Being Published in Asia Changed Everything About My Asian American Writer Experience

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Last spring, I was flown to Seoul to launch the Korean edition of my debut novel, Dark Chapter. My publisher Hangilsa Press had astutely monitored the growing public response to #MeToo in Korea and had decided to not only bring forward my novel’s publication date, but also set up a full promotional “tour” for me with multiple TV interviews, public talks, and a press conference. In some ways, it was every debut author’s dream: a round-trip flight halfway across the world, five nights in a luxury hotel, guest of honor treatment throughout. It was also completely exhausting, requiring nonstop eloquence and enthusiasm about a difficult topic (my own rape)—and all this while jet-lagged, surrounded by translators. (I am Taiwanese American, not Korean American, and I don’t speak any Asian language fluently, but my Korean publisher, media, and audiences were unfazed by the language gap.)

It was simultaneously exhilarating and lonely, yet also the kind of publicity platform any ambitious novelist would love to have. But throughout most of this, a question popped up, the inverse of a more familiar one: Would my Korean publishers have done this if I were white?

I imagine most people of color living in the West have internally teased a question like that at various points in their lives: Would I have been treated like that if I weren’t Black? Would those strangers have said that to me if I weren’t Asian? Would I have gotten the job if I fit more easily into the mainstream culture—i.e., if I were white? Writers of color are accustomed to this question, too, and indeed, I asked it of myself many times while trying to find a U.S. publisher for Dark Chapter. Would this be so difficult if I were white, I wondered, or if I conformed more stringently to the narratives that white readers expect of Asian stories?

Dark Chapter struggled to find a U.S. publisher. In 2015, when it was on submission, many publishers were disturbed by its portrayal of sexual violence, which some editors considered “too real” or “too unflinching.” (An ironic comment, given how much some genres rely on sexual violence as a trope.) But the exact opposite happened in Taiwan in Autumn 2017, after my novel won The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize. There, a five-way auction for Complex Chinese rights led to my biggest advance thus far. The Taiwanese edition of my book has just been published in April 2019. Rights for a mainland Chinese edition sold for more than twice the Taiwanese advance. Why this difference between U.S. and Asian publishers’ reactions to the same book?

You could argue Dark Chapter still falls within a tradition of “pain narratives” expected of writers of color by Western readers. But my book doesn’t directly address issues of race, even though the heroine’s identity as Asian American informs her experience of the world. It is more a story of gender and class, following the well-educated heroine’s encounter with the feral, illiterate Irish teenager who rapes her in Belfast. If my book were more overtly Asian (instead of inhabiting the amalgamated, international background that I come from), would American and British publishers have known how to market it more easily as literary fiction? If writers like Lisa Ko, Chang-Rae Lee, and Amy Tan address the immigrant experience, are all writers with Asian last names expected to as well?

The total advances from my three Asian publishers exceed the total advances from my nine Western publishers.

It seems to be a very different experience for Asian American writers in Asia. While on my Korean book tour, I encountered a very unfamiliar notion of privilege: in addition to losing out on opportunities because I wasn’t white, I was also getting new opportunities precisely because I was Asian American. The total advances from my three Asian publishers exceed the total advances from my nine Western publishers. And like my Korean publishers, my mainland Chinese publishers are hoping to fly me to Beijing to promote the novel. I can’t help but notice that the only publishers to have invested in a promotional tour thus far are Asian.

The cynic in me focused on the “optics” of marketing authors, but when I got to Seoul, I realized there may be some deeper emotional truth in promoting an Asian American female author to other Asian women. Since my book deals so directly with the painful, often private trauma of rape, I believe it meant something to potential readers in Korea—specifically female readers—to see an author who looked like them. As if our shared experience of womanhood, gender inequality, and (for some) sexual assault, somehow felt closer to theirs, because we were the same race.

Nominated for an Edgar Award in 2018, Dark Chapter is a fictionalized retelling of my own real-life stranger rape, but imagined equally from the perspectives of both the victim (a character with strong parallels to myself) and the perpetrator (in real life, an Irish teenager who stalked me in a park). It is set largely in Northern Ireland (where my rape took place) and London (where I lived at the time, and still do do now), so there is no direct connection with contemporary Korean or Asian culture, save for the fact that the victim, Vivian, is Taiwanese American.

