spoons of this life. The fiction writer who wants to have access to all those details is constantly coaxing the reporter—immersed in the scene itself—to take better notes, so I’ll have it all available to me when I write.

How do we relate to our own longings? How are we defined by the things we don’t have? How are we shaped by our fantasies as well as our realities?

In terms of lived experience, I have kept a diary—inconsistently, but ongoingly—for much of my adult life. I’d say my diary has definitely become less wholly abstract, and more populated with concrete details, over the course of my life. That’s less about intentionally wanting to mine my diaries for details down the road, and more about the ways I noticed that putting down concrete specifics—what I ate for breakfast, what I saw on the side of the highway—meant my diaries captured the world (and even, often, my mood in the world) more fully than when I stayed ruthlessly interior. When I talked to Chris Kraus for Interview Magazine a few years ago, she and I had an exchange about precisely this phenomenon, the impulse to make your diary more exterior and concrete. I loved how she described the diary as a kind of self-reporting: “I realized that a diary is a kind of report—or self-reporting. And if you report, you have to give details.”

And now the Jamaican kite is back up! Higher than it’s been at any other time this afternoon, maybe a hundred or two hundred feet up—as high as a high-rise. And it’s not that I know what it’s a metaphor for—just “things can fly again, even after they’ve fallen?” Could it be that simple?—and more that I’m interested in transcribing it—the kite going up tentatively, coming back down, going up again—and maybe later these details will arrive in service of some question I’m reckoning with. Sometimes it’s liberating to just transcribe the world and let the meaning filter in later. 

RV: In your essay on visiting Sri Lanka, you quote a journalist who says he would only go to Jaffna, the city at the heart of the 30-year civil war if he felt “useful” doing so. This idea of utility runs throughout the collection: the utility of writing and art, of witnessing and telling ourselves stories about what we’ve witnessed. How do you think about usefulness or utility in relation to this book specifically? What purpose do you hope it serves?

LJ: The great anxiety! What good is writing, anyway? Or rather, what good is this writing? How is it useful? There’s a particular kind of utility that the journalist in Sri Lanka was referencing—in terms of active contribution to social justice—that I think it would be naïve to pretend like my literary essays were really making a dent in.

But yes, I think about usefulness. And yes, I hope this book is useful. I hope it invites people to think about certain ideas in new ways: Where do we find surprising sources of solace and community? How do we relate to our own longings? How are we defined by the things we don’t have? How are we shaped by our fantasies as well as our realities? How does it shape us—challenge us, terrify us, inspire us—to show up for daily intimacy? Ultimately, I’ll always be a bit of a romantic when it comes to literature, because I’m such a devoted and desperate reader—I need books. I crave their company. I crave their disruptions. And my belief in the utility of my own work is a function of that craving: If I could just write something that offered some fraction of the grace I’ve felt as a reader, that would be enough.

An Agent Explains the Ins and Outs of Book Deals

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Everyone wants to write a book, or to say they have written a book. Publishing a book is still an honor, a point of pride—but like pretty much everything else, it’s also dependent upon a capitalist business model. And the financial side of publishing can be opaque, unfair, and downright contradictory. Combined with the distinctly American habit of not wanting to sully talk of artistry with talk of money, this means that many people who want to make writing their full-time career have no idea how the money part of writing actually works. In this TED talk I will answer some of the most common questions I get as a literary agent about the money side of things. I will try not to make it too depressing. 

Note: this information is based on the American traditional book market, and won’t necessarily apply to other countries, or to self-publishing. 

How much money am I going to get for my very, very good book?

This is the single most common question I get from my clients, and other people when they find out I’m a literary agent, and I respond with a very infuriating “$5,000 to $50,000.” Most times, though, I’m right! I have sold books for both more and less than those amounts, and to be fair, there are many genres where I can estimate a much smaller spread. But the total advance depends on so many things, including the quality of the work, the sales potential of the work (not the same thing!), the author’s platform and/or previous sales, the zeitgeist, the “market,” how many  other editors are interested (if any), how similar books have performed for the publisher and/or other publishers, and many, many other things. Because there are so many factors, there’s no “average” book advance. $1,000 is rare. $1,000,000 is also rare. 

What does it mean when you say “advance?”

Because there are so many factors, there’s no ‘average’ book advance.

