Meet the Most Promising New Voices of Nigerian Fiction

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

The next issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Issue 56, publishes early July and includes a section featuring fiction by five outstanding new Nigerian authors—all alumni of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus writing workshop. Their stories blew us away, exhilaratingly original, brimming with heart and life. We’re confident that their names will soon be widely known. We talked with these five writers about their take on audience, the role of place in their work, their experiences at Purple Hibiscus, and more. These interviews are prefaced by Adichie’s introduction to their stories from Issue 56. And if you want to buy Issue 56 or subscribe starting with this issue, you can save 15% with the code ElectricLit.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 

Every year, I organize a writing workshop in Lagos. Thousands of people apply, many of them talented. But we have room for only twenty. In choosing the twenty, I look not only for good writing but also for courage and for what I like to call heart. 

We spend ten days in a small hotel, around a large table, talking and laughing, reading stories from laptops and phone screens. We disagree and agree. We argue and explain. We talk about popular culture and politics. We break for lunch in the hotel restaurant, and pile our plates with rice and yams and plantains and vegetables. We take pictures. I ask about the poets they like and I ask about their love lives. We become, even if only briefly, a family. 

This year, the tenth of the workshop, my friend Dave Eggers was kind enough to come and co-teach and to give these young writers a chance to have their first major publication. 

I’m so delighted that these stories have found a home in McSweeney’s. 

I love the confidence, the clear-eyed honesty, the beauty, of these stories. In the early 1960s, with European colonialism ending all over Africa, Nigeria was at the center of a new African literary renaissance. But cultural production dipped with the military dictatorships of the 1990s, when little fiction was published. Today there is another renaissance, and it feels to me more resilient, more diverse, and with less of an obligation to overt politics. The young writers I have met at my workshops—like Ope, Roy, Adachioma, Chukwuebuka, and Ngozi—make it clear that our storytellers are here to stay.

Chukwuebuka Ibeh. (Photo courtesy of McSweeney’s)

Chukwuebuka Ibeh

What did you see as your audience, if any, when you wrote this piece? When you write in general?

I was too obsessed with getting the story down on paper as vividly as it played in my mind to consciously ponder an audience. Generally, when I write, I only hope my family, especially the ones older than me, do not read it. And that the younger ones are sensible enough not to discuss it with them. I suppose this is a way of saying I don’t really think of an audience when writing. It has been said that doing this is a sort of self-censorship—and where I’m coming from, there’s a whole lot of things you’re not supposed to be talking or writing about—so it gets in the way of the writing, and I quite agree with that. 

What was your biggest takeaway from the Purple Hibiscus workshop? 

The idea of “plausibility” in fiction is overrated. Also, it’s important to acknowledge your privilege and be intuitively aware of how much it allows you, even things you don’t necessarily deserve. It’s doubly important to have this in the back of your mind when what your writing involves an under-privileged group. Acknowledging your own privilege gives room for empathy, which is probably the best quality you can have as a writer. I could go on and on. 

How would you describe yourself as a writer?

I think about writing much more than I actually write. I’m hoping this changes. I am an obsessive editor. I could take so long to write a very short story. “The Good Ones Are Not Here,” my story in McSweeney’s, was in the works for about three years. 

Adachioma Ezeano. (Photo courtesy of McSweeney’s)

Adachioma Ezeano

Where do you live? How does it affect, or not affect, the sense of place in your writing?

I was born in Onitsha, Nigeria, and in 2003 we moved to Awka, a small university town, the capital of Anambra State. I was young, very young. Yet I can still remember the transition, and it shocked me. Though I didn’t know what culture shock meant then, I believe what happened to me was more than culture shock. 

In Onitsha, life was fast, noisy, very noisy. It was in Onitsha that I learned what it meant to experience armed robbers in broad daylight; muscled men shooting their guns loud, citizens aka the victims running for shelter while the police flew from the crime scenes. It was in Onitsha that I learned what it meant to watch humans burnt alive for stealing something as trivial as underwear. It was in Onitsha that I learned what it meant to have neighbors who genuinely called you neighbors, strangers who would become family simply because you preferred to pay for the apartment next to theirs. 

The rhythm was different in Awka. In Awka, life was simple. My father worked in a mortgage bank, and my mother taught in a state government-owned primary school. We lived near university lecturers and civil servants and public servants, people who read. And life was like the early morning breeze; soft, uncorrupt. 

Now, when I write, consciously or unconsciously, of course I find these places working into my settings. These are the stories I know. And not all of us can tell of Lagos.  

What was your biggest takeaway from the Purple Hibiscus workshop? 

I remember on this particular day, one of the workshop participants pulled out this fanciful diary that was further fancied with words from Chimamanda Adichie, and I was surprised and guilty at once. I hadn’t thought of taking notes while Chimamanda was speaking, not because I didn’t know I should. I had even come with a book. But I was consumed with looking at her while she talked, while she gesticulated, batted her eyes, stood up, walked, sat down. One particular evening, class had ended, and we were having the moments, a sort of social class, I cannot remember what was being discussed. But she called me by the name I love, Kpakpando, and asked my opinion. Sincerely, I don’t know where what I said had come from. I’m sure I said rubbish. Yet, nobody acted like I said rubbish. And that was one of the many strings of beauty of that workshop. Sitting in that class. Filled with beautiful young men and women. Beautiful, smart, intelligent. Yet, kind, excessively kind.

I said to my friends, I think I might reapply again this year. Of course, that is not possible.   

Roy Udeh-Ubaka. (Photo courtesy of McSweeney’s)

Roy Udeh-Ubaka

What did you see as your audience, if any, when you wrote this piece? 

I don’t quite believe I think about my audience at all when I write. I just write. Now, this is not to say that in general I do not write to be read. It’s such a beautiful thing to be read, and to be read by many, but when it comes down to it, I really do not consider my audience in the primary process of writing. A word comes to mind when I think about writing for an audience, and this word is “allow.” I find that with my stories, and the contents of most of them, there are a lot of questions surrounding what I am (should be) allowed to write about, and I find this absurdly restricting. 

I like to think that first and foremost, I write to and for myself, like a written soliloquy—a note, of sorts, to self. I did, however, appreciate the feedback from close friends, particularly women, who read through the first draft of this story and were taken by the limitless boundaries of what love should and can be. And this, for me, is how I hope this story will translate for everyone that reads it—as a heartfelt love story. 

What surprised you most from the Purple Hibiscus workshop? 

The workshop was, as Chimamanda often put it, a safe space. I guess if I was particularly surprised by anything, it was the intentional consistency with which this space was guarded. For ten days, we watched each other unravel, strip ourselves bare, and stand in what the world outside would have cloaked in prejudices, and we chose—for it was always a choice—to press our bodies together, guarding jealously one another’s truths like they were ours. And this, for me, was everything.

Where do you live? How does it affect, or not affect, the sense of place in your writing?

I think place, whether good or bad, like the weather, encompasses us—sometimes without our knowledge. I was born and raised between Enugu and Lagos, and these locations have been central in most of my stories. Place plays a considerably important role for me because it provides an indelible sense of presence. In “Until It Doesn’t,” there is a small mention of the “abroad,” which one of the protagonists believes to have changed his friend. This is an age-old belief in my country, that “abroad changes you,” particularly for the worse, and I wanted this to be fundamental in pulling the characters apart. The concept of place, nonetheless, played a pivotal role in differentiating the behavioral patterns of both protagonists. Before I wrote this story, I often wondered about the possibility of a place owning you in ways that are not primarily known, in ways that seep in and take root in who we are constantly becoming, whether for good or bad.

Ope Adedeji. (Photo courtesy of McSweeney’s)

Ope Adedeji

What’s the value of short stories, in your mind, over longer fiction? Why is it a form that speaks to you?

I love short stories. With this form, you can compress so much in so little time and space. To do this requires expertise. Every word is intentional and is there for a purpose (as we learned in the class taught by Lola Shoneyin) unlike with novels, where there’s avenue for diversions. Short stories leave room for readers to imagine and to create multiple scenarios in answer to questions the story may have left hanging. 

Still, I value the longer form as much I do the shorter form. Reading a novel is also like going on a journey into the unknown. There’s that adrenaline that good novels offer, in both reading and writing them. 

What was your biggest takeaway from the Purple Hibiscus workshop? 

I feel like I took so much of equal importance from the Purple Hibiscus workshop that it might be wrong to put one lesson on a pedestal and say, this is bigger than the rest. I’ll just say that the workshop gave me a community of people with whom I can share my work with; who can give me honest feedback; and who I can share my writing victories and rejections with. I had no idea just how fundamental this community was to my career until the workshop. Ours is a community of very brilliant writers of various backgrounds and ages who I consistently learn from and who share valuable criticism, opportunities and their reading list! Every writer needs this.

Ngozi John. (Photo courtesy of McSweeney’s)

Ngozi John 

What did you see as your audience, if any, when you wrote this piece? When you write in general? 

When I write, I don’t have to actively think of an audience. Because I am Nigerian, and share her experience, I automatically write as Nigerian, and to/for Nigerians. I’m writing in their culture, their language, their nuances, complexities, dynamics. In a scene from my story, a father abandons his child to attend a Fela concert. Now, while a non-Nigerian can relate to this, the only point of connection might be the rave of attending a similarly famous artist’s concert. But for a Nigerian, there is a psychological, ideological, political, musical, and social attachment. However, as much as my primary audience is Nigeria, I’m writing human/individual stories which aren’t peculiar to only Nigerians. So, by extension, I’m writing to anyone who shares similar experiences with the characters in my story. They may not be able to situate themselves within the environment in which my story occurs, but they can identify with it.

What was your biggest takeaway from the Purple Hibiscus workshop? What surprised you most? 

Oh, the friendships! But more than that, a scene plays out in my head, where one of the participants had written about a myth of wrapping children’s waists with snakes to prevent them from bed-wetting. There was some sort of argument on how valid or effective this myth is. Two other people confirmed this belief, but most of us were ignorant of its existence. Listening to and interacting with twenty-one people from different parts of the country and world for ten days began to highlight my limited insight of the world—even my own society. How little attention we pay to the diversities in our existence. How unmotivated we are in the deliberate learning and observation of the world.

What surprised me most? Ironically, I would say, the parallels in our worlds. I know Cameroon is proximal, but I still found it interesting that we share some proverbs. I remember Clementine using “na condition make crayfish bend,” in one of her stories, and trying to explain to us, and we were like, “Ooohh, we know this one.”

How would you describe yourself as a writer? 

Self-aware. Empathetic. Emotive. Emotional, too. I don’t start to write until I can feel it trying to jump out.

From Homesteader Wolf to Public School Boy

Posted on by Erin Bartnett

An excerpt from Stay and Fight
by Madeline ffitch

PERLEY

The snake has strong beliefs. The snake has strong beliefs about territory my Mama K said when the snake began to sleep with us in our bed. We tried to ignore him, at least I think it was a him. He wasn’t the biting kind, but he had a piss flinty smell which was hard for Mama L to sleep through. The snake considers our home to be its home. Who will say whose home it is? It’s the same with the wasps. We let them nest up there in the rafters they are a bunch of grapes. They sometimes lose their grip and drop onto the sofa like anyone would. They sting you if you sit on them like anyone would. Who will say that this is their fault? What would you do if you were a wasp?

Most of the people I know are women except for the snake and me, we are boys. A small boy, Mama K said, he’s small for his age so we can get rid of Rudy’s friggin shirts. Which we didn’t. When my age was five I stopped nursing. When my age was six I climbed the tree and shook the acorns down onto the blue tarp. When my age was seven the yellow bus rumbled by on the road each day, passed right by the bottom of our drive- way, but I didn’t get on it. The thing about me that isn’t like other kids at the IGA or the gas station or down along the road is that I am the only male in the vicinity and I have an extra mom. And I have a Mean Aunt who isn’t fun or anything my Mama K says she’s bitchy and she knows everything. They aren’t like a lot of people but they are mine. My women are always working and I am always working.

This is what we do, me and my women. We hunt in the woods. We gather plants. We fry grubs in a skillet. We roll the dice. We know how to fight. We drill our reflexes. We practice lying down on the ground and then getting up really fast. We practice throwing spears and shooting arrows into bales of straw. Sometimes we get really hungry and then we make a big stew that is dark green and then we get our bellies full of iron my Mean Aunt says. When it is time to kill the ducks, we kill them and eat them, even the extremely cute one named Brownie Starlight. I named him that. We don’t cry.

In the evenings in the summer and also when it rains and also when it snows I build a fire that my Mama K showed me how to build log-cabin- style, little stuff then medium stuff then big stuff then the bow drill. I blow on it so the Smoke Witch dies and the Fire Fairy comes out, and then we sit with our stew and Mama K asks for my report and then she whit- tles with her sheep-killing knife and I demonstrate everything I know how to do: bowline, klemheist, one-handed push-up, pickle a bean, cure a potato, process a hickory nut, four-strand braid.