But even this representation of Asian womanhood seemed to be something Korean women readers identified with, particularly around a subject that carries such a cultural taboo. During my promotional tour, Korean women lined up at the signing table, some of them sharing their own stories of sexual trauma with me. Some would cry, telling me how grateful they were I had written this book. My literary translator, Byeol Song, is herself a rape survivor and public about this—and I, in turn, was grateful for the emotional authenticity she gave to the Korean edition. Elsewhere on my tour, I conversed with leading feminist scholar Dr. HyunYoung Kwon-Kim, participated in a special discussion with women journalists, gave a lecture for Women’s Studies Masters program, delivered a TED-style televised talk. At night in my hotel room, I cried on my own—partly out of sheer exhaustion, partly out of the chance to connect with these women living on the other side of the world, Korean readers I wouldn’t have otherwise met.

If I were white and talking about my rape, would Korean readers have thought my life experience was too different from theirs to relate to?

My professional life in London often involves enabling conversations among rape survivors. Predominantly, participants in these conversations are white, although there is certainly ethnic diversity. But my experience in Korea raised another question. Because sexual assault is so deeply personal, do people naturally feel drawn to someone whose experience seems closer to theirs—because of how they look? If I were white and talking about my rape, would Korean readers have thought my life experience was too different from theirs to relate to, despite also being a rape survivor?

Strangely, I, too, found myself being more honest about being an Asian American author in the West, when Korean audiences asked me about it. I said that writers who looked like me were often expected to write about “being Asian,” rather than a more “universal” experience like gender or sexual assault.

It was the first time I felt I could even mention that publicly when discussing the book. To a more general, Western audience, I worried that such thoughts might label me a whiney or ungracious minority writer.  But in Korea, I sensed a duty to be honest about the kinds of unspoken discriminations that still happen to women of color in the West. Perhaps I myself perceived a sense of kinship with these Asian women.  Perhaps the optics affect all of us—even the most cynical—into an imagined sympathy with those who look like us. And yes, visibility matters. Even a symbolic visibility enables an author to connect with an audience.

Even a symbolic visibility enables an author to connect with an audience.

I am glad my Korean publishers recognized the value of promoting an Asian American female author to Asian women readers, but our readerships shouldn’t be limited by race.  It is truly a shame if Western publishers perceive a problematic gap between the race of an author and the race of a book’s intended readers—because there are readers of all ethnicities in the West, and we are all capable of empathy.  And literature, after all, is meant to transcend such human particularities. As a Taiwanese American girl growing up in the U.S., I certainly identified with characters who didn’t come from a world anything like mine: Scout Finch, Holden Caulfield, Bigger Thomas. And indeed, it works the other way around. I’ve had white male readers say that reading Dark Chapter made them understand a bit better what it’s like to be a woman, who cried reading the scenes of the heroine’s experience of the criminal justice system. So if they can identify with a Taiwanese American heroine, then that’s already one step towards progress.

Looking ahead, I am curious to see how my Taiwanese and Chinese publishers will handle Dark Chapter.  (Of the ten book covers finalized so far by international publishers, only the Dutch one explicitly shows an Asian face in the cover design). My mainland Chinese publisher will roll out the Simplified Chinese edition to billions of potential readers later this year.  A British-Vietnamese producer is optioning the film rights. And, as I write my second novel, I also wonder if it’s a disadvantage with Western publishers that my work doesn’t address ethnic identity more explicitly. Should I write what’s easier to market by an Asian American author, or what truly interests me?  Of course, it’s the latter. As I’ve been told time and time again by other writers, you just have to hope your work will find its readers. Regardless of your race and theirs.

How William Styron Kept Me Alive

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Novel Gazing is Electric Literature’s personal essay series about the way reading shapes our lives. This time, we asked: What’s a book that changed your mind?

My first night in the hospital, I sleep on a gurney in a room imbued with the scent of hopeless men, the sounds of adults bawling in agony. The man adjacent to me, doughy and pallid, a homeless schizophrenic who has ingested some bad drugs, keeps muttering about humus and the mysteries of women’s bodies, about how he’s Jesus, how he’s going to kill the people that only he can see. Quiet finally comes when he’s tranquilized into insentience.

I curl up, feeling prenatal and pathetic, and face the wall. The hospital thrums all night, bodies in perpetual motion. A young girl on suicide watch tries to walk out the door and is apprehended. As two men escort her back to her room, leading her past my gurney, I can see her forearms mottled with scars, her eyes dark and sunken into her head.