A book deal is not patronage for your sheer talent, or even direct compensation for the hours you have toiled to create the book. It is an advance against what the publisher thinks your book will earn. The publisher takes a financial risk on your work. If your book doesn’t sell well, you don’t have to pay it back—the publisher assumes that risk. But you do have to sell that much in books to earn anything more on top of that. 

Oh, is that what royalties are?

Yes, royalties are what you get when you “earn out” your advance. You earn a percentage of each book sale, and that adds up against your total advance. When you earn more than that, you get royalties. Here’s how that works. (Math incoming.) 

A common royalty rate is 10% of the cover price of the book. If your book retails for $25, then you earn $2.50 a book. (There are different rates for different formats and you can negotiate higher royalty rates, to a point.) If you get a $10,000 advance, you have to sell 4,000 copies of the book to earn any more money (10000/2.5 = 4000). There are many books that do not sell 4,000 copies and plenty of books that do. 

When can I quit my job?

You probably can’t! You’ll see why soon.

When will I actually get money?

Your advance will be broken up into several payments, anywhere from two to four depending on how big your advance is, how you negotiate, etc. First, you’ll get a portion after you sign the contract. Having your agent review and vet your contract, signing it, getting it countersigned by the publisher and waiting for the publisher to send your check can take several months. Then you’ll likely get a portion when you are finished writing AND editing, editing again, and editing some more. This could also be months after your contractual delivery date, which could be six months to a year after you sign the contract. You may then get another portion when the book is published, which is almost always about a year after you deliver the manuscript. Even if you got an $100,000 advance, you might get $33,333 when you sign the contract, but after agent commissions and taxes (YMMV), you’ll probably net a little less than $20,000, and you might not get another check for a year.

Sooooo when do royalties checks come?

Royalties are calculated and paid out every six months, but according to a fixed schedule that differs from publisher to publisher. For example, one major publisher sends their royalties out in April and October. The April statement and money (if any) covers books sold from July to December of the previous year. The October statement and payment covers sales made from January to June. Yep! Statements are about 4 months old when you get them.

You have got to be kidding me.

Nope! It’s true! Publishing is a consignment business. That means a wonderful place like Books Are Magic can order, say, 1,000 copies of the fantastic novel The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow (just to pick a random book with a great agent!), and if they only sell 955 of them, after a while, they can send the remaining 45 back to the publisher.  These are called “returns” (for obvious reasons), and publishers have to wait for them to come back before they pay the author royalties, or they’ll overpay everyone all the time and go bankrupt. 

Oh, is that why I can’t find out how many books I sold hour by hour, like how you can see website traffic and stuff?

Yes! There isn’t a single book-tracking entity that reports all books sales from every retail outlet and makes that available to everyone. There is something called BookScan, but it’s imperfect at best and infuriating at worst (getting into why would be a whole other article). The publisher can see the sales of their own books, but they don’t (yet, fingers crossed) have robust and detailed author portals to share that kind of information. 

If I don’t earn out my advance, will I ever sell another book?

Earning out does not dictate whether you’ll sell another book, for better and worse. Publishers do look at that, and earning out, or getting respectably close to it, does factor into their decision-making, but it also matters if your book is good, has sales potential (not the same thing!), how your platform has improved (or not), the zeitgeist, the “market,” how similar books have performed, etc., you get the picture. Once you have a book and a sales track record publishers will consider that in making future decisions about your work, but it’s not earn out or GTFO.

Okay, but can’t I just write 16 books at the same time and then make a living wage?

You probably can’t. There are clauses in a book contract that prevent you from directly competing with your own work and something called an option clause that gives your publisher dibs on your next book, but only after you’re done with the first. It’s complicated. That’s why you probably want an agent (but of course I’m biased). There’s good reason for this, though. If you have a dedicated fanbase, they’ll only be willing or able to buy one of your books at a time. And your fanbase, such as it is, is your strongest market.

Publishing is not a meritocracy. ‘Good’ books don’t get the most money.

But what about that person over there? THEY got a huge advance and my book is way better than theirs.

I know, right? It sucks. But publishing is not a meritocracy. “Good” books don’t get the most money. Besides, what you think is great, someone else thinks is crap. There’s a book out there for every reader, and that’s how it should be, in my opinion. 

Shouldn’t I just write some crappy **~~*commercial**~~* book and cash in?