A wizard chiseled from the very stone holding a crystal ball that is for sale at the gas station is what I’m not allowed to have. Also cereal from the IGA. Also anything from the mall on the way to the feed store. Also TV, sugar, and a dirt bike like the kids along the road. What I am al- lowed to have is lip gloss that came in the mail for the Mean Aunt that looks like you’re supposed to eat it but don’t eat it. What I am allowed to have is as many blackberries as I can pick, venison jerky, ElfQuest, and chocolate-chip pancakes secretly. What I am allowed to have is as many pet snakes as I want. That is what Mama L says even though I know she doesn’t like the snakes. She says that because she doesn’t want me to be afraid, but why would I be afraid? Mama K says the snakes aren’t pets, they are wild. She says they are wild and I am wild. What does it mean to be wild? I asked, and she said, It means that you can make yourself invisible. When you are in the woods, no one can see you.

That’s true. For example the mowed head kid along the road. I hid behind a sycamore and watched him catch the yellow bus and I knew the bus was going to school because the Mean Aunt told me. Were we alike or not alike? Was he real or was I real? We both had like a ton of freckles and winter-grass kind of hair I mean yellowish nothing color but mine kept falling into my eyes and someone had driven over his head with a tractor. The Mean Aunt saw me behind the sycamore and said, Don’t worry about that kid, Perley. Trust me, Perley, you are the lucky one. But what’s the point of being the lucky one if all those other unlucky kids along the road have each other and you have no one and are skinny and small and can’t even have a chiseled wizard? The mowed head way looked pretty good. The mowed head way was to eat Twinkies and black cherry soda pop and to ride on a dirt bike which Mama L said was too dangerous. The mowed head way was to eat at the DQ on the road into town if there was a four-piece special, and then sit outside in the back of his uncle’s truck. And if there was a wasps’ nest in the mowed head house his dad sprayed it with WD-40 and he had a dad. Also he didn’t use a bow drill but poured gasoline onto his campfire. That’s toxic, said Mama K when I suggested it. Do you want to be toxic? she asked me, even though the answer was obviously hell yes. His dad burned a tire which turned all kinds of colors and his uncle was there with fireworks and his family would, it’s hard to say, just mix more. Like with other people. They knew good songs with music you could move your body to. I thought I could be like that. I watched every day from the woods, skillfully like a Wolfrider with ultimate stealth, but the mowed head kid didn’t see me and the mowed head kid didn’t invite me over. If someone doesn’t invite you over how do you get to go over? You have to go live with them. Or you have to go to school.

If someone doesn’t invite you over how do you get to go over? You have to go live with them. Or you have to go to school.

So I said, I want to go to school.

Mama K said, Christ, who put that into his head, Lily, was it you? And Mama L said, School, my Piglet? Of course you can go to school if that’s what you really want, but you missed kindergarten. I don’t care I want to go to school with the other kids, I said, and the Mean Aunt said, I’m sure he could test into first grade no problem, and Mama K said, He’s not going to school conversation over. And I said, Yes, I am too going to school. I’m going to go down there and get on that bus tomorrow and go where it takes me. And Mama K said, Oh, you are, are you? And Mama L said, My Perley, are you sure? And Mama K said, You know what they have at school? Useless bullshit brainwashing is what, and the Mean Aunt said, You know what they have at school? Other kids is what. Mama K said, You stay out of this you aren’t his parent, and the Mean Aunt said, It’s actually really problematic not to let Perley go to school. You see how he watches the neighbor kids, he hides behind the trees and spies on them it’s not healthy, and Mama L said, Perley, you should go play with those kids, you don’t have to go to school to do that, just go say hello, I’m sure they’ll love you as much as I do. Mama K said, Who cares about other kids? There’s more important things. I care about other kids, I said. I want to mix more. Mix more? said Mama L. Come here and give a cuddle and a nose kiss, and I said, No, and hid behind the sofa with the black snake who looked at me with silver eyes and who sent me this message, Stay true, Perley, stay true. The Mean Aunt said, What’s going to happen is that he’s going to be fixated on school the more you won’t let him go there. You should probably just let him go to school and get it out of his system. And Mama L said, I think that if Perley really wants to go to school it should be his decision. Mama K said, Of course you do, Lily. You always think that Perley should get whatever he wants. But he’s not going to school.

Mama L went down to enroll me and she stopped at the gas station on the way home to buy me school supplies which were a notebook and a pack of pencils but not the chiseled wizard even though I begged. Maybe for your birthday, Mike said. Maybe, Mama L said.

Then it was the first day, and I opened my eyes and looked through the crack in the wall to the light out in the woods, and I felt the snake at my belly uncoil. I sat up and the snake slid down into the wall. During breakfast Mama L cried, My Velvet Piglet, and Mama K sharpened my pencils with her whittling knife and she said, Oh, now you’re crying, Lily? Well, just remember I didn’t think he should go in the first place, and I said, Mama K? and she said, What, Perley? What is it now? And I knelt down as Strongbow would and I said, Don’t worry, I am prepared. You have trained me well. I will honor your training. I will return this evening and I will be ready to give you my report. She said, Get up. Let’s just hope your report is that you don’t want to go back to that horrible place, and she gave me my pencils. The Mean Aunt looked at the clock and said, If he’s going, he’d better go, and Mama K said, I can’t believe any son of mine wants, actually wants, to go to school, and Mama L lay on the sofa and wiped her eyes and the Mean Aunt took me by the hand and led me down to the bus stop so I wouldn’t miss the bus.

In my lunch box there was a jar of pemmican packed in tallow and there was a jar of milk and there was a can of sardines with the tab I could pull and Mama L had put a square of chocolate in there, too, even though Mama K didn’t know. The Mean Aunt marched me down the hill and pulled out some yarrow as she passed it. She chewed it furiously and gave me a fistful. Chew on this it has superpower, she said. It will shoot juice into your brain that will make you so brave. It’s like she didn’t even no- tice that I was already brave. I was going to school which is where the other kids were. So I pulled my hand out of the Mean Aunt’s hand just as we got to the roadside where the mowed head kid stood waiting for the bus. His eyes were crusty and he was eating something from a piece of cellophane with a cool animal on it in sunglasses. He looked at me real quick but then he looked away again and the yellow bus pulled up so that the sun went dark and I didn’t wave goodbye to the Mean Aunt. I threw back my shoulders and I walked to the door of the bus and then I turned to the Mean Aunt, and I put my fist to my heart the way that a Wolfrider would, a noble salute of undying gratitude and respect.

On the bus everyone was laughing, and I loved laughing. It was one of my favorite things to do so I started laughing, too, except then I thought maybe we weren’t laughing at the same thing exactly because the bus was full of kids, which was toxically cool, but they were all making the same sort of salute I had made to the Mean Aunt, the noble salute I gave so that the Mean Aunt would tell Mama K that I was steadfast and resolute. No one had ever laughed when I did the salute before. But when I saw all the kids on the bus doing the salute, I knew that it was funny. In fact, it was the funniest thing anyone had ever done and I was the one who did it.

I sat down next to the mowed head kid and the girl in the seat behind us put her fist on her heart and said, Hey, Bexley, aren’t you going to say hi to your new friend? So then I knew the mowed head’s name so I said, Hello, Bexley, I am Perley. We could be new friends.

Could be but ain’t, he said. I’ve seen you. I’ve seen you, too, I said.

Shut up, he said. You wouldn’t hide like that behind the sycamores with your mouth hanging open unless you were touched, is what my uncle said.

I am an elfin spy with optimum fighting skills, I said. Part wolf. Maybe you are, too.

I am an elfin spy with optimum fighting skills, I said. Part wolf. Maybe you are, too.

You’re touched, he said. Or you’re a baby. That’s how come you need a grown-up to take you to the bus. He pointed out the window at the Mean Aunt, who stood scowling at the bus as it pulled away but that was just her face. Is that your mom or is that your dad I can’t tell, said Bexley. The girl behind us laughed so I was helpful and said, Actually I don’t have a dad that’s my aunt.

You know what that makes you? said the girl. That makes you a bastard.

I don’t think so, I said.

Yes, it sure does, said Bexley.

I have two moms and one mean aunt, I said.

Two moms? the girl asked, and I said, Yeah, Mama L and Mama K.

That makes you a faggot bastard, Bexley said. And I didn’t know what either of those things meant because they weren’t in ElfQuest, and they weren’t in The Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening by J. I. Rodale and Staff, 1970 edition, and my women had never mentioned them to me. I didn’t know what they meant, but I knew I would have to remain extremely vigilant at school to find out.

It’s a good thing I was prepared. It’s a good thing I was ready for anything. It’s a good thing I remained steadfast and resolute. Because even after the bus stopped and I went into my classroom things didn’t turn out the way I had imagined them. I was highly skilled, my training was top- notch, and I thought that would make the other kids like me, but I didn’t get a chance to show them how prepared I was or how much I had practiced. When do I get a chance to make my report? I asked the teacher, who was a grown woman like a box of tissue at the IGA, that beautiful. I almost touched her, but I remembered Mama K had said, Don’t touch anything, Perley, just don’t. So I held my hands to my sides, and the teacher said, Your report? And I said, When do we show our skills? And she said, Right now is the time to show your skill on the tablet. Which is one thing I knew about because the elves had tablets, too, they were made out of stone. The teacher said, Class, it’s time for Specials and from now on we are going to do our Specials on our tablets. It’s an initiative, it’s an initiative that each Appalachian child gets a tablet. Carved from the very stone, I said. No, you faggot bastard, said Bexley, but really quiet so the teacher didn’t hear. She passed around books that weren’t books and each and everyone else got started but I just waited for the tablet. Perley, you’ve got to turn on the tablet so that you can do your Specials, she said. Oh yes, I said, and that’s how I knew that the book was a tablet not an elf tablet a school tablet it was made of plastic. It was like what my women had but bigger, a phone with a screen that they had to walk up to the top of the ridge to get reception, and they wouldn’t let me touch it because they said it would rot my ear.

I love tablets, I said. That’s good, Perley, said the teacher. Plastic is my favorite material, I said. So you should turn it on and get started, she said. That’s okay, I just love to hold it, I said. But you’ve got to do the work, Perley, she said. You’ve got to do your Specials. I just stroked the tablet like it was a baby wolf and she said, Perley, the other children are getting started, what is the trouble? Nothing, I said. Fucking hillbilly, said Bexley, but still so quiet it was almost like he was sending to me with his mind like an elf would even though I was beginning to realize that there was no way Bexley could be an elf, or at least not a valiant one, definitely not a Wolfrider.

The teacher leaned down and pressed a button on the back of my tab- let and the screen glowed up at me like opening a magic vault. There, she said. Thank you, I said. I love this. I love this tablet. Good, she said. I’ll let you get started. She left me alone. I looked at the tablet. But I didn’t know what I was seeing because I was a total fucking hillbilly. All the other kids were quiet, staring into the light and using highly skilled fin- ger actions, but when I looked at mine, all the light from the vault went so fast that I didn’t know where to look, and I didn’t know where to put my hands. I knew how to read but it’s like I forgot I knew how to read. So even though I loved the tablet, and even though plastic was my favorite material, I took a break and looked out the window for a minute. Just to check if I was missing anything out there, and I soon saw Leetah and Cutter through the oaks at the edge of the playground and they were riding on Nightrunner, the noble old wolf. Nearby were their children, Suntop and Ember, tumbling around with Choplicker, who was still only a pup.

They were calling to me and I had to go. Also my leg had a cramp it felt like it was flexing itself. I’d never been inside for so long unless it was a total friggin blizzard. I stood up. Perley, what is it? asked the teacher. I knew that she wouldn’t understand. She wouldn’t understand that when- ever I saw the wolves with their elfin riders I had to drop whatever it was I was doing and see how close I could get to them before they disappeared. I had to get close to them because one day they might carry me off and there was no way that I was going to miss that. I have to go to the bath- room, I said. It was my first lie. At home I told the truth and then watched my women fight it out. But I could tell school was different. Optimum strategy was called for, like when the elves match wits with the trolls. It didn’t matter if I lied or not. What mattered is if I made it through. So the teacher gave me a hall pass which said hall pass and was a laminated piece of construction paper with some yarn on it.

I took the hall pass and I didn’t go to the bathroom I went out to the playground but by the time I made it outside Cutter and Leetah were gone, and the wolves were gone, so I undid my pants and peed in a bush. Then I looked up at the school and Bexley was looking back at me through the open window and then the nice teacher’s head appeared above his mowed head and then she came outside and took me by the arm to the principal’s office.