In the photograph on my hospital bracelet, I’m snarling.

In the morning I go to the in-patient psychiatric unit, still wearing the clothes I arrived in. It’s a place of penitentiary gloom, free of lusts and luxuries. A blue gauzy shirt, three sizes too big, is draped over me; all of my things are locked up.

It takes a day to really assimilate into the unit. I’m initially hostile to the staff, and one of the patients, a bearded and garrulous man who’s been here for two weeks and will remain here for another three (this is his seventh or eighth stay in the unit), comes up to me and asks, sharply, “What are you doing here? You don’t belong here.” I threaten to break his face. I’m escorted to my room.

The unit can be broken down into three sections: the bedrooms, which I avoid because sharing quarters with three noxiously flatulent psychotic men who thrash in their sleep and openly masturbate is not conducive to a good night’s rest; the hallways, in which patients pace and lurk and occasionally sleep, all furled and exposed and uncaring; and the Dayroom, in which a television acts as electronic idol—it is to the patients what the Monolith is to David in Kubrick’s 2001.

With its hermetic atmosphere and unusual internal logic, the unit feels like the setting for a chamber drama, replete with a cast of tragicomic characters. Some patients burst into chortles, bouts of unending histrionics, for no discernible reason. Other patients sleep their days away, emerging only to eat, then receding back like the tide. Some amass trays of food in their rooms, flies doing curlicues over the remnants. One woman, with the sallow complexion of a nun, has revealed—during a movie about alien abductions, apropos of nothing—that she was raped by her uncle, and that her swollen belly may, in fact, contain his child. The older men in the room respond with skepticism and mirthless chuckles.

Being a city hospital, the unit lacks most amenities: salt, internet, phones, deodorant, shoelaces. You don’t realize how much you’ll miss these things until they’re gone. Garishly lit, and locked at both ends, the long halls have a sealed-off feeling. They’re the color of dirty teeth, often fetid, filled with the effluvia of bodies losing control.

The in-patient psychiatric unit of the hospital is a place of rigorous regulations. Maroon tape sections off the nurse’s station, sequestering the patients. The chairs are surprisingly heavy, so that patients can’t throw them. The mirrors are dented plates of aluminum. Patients adhere to strict routines; if dinner is served several minutes late, tantrums are thrown. When the food arrives, it’s all complaints about the blandness—every day, with little alteration.  

Wall-eyed and languid, sapped of energy by exhaustion and medication and sleep deprivation from sharing a bedroom with volatile and vociferous men, I spend my first day wandering the halls.

My lone, loyal companion during my stay is a book, a copy of William Styron’s Darkness Visible, which I picked up the day of my unwitting arrival from a bookstore in SoHo. I had spent the previous two weeks sleeping on friends’ couches and working as a customer service representative for a meal delivery company, spending my days answering emails and phone calls from customers vexed over the quality of their avocados, and doing cheap cocaine by myself in dive bar bathrooms to mitigate the feeling of failure that clung to me like stale cigarette smoke. The job numbed me; the drug obliterated the haze like a great beam of light from a lighthouse. When my boss, a stoical, laconic man who had been with the company since its embryonic stage, called me into one of those homogenous glass conference rooms, I knew what was coming. He asked me if I was happy. I said, Yes. He said, No you’re not. He said, We want our employees to be happy. So, after assuring me that my work had been very good, he nonetheless fired me for “being unhappy,” for bringing down the morale of the team.

When I found Styron’s memoir, I felt an epiphanic pang: this should be the last book I ever read.

The emasculating feeling of having been fired from a minimum wage job for being “unhappy,” and the more pragmatic problem of now having no source of income, commingled with the still-lingering malaise of having been dumped by my on-again off-again girlfriend several weeks earlier. An aphotic darkness, heavy and impermeable, pervaded my mind. A coterie of friends met up with me at a bar, where I, ripped on my favorite palliative, I desperately, futilely tried to use a torn can of Modelo to carve up my forearm in the sordid bathroom, an inane idea whose Sisyphean hopelessness seems, in retrospect, sort of silly. The next day, compelled by notions of self-destruction, I went to the bookstore, where I spent many afternoons typing fervently, thinking of myself as a writer, seeking solace in the pages of books. I was flummoxed, unsure of what to do with myself as I felt the end encroaching. I perused the great variegation of books. When I found Styron’s memoir, I felt an epiphanic pang: this should be the last book I ever read. I bought the book and shoved it into my bag, ensconced between an antiquated iPad and a notebook rife with the scrawlings of coke-induced mania.