If you want to? But “cashing in” and “book publishing” don’t usually go hand in hand. If you’ve gotten this far, you can probably see why.

Why does anyone write anyway?

Because people, writers, readers, interior designers, love books. Books are the best. There should always be more books. You just aren’t going to get rich from them.

Fall 2019 Horoscopes for Writers

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

After an emotionally torrid summer, this fall settles down (somewhat). Libra, Scorpio, and Sagittarius season are on deck as we get back to work and dig up those projects that may have taken a beat to allow for vacations, mental and otherwise. 

Fall is busy for writers. We’ve got the last Mercury retrograde of the year, traipsing through Scorpio October 31–November 20, which will offer all of us the opportunity to review, renew, revise, rethink, redo. Anything with a re in front of it: that’s the key to working with, and not against, retrograde energy. (But also: back up your hard drive.) We’ve also got lucky, expansive Jupiter changing signs at the tail end of Sagittarius season, right before the winter solstice. If there’s an area of your life that’s been particularly blessed or big this year, chances are good Jupiter was involved. 

What does this fall have in store for you, and for the work? Read more to find out. 

P.S. If you’re into learning more about the nitty gritty of what goes on every other week, you can sign up for my astrology newsletter, geared to writers and creatives: astrology for busy bitches.

Aries symbol

ARIES

If the summer was about creative inspiration and getting a handle on your daily routines, this fall is all about partnership and shared resources—and what you can build with and through them. Libra season, in particular, puts the spotlight on your most committed relationships—romantic and business. As writers, we get into bed with people by way of contracts all the time: literary agents, publishing houses. Who are you in partnership with, and why, and what kinds of resources are both of you bringing to the table? A full moon in your own sign on October 13 puts particular emphasis on making sure that your individual needs are being respected in any ongoing negotiations. 

Meanwhile, Jupiter, that big ol’ planet of bounty and good fortune, is finishing its year-long trek through your zone of travel, education, long-term journeys, and—most notably—publishing. Have you taken advantage of this extra boost, Aries? If you haven’t, be sure to pitch your ass off this fall—especially after Jupiter finally and fully clears Neptune in the week following September 21. It’s clear skies from late September through early December, when Jupiter enters Capricorn and your zone of career and public image. Get ready to take that pitching energy you worked on during Jupiter in Sagittarius and put some long-term strategy behind it. This is an entirely new glow-up coming your way, one that will hopefully capitalize on the advances you’ve made in the realm of publishing and/or education this year. 

Aries writer inspo: Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Maya Angelou

Taurus symbol

TAURUS

For you, Taurus, this summer was about creative nesting: about really refining your relationship to your regular writing schedule and to your nearest and dearest—the folks you let into that inner circle when you’re in the thick of imagining. As we move into fall, the emphasis moves to a more expanded vision of your daily routines: how you’re taking care of your body, and how that subsequently impacts your partnerships and the resources you share and create within those partnerships. You feel and create from your body more than most, and making sure that you have a schedule and routine (however limited or liminal) that keeps you in your ideal state of being is the focus as we enter Libra season. The full moon in your own sign on November 12, during Scorpio season, puts an emphasis on how you can reclaim time and energy for yourself, even in the midst of an energetic wave of focus on the other. 

Meanwhile, Jupiter—the most expansive planet in the galaxy, where we find our luck and fortune—wraps up its journey through your zone of shared resources. Sagittarius season puts a particular point on whatever issues around shared intimacies you’ve been working through this year. It’s hard to be vulnerable, especially in business, but if you used this energy to your benefit, then there was a lot to gain. And this will help you as we move into 2020. In early December, Jupiter enters Capricorn and your house of publishing, education, and long-term journeys. What projects are ready to move to center stage, Taurus? 

Taurus writer inspo: Angela Carter, Adrienne Rich, Louise Gluck

Gemini symbol

GEMINI

Summer was about the fundamentals: getting your money, everyday communication, and home in order. Fall? That’s where you see the payoff, Gemini: how getting the everyday essentials in order sets you up for creative success. This fall highlights your creative energy, how that funnels into your work routines, and then—finally—how you manage all of those things in your committed partnerships. There is a transition in this season, for you, from considering your individual needs—what you require for the writerly life you want—to an expanded bigger picture (cause you’ve been growing, growing, growing). What does that look like when you bring people like editors, agents, and writing groups into the fold? How does your creative energy blend with, nurture, and perhaps even challenge those around you? On a very pragmatic level, Gemini, how has your creative growth this year impacted your personal relationships? These are all questions that will come up for you this fall—and success lies in the road directly chosen and communicated. A full moon in your own sign on December 12 highlights this choice. 