Perley, said the principal. Sir, I said. You’ve just joined us, he said. Yes, sir, I said. This is your first day, he said. Yes, sir, I said. Don’t call me sir, he said. Call me Mr. Anderson. Yes, sir, I said. He won’t focus, said my nice teacher. He can’t focus on the tablet. We’re doing Specials and he won’t do it. He went outside without permission. Think of the trouble I could get in. Also another child said he peed in the bushes not that I encourage tattletales. The principal was a good man I mean he was a good big man I mean his belly was big he was like a balloon with the nicest wig on top. The teacher said, I have twenty-five other kids to look after, and he said, Go, Ms. Carroll, go on I’ll take it from here. When she left he smiled sadly at me and I smiled sadly back at him and I had never smiled sadly before, not like that, and it felt good, almost as good as being an animal wearing sunglasses on some cellophane. Perley, the principal said, we can’t have kids wander away what if you were hit by a car or a stranger kidnapped you, think what would happen to us here at this school think about it we are responsible for you. I thought about it. I smiled sadly. You have to focus, he said. You have to do what the teacher says. Don’t you want to do your Specials? I said, Yes, sir, of course, sir. And he said, Why did you go outside without permission? And I said, My body did it my body went outside without permission, and he said, That is unacceptable, and I said, Yes, sir. And he said, Did you pee in the bushes you can tell me. And I said, The Best Practices Binder says, Don’t pee in the bucket. Pee on a tree but instead I peed on a bush. I waited for the principal’s sad smile to turn to a sad smile of understanding, but it didn’t. Instead he asked, Don’t you have a toilet at home, Perley? And I waited ten seconds. I waited exactly ten seconds I know because I counted and I looked out the window behind the principal and I saw that Nightrunner the wolf had come back and was winking his green eyes at me from behind the oak tree. I wanted to make the principal happy so I said, Yes, sir, you should see our toilet it has one of those automatic flushers with a flashing light, it’s even more powerful than the one at the IGA. Which was my second lie.

I said, My body did it my body went outside without permission, and he said, That is unacceptable, and I said, Yes, sir.

I thought the principal was going to make me do like fifty push-ups or run laps or something where I could show my physical strength and endurance, but the principal just sighed and wrote something on a piece of paper and then he said, This is an adjustment period, Perley. You’ll soon understand how things work around here. Remember our motto here is excellence.

He sent me back to my classroom but by that time Specials were over for the day and anyway no one cared about the skills I had and I could hardly even remember what they were because there was no place to try them out because we were always inside except for half an hour at recess. And later, when we opened our lunch boxes I realized that sardines were the funniest thing a person could eat. They were the funniest thing a person could eat and I was eating them and everyone was laughing.

I knew what my women would say, they’d say, Fuck Bexley, don’t say fuck, and Mama K would point out all the reasons Bexley could never be a Wolfrider and was totally not noble. But they hadn’t seen him mix. It was like Bexley built the school himself he was that easy inside it. He was like Winnowill, who was evil but was also beautiful and in charge. I wanted to know if Bexley’s way could be my way. So I threw my hilarious lunch in the garbage and I stood against the chain-link fence and I watched.

Bexley and the other kids did everything like they’d always known how to do it, like they’d known how to do it even when they didn’t exist yet, even when they were just an energetic force in the universe which is what Mama L said I was before I was born. Even then, they were an energetic force that knew all about tablets and Specials and kickball and shoes that flickered and animals wearing sunglasses, and they had bubble gum instead of yarrow and they knew what was funny and what wasn’t funny and they knew why.

They knew what was funny and what wasn’t funny and they knew why.

And I saw that even though it seemed like all the other kids were one way and I was the other way, actually there were some other kids that were also the other way. For example, there was this one kid, a chubby kid, he was in the second grade, but the other second-graders avoided him, and this kid had round glasses and brown skin and curly hair that floated around his head, like only a few of the other kids at school did, like what the Mean Aunt said about Mike at the gas station, He is an oppressed minority, and Mama K said, Why don’t you say that to his face? and Mama L said, Love sees no color, and the Mean Aunt and Mama K laughed meanly at her. But what I really noticed about this kid is that he wore red rubber rain boots even though it was definitely not raining and this kid collected acorns.

I watched him skirt the perimeter of the playground. He walked beneath the oak trees at the edge of the wood chips and he picked up a few acorns at a time and he put them in a pouch he made by tying the front of his T-shirt in a knot. No one else looked at him they just barreled past him screaming and throwing the kickball onto the roof of the school. No one else looked at him but I looked at him and then I followed him.

He took his acorns around the corner of the school building, behind the blue dumpster where there was an oak tree whose roots were tearing up the pavement. He checked to see if anyone was watching, so I hid behind the dumpster and he knelt down by the tree and then I saw that he had dug out under one of the roots and untied his T-shirt so that the acorns fell into the cave he had made there and he must have had hundreds stored away. I wanted to help him so bad so I sent to him with my mind like an elf or like a wolf but he didn’t hear me so I stepped out from behind the dumpster and I said, We could do that together I am pretty good at collecting acorns I actually do it pretty much all the time with my Mean Aunt, but he said, Back off I have all the help I need, which was weird because he didn’t have any help he was doing it all by himself. Which I told him and I said the Mean Aunt is toxic at acorns and I am toxic at acorns. Actually I’m part wolf. He said, Back off faggot bastard.

I backed off. But my motto was excellence. I stayed resolute and steadfast and I played a game with myself where I was his wolf acorn guard. I stood against the chain-link fence and made sure that no other faggot bastards tried to help him. And none did.

Imagining the Secret Queer Lives of Legendary Movie Stars

Posted on by Jo Lou

In 1928, at a glamorous soirée in Berlin, the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt takes a black-and-white photograph of Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl, immortalizing the three actresses before the height of their fame. This brief, shining moment, where the women’s lives intersect, is where Singaporean author Amanda Lee Koe begins her sweeping, richly imagined debut novel Delayed Rays of a Star.

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Spanning eras and geographies, from Weimar Berlin to Los Angeles Chinatown to the Bavarian Alps and modern-day Paris, through the rise of Hitler and World War II: Delayed Rays of a Star follows the three women as they move through the world in their different ways, in pursuit of art, ambition, fame, and love, while navigating thorny issues of identity, ego, and integrity in turbulent times. They all want to be, as Leni expressed in the book, “the reason for things.”

And evolving around them, sometimes intertwined with them, are a secondary cast of characters. Among them, a Chinese housemaid beginning to intuit the ways of a woman of the world, a German-Turkish-Kurdish young man struggling with his multiple identities, and a German soldier on leave from North Africa grappling with a secret love. Amanda Lee Koe brings each of them to life in deeply specific, textured detail, so that their dreams are no less bright, and their desires no less fervent. Like the three actresses, they’re feeling around, sometimes blindly, for a heightened existence.

I’d enjoyed Amanda Lee Koe’s debut short story collection, Ministry of Moral Panic, which made her the youngest person to win the Singapore Literature Prize in 2014, at the age of 27. And in a way, her debut novel also feels like a tapestry of short stories, with a dazzling rolodex of characters, including cameos by JFK, Davie Bowie, and Hitler. In her hands, even in a pithy exchange between two people, you can sense their burgeoning humanity, the multitudes they contain. 

Emily Ding: First, let’s talk about that photograph. What about it captured your imagination? What drew you so completely into this world?

Amanda Lee Koe: It was a photograph that was so unlikely, one that opened up many questions. To see pre-Hollywood makeover Marlene, early flapper-styled Anna May, and pre-Nazi propaganda Leni together, it was like a Pandora’s box.

To see pre-Hollywood makeover Marlene, early flapper-styled Anna May, and pre-Nazi propaganda Leni together, it was like a Pandora’s box.

Not just as a writer but as a person, I’m always looking for the intimate gap in history, the lateral wormhole in time. These were three women who would soon all be pioneers in their own ways; here they were at a party, being coy for a man’s camera. If you know Marlene at all, you’ll know that once she became that blonde femme fatale we all know her to be, she wouldn’t be caught dead smiling so sincerely and guilelessly for the camera. Once she had her star image in place, it was something she was very aware of performing for the camera.

Marlene meant a lot to a younger, half-formed version of me. I grew up with a gigantic poster of her on my wall, and I think in some invisible, personal way, she must have helped me to grow into the adult I wanted to be. So I guess it’s fitting that, eventually, I somehow managed to create an aesthetic universe that was capacious enough for her to exist in.

ED: What did she mean to the half-formed version of you?

ALK: As a teenager in socially conservative Singapore, I had no epoch-appropriate idols, but Marlene was someone I had chosen out of time and space because she gave no fucks, was so publicly bisexual, knew how to work a pair of pants the same way she knew how to work a dress. I never got to see any of that. I grew up with literally zero visible queer role models, to the point that I thought oh, maybe there were no gay grownups in Singapore. From the age of 13 to 16, I was in an all-girls school, and they sent me to corrective counseling when they found out I had a girlfriend. To remember that Marlene was so free and unapologetic decades ago made me feel that I could not only survive, but laugh my way through whatever I was going through.

And it wasn’t just Marlene either, it was the whole milieu I became enchanted by. At 19, I felt a great affinity for Dada, Surrealism, even tried to study German as an elective language. But after three levels, my school didn’t offer anything higher than that, so I’m still stuck at toddler-vocab probably. Eventually, as with all idols, I forgot about Marlene, or rather, she became dormant in my life with the passage of time, and I hardly thought back about her at all. When I came upon that Eisenstaedt photo of the three of them in 2014, the year I moved to New York, it was like seeing an old friend again.

ED: A central theme of your book and the thing that ties most of your characters together—including the more minor ones that revolve around the three women—is that they have dual/secret selves, and there are schisms between their inner and outer lives. This usually poses the question of authenticity, but you have the Hollywood director Josef von Sternberg, a creative and romantic partner of Marlene’s, speaking of a “lust for bothness,” and I’m struck by what you have Anna May thinking, about “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” Can you speak to this a bit more?

ALK: A commitment to duplicity, or multiplicity, is a form of authenticity too. Anyone who’s a whole human being, who’s being honest about their humanness, will be able to locate this sort of breach between their inner and outer selves. It could be a small rift or a large one. By way of a simple example, people are often surprised to learn that I’m an introvert, because I am not at all shy; in fact, I am quite bold. But this constant tussle—any tussle between two seeming opposites—this lack of holistic consistency, is what’s specific and truthful about being human, is what leaves room for fictional characters to evolve in a way that isn’t programmatic.

“Living truthfully under imaginary circumstances” is actually something I picked up in an acting class. The only time I got stuck in the writing of this novel, I took an eight-week seminar at an actors’ studio in Manhattan focusing on Meisner, Strasberg and Hagen to try to understand that process more for my characters who were professional actresses.

ED: Something else I’m thinking about after reading your book is how a more interconnected world lets us try out new identities: We’re permitted to be different people in different places, or, even if we don’t end up somewhere else, to think about ourselves as someone from a different place. This sort of internal freedom seems especially true for Bébé, the Chinese immigrant housemaid—I love Bébé as a character, by the way!

ALK: Everyone loves Bébé! Have you seen the Hou Hsiao Hsien film Millennium Mambo? With Bébé, I was partially trying to capture the innate innocence of Shuqi’s character in Millennium Mambo, who has been through a lot, but has such purity in her reaction to seeing snow for the first time.

ED: Yes, but along with that purity, there is a delicious sort of creeping knowingness too? I especially liked the part where, when she’s questioned by a French immigration officer, Bébé repeats a story a blacklisted Chinese publisher had told her about young Chinese peasant women reading Madame Bovary underground and took it as her own. What I liked about it, I think, was that it suddenly hinted at depths and complexities you might not have associated immediately with her, and also, I think it’s a testament to the power of ideas—how one, seemingly innocuous little thing revealed to you can change how you think about the world, how you think about yourself and your place in it.

I grew up with literally zero visible queer role models, to the point that I thought oh, maybe there were no gay grownups in Singapore.

ALK: That’s one of my favorite bits of the book as well. I had a friend, a Chinese political scientist, who was a boy during the Cultural Revolution, and he told me many things that gave me deep insights into China’s modern history. I think the tendency is for a lot of Anglophone writers to approach the traumatic parts of Chinese history with a Western liberal lens, and I was interested in trying to show something else. This episode, with Bébé using Madame Bovary and the Tiananmen crackdown essentially to commit asylum fraud for personal rather than political reasons, was a wink at acknowledging the existence thereof, but also reversing the latent cultural superiority inherent in the ways “third-world” migrants and refugees tend to get written and thought about, as if they can only suffer, as if they can’t scheme and dream just like everyone else, too. The part where the French lawyer tears up and says: “I can’t imagine they read Madame Bovary in China” still cracks me up. And the best thing is that this was historically factual, too. Bourgeois European novels in translation, which had been banned by the Communist party, were all the rage amongst literate Chinese youth. I just nudged the historicity a little further.