That night, I went to a friend’s apartment, where I was ambushed by a gaggle of friends who, after an intense confrontation during which I almost punched one of them in the face, put me in an SUV and took me to Bellevue.

At the hospital, a man searched my bag, cataloging everything so they could store my stuff in a giant paper bag in a room rife with evidence of an outside world. When I saw Styron’s book sitting there amid the miscellany of items, I asked if I could bring that with me, so I at least have something to read. After a prolonged moment, they said yes.

For the duration of my stay, I carry the book everywhere, tracing the letters on its cover with the bulb of my thumb, flipping its pages and listening to the paper rustle. (There is a tiny library in the recreation room, though most of the books are bedraggled and battered, pages torn out, books left disemboweled, which contains, inexplicably, a pristine copy of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Oprah’s seal of approval adorning the cover, as well as a bevy of coloring books whose pages are already violently mottled with crayon and marker. Seeing the carnage, I keep my own book close.) Like Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, Styron’s splinter of a memoir taps into specific but familiar feelings of despondency, and, eventually, hope.

Initially, reading it is difficult, my brain not yet used to the drug they’re feeding me. My thoughts are soupy, a fog of confusion; words waver and swirl around the page. “The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence,” Styron wrote. “It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk.” But Darkness Visible cuts through the brume. As nothing sharp is permitted here, I feel a twinge of satisfaction at having snuck writing so lacerating into the unit. I chose Styron’s memoir as the last book that I would buy, the last I would add to my shelf, surrounded by wayward piles of hardcovers and softcovers and dog-eared mass markets, hundreds, some unread, some read repeatedly, but in the hospital, the book becomes something more, something almost transcendent: a source of familiarity, a relic from my outside life; it reminds me that I want to write, and that if I let the life drain from me, I will not be able to. In this sense, William Styron helps keep me alive.

The book reminds me that I want to write, and that if I let the life drain from me, I will not be able to.

If the stigma surrounding depression has been ameliorated in the almost 30 years since Darkness Visible, there still comes with the disease, like a parasite attached to a host, a sense of embarrassment and shame. You can see it on the faces of your friends when you try to tell them how you feel, their mouths contorted into looks of discomfort, their reticence exuding an air of apathy. The disquieting silence can make the depressed feel even worse for having become a burden. Reading Styron, I feel as though I’ve gained a new, caring friend, someone who understands. When I try to write about my own emotions, I don’t feel as narcissistic or melodramatic because Styron felt that same compulsion. Once the fog in my head started to dissipate, the medicine (an antidepressant, of course, and a small dose of an antipsychotic to mollify the mania to which I was occasionally prone) now working, I was able to luxuriate in Styron’s writing, able to write myself.

In 1990, during a radio interview, Styron described the disease: “I think the closest I’ve ever been able to hit upon an analogous pain is that of suffocation or of being in prison in an intensely hot room from which there’s no escape. It’s that kind of sort of diabolical discomfort.” I feel such a diabolical discomfort in a small, hot room, sudorific, the air stagnant and room suffused with the smell of sweat and flatulence. I want to cover my head with a pillow, but it’s too hot. I lay furled on the long, narrow bed, trying to ignore the sound of slick skin and enlivened breathing. My roommate hordes his food, leaving a pile of partially-eaten sandwiches, cookies, apples on the small table between our beds. A flotilla of flies accrues. I take one of the half-dozen wrapped cookies he’s stored in a pile. When he returns to the room, vexatious, bellicose, screaming about the missing cookie, they move me to a different room, one with four other roommates, none of whom ever leave their bed. In order to read, in order to live, I have to escape the hot room.

From the book:

A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self—a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn’t shake off a sense of melodrama—a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience.

Depression expunges from my mind any sense of lucidity; it is a roiling fog permeating my skull, leaving me unable to write. Words elude me, seem to evanesce. Styron’s writing cuts through the brume, and I am able to write again, scribbling my thoughts on anything I can find—paper plates, napkins, the cardboard sleeve from my doctor’s coffee. They give me a felt-tip pen, so I can’t stab anyone, and eventually some sheets of paper, which I festoon with slovenly handwriting, words fervidly scrawled before they disappear into the bog in my mind. According to James Salter’s review of Styron’s collected letters, the bibulous writer, who penned all of his works in longhand on yellow legal pads, found writing to be the hardest thing in the world, each word “sheer pain.” Yet it was the only thing that made him happy. Writing about my time in the hospital, about the influence of Styron’s book, makes me feel like I have a second self, like I’m writing about a character conjured from my imagination. There’s a sense of distance, of dislocation.