But then, you’ve had some practice this year at considering your own needs both with and against the demands of partnership—professional and otherwise. Jupiter, the largest, luckiest, most expansive planet in the sky, has been traipsing through your opposite sign of Sagittarius and, consequently, your zone of committed partnerships. Perhaps you’ve seen some luck in the realm of folks wanting to partner with you long-term on professional, creative projects; perhaps this has manifested in a more personal way. Jupiter is at home in Sag, where it can do so much good if we work with its energy consciously: you’ve got until December 2 to take advantage of this transit before Jupiter enters Capricorn and your zone of shared resources, where new blessings and challenges (and perhaps, even, a book deal) await. 

Gemini writer inspo: Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Erdrich, Jamaica Kincaid

Cancer symbol

CANCER

Summer is your season, all about renewing yourself as a snake sheds its skin. You get to reconsider your sense of value (and what you value); you take another look at how you best communicate. And then, before you know it, we move to fall, where it’s still all about your individual needs, but where we press deeper. Where that work you’ve done around identity and value provides the building blocks for any changes that need to happen around the home (Libra), for a renewal in creative energy (Scorpio), for how your daily routines may need to find a little more room to breathe to fit this new self you’re building (Sagittarius). Fall is about praxis; it’s about putting the version of you that you want to build into practice. Easier said than done. 

There are blessings to be found in this work, if you accept the journey ahead. Jupiter, that big, beneficent bringer of blessings, has been sifting through your daily routines and your relationship to your own body: what do you quite literally, physically, require for daily success, whatever “success” means to you? How can you best support yourself? This is the question Jupiter asks. In Sagittarius, Jupiter has been home and consequently particularly powerful; we all have until December 2 to work with this Jupiter in Sag energy before Jupiter moves into Capricorn and your zone of committed partnerships for the next year. What 2020’s Jupiter transit will bring for you, who can say: perhaps new agreements or renewals in your most important relationships, perhaps—if you’re in the market—a new partnership with someone who is just as committed to your career as you are. Focus on laying the track now. 

Cancer writer inspo: Jhumpa Lahiri, June Jordan, Lucille Clifton

Leo symbol

LEO

For you, Leo, summer is complicated: you move from a deeply contemplative state in Cancer season to complete and utter buoyancy in your birthday season to and how do we put everything together and reshape our values? in analytical Virgo. If you’ve been feeling it lately, there’s a reason why! But fall moves you further into that stage of building or, perhaps, rebuilding: of considering what kind of communication most feeds you, what kinds of workspaces—and work/life boundaries—you need in the home, and then, at last, how you can best work with your creative energy. Everyone’s life is individual, of course, but these are major themes that are on the table for you as the days get shorter. 

The big story this fall is that Jupiter, the planet of big faith and big luck, is wrapping up its journey through Sagittarius and your zone of creative and erotic energy. If you’ve had big ideas—and a correspondent thirst for inspiration—this year, that’s where that energy is coming from. This energy is a huge blessing for the artistically inclined, especially for short-term flings and generative new directions you’d never before considered. You’ve got until December 2 to take advantage of this transit, when Jupiter goes into Capricorn (your zone of daily routines and health) and asks you to take a serious look at what is and isn’t working when it comes to your physical body and its relationship to your work. 

Leo writer inspo: James Baldwin, Beatrix Potter, Alexander Chee

Virgo symbol

VIRGO

Fall is about moving through the deep internal work you’ve been doing around your communities and subconscious patterns and into a renewed sense of self: how are you using the information you gained over the summer to transform your sense of value, your communication patterns, and your very conception of home? These are foundational questions, Virgo, that may not always be explicitly about the writing but that deeply inform the writing: an ever aware and evolving understanding of self—and the foundations on which you build your life—is what lends a sense of stability to your ever growing body of work. 