ED: We were talking about the freedom of trying out new identities. Do you think a person has any obligations to their “origins”?

ALK: I think the question about obligations and origins is one that needs to be reconsidered in our globalized, wired age: What are origins, in the first place? So often this gets conflated as place of birth, or color of skin, but what does that really mean today? For example, I might be racially read as Chinese, but what does that even mean in my middle-class, Anglophone context, where my first language is English, and I grew up reading Virginia Woolf?

The assumptions that we might make are natural, but they’re also limited by a failure of imagination. Most readers might be likely to assume that I identify most with Bébé or Anna May in the novel, because I’m Asian and female. But what if, in fact, the character I personally most identify with might actually be Josef [von Sternberg]? The bit where he goes off on a tangent about code-switching depending on whether he’s in Europe or America was a bit of a hehehe for me.

The idea of personal reinvention, liminal identities, and its linkage to the ever-changing metropolis, is of great importance to me. Particularly perhaps because I grew up in Singapore, which is less than two thirds the size of New York City (the city, not the state!) but is its own country. This is like growing up in a big city that is also a small town. Infrastructurally and economically we are a big city; socially and emotionally we are pretty much a small town. In a small town, it’s harder to evolve, to try on new behaviors and identities that might be more intrinsically in line with who you know or want or have gradually or suddenly discovered yourself to be, because you’re hemmed in by the cultural context, the class bracket, the social norms you were born into, and expected to perform within.

ED: It sounds like you had discovered for yourself an eclectic range of influences, a whole different other world, to fill in the gaps of what you were feeling while growing up in Singapore. 

ALK: I was someone who really did not fit into the Singaporean education system, and I had a lot of free time because I hardly ever did any homework. I only did my homework if I had a crush on the teacher! Because nothing felt like a good fit, I had to learn to build my own private universe from scratch to feel like it was worth my while to wake up, go to bed, on repeat. Autodidactism is fantastic because it is so bespoke. 

I didn’t ever feel like I belonged in contemporary Singapore. I needed very deeply to believe that I was not wrong, I was only in the wrong time and place.

I’m sure that I projected a lot of my own baseless fantasies onto Weimar Berlin, but as a teenager growing up in a repressive culture where there’s so little push back from the populace, the mirage of the famed sexual freedom and decadent amorality of Weimar Berlin was like a mirage of an oasis in the desert for me. Didn’t matter if it was real or not, I just needed it to go on.

Because I didn’t ever feel like I belonged in contemporary Singapore, because in my formative years people were always telling me I was wrong, or abnormal, or that I had to change, I think that to stay alive on the inside, I needed very deeply to believe that I was not wrong, I was only in the wrong time and place. That there would have been a space and time in which I would have felt at home. In which I would have been right, for once.

ED: Though much of your novel is set in previous decades, it also feels very current at the same time, and resounds, I think, with our present anxieties about gender and race and representation, and moral responsibility. Was this something you set out to explore with your novel?

ALK: The funny thing is that when I first started on this novel, people thought it was an obscure, historical anomaly that would appeal only to a niche audience. That was pre #MeToo, pre-Trump, pre-Crazy Rich Asians, pre mainstreaming of female empowerment (of course I believe in actual, intersectional female empowerment, but also a lot of the real issue around gender equality is now being used as a marketing sideshow), pre-Lucy Liu getting her very well-deserved star on the walk of fame. But when it came out that my manuscript got sold before I graduated, then the same people who’d written me off as an experimental nutcase writing myself into a niche started saying I was a trendy writer with commercial appeal. Neither of these contexts and characterizations have anything to do with me and why I write, so they didn’t affect the vision I had for the work.

Race, gender, and representation are issues that I think all good artists today deal with, in one way or another, some more personally than others, some more covertly than others, but I do think that there are traces of the anxieties of every generation that occur congenitally within our collective work. The challenge, I think, is to not have a didactic approach, and to not overthink the relation—if it’s there in you, it will appear on its own in the work; and if it isn’t in you, it’ll never be there, or it’ll smell phony if you force it. 

ED: You’ve spoken about your dilemma of choosing a voice performer with an appropriate accent for your audiobook, and how you settled for a “midatlantic” sound. How did you create the right tone for the novel in order to inhabit all the different characters and eras and milieus, but that could still feel specific to each character? Like when Bébé described one man’s ass cleft as “the color of unhulled beansprouts”!

What are origins, in the first place? So often this gets conflated as place of birth, or color of skin, but what does that really mean today?

ALK: I might have a certain disadvantage that’s also a happy advantage, which is that although I’m a native English speaker (we were schooled in English in Singapore, Mandarin is a second language) from a former British colony, the syntax and idioms I grew up with have absolutely nothing to do with English, or even Germanic or Romance languages. My syntax and idioms come instead from a messy broth of Singlish (Singaporean English), Mandarin, Chinese dialects, and assorted Southeast Asian polyglossia (I can speak market Malay). And I love it, I love every last weird noun and sound of how that has turned out for me. Love isn’t a word I’d use lightly.

What I realized was that I didn’t want to lose the spirit of the polyglossia I am used to, even though obviously I was writing in English, and also that the tone shouldn’t have to be a slave to an era or character or milieu, because then I would be locked into just one thing, and I wouldn’t be able to be ambidexterous or polyamorous enough to tell the story—the stories—I wanted to tell. I just had to find a tone that reflected the newness of my physical millennial shell and the mental octogenarian oldness that lives inside.

ED: On your Instagram account, you sometimes make up stories about imaginary characters—basically yourself in different guises (this caption made me laugh, because I feel like I must know an aunty like that)—that are often funny and moving. What’s the impulse behind that?

ALK: Hahaha I can’t believe someone would notice that and think to ask this question! Now that I’m looking through my feed, it’s true, those characters do crop up more regularly than I thought. To be honest, I have no idea what drives that impulse, it’s so throwaway for me, I’m just having fun, being frivolous, but if I had to guess, perhaps a strong sense of play, and wanting to be many things at once?

Play is super important to me. So much of writing is being able to play well on the page. When I was nine, as the oldest sister to two malleable toddlers, I used to dress them up as wuxia characters, and we would go on adventures together… Monkey God, Dongfang Bubai, the Eight Immortals… I was always the lead character, not just because I was the bossy eldest child, but also because these adventures actually had contiguous plots from day to day, and the lead character is the one who shapes the action. There’s huge craft and technique to good playing. 

And, it’s something we all knew how to do once! I think it’s a huge shame that playing and imagining were driven out of most of us with conventional modes of learning, just because it can’t be quantified and tested as useful. I hated the rote education I received and rebelled against it in the smallest and stupidest of ways—too many ear piercings, spelling my name backwards, arguing for Mercutio as the most interesting character in Romeo and Juliet when we were supposed to write an essay on oxymorons—because I needed to show myself that I was still alive in this fucking bog. And then what? Finally you get out of school, where they tried to beat all the play out of you, then you start hearing the sort of language the corporate marketplace is using, that co-opts playing and now places a premium on it: “Sandboxing,” “thinking out of the box,” whatever. I spit on their graves.

The New National Literature of Canada Is Being Written by Women

Posted on by Kelly Luce

As an American-born literature scholar and writer who became a permanent resident of Canada last year, I’ve spent a lot of time recently wondering how to differentiate between American literature and Canadian literature. Growing up in the 1980s, I saw these two nations as not just contiguous but porous, and they were; back then, my mother and I would drive over the Canadian border for day trips, without passports or any form of identification. (The one time a border officer spared a glance for anyone inside the car was when we were accompanied by her Iranian grad student. “Are you American?” the officer asked. The student nodded, and we were ushered back into the U.S.) We are all painfully aware that borders are being tightened around the world. In this climate of hard stops and blocked-off countries, then, is it any easier to discern the traits of a national literature?

Pinpointing the quiddity of one is tricky, but if I had to do so, I would argue that Canadian literature has traditionally been concerned with negotiating the tension between tightly-knit communities and vast expanses of space. The idea of who is part of the group—and even more importantly, who is not—has always been central to that negotiation. Yet we see this tension in American literature too, and it’s worth remembering that one of the novels speaking most strongly to our current moment in the United States is The Handmaid’s Tale by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. 

In this climate of blocked-off countries, has it become easier to discern the traits of a national literature?

However, in this newly partitioned North America, a more definitive Canadian literature seems to be emerging. Based on my recent reading, one aspect of it is noteworthy: The women are talking.

Up until a couple of years ago , my exposure to Canadian lit was largely limited to Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, and Robertson Davies. Atwood, of course, has proven to be a protean predictor of our future as a species and as readers. When Munro’s Nobel Prize was announced, I was thrilled that the committee was honoring an author who spent her life chronicling small-town women and girls. Davies’ Deptford Trilogy presents academia as a raucous hero’s journey—part Rabelaisian, part Jungian. Ondaatje’s The English Patient is one of the supplest historical novels and meditations on identity that I know. In the works of these authors, the story is often about who controls the story, who gets to speak, how stories throw up their own borders and desires. Like the texts of many national literatures, they probe contested or attenuated authorship and the dangers of repressed language and memories.

I still love all of these writers, but as I put my ear to the ground of my adopted country, I long for new voices—indigenous authors, writers of color, women speaking to experiences hidden from common view. Recent books by Katherena Vermette, Tanya Tagaq, Esi Edugyan, Sheila Heti, and Miriam Toews have fed this urge and suggested to me that one quality intrinsic to Canadian literature, at least in its most recent iteration, may be its emphasis on women’s speech and the act of listening.

Before I settled in Canada, I was ignorant of residential schools and the damage they wrought. From the mid-nineteenth century until the last one closed in 1996, First Nations children were torn from their families and communities, and placed in government-run residential schools for the purpose of “assimilation.” The mortality rate and frequency of all kinds of abuse in them were obscene. From 1928 to 1972 in some provinces, legislation even allowed residential schools to sterilize any child in their care.

Vermette’s The Break and Tagaq’s Split Tooth both reckon with this toxic legacy and transgenerational trauma. The Break, which was published in 2016 in Canada and last year in the United States, is a chamber piece for a tortured orchestra, with each chapter narrated by a different character from one community. Its central mystery is a horrific crime: a Métis teenage girl (someone of mixed indigenous and European ancestry) is sexually assaulted, glass found inside her afterward. As the novel unfolds, the various strands of the story knit more closely together. Women of all ages who at first seemed disparate are shown to either be related by blood or to have played roles in each other’s lives, with the daughter of a woman who was impregnated through rape perpetrating abuse in turn. The novel pivots on the motif of assembly in its content as well as its form. In one scene, a character reflects on how she pieced together the story of her mother’s death in an alley: “Stella learned all the facts. She gathered them like bits of debris and glued them together as if they could stick again.” A different character says of her sister, “She was stitched back together, but there was always a scar.” Narrative, in this context, is one of the few ways to bind torn bodies, memories, psyches, and histories. Vermette, who is herself of Métis descent, doesn’t explicitly discuss residential schools, yet the structure of her novel enacts their great crime of ripping apart communities; the female characters who might be able to heal if they communicated with each other are severed by chapter breaks. Only the reader hears the full story.

Narrative, in this context, is one of the few ways to bind torn bodies, memories, psyches, and histories.

By contrast, Tagaq’s Split Tooth indicts residential schools in the fiercest terms. Fitting for a woman best known for her otherworldly throat singing, Tagaq, who is Inuit, screams at the sky with this story. It is more an unleashing than a traditional novel, a long wail of Arctic magic realism. Its protagonist is ravished by the northern lights and destined to suffer for souls in hell, but her trials are softened by love and tenderness. Interwoven throughout are songs and odes in prose to the landscape of Nunavut, the largest, northernmost Canadian province and where Tagaq grew up: “the air is so clean you can smell the difference between smooth rock and jagged.” The book’s natural refrains advocate for listening not just to other women but to the landscape itself, which according to recent reports is under attack as much as any of us, with Canada warming at twice the global rate.

This sentiment finds good company in the bestselling, award-winning Washington Black, written by Esi Edugyan, who lives a stone’s throw from where I teach in Colwood on Vancouver Island. The daughter of immigrants from Ghana, Edugyan’s cinematic novel starts on a nineteenth-century slave plantation in Barbados before traversing the world. There is even a dreamlike stop in northern Canada, where Tagaq’s characters would feel at home. In one extraordinary scene, the hero encounters an octopus underwater:

“When I came forward to touch it, it sent out a surge of dark ink. We paused, watching each other, the grey rag of ink hanging between us. Then it shot off through the water, stopping short to radiate like a cloth set afire, its arms unfurling and vibrating. There was something playful in its pause, as if it expected me to ink it back.”