In Styron’s exacting lyricism, I find hope, a companion to my pain.

My hasty scribblings and Styron’s book are the only things I take with me when I leave the hospital, my hair an oleaginous mess, my friends relieved that I’ve seemingly climbed out of that dark pit of despair. I usually find Styron’s prose irritatingly loquacious (e.g. Lie Down in Darkness), but his writing about depression touches me, cuts me deep. In Styron’s exacting lyricism, I find hope, a companion to my pain. Depression is a selfish disease. You succumb to solipsistic thoughts, luxuriate in self-pity. It is a malady you can never truly mitigate, an affliction of histrionics and hyperbole, that sense of “melodrama” which Styron couldn’t shake off. Reading Styron’s descriptions of something I had tried but failed to articulate so many times, I feel less alone. All of the ineffable feelings I’ve felt are articulated with eloquence and precision and empathy in Styron’s book. I have wanted to be a writer my entire life; in my second grade yearbook, where it asks what I want to be when I grow up, I wrote, “A writer.” But everything I write seems to return to depression, the most loyal partner of my life; in Styron, I find, for the first time, writing that earnestly, honestly captures how I feel. It gives me an impetus, an inspiration.

The book now resides on the top shelf of my bookcase, nestled between similarly lissome paperbacks by Paula Fox and Renata Adler. When I feel, as Melville said, grim about the mouth, I turn to Styron’s memoir, as some turn to prayer. It is a beacon of hope for me, the light in the darkness.

7 Books That Look at Nature Up Close

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

There is an area of Central Park called Cherry Hill, located just above the Lake and east of Strawberry Fields, that is covered in a ring of its namesake trees. Ignored most of the year in favor of bigger, flatter picnicking spots like Sheep’s Meadow or the Great Lawn, Cherry Hill is overrun with visitors for a few weeks each spring. On a recent walk, I saw an engagement shoot, a couple taking wedding portraits, and a dozen tourists crowded under the pink boughs, all angling for a photograph that didn’t include someone else’s head. But soon the trees shed their petals for leaves, and now people indifferently pass by the slope, looking for the next Instagrammable shot.

The drawbacks of treating life like a highlight reel are becoming increasingly obvious, and not just to the people who have tried to do yoga in the Central Park rowboats. Many of us are trying to be more “present,” a term beloved by wellness blogs but which can be frustratingly hard to enact. What does being present look like? How do we attain this kind of tuned-in mentality? There are answers in a niche type of nature writing which I think of as field guides to being present.

Put simply, these books do what great literature does best: blend form and function. Their language is evocative and poetic, their writers generous, inquisitive, and open. For most us, it’s impossible to move to a secluded landscape and closely observe it for a year, but we can all be more engaged in the world around us. We can ask questions and observe, because the more we notice, the more we get in return.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Like much of contemporary nature writing, this genre has strong ties to Henry David Thoreau. When Thoreau wrote Walden, his famous memoir-cum-manifesto about the two years he spent living at Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts, he obsessively detailed the natural world around him, tracking the changing colors of the pond water to the migration patterns of local birds. By capturing this “raw” wilderness (which actually wasn’t that far from town), Walden famously helped spread the idea of Transcendentalism, a social and philosophical movement that emphasizes the individual’s connection to nature. But Walden also helped popularize a literary genre in which a writer carefully observes a specific environment over a limited amount of time, usually one year.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond has inspired many nature writers, though the beauty of examining such a specific, and therefore unique, landscape, is that each writer inevitably comes to the format in their own way. Take Annie Dillard. Dillard won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which captures a year spent at her house in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Dillard combines David Attenborough’s passion for natural dramas with the voice of a poet; her prose is lyrical yet raw, and her description of the creeks—“an active mystery, fresh every minute”—could actually describe the book itself. The race to capture cherry blossoms would be anathema to Dillard, who is electrified by every aspect of her environment, and who keeps her eyes open for its surprises. For example, on the night that Dillard goes looking for muskrats, she fails to find any, noticing instead a small insect’s unlikely and inspiring escape from a spider’s web. Dillard is free from the constraints of expectation, which allows her to appreciate life’s many surprises.