So: home. Let’s talk about that. If you’ve had changes around your home that felt more inspirational than oh fuck, that was Jupiter, sifting through the base of your chart throughout this entire year. This may have felt sensitive—planets, no matter how lovely, pushing on this particular zone usually bring up tender things. But you’ve had opportunities to bring changes to your home that serve who you are now: what are you creating for yourself? These changes could have manifested physically, by moving or redecorating a home office, or conceptually, by working through deep-seated beliefs around your ideas of home and family. And the transit isn’t done: Jupiter will be in Sagittarius until December 2, when they move into Capricorn and your zone of abundant (if structured) creative and erotic energy. Yes. 

Virgo writer inspo: Mary Oliver, Leslie Feinberg, Stephen King

Libra symbol

LIBRA

Happy birthday, Libra! You are probably ready to take a load off, because for you, Libra, summer has been all about the work. Whether getting work done, networking your ass off, or working through some of your most subconscious, self-sabotaging patterns, you’ve been at it. And now, with the fall equinox, we officially enter your season. This is all about taking the lessons from summer and sifting through what works, and what doesn’t: what career goals and friendships serve who you are, now, and who you most want to be—and how are those informed (and challenged) by your roots? As we move deeper into fall, you’ll take these fundamental questions to your sense of value—which may also impact your money-making—as well as your daily communication habits. The end of the year is about shedding, shifting, and realigning. A new moon in your own sign on September 28 brings an opportunity to particularly powerful intentions for the months ahead. 

What have you learned about setting intentions within the last year, Libra? With Jupiter in Sagittarius in your zone of daily communication, you’ve had a crash-course reminder in how our words have power: what we say to ourselves, about ourselves, is, truly, what we believe—and what will come to pass. So… what are you saying these days? What are you writing? What are you putting out there, into the universe? Make this manifestation happen as Jupiter wraps up this transit; it’ll enter Capricorn and your zone of home on December 2, where you’ll take what you’ve learned about the extraordinary magic of small daily routines and apply it to your nest. 

Libra writer inspo: Oscar Wilde, Zadie Smith, Nora Roberts

Scorpio symbol

SCORPIO

Did you get a lot of work done this summer, Scorpio? This summer lit up your zones of publishing, career, and professional networks—if you were open to working with that energy, then you’re seeing a payoff now, as your birthday season dawns and brings with it a time of shedding and rebirth. Some folks are less comfortable with the deep, subconscious dive that some seasons demand of them, but let’s be real: you love this. You live for this. You are energized by this: by working through the deep subconscious—even facing those fears—and coming out the other side, in a new skin that suits the creative individual you are ever becoming. There’s a reason Scorpios are associated with the phoenix. You rise, and rise, and rise again. (Take a minute on October 27 to enjoy the new moon in your own sign.) 

While you’re in the process of being in process, you’re also being asked to consider your relationship to value and, specifically, money. Jupiter, that big, beneficent planet of expansion, has been traipsing through your financial sector, probably bringing you some wonderful money-making opportunities over the last year but also asking you to get right with your budget. Are you charging your worth, Scorpio? On another level, Jupiter is often thought of as a blessing, but it can also blow things out of proportion—say, in the realm of over-spending. If you need to get back on track, you’ve got until December 2 to use this energy; then, Jupiter moves onward to Capricorn and your zone of those daily communications that need tending. Is it time for a new writing routine? Jupiter in Capricorn says probably.

Scorpio writer inspo: Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman

Sagittarius symbol

SAGITTARIUS

You’ve had a year, Sag. The last few months of summer have been all about translating your resources into publishing opportunities that buff up your public image and move your career forward. But fall brings a bit of a slowdown: the opportunity to invest in the community that supports the work (and let them invest in you). However, it’s also time to invest in yourself. For you, the further we get into fall, the more it’s about dreaming: about tapping into your subconscious, about reflecting on the lessons you’ve learned this year, and then—when your birthday season arrives in November—translating those insights into a renewed sense of self. A new moon in your own sign on November 26 marks your new year. 

But then, you’ve been enjoying a renewed sense of self all year already: Jupiter, the biggest, most inspirational planet in the sky, has been traveling through your own expansive, freedom-loving sign of Sagittarius, bolstering you as you expand your conception of self. Jupiter has been home here in Sag, and particularly powerful; if you’ve still got some work to do around shedding what doesn’t serve and establishing what does, you’ve got until December 2, when Jupiter enters Capricorn. Here, at the very end of 2019 and throughout almost all of 2020, Jupiter will turn its lucky focus toward your money and overall sense of value. Get ready for a shakeup. 