This interspecies communication is its own form of listening; if we cannot convey our truths through human speech, we must observe one another closely. Throughout the book, in fact, Edugyan demonstrates how human dignity can be reclaimed by paying close attention to the natural world. Similar to Split Tooth, it espouses a poetics of extreme vigilance, of listening with all the senses, not just the ears.

Other Canadian authors focus on the importance of listening to ourselves. Across the country, in Toronto, Sheila Heti harkens to her mind and attempts to divine her future in Motherhood, an inventive memoir that questions not just whether she wants to have a child but whether it’s possible for a childless woman to mother the world. One of the surprises of Motherhood is that it ends up being as much about Heti’s relationship with her own mother, a successful doctor who skimped on time with her children, as it is about her decision of whether or not to conceive. Heti muses:

“Is attention soul? If I pay attention to my mother’s sorrow, does that give it soul? If I pay attention to her unhappiness—if I put it into words, transform it, and make it into something new—can I be like the alchemists, turning lead into gold? If I sell this book, I will get back gold in return. . .When the gold comes in, I will go to my mother’s doorstep, and I will hand it to her and say: Here is your sadness, turned into gold.”

Interrogating her motivations and choices, Heti flips coins in a version of fortune-telling based on the I Ching; how the coins land determines whether the answer is yes or no. The answers are sometimes heartrending, sometimes hilarious:

“Is there a male equivalent to this, well, barrenness?

no

Is there a romantic female figure that equals those male, romantic, artistic figures?

yes

Women artists with children?

yes

If I have children, will I be like those women?

no”

Despite the question hanging over its project and the hundreds of queries that alight from its pages like a fleet of balloons full of hot air, the book crackles with insistence—the insistence that living with honesty is about asking the right questions and listening for the answer without expectations or preconceptions.

Playful and searching, Motherhood is a philosophical inquiry into personal freedom. In this one respect, it echoes Miriam Toews’ Women Talking, which was published last year in Canada and just came out in the U.S. Before I moved to Canada, I’d never heard of Toews, but she’s a national treasure here, based on anecdotal and other evidence; when I was out in public reading Women Talking, several women came up to me to enthuse about it and say they’d read all her books. With a recent glowing profile in The New Yorker and this unsettling, gorgeous, timely novel, Toews seems poised to get the recognition she deserves across the border as well. Though it draws on real-life crimes in Bolivia, where women and girls as young as three were drugged and raped at night by the men of their remote Mennonite community, Women Talking is a joyful novel. It is not a police procedural; it doesn’t dwell on the crimes. But neither does it shrink from the terrible violence and trauma these women have endured. We as readers bear witness not to their suffering—which, necessarily, was always postponed, belladonna having rendered them unconscious during their attacks—but to their excruciating yet exhilarating seizure of agency, as they debate whether to stay in the colony or flee.

Reviewers have rightfully compared Women Talking to a play, given its chorus of voices and the predominance of reported dialogue, but there are strains of the epistolary novel in it too. The narrator, August Epp—who is nearly as disempowered as any female in the community, and a mess besides—is taking the minutes of a secret debate between the Mennonite women, but his confessions and interjections read at times like a diary. His notes of the women’s conversation are interpretation as much as faithful record:

“A translation note: The women are speaking in Plautdietsch, or Low German, the only language they know, and the language spoken by all members of the Molotschna Colony . . . I mention this to explain that before I can transcribe the minutes of the meetings I must translate (quickly, in my mind) what the women are saying into English, so that it may be written down.”

As powerful a statement as women’s speech can be, when their spoken words are written down, something is always lost in translation.

The novel’s chorus builds to a piercing aria at its end. It should not be forgotten that Toews’ novel, which celebrates female articulation, is narrated by a man, and his epiphanies swell the final pages. Epp’s lyrical supernova speaks for the women of his community, yet his words are not appropriation but grace—for the women, for those left behind, and for August most of all. He realizes that Ona, the woman with whom he has been in love all his life, asked him to record their words not because she and the women need to remember them but because he needs to listen. This should have been obvious to him from the beginning, given that the women won’t be able to read his words in English. But the revelation, and what it hints at, is still glorious. That is, women talking can save not just themselves through this transgressive and liberating act, but everyone around them.

The book’s natural refrains advocate for listening not just to other women but to the landscape itself

At the close of Women Talking, August considers, as he writes a list of things for the youth of Molotschna to cherish, that the word “list” derives from an old word for “desire.” But used in another way, its origins link back to “borders.” The words “list” and “listen” are also connected etymologically. Within this quasi-list, then, my desire to discern literary borders and truly listen to and through these Canadian women’s texts finds its natural expression. But as I trip along those borders, I caution myself. Women are talking in Canadian literature, yes, but we still need to make an effort to hear what they’re saying.

This Novel About the Publishing Industry in 1987 Shows How Little Has Changed

Posted on by Jo Lou

Eve Rosen is an aspiring writer. She’s an editorial assistant at a literary imprint, but the office seems far friendlier to WASP-y men than to Jewish women like her. When her boss’s star writer, the longtime New Yorker reporter Henry Gray, invites Eve to spend the summer of 1987 as his research assistant in Truro, Cape Cod—a town where both he and Eve have long vacationed, though in spheres separated by religion and class—she jumps at the chance.

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The Last Book Party is at once delightfully gossipy and intellectually serious, an ode to literature and a warning against hero-worship.

Like Eve, both Karen Dukess and I have gone to Truro every summer of our lives, thanks to her mother, Mona, and my grandmother. They met at Mount Holyoke in the era of Jewish quotas, when the few Jewish women on campus had to live and socialize together—but in their case, it stuck. As far as I know, they’ve talked on the phone every day for fifty years.

While Karen and I talked about family, Jewishness, and female ambition in The Last Book Party, I thought often about Mona and my grandmother, two women just as ambitious as Eve. 

Lily Meyer: The Last Book Party is a balance between Eve’s vacation and her real life, so to speak. To what extent do you want Truro to feel like a vacation?

Karen Dukess: I thought of Truro as Eve’s better life. She has a better sense of who she is there than in New York, or in her suburban childhood. Even when she begins looking at Henry’s literary Truro world, she’s thinking: “This is the life I want to have. This could be my better self.” It’s what she hopes her real life might be.

LM: Did you always intend to write about literary Truro, or WASP-y Truro?  

KD: Not at all. The Last Book Party began as memoir. I was working in publishing at the time, and once I wrote about it, I kept writing—and then it turned into fiction. After that, I decided I wanted to write about a young woman who’s looking at another world, and idealizing it, and making a lot of assumptions about it. Eve thinks that if she enters Henry’s world, she can be who she wants to be, and then she discovers how wrong she is.

LM: What was it like to work on a novel about publishing that’s set in the 1980s with editors and publicists who are working in publishing in 2019?

KD: What surprised me the most was that when the novel was on submission, time and again, people kept telling me I’d really captured publishing. I thought, “What? I’m writing about 1987! Has nothing changed?” But several people told me that their editorial assistants related to the book, and to Eve. I was surprised to find that, at a certain level, not much had changed. Sadly, somebody told me that even the part in which Eve gets passed over for promotion in favor of a handsome, WASP-y guy could happen today.

LM: Recently, I’ve read a lot of books that address the maleness of media, most notably Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble and Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry. Both touch Jewishness as well, but I did wonder: Is it harder for Eve to be Jewish in publishing, or to be female? Which do you think is the reason she got passed over? 

The writing scene in college was very male. It seemed impossible that a suburban girl like me could be a writer too.

KD: I think it’s harder for Eve to be female. She’s very conscious that her workplace is male-dominated, and that the writing world is, too. This really draws from my own life. When I was in college, the writing scene—students, professors—was very male. To me, the men were the writers on campus. It seemed impossible that a suburban girl like me could be one, too. And Eve really feels the same way. 

As far as Jewishness goes, Eve barely knows how to think about it. She’s so assimilated that she’s not conscious of it, beyond knowing that she’s attracted to the difference of Henry’s WASP-y world. Jeremy, the Jewish writer she gets to know in the book, comes from a less assimilated background, and he notices subtle anti-Semitism much more than Eve does. 

LM: Did you need Jeremy in order to make the book more explicitly Jewish? Or to deal with anti-Semitism?

KD: I really wanted to have somebody from another Jewish background. Jeremy has a complicated relationship to his family, and to Jewishness. Eve thinks her suburban Jewish family background makes her not literary; Jeremy doesn’t want to deal with the grief of being the son of Holocaust survivors. They’re both running away, and that impacts how both of them try to become writers.

As far as anti-Semitism goes, I was more interested in exploring the subtleties of difference. For instance, Henry’s wife, Tilly, assumes that Eve won’t eat bacon. That’s not anti-Semitic—though she later makes comments that are—but it does show a lack of familiarity with Jewish people, or with the nuances of being Jewish. That said, an editor did say to me, “Oh, you really captured the subtle anti-Semitism of that era in publishing.”  

LM: In one scene, Jeremy compares himself to Neil Klugman in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, and Eve lives in fear of turning into the title character from Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar. I love that—and I love how many books you invoke in The Last Book Party. Are there any books that felt especially important? Was there one you always had on your desk?

KD: I didn’t plan to put so many books in! I was somewhat astounded by how many turned up at the end—over fifty—but Eve lives in books more than she lives in life. It made sense that she’d talk about books so much. 

As far as important books go, the novella Goodbye, Columbus informed this book both in content and form—not just the Neil Klugman references and the storyline of someone pressing their face up against a different world than the one they’re from, but also in that Roth’s novella takes place over one summer. I re-read it while writing The Last Book Party, and I also wrote out the first sentence of each chapter to see how Roth structured this story in such a tight timeline.

Jane Eyre and Rebecca were both very important, too. I love the sense of a person entering a world she’s not quite up for and making wrong assumptions about it. Both The Last Book Party and Rebecca have big costume parties that are big disasters and lead to a lot of revelations—I borrowed that, and I love the Gothic-ness of it. Eve’s life is much less Gothic than Jane Eyre, but I do love that sense of over-the-top upset-ness. 

LM: That’s how it feels to be in your twenties! I see that tendency in myself and my friends, and I appreciate that Eve has it, too.

It wasn’t until seven or eight years ago that I accepted that to be a writer, I just had to write. 

KD: Sure! Life feels heightened when you’re in your twenties and you have no idea which choice will have dramatic meaning, or will change the path of your life. People often have a sense of urgency as a result—who am I? what is my life going to be? —and I think it can be overwhelming. It can make you grasp for answers. 

LM: There’s a certain stereotype that millennials have no idea how to treat each other, as if our lives were an eternal episode of Girls. I appreciate that the young people in The Last Book Party, who are not millennials, all treat each other just as badly as millennials supposedly do. 

KD: Well, they’re all so competitive! Eve and Jeremy are always circling each other. I think that reflects a certain insecurity. They see something similar in each other, and don’t like that, since each is trying to move away from where they’re from. Both want to join the WASP-y literary world, and both hate being reminded that they’re strivers. 

LM: At one point, Eve asks how a life like hers could result in a story worth telling. Did writing The Last Book Party help you answer that question?

KD: I had to own the idea that I could tell a story—and that I could tell this story. I loved writing as a child, and I remember that when I wanted to write but got stuck, I’d always describe a girl who wanted to write a story. I had to get back to that story. In college, I was so intimidated by the “real writers” that I fled to journalism and speechwriting. I thought I didn’t have a story to tell, and that I couldn’t be a writer. It wasn’t until I joined a writing group seven or eight years ago that I accepted that to be a writer, I just had to write. 

Which Looks Better, Hardcovers or Paperbacks?

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Perhaps the defining question of any book lover’s life is: should you read the hardcover or wait for it to come out in paperback? There are countless considerations to take into account when defining yourself as a Hardcover Person or a Paperback Type. Are you a weakling, or given to prancing around in a fancy evening gown with only a clutch to keep things in? Paperback. Are you looking for books that can be recycled as monitor stands or improvised weapons? Hardcover. If you care about being the first to read something, hardcover might be your best bet; if you’re prepared to buy your favorite book multiple times so you can lend it out, go with the cheaper paperback. But one consideration that rarely gets discussed is the aesthetic difference. Which cover looks better? What do you want to look at on your bedside table?

We’re back with our Battle of the Book Cover series, in which we judge books by their covers based on our Instagram poll results. This time, we’re looking at covers in their paperback and hardcover editions.

Alternative Remedies for Loss by Joanna Cantor

This is a funny novel about mourning, and one of the covers is more about the grief while the other is heavy on the humor. In contrast to the paperback cover, in which a sweater-clad woman sits hunched at her desk with her back to us, the hardback makes light of the story by showing a young woman doing yoga in full office attire. Our readers may have felt it lacked gravitas.