The Outermost House by Henry Beston

The Outermost House by Henry Beston

Henry Beston was also trying to free himself. The year he spent living on a beach in Cape Cod was a respite from a country that was between World Wars and “sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for water, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.” Beston recorded his observations from his isolated beachfront cottage in The Outermost House. Without a schedule or concern for time in a conventional sense, Beston’s work feels expansive and elemental. A pattern of waves might interest him for pages whereas his lunch is briefly mentioned, if at all. Of spring sand he writes, “it has entirely resumed its looseness, its fluidity, but the color still tells of winter in the faintest hint of grey.” Turning this kind of lens on something as seemingly mundane as sand is a lesson for the reader. After reading The Outermost House, it’s hard to step on a beach without thinking about how sand changes throughout the year, and then noting that day’s weight, color, and feel underfoot. To see just how much of an impact Beston had, you only have to look at the land he wrote about. The Outermost House is credited in the establishment of the Cape Cod National Seashore by John F. Kennedy, and Beston’s cottage was a national literary landmark until the 1970s, when it was tragically washed away in a storm.

The Forest Unseen by David Haskell

The Forest Unseen, A Year’s Watch in Nature by David Haskell

What if instead of waiting for the next big event, you carefully noted the progress of everything around you, down to a single plant? That’s what David Haskell did in his Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, The Forest Unseen, A Year’s Watch in Nature.  Haskell marked off a one square meter plot of land in Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains and obsessively monitored everything that went on in this small ecosystem. As the Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of the South, Haskell is well-versed in the science of the forest floor, and his goal is to show us how nature is constantly in flux (lichen, for example, may look like a smear on a rock, but in some ways it’s actually busier than a tree, constantly altering its appearance based on the weather.) We might not all be scientists, but we can all benefit from this scientist’s mentality, and celebrate small changes rather than waiting for something huge.

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey

During the 1950s, Edward Abbey worked as a seasonal ranger for the United States National Park Service at Arches National Monument in Utah. His account, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, is a series of vignettes, including beautifully rendered descriptions of the unusual, arid landscape. Abbey, like Haskell, has a keen eye for what’s changing in his landscape, especially when it comes to what’s in decline or already gone. When he realized he wasn’t spotting as many bobcats or other large predators that historically ruled the park, he tracked their loss to the Department of Agriculture’s policies, which not only endangered some species but led to an explosion of rabbits and deer that threatened the park’s whole ecosystem. Abbey’s critical probing of what he sees is an important reminder of the reason why being present matters at all; it allows you appreciate what we have before it’s gone.

A Year in the Wilderness by Amy and Dave Freeman

A Year in the Wilderness: Bearing Witness in the Boundary Waters, Amy and Dave Freeman

The Boundary Waters is a one million-plus acre wilderness area in the Superior National Forest in Minnesota. Despite some government protection laws from 1964, it’s seen years of disputes over actions that would destroy the landscape, including mining, vehicle use, and pollution. When Amy and Dave Freeman learned that toxic mining had been proposed for the area’s watershed, they decided to call citizens to action by spending a year in the area and documenting their experience in its wilderness. The resulting book combines both nature writing and activism; it beautifully captures the flora and fauna which are so at risk—loons skating on misty water, the wolves who trailed them through the forest—and helped spur an ongoing, organized effort to save the Waters and ensure their permanent protection.

The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks

The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks

When Michiko Kakutani named an English shepherd’s farming memoir one of her best books of 2015, people took notice. In fact the book had already been a success in Britain thanks to its incredibly honest, authentic, and moving portrayal of an ancient way of life. James Rebanks herds his sheep in the Lake District, a unique mountainous landscape which has been farmed by small homesteads for generations. Rebanks himself is an unlikely character, a man who comes from a long line of shepherds and loves his work, but also found his way to Oxford and writes as well as any experienced nature writer. What comes through most in this book is Rebanks’s deep appreciation for what he has, even through its many hardships. Every season presents new challenges, but that only means more moments of success.

We Can’t Hide if There’s No One Looking

Posted on by Kelly Luce 
January
  
 In January we held out 
  
 for a snow that didn’t come –
 instead, the clouds grew
  
 varicose with rain.
  