Sagittarius writer inspo: Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Joan Didion

Capricorn symbol

CAPRICORN

If you’ve been a little obsessed with how your partnerships—romantic and business—fuel your resources, there’s a reason: astrologically, that was what summer was all about for you. Major eclipses in Cancer and your own sign of Capricorn set off chains of events that will continue to unfold over the next few years. As we turn to fall, your focus is how the work you’ve been doing on yourself and also on your most committed relationships impacts your career. For you, Libra season kicks off a renewed season of focusing on your career and public image, and you carry that energy into how you invest in your community and professional networks—and also yourself. As fall trails into early winter, you get quiet; you go deep. All of these big projects, big plans, big career moves: what’s the foundation for them? 

You’ve been thinking a lot about how the behind-the-scenes impacts that perpetually having-your-shit-together persona that you like to project, Cap. Jupiter, the planet of expansion and faith and luck, has been traveling through your most psychic, subconscious zone: in many ways, the quietest part of your chart, but also the most potentially disruptive. Here lives all the long-buried secrets; all the shit you don’t want to have to deal with. But if you’ve worked with this energy this year, Cap, if you’ve done the damn thing, then Jupiter has blessed that work. And you’ll see the benefits when Jupiter goes into your own sign of Capricorn on December 2. The very end of 2019 and most of 2020 will bring all kinds of opportunities through other folks seeing you—really seeing you—and rocking with what you’re putting out in the world. 

Capricorn writer inspo: Zora Neale Hurston, Patricia Highsmith, Susan Sontag

Aquarius symbol

AQUARIUS

How have you revised your daily routines, your expectations, your relationship to your resources—especially the ones you share? That was summer’s focus for you; as we move into Libra season and, with it, the first light of autumn, your task is to translate these renewed and refined everyday habits into Big Work. Publishing opportunities? Coming your way, if you’re willing to put in the work. The writing you do in the next few months may be different than what you started the year expecting, but that’s okay; here, in the depth of fall, what feeds your vision for your career and long-term legacy is what’s on the table. Low-hanging fruit isn’t what you’re here for. You’ll take the deep work that requires you to be rigorously self-aware. That’s where the gems are.  

Your community is here to support you as you do this work, Aquarius. Jupiter is home in Sagittarius and your zone of community, and it’s been a particularly blessed time for y’all, as Jupiter absolutely loves helping us out when it comes to friendships and professional networks. If you’ve had opportunities come to you through people you know—and especially from people you’ve been building relationships with in recent years—that’s all Jupiter, creating pathways of ease between the personal and the professional. This transit doesn’t end until December 2—it’ll be all systems go until then, when Jupiter enters Capricorn and your most dreamy, subconscious zone and takes a lot of this year’s energy deep, into a time of reflection. 

Aquarius writer inspo: Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison

Pisces symbol

PISCES

If summer was about digging up new sources of creative inspiration to introduce into your daily routines, then fall is about expanding the vision: considering the resources you share with other people, deciding which stories to tell and why, looking at the long-term vision. You move from your individual concerns to more social concerns as the days get shorter, Pisces; you’re thinking not only about how your work feeds you but also how it works in the public and perhaps even for the public. No writer is an island; the work exists in conversation, if you put it out there. (And you want to put it out there.) 

You’re more aware of this than ever, in part due to expansive Jupiter in Sagittarius lighting up your zone of career and public image. But here’s the thing: though you may crave emotional connection and understanding as a person, when it comes to your career, you want freedom. You don’t want to feel penned in or tied down, which may have caused some hiccups over the last year as you gain more professional prominence. But there’s a silver lining to this, Pisces. On December 2, Jupiter moves into Capricorn for a year-long journey through your zone of professional networks and community. After a year of bringing new career opportunities to your door, you focus on building your community. Who do you want to do the work WITH, long-term? This is a year where you figure out who you want to really build with, and opportunities feed your need for freedom while building your brand. 