WINNER: Paperback

Social Creature by Tara Isabella Burton

A thriller about 20-somethings living the high life in New York, Social Creature questions self-esteem, friendship, and the cultural obsession with social media, so it makes sense that this basically came down to a makeup challenge. Heavy eyeshadow marred by tears, or an avant-garde butterfly mask design? Voters preferred the butterfly lewk.

WINNER: Paperback

Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa

The title does a lot of work here, but it deserves a cover to back it up. The paperback of Your Heart is a trip: a distorted image of a crowd centering in on a person in red is vibrant and modern. But readers preferred the simpler, starker image of a crying eye on the hardcover of Yapa’s novel about grief, activism, and love.

WINNER: Hardback

Open Me by Lisa Locascio

With a title that commands you to read it, Open Me is a bildungsroman about a high school grad with a lifelong dream of going to Paris who ends up in Copenhagen with an older Danish lover. The relationship takes a turn when the two move to a small town up north and she meets a Balkan War refugee, with whom she shares a special connection. <whispers> THE CONNECTION IS SEX. Our voters couldn’t choose between the juicy lips on the paperback and the deceptively chaste purple flowers on the hardback version.

WINNER: TIE

All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy

Both of these look good as hell, but voters preferred the layered, intricately patterned window shapes of the paperback to the hardcover, showing scraps of paper scattering over a mountain. The book is about a biracial German Indian man looking back on his and his mother’s lives, so the fact that there’s actually a man looking at things on the paperback cover also helps.

WINNER: Paperback

Hippie by Paulo Coelho

The cover on the left shows us that this is an On the Road-esque journey that leads to Kathmandu by showing… someone driving to Kathmandu. In a VW bus. The ‘60s peace-and-love font of the hardback, despite featuring a LITERAL heart and peace symbol, is somehow less on the nose.

WINNER: Hardback

America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo

Voters preferred the illustration of a mother and daughter on a sunlit path walking into the horizon, on the hardcover of this tender story about three generations of women, rather than the paperback cover, which depicts the symbolic experience of motherhood: a skewer through the heart.

WINNER: Hardback

Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

An image of red wine sitting in a broken glass graces both versions of this debut, a gritty story of a young woman who moves from Ohio to work in the glamorous and chaotic New York City restaurant scene. The paperback shows the act of the glass shattering and the hardcover shows the aftermath–perhaps EL readers preferred the latter with its millennial pink cover perfect for Instagram.

WINNER: Hardback

Good Trouble by Joseph O’Neill

Irish novelist O’Neill’s first collection of short stories focuses on American men in the 21st century. In an interview with Lit Hub, O’Neill said, “When I came to New York, I saw there was a theme in the culture of men in particular trying to come to terms with what it means to be an adult, a crisis of maturity. It was a consumeristic, materialistic view of American society. This quest for maturity seems to be an American preoccupation.” Both covers capture O’Neill’s signature wry tone, but the ominous cloud floating in orange space makes the book look more enticing.

WINNER: Hardback

So Much Life Left Over by Louis de Bernières

De Bernières writes about a couple left in turmoil in the aftermath of the World War I in his newest book. For a novel that travels between Western Europe and South Asia, the paperback seems pretty static. They’re just standing there! Right outside the house! Meanwhile, the hardcover accurately conveys the numerous lives the couple lives. With a plane emitting sections of an image of a tropical place as it soars from a person’s finger, this one wins.

WINNER: Hardback

A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza

These covers pose the question: Where do you want your house, in a suburb or on the moon? The hardback cover centers a house (emblematic of the Indian American family at the book’s center) against a huge moon and a bronze sky. On the paperback, it’s under fireworks in what looks like a subdivision. EL readers picked the more exotic locale.

WINNER: Hardback

Everything Here Is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee

Butterflies are at the center of both covers of Mira T. Lee’s debut about sisterhood, immigration, and mental illness. The paperback features a kaleidoscope of butterfly shadows flying in front of a faceless young woman, but readers preferred the hardback, which might be two butterflies, or a butterfly ripped in half. If you’re going to put a butterfly on your book, make it metal.

WINNER: Hardback

Transcription by Kate Atkinson

A BBC children’s radio producer grapples with her past and Great Britain’s history a decade after the Second World War, in which she was forced to engage in Fascist espionage. Is this better conveyed by a statuary angel or a flamingo? Voters didn’t think it was the flamingo.

WINNER: Hardback

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

It seems like a good idea to trust the story to stand on its own, as the black-and-grey text cover does. But this is a story about an eleven-year-old slave in Barbados who escapes and journeys from Barbados to Canada, London, Morocco, and even the Arctic. The paperback accurately conveys that sense of adventure—plus it makes you very curious whether he will end up flying in a hot-air-balloon-boat. (Spoiler: yes!)

WINNER: Paperback

The Falconer by Dana Czapnik

The Falconer introduces us to Lucy Adler, a seventeen-year-old girl who preoccupies herself playing pickup basketball in New York City in the 1990s. A photograph of the legs of a young couple is centered on the honeydew-green paperback cover, portraying the budding romance with her wealthy classmate, with whom she plays basketball. This makes it seem like the book is about young love and detracts from the fact that Lucy is the center of the story. Maybe it’s not surprising that Electric Literature readers preferred the drawing on the hardcover that takes the man out of the picture.

WINNER: Hardback

A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley

The hardcover of Brinkley’s story collection, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in Fiction, might make your eyes cross; the image of a city street accurately evokes the urban setting, but it’s so blurry, like portrait mode without a portrait. Our voters preferred the poignant and original paperback art of silhouetted breakdancers.

WINNER: Paperback

The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling

A young mother travels from bustling San Francisco to the desert in Altavista, exploring what the Golden State has to offer for her and her toddler. While the paperback cover is muted and mysterious, it’s not as unique as the hardcover with the two blurry stacked images of a woman and the road, amplifying the cold and heavy aesthetic of this novel.

WINNER: Hardback

We That Are Young by Preti Taneja

The cover on the right is gallant with a golden fist against a red background, but maybe EL readers couldn’t stop thinking about that urban legend about the woman who was painted gold and DIED. They preferred the childlike drawing of a three-headed tiger, symbolizing three daughters made to compete against each other by their successful, megalomaniacal father.

WINNER: Paperback

All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdevi

One of the most celebrated books of 2018, All the Names They Used for God is a genre collection as much as it is a short story collection. A mermaid on the paperback hints at one story that is a concoction of magical realism, but readers may have felt that the fragmented pressed flower collage on the hardcover does a better job of suggesting the other genres being played with: science fiction, horror, and more.

WINNER: Hardback

Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson

A finalist for the 2018 National Book Award, Where the Dead Sit Talking is a coming-of-age story about two Native American teenagers who connect in the foster care system. Both versions of this book cover feature the same bird of prey: one’s head and wings are shown at the bottom of the paperback and one floating with a single feather falling off on the hardback. The more grounded image won Instagram followers’ hearts—they like their birds at rest.

WINNER: Paperback

The Strange Connection Between Detective Fiction and Union Busting

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

In the summer of 1892, members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steelworkers (AA) union and the Carnegie-run steelworks in Homestead, Pennsylvania were squaring off in a labor dispute when matters came to a head: factory management attempted to bring in armed militiamen along the river abutting the plant, resulting in a battle between the hired gunmen and the strikers that killed ten and left a number of others injured. Today, the Homestead strike––sometimes referred to as the Homestead massacre––is widely remembered as one of the bloodiest moments in American labor history and represented a major blow to the AA’s unionization efforts throughout the United States.

Though typically referred to as detectives, employees of the Pinkerton Agency would perhaps more accurately be described as paramilitaries.

The armed forces who faced the strikers on the river at Homestead were members of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a private security force frequently hired by the robber barons of the era to investigate unioneers, infiltrate labor meetings, and instigate violence against strikers. Though typically referred to as detectives, employees of the Pinkerton Agency––whose logo of an ever-open eye and motto of “We Never Sleep” create a strong impression of menacing hypervigilance––would perhaps more accurately be described as paramilitaries. Amongst labor activists of the Gilded Age, Pinkertons were widely despised; in an essay on the Homestead strike, socialist organizer Eugene V. Debs referred to them as “a motley gang of vagabonds mustered from the slums of the great cities; pimps and parasites, outcasts, abandoned wretches of every grade; a class of characterless cutthroats who murder for hire; creatures in the form of humans but as heartless as stones.” Given its prominence as a cultural force, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the Agency exerted a strong pull on the imagination of many early icons of the detective fiction genre, some of whom admired the organization and some of whom vilified it.

One early pioneer of crime fiction to write about the Pinkertons was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who met William Pinkerton (son of the Pinkerton Agency’s founder) while the two were on a trans-Atlantic journey together. During the voyage, Pinkerton regaled his new companion with stories of Pinkerton agent James McParland’s recent exploits infiltrating a group of Irish Catholic miners in Pennsylvania known as the Molly Maguires. Conan Doyle was so impressed that he wrote McParland into the final Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear. In that book, a Chicagoan Pinkerton agent by the name of Birdy Edwards recounts his attempts to bring a villainous group known as the Scowrers to justice. Conan Doyle also included a Pinkerton agent in “The Adventure of the Red Circle,” referring to the fictional detective as “the hero of the Long Island cave mystery.” Conan Doyle’s stories depicted the agents as professional and effective. In his admiration of the Pinkerton Agency’s sleuthing skills, Conan Doyle seems not to question––or even register––the organization’s politics. Yet for other early writers of detective fiction, that reality was evident––and became a shaping force in their writing as well. 

One such author was Dashiell Hammett, whose classic The Maltese Falcon came out in 1930, fifteen years after Hammett (a school drop-out by the age of 13) joined up with the Pinkerton Agency. Not long after, the young Hammett was dispatched to Butte, Montana, at a time when the mining town was roiling. Earlier that year, 168 workers had suffocated when an underground fire had consumed the oxygen in the shaft, the deadliest hard-rock mining disaster in American history. Now, miners striking for better safety regulations, higher wages, and an end to abusive labor practices were meeting with violent suppression from their bosses.

Dashiell Hammett would later claim that as a Pinkerton, he had turned down an offer of payment to kill a union organizer.

Hammett, along with other Pinkerton agents, was sent to Butte in order to halt the ongoing industrial action. Attempts to quash the strike were violent: Hammett would later claim that he had turned down an offer of payment to kill Frank Little, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World who was lynched for his role in the strike and in anti-war activities. Whether that particular story is true or not, there is no doubt that Hammett returned from the strikes jaded and deeply marked by the anti-worker violence he saw. Later in his life, he would join the Communist Party and be elected president of the Civil Rights Congress. When called to testify in 1951 about a bail fund established by the CRC to aid those accused of political subversion, Hammett refused to reveal the names of its donors and was imprisoned for contempt. Two years later, his unwillingness to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee led to him being blacklisted. 

The seeds of Hammett’s later politics can be found in his 1929 debut novel, Red Harvest. The novel’s protagonist, a nameless figure known only as the Continental Op, is dispatched to Personville (a Butte stand-in nicknamed Poisonville by its residents) after an industrial magnate’s earlier attempts to enlist militiamen to quell a strike has descended into a lawless turf war between competing bands of hired guns. The Continental Op, cold-blooded and calculating, observes the killings around him with little reaction. Quite the opposite: his part in orchestrating the deaths of the people he’s been hired to eliminate causes him to go “blood-simple,” relishing the spectacle of violence instead of abhorring it. Far from Conan Doyle’s praiseful accounts, Hammett’s own fictionalization of the Pinkertons––one rooted not merely in hearsay tales but in his own first-hand experience with the agency––zeroes in on callousness and cruelty.

While Russia’s love for Pinkerton novels didn’t diminish with the Russian Revolution, their politics became something of a problem for a socialist state.

The literary influence of the Pinkertons extended beyond the United States as well. In Russia, where there was a craze for illustrated detective paperbacks, such books were collectively known as “Pinkerton novels,” or Pinkertonovshchina. One of the most popular protagonists of these books was a savvy investigator by the name of Nat Pinkerton, a clear homage to the American union-busters. While Russia’s love for Pinkerton novels didn’t diminish with the coming of the Russian Revolution in 1917, their politics became something of a problem: for a socialist state, the idea of idolizing an individualistic American hero with origins in violent anti-unionism was absolutely anathema. Yet there was no denying the books’ enduring popularity. In the 1920s, prominent Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin (by all accounts a fan of thrillers himself) called for the creation of the so-called “red Pinkerton,” a detective story that would capitalize on the preexisting success of the genre to teach socialist values. In a 1922 speech delivered to the Russian Communist Union of Youth, he justifies his push for red Pinkertons by noting, “Marx, as is generally known, read crime novels with great enthusiasm.” Red Pinkertons like Marietta Shaginian’s Laurie Lane, Metalworker and Mess-mend, or Yankees in Petrograd (both penned under the pseudonym Jimmy Dollar) aimed to teach socialist ideas and capture the imagination of young readers, inspiring them to throw themselves into the revolutionary struggle. But the genre faced severe criticism from Party members who thought that the detective novel was inescapably enmeshed with bourgeois values, and debates about the genre quickly became a proxy battle for deeper internal rifts among the Bolsheviks. By the end of the 1920s, Bukharin had been forced to abandon his calls for the creation of a Soviet Pinkerton novel.

Though the red Pinkerton phenomenon was short-lived, its existence testifies to a growing global awareness of the ways in which mass media––including detective stories––could be harnessed for propagandistic purposes––an awareness that was latent amongst the authors who wrote about the Pinkertons from the beginning. Perhaps the strongest testament to the Pinkerton Agency’s skills in secrecy is the way it dropped off the cultural radar in the decades after it captured the attention of Conan Doyle, Hammett, and Soviet officials: though it no longer makes its way into major detective novels, the Agency still exists, repackaged as a corporate risk management firm after the growth of municipal police forces and the creation of the FBI took over much of its old territory. The history section of Pinkerton’s website, which claims that the company’s agents have long served “as guardians and protectors of organizations around the world,” makes no mention of its union-busting days. Its logo remains the all-seeing eye.

The Literature of Cootie Catchers

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

There are soothsayers in the back of the school bus. Their hands move in familiar patterns: they fold a piece of notebook paper in half, then again, tuck the corners toward center and crease. As they work, a small apparatus manifests, pleated and primped. It begins to move. It opens. It closes. It reveals your future. 

Perhaps it’s been years, decades, since you’ve enacted these motions yourself: first, choose a color from the outside flaps, and the soothsayers speak the letters aloud while widening and shutting the device’s pointed mouth, a soft crinkling of paper swishing through the hushed air. Now choose a number from the inner folds. Five? Alright, whisper the soothsayers, one, two, three, four, five, they count, as their hands twitch in tandem. Pick again. Seven? The flap levitates open, and there, hidden beneath the innermost paper petal, lies your fate.

Yes, this is familiar. A dream or a question, just on the edge of your memory: the nostalgic step by step ritual of playing with a paper cootie catcher.

How to fold a cootie catcher

You may have known the device by another name— “fortune teller” is the most common alternative, though certain regions also favor salt-cellar, whirlybird, chatterbox, or snapdragon, among others. There’s Poland’s “niebo-pieklo,” Germany’s “himmel und hölle,” Italy’s “inferno-paradiso”—all of which translate into some form of “heaven and hell.” “Cootie catcher,” itself, refers to one particular style of decorating the apparatus, in which small, scattered dots, or “cooties,” would be drawn on half the second-tier flaps, so that opening and closing the catcher would reveal or swallow them. 

Regardless of its title, chances are you’ve used the cootie catcher just the way I did: as a two-person game designed to tell brief, randomized fortunes. Like most folk traditions, evolving and adapting under the influence of many thinkers and makers throughout time, the catcher’s true origins are unclear, with some accounts tracking them all the way back to 17th-century Europe. We do know that the device was popularized in the United States during the 1950s. From there, it bloomed into one of the nation’s most popular children’s folk traditions, right up there with Bloody Mary in the mirror and “light as a feather, stiff as a board.” Traveling onwards between friendship-braceleted hands, stuffed into pockets, and torn from diary pages, the cootie catcher spread across the world. And, as a child mystic requires only a single sheet of paper and a writing utensil to conjure one of these fold-up fortune tellers into existence, the toy was available to children of all income levels and classes. By its very design, the tradition could survive in any community, could manifest in any child’s hands.

I had nearly forgotten about cootie catchers until three winters ago in New Orleans. It was a friend’s 25th birthday, and we had (in a youthful burst of exuberance) transformed her shotgun apartment into a labyrinthine series of blanket forts. Lace and golden string lights were draped over chair backs. A tunnel led from the front door into the main quilt-muffled chamber, forcing party guests to make their entrance by squeezing into the room on hands and knees. As dusk slipped towards midnight and the wine ran low, we found ourselves recalling the blanket forts of our childhoods—and the strange occult happenings that shimmered inside them. Someone took out a piece of paper, tore it into a square, and began to fold.

Girls have long been drawn to games of chance, of luck, of peering into a future that seemed to already have been decided for them.

The cootie catcher is primarily associated with girlhood, a gendered tradition passed hand-to-hand at sleepover parties and in schoolyards. Like so many divinatory games, young women have long been the keepers and practitioners. In our patriarchal society, young men have been emboldened to select their own paths, to determine who and what they wanted to become—leaving boys with no true need for fortune telling or luck. Why bother with divination when you can control the future? Adolescent girls, however, were never afforded this promise. Thus, girls have long been drawn to games of chance, of luck, of peering into a future that seemed to already have been decided for them. If they couldn’t control the future, at least they could get a preview of what’s to come.

As a writer by trade, I’ll admit that I was immediately intrigued by the narrative qualities of the cootie catcher. Relying on a sort of “choose-your-own-adventure” storytelling format, the secrets hidden within the innermost flaps can be read in any order, as selected by the players themselves. The game-play relies on spelling (counting letters in a given word), as well as full sentences of language. Unlike visual mediums like palm reading or tea leaves, the cootie catcher is an outright literary form of fortune telling. And the catchers’ creators take on an authorial role, composing unique, original text to fill each fortune.

The further I examined this intersection between divination and literature, the more I found intrinsic ties between them. Countless examples of literary divinations began to unfold, not unlike (dare I say) the many layers of a cootie catcher. For example, take bibliomancy, in which a book (often a bible) is dropped and whatever page falls open portends the future. Or fortune cookies, containing tiny, prophetic koans. Or automatic writing, where a pen-toting medium allows a message to flow onto the page without conscious effort. All of which is to say—language is given extraordinary social and psychological power. This is beyond “the pen is mightier than the sword”: writing serves specifically as an occult power, a supernatural tool that must be wielded delicately. And the implication? Language can transcend time, slipping past us to peer into the future. While we’re trapped in a single moment, tied to our mortal bodies, words can scurry on ahead of us. And oddly, this makes sense—already, writing is viewed as a sort of time travel. Through language alone, we can meander through the mind of a long-dead author, accessing ideas and images from prior centuries. If writing can carry us into the past, can even transcend death, then why shouldn’t it carry us into tomorrow, too?

When the tarot was first popularized in Europe during the mid-15th century, it was not used for divination, nor for psychological insight. Like a standard poker deck, the tarot was simply a set of cards used in game play. Over time, it shape-shifted. The cards were shuffled and dealt and passed hand to hand, until they had transformed into tools for premonition. What was it about the tarot that allowed such a dramatic re-purposing? I’d argue that the tarot’s magical root is as simple as this: every card tells a story.

If something can tell a story, chances are that it can tell your story. The Fool who steps into the unknown… the Three of Swords bearing heartbreak… the patient, dangling Hanged Man… As any good writing teacher can tell you, the microcosm contains the macrocosm— within the tarot, we view an individual illustration and immediately it expands, jumpstarting associations with similar images in our own lives. And so, through these archetypal narrative images come tales. And tales lead to questions. And questions lead into the future. 

If something can tell a story, chances are that it can tell your story.

The tarot and the cootie catcher are far from the only divinatory forms that succeed as not only literature, but as games as well. The Ouija board—a form of automatic writing— contains similar traits, yet evolved in the opposite direction of the tarot: it began as an occult tool called a “spirit board,” used by professional mediums during the American spiritualism movement. Only later, after Hasbro patented the first “Ouija board” in 1890, did it transform into a party game. Ouija provided a rare opportunity for young men and women to be intimate in public, unsupervised, as game play required users to sit close, knees touching, with hands overlapping on the planchette. Cootie catchers, too, involve partnership to operate, as does the tarot—all telltale traits of gaming form. And I believe it’s no coincidence that the Ouija board relies on the written word, spelled out letter by letter, to reveal its powers. Once again, language and divination find themselves hand in hand.

Remember the game where you open a can of soda and toggle the tab back and forth while reciting letters of the alphabet? Whichever letter the tab snaps loose on marks the first letter of your future spouse’s name. Similar patterns are seen in children’s jump rope games, where letters are counted off, and wherever the jumper trips up marks their future sweetheart’s identity. As with the cootie catcher, these are both traditionally feminine games– and as such, focus on one of the greatest, most influential unknowns young women faced: marriage. 

It seems that everywhere we look, from the psychic’s velvet draped, neon-signed shop front, to Pepsi vending machines, to the foggy mythos of our own childhoods, language has been playfully divining our paths for centuries.

Of course, this inspiration can go both ways. Authors have often repurposed divinatory forms directly into works of literature. Pulitzer-winning poet James Merrill used a Ouija board to write his epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover. Italo Calvino wrote his novel The Castle of Crossed Destinies though tarot cards, which his two characters display to recount their tales. Lily Hoang’s book Changing was written using the I Ching. I found myself wandering a similar path at that ethereal blanket fort soiree in my friend’s New Orleans home, wondering how the cootie catcher might be re-worked into a storytelling tool. Over the course of the next few years, I collaborated with an illustrator to create a spooky tale told exclusively in a series of cootie catchers, each liftable flap bearing new narrative secrets and revelations. (If this sounds like your kind of thing, the bizarre and illustrious Ninepin Press has agreed to publish this miraculous object-set in its entirety—you can take a peek here).

Whenever I purchase a new journal, I flip through the blank pages cautiously. I can’t help but be suspicious of them. Soon, those pages will fill up with intimate, documentary words, boiling over with memories I haven’t yet lived through. The journal will contain so much I cannot yet know. In those early moments when a new journal is clean, crisp, unsullied by ink, I can’t help feel that the pages already sense what they’ll eventually hold. I squint over them, as if trying to read a note written in lemon juice. What does this paper know of the future that I cannot? How can I read past the limitations of my own body, into the writings I’ll scrawl tomorrow?

“Reading” is an essential act in divination. Even non-linguistic divinatory forms that focus on image or symbol rather than words are still spoken of like, well… literature. A seer doesn’t watch or glance or speak a palm—she “reads” it. Fortune tellers “read” tea leaves and tarot, despite the fact that these are all visual mediums of soothsaying, not word-based. 

At its heart, divination is rooted in story.

The consistent use of “read” implies something important. It suggests an intrinsic link between divination and literature. At its heart, divination is rooted in story. And even if the tools being used are illustrations, or Earl Grey, or the wrinkles in your own hand, at the end of the day what matters are the stories these symbols tell us.

There are always new soothsayers in the back of the bus. There are always children peering forward from the beginnings of their lives, hungry to know what the vast future will bring. There will always be stories, and there will always be new ways of reaching past our own, mortal forms into the flickering future. However, each individual cootie catcher itself will not stand the test of time. These are no hardbound books, nor precious documents sealed away in museums. A cootie catcher is ephemera. It begins to dissolve in the very hands that create it. These art objects, these literary devices, these vital pieces of literature authored by young women are doomed to slip away just as quickly as the years themselves. They tear at the corners. They’re abandoned in schoolyards and tossed into wastebaskets. Far from treasured heirlooms, they exist in a moment of strange, supernatural ritual before being unceremoniously abandoned. Perhaps this is the cootie catcher’s greatest poignancy— as the school bus soothsayers grow and age and yearn towards womanhood, into the futures they dreamt of, their paper fortune tellers fall behind. Time gallops on. And as the predicted storms and joys arrive, the very objects that once envisioned these fates no longer exist to see it.

Time and Gravity Hit the Open Road

Posted on by Kelly Luce

Equations of a Falling Body

Time drove down the street in her vintage Volkswagen Beetle, her best friend Gravity in the passenger seat. The top was down even though it was January. Their hair slapped their cheeks and got caught in the corners of their mouths and pulled against their scalps. They yelled over the top of a Black Flag song, destroying the lyrics.

Gravity laughed at the women on the sidewalk, who didn’t see the Beetle but felt a strange sense of self-consciousness overtake them. Gravity made one girl wobble in her high heels and fall into the arms of a married man. Time grinned and froze the tableau just long enough for his wife to come out of the shop. The girl in heels scraped her knees in the snow, the wife towering over her like a mad titan with mad titian hair. The husband twisted and twisted his ring.

At the next light, the Beetle rolled to a stop next to an old man in a Toyota Corolla. His gray hair brushed against the tips of his big ears, and when he turned to look at them, it started to rain. He had eyes filled with starlight. He remembered them in their cradles, and they wanted to forget.

Gravity pulled up Google Maps, and Time punched down on the gas.

II.

They blasted out of Boston, the blue Beetle wheezing beneath them. It was too cold, and the Christmas lights kept burning out, and the city air – flavored with asphalt and baseball and salt and sprawl – crusted their throats.