Pisces writer inspo: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anais Nin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Best Books Under the Bigtop

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Couldn’t get your tickets to the greatest show on earth? Don’t worry, we saved you a seat. In these circus books, you’ll find death-defying stunts, powerful beasts, and sideshow performers who aren’t always what they seem. With daring, danger, and cotton candy around every corner, you’ll need to hold onto your top hat to get through these exciting books.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Le Cirque du Rêves is only open from sunset to sunrise, but the drama continues all day long at this traveling circus. Dueling magicians Celia and Marcus have been raised to be enemies, and the circus is their battleground. But when the two young spell-casters fall in love, their lives–and the lives of everyone else in the circus–are suddenly at stake.

The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler

When a young librarian receives an ancient book inscribed with his grandmother’s name, he immediately plummets head-first into a world of family secrets, magic, and mermaids. When he discovers a curse that has haunted generations of circus-performer women in his family, the librarian must untangle the mysteries of his family’s past before it’s too late.

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

Narrated by Oly, a bald, albino, hunchbacked dwarf, this novel tells the story of a couple who sets out to bear only “circus freak” children. Through the use of both legal and illegal drugs, and other dangerous materials, the Binewskis manage to give birth to a family whose anatomy ensures them success at any circus—but who also, perhaps unsurprisingly, have slightly more than the regulation amount of boiling family resentment. Katherine Dunn turns a carnival mirror to her audience in this dark, funny, and hugely original read.

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

When a Florida family’s gator-wrestling theme park falls into disarray, it’s up to Ava, the youngest daughter, to save the day. With her mother ill, her father gone, her sister tied up in a spooky love affair, and her brother defecting to a rival theme park, Ava must travel through a magical, dangerous swamp called the Underworld in order to hold on to the life she knows.

Image result for museum of extraordinary things

The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman

In turn-of-the-century Coney Island, young Coralie lives with her father above a museum of oddities. When Coralie’s father begins displaying her in the museum as a mermaid, she forms bonds with the other so-called freaks on display. One night, while out for a swim, Coralie happens upon a young Russian immigrant with a camera and quickly becomes embroiled in a mystery involving a missing girl and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire that sets Coralie’s life into motion. 

The Boundless by Kenneth Oppel

On the maiden voyage of the greatest train ever built, Will Everett happens upon the key to a car filled with treasure, and immediately has to run for his life. Will escapes to a traveling circus where he meets a ringmaster and a young escape artist, and the three must stop the villains pursuing Will and save the train before tragedy strikes.

Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

Sophie Fevvers is part woman and part swan—or is she? When an American journalist desperate to uncover the truth about this famous aerialist falls in love with her, he’s swept away with the traveling circus on a tour of nineteenth-century England and Russia.

Image result for electric woman tessa fontaine

The Electric Woman by Tessa Fontaine

In this electrifying memoir, a young woman pushed to the brink of fear over her mother’s long-standing illness is offered an opportunity to escape her life—by joining the circus. As she learns to control her body and mind while performing death-defying stunts, Fontaine also learns about her deepest self, and the power of love to overcome even the most frightening moments. 

Image result for Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta

Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta by Aglaja Veteranyi

A family of Romanian refugees/circus performers travel through Europe and Africa in a caravan: A mother who can’t quit her dangerous and reckless performances, a father with dark secrets, two daughters trying to keep their family together. Told from the point of view of an illiterate narrator, Veteranyi’s only novel is both dark and funny, gripping and elusive, but always brilliant.

Sea Monsters: A Novel by Chloe Aridjis

Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis

In 1980’s Mexico City, Luisa feels trapped in a life without meaning. When she stumbles upon a newspaper article about a troupe of Ukranian dwarves who ran away from a circus touring Mexico, Luisa decides she must find these Soviet escapees in order to find herself. After boarding a bus to the Pacific coast with a boy she barely knows, Luisa will discover more than her fair share of dark secrets waiting in an eccentric beach town on the Mexican coast.

Image result for tumbling turner sisters by juliette fay

The Tumbling Turner Sisters by Juliette Fay

It’s 1919, and the Turner family has just lost their main source of income. In order to avoid poverty, their mother pushes daughters Gert, Winnie, Kit, and Nell into a tumbling vaudeville act. When their act is picked up by an agent, the sisters and their mother are sent on a tour of east coast vaudeville theaters, where they travel with a peculiar company of performers. As the Turner women become closer with their fellow vaudevillians, the characters tumble together into a world of romance, friendship, and theatrics that will leave them changed forever.