Dusty and lukewarm, El Paso wasn’t any better. The women were in tank tops; they accessorized with sunglasses and sweat. The men gazed into their half-drunk beer bottles, waiting for wisdom or unconsciousness.

Time pulled into a dive bar on the south side, vaulting over the driver’s door in ankle boots and short shorts, while Gravity took her sweet sweet time sliding from the car to the asphalt, her eyebrows as low as her neckline.

The bar was a smoke-dark lung that pulled at Gravity. The air clung. She was used to that, but the eyes lit up like wolves’ eyes as she slinked toward a booth at the back. She wanted to return to invisibility; she tugged at the hem of her skirt.

Time was hours ahead of her, slamming her sixth shot down on the cracked brown bar, her laughter arrowing through the dark and waking no one. At the scattered, scarred tables, the whiskey-worn patrons sniffed, their throats rumbled, but they didn’t move closer. The air around Time was a latticework of electricity and don’t-fuck-with-me. Gravity watched her back.

III.

Seattle: Gravity was hungry. Every smile she attracted was bone-thin and braced against the cold night. No one had candles for eyes, or stretched their fingertips toward her under the cloud-broken moon. They hurried past as though she were nothing special.

Time sat on the Beetle’s hood, watching the snow soak into the skin of her arms. She didn’t make it fall faster, only let it take its course. She could be a merciful god, sometimes.

IV.

Theoretically, the universe belongs to them now: Gravity pulling, Time propelling. The rest of the old gods – ghost-artists, dust-engineers, planet-mechanics, carbon-masons, silence-miners, fire-defiers, mothers – are lost in their own stories, can’t be bothered.

Time catwalks all the silences between stars in glitter-green ice skates, her umbrella inside-out. The comets swish their tails and streak the sky, uninterested in being pets. Gravity trudges behind. Her tutu droops with rain from Io, diamonds from a nameless place, rust from Mars. Her cigarette smells of silicon-petrichor from Saturn; she can’t light it out here; she slides it back behind her ear.

Time longs for the people with her whole body, which is the whole universe, which balances precariously in her belly, which is a ewer of wishes and endings.

The beginning (there is only one) is so far away now, not even Gravity can grasp the corners. She dons a knee-high pair of boots, and the very last parachute. Time drifts out but Gravity belts her back in. If they’re together when they fall, they always fall toward home.

7 Novels Set in Deserts

Posted on by Jo Lou

I come from Moreno Valley—brown valley—in an area of California known colloquially as the Inland Empire, located three hours from Vegas, and two from the border. In the 80s and 90s, when I was growing up there, the I.E. was a constellation of freeways connecting deserts and meth labs and good dogs and medium people. It holds no relation to the David Lynch movie of the same name.

A Prayer for Travelers by Ruchika Tomar
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The Inland Empire is where I first fell in love with dry, barren landscapes and got to know them as the kind of beautiful, brutal places that will grow you right up. We—by which I mean my friends and I—lacked this perspective at the time. We ditched our classes and wore blue mascara daily and fell silent when the principal announced over the PA system that another student died huffing anti-freeze. In eighth grade, our friend’s mother’s meth lab blew up, and the announcement made a  2”x2” square in the back pages of the local paper. In high school, we shared a memorable year in the company of a twitchy ex-con named Worm—but that ended, inevitably, in his violent return to prison.

We spent the rest of our time in Palm Desert and San Bernardino and Indio, dancing the night away at various Indian casinos; we went to sleep in parked cars; we woke up to the sun frying us like eggs in our tin cans. We drove east to Vegas and north to Death Valley, crossing Reno in winter, stopping on the side of the road to buy blankets and fruit. When I finally left the desert, it was very much on purpose, so you can imagine my disappointment when I started writing a novel, only to realize that a part of me longed to return.

They say you can never go home again—and I think that’s true—but artists have always loved the desert for the inescapable fact that it’s blank and pitiless and full of possibility. What is nothing if not the most keenly seductive invitation to anything? It’s the absence of place that honors our most elemental self; it’s the desert’s famine that allows for all sorts of creatures to evolve as brutally and singularly as they must. Perhaps that’s why the stories that often emerge from deserts are often outlaws too, breaking traditional forms and narratives structures, unafraid to invent desperate risks. Many of us are blessed to be in driving distance to the Chihuahuan, the Sonoran, the Great Basin, or the Mojave—and if you are, I hope you’ll visit them while we still can. But if you find yourself out of reach of a great desert, you can always pick up one of these brilliant books and bring the desert home to you.

Image result for yuri herrera signs preceding the end

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Hererra

On the first page of this slim, powerful novel, we meet our sixteen year old narrator, Makina, who’s charged with hand-carrying a note from her mother in Mexico all the way to her brother in the United States. “I don’t like to send you, child,” Cora tells her, “but who else can I trust it to, a man?” Nope! So Makina sets off alone, first to gather intel for her journey from a series of local jefes, and then, with their blessing, she departs into the desert alone, picking her way towards our inhospitable border, hazarded by numerous mortal and political obstacles on the way. The division of family and the question of true reunification is one Hererra wants us to ponder, while Makina’s heartbreaking passage exposes the vulnerability of bodies and the violent schisms between men, women and country.

The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams

The Quick & the Dead by Joy Williams

Alice, Corvus and Annabel are three young women coming of age in a small town in the Arizona desert. The girls spend their time stalking cats, blowing shit up, and being embarrassed by their parents, respectively—pretty true to life, in other words—but the novel’s more crucial enterprise is Williams’ devastating reflection on the banality of death. Among the girls, Alice is the guerrilla environmentalist, Corvus is the grave and solemn orphan grieving over her parents’ death, and Annabel is the late-to-town transplant whose arrival incites our tour of the town’s eclectic personalities and pedestrian violence, a place where roadkill leaves a “rosy kiss on the pavement,” elderly men and women wither “like iguanas” in a nearby nursing home, and vengeful, backtalking ghosts materialize with unsettling aplomb. Williams’ prose is artful and precise, the story is comic and outrageously clever, and the starkness of Williams’ narrative ecosphere exerts an intense pressure on her female characters to transmute their surroundings and become “extraordinary.”

On Swift Horses by Shannon Pufahl

On Swift Horses by Shannon Pufahl

Shannon Pufahl’s On Swift Horses is an elegant, powerful novel about Muriel, a deceptively coy San Diego newlywed (by way of rural, postwar Kansas), and her shrewd brother-in-law Julius, a rambling cardshark betting his life on luck’s mercurial bidding. The two gamblers share an early connection before their fates diverge—Muriel becomes involved in the aggressive, male-dominated universe of horse-racing at Del Mar, and Julius flees to the old Las Vegas, that glamorous, mafia-orchestrated oasis whose surreptitious thrill was once a provisional lapse  of repressive post-war social conventions. One of the unique pleasures of Pufahl’s seamlessly-researched novel is the momentary return to a less-excessive American excess —when the purchase of an ocean-proximate California home by regular, hardworking Americans wasn’t a laughable possibility; when Las Vegas had yet to be rebuilt into a 24-hour landlocked Royal Caribbean. It’s the kind of nostalgia that can only be enjoyed from the safe distance of (arguable) progress, especially by all those who were never been invited to partake in America’s middle class comforts. On Swift Horses is a solemn reminder of the resilience of generations of Americans who survived our country’s violent past, a timely reminder of the modern consequences of failing to relinquish its dogged shadow, and a heartbreaking elegy to those who never made it out.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

A novel in three parts: first, “Mexicans Lost in Mexico,” written in epistolary form by the aspiring poet Juan García Madero, who begins his diary with his decision to take a writing workshop at his university. It’s there he first encounters Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, two second-generation visceral realists, following in the tradition of the original visceral realists, “a Mexican avant-garde group [of]  . . . writers or painters or journalists or revolutionaries.” Madero is seduced by Lima’s literary talent and wants to joins the group, despite remaining somewhat unclear who exactly the men are. As he gets to know Lima, Belano and their friends, Lima’s fascination with the original visceral realist movement and it’s founder Cesárea Tinjero evolves.

The second part of the novel is “The Savage Detectives,” comprised of variegated recollections from an array of characters who come in contact with Belano and Lima during their travels from 1976-1996. The third and final section of the novel, “The Deserts of Sonora,”  returns us to Madero’s diary in 1976 as he, Lima, Belano drive into the Sonora Desert to search for Cesárea Tinjero. Bolaño loves to play with themes of recursion and doubling, often echoing personalities and settings across his works, and The Savage Detectives can be seen in many ways as the literary precursor to Bolaño’s subsequent masterpiece 2666, but while the two works share some literary preoccupations, The Savage Detectives is singularly concerned with the elliptical nature of time and the purpose of art in the politicized framework of Latin American history. A compulsively readable, structurally innovative novel told in Bolaño’s signature exuberant, roguish prose.

Image result for john mcphee encounters with the archdruid

Basin and Range by John McPhee

A stunning work of non-fiction, I can’t imagine more essential reading for our times than John McPhee’s legendary, lyric survey of the United States written through the prism of geological history. McPhee, a prolific journalist whose expertise on a broad range of topics won him a Pulitzer Prize, focuses this particular inquiry on the Western desert “with its welded tuffs a Franciscan mélange (internally deformed, complex beyond analysis), its strike-slip faults and falling buildings, its boiling springs and fresh volcanics, its extensional disassembling of the earth.” McPhee guides his readers through millions of years of “deep time” that have fashioned our most familiar Western landmarks through the pitching shifts of tectonic plates, eroding river currents and massive extinctions of plant and animal life that remain fossilized in our earth’s crust. You’ll leave this book with a deeper appreciation for our ancient planet and her centuries of gracious shelter.

Point Omega by Don DeLillo

I admire Don DeLillo’s work so much that I’d be happy to move inside his intellectually rigorous, doom-obsessed brain for five hours straight—which is, coincidentally, how long it took me to read this slim, dense novel in one sitting. If you’re the kind of person who gets turned on by intelligent, evasive repartee between two loquacious men committed to deploying their own emotional smokescreens, you’ll enjoy this novel that focuses on a scholar-turned-national-war-strategist Richard Elster and a documentary filmmaker, Jim Finley, who wants to make a film about Elster’s role in the (mis)management of the Iraq War.

Shortly after the novel opens, we learn Elster has been elusive about his willingness to be filmed, and Finley has been persistent, so Elster invites Finely to his desert hideaway, alone, so that he can unofficially consider the project. Because Finley is a man, he somehow doesn’t immediately find this request creepy or foreboding, despite the fact that Elster is described as wearing his long grey hair in a single braid, and frequently holds forth on a number of subjects at intense length, including the quality of the desert landscape they’re isolated in together, a place he feels is abortive of natural time, “the minute-by-minute reckoning” of city life. Elster argues that in the desert, “Day turns to night eventually but it’s a matter of light and darkness, it’s not time passing, mortal time. There’s none of the usual terror. It’s different here, time is enormous, that’s what I feel here, palpably. Time that precedes us and survives us.”

By the time Elster’s daughter shows up, you’ll be wondering how many different ways this situation could implode, but you won’t be able to look away, because DeLillo’s sentences always mange to build in on themselves at the same time they bridge out to the reader, collapsing into a singularly momentous experience the reader can’t forget. The usual terror is never DeLillo’s long game—but in Point Omega, as in all his works, DeLillo makes sure to serve up a uniquely American nightmare.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

Arguably the most famous of Michael Ondaatje’s novels, this story opens with Hana, a young Canadian nurse stranded in the bombed-out ruins of an Italian villa during WWII. Hana has remained in the villa long after everyone else has fled to provide care for the English Patient, as he is rather arbitrarily named, a man burned beyond recognition, without face or country, who can recall nothing about who he is beyond a fractured key of memories—a violent plane crash and its subsequent blaze; the dry North African desert where he wakes bewildered and nearly blind, salvaged from the wreckage by Bedouin tribesmen who dress his charred body and carry him between them in a makeshift hammock they move across the dusty landscape.

Hana listens to the patient’s fragmented evocations of the desert as the pair is joined by two other stragglers from the war—Kip, a British Sikh sapper disillusioned with his time in the army, and Carvaggio, a charming criminal and former friend of Hana’s father. The novel’s setting is poignantly charged and the cast of characters are rich and diverse, their discordant backgrounds clashing to reveal the most surprising harmonies—and it’s only Ondaatje’s lush, lyric sentences that feel exotic, begging to be read aloud. This is a novel that meditates on loss, but what it interrogates is identity—who are we without our families, our pasts, our nationalities to shape us? How are we made, and how must we survive? The English Patient maps the delicate bonds and limitations between friends, and explores the “physical and spiritual sense of loneliness” that haunts all human experience.