 I turned twenty-one
 and my father watched me drink
  
 a glass of wine with his best friend,
  
 at a table worn rough by years of dinner.
 This friend had trouble sleeping, and when he died
  
 we read his journals: read catalogues of light,
  
 the position of his head, the weight
 of blankets; he’d kept volumes to determine
  
 what might let him pass into that state –
  
 yet in Vermont, he claimed he slept
 like a dream, the four nights we stayed. 
  
 Remember, he wrote, in a journal we found,
  
 the image of Natalie and Beatrice hugging in the morning. 
 They were so beautiful. They had such ease and acceptance. 
  
 Something I have never felt. Reminds me of my mother 
  
 when I was young. I’m crying
 on the flight from Spain to Paris.
  
 When I was ten, and flying into Iceland,
  
 we saw below us a flaming house
 in the midst of a black field,
  
 and the lights of fire trucks, too far away –
  
 I imagined I could hear them wailing
 as they crawled their tiny way across the earth.
  
 Loneliness is not a passive feeling;
  
 it has teeth, it chews, and I believe 
 we take some power from it, 
  
 from how it puts its mouth around our heads
  
 and forces us to stare 
 into the complicated tunnel of its throat.
  
 We cannot hide if there is no one looking,
  
 and the lonelier we are, the more we ask, 
 who am I, to myself? 
  
 Though perhaps the question ought to be,
  
 who am I, to the winter?, and the answer 
 – in its coldness – nothing –
  
 might hold the truth to shrink our grief. 

Vinegar Ghazal

To preserve this sight, please drop my eyes – like spring’s green fruit – in vinegar.
I’d put aside my wine for memory, and drink only thin vinegar.

New owner of antique furniture: do chairs remember bodies once held,
Do beds remember dreams of falling, or the taste of love’s skin-vinegar? 

At the carnival of my ex-lovers, I watched you toss a ring: your prize?
An oak barrel of satisfaction, while you watched me win vinegar. 

How did I come to be? I was distilled from yeast and sugar, heated
To a potent soul. If left too cold and still, I’d have been vinegar. 

A doctor came to town and drew the crowds, crying Cure Your Loneliness
With this proprietary blend of blackened oats and Berlin vinegar!

At the café by my house, where I am known, they give me bread and oil
When I sit. They bring me salt. But they withhold my passion: vinegar. 

Attic-bound, I write a drama for four sisters – wool blankets gown us,
Bittersweet piano trails the sour flute, the violin vinegar. 

To make a sword that’s forged from blood, extract all iron from the body’s Veins. 
To make a knife from wine and ire, harvest grapes and smelt tin vinegar. 

I walked across a grassy field to find the marble entrance of your
Crypt, and moved the stone. A dark room; your casket; and therein, vinegar. 

Let me tell you what I look like with my clothes off. My eyes are rabid
Mice, and above the unset table of my chest, my grin’s vinegar. 

Sanded down with thirst, how I long to be invited – Dear Emma, drink
This vintage and ascend, do not content yourself with maudlin vinegar!


“Infinite Detail” Imagines an Apocalypse Many of Us Long For

Posted on by Jo Lou

Tim Maughan is a technology reporter and fiction writer whose first novel, Infinite Detail, is about an apocalypse many of us dream about. A group of radicals in Bristol use a computer virus to destroy the entire internet, sending our hyper-connected society back to the pre-information age. We follow several characters in the U.S. and England as they cope with what often feels like civilizational collapse, and try to rebuild. Angry, keenly observed, and satirical by turns, the novel explores where contemporary digital politics might lead us. I talked with Tim over the internet, using a device he’s destroyed in his novel, to talk about political science fiction, smart cities, and why dystopia has hope at its core.

Annalee Newitz: As I was reading this novel I kept thinking of the term “cyber-communism.” There are a lot of little strands of cyberpunk in this novel, but it’s really quite different from what’s gone before in the genre because of this really strong focus on leftist politics that are named as such. These aren’t allegorical politics; they grow out of what’s happening politically right now. What are the kinds of political issues that you wanted to tackle, and how do you see them growing out of current issues?

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Tim Maughan: It’s not because I want to be disrespectful to the kinds of science fiction that uses metaphor and tropes to discuss current political issues, because science fiction does that, even inadvertently. But that doesn’t appeal to me as a writer. I do enjoy reading books by [Ursula K.] Le Guin and classic science fiction books that tackled social and political issues through metaphor. But I want to write stuff about now that’s explicitly about now, that is kind of putting that out on the table and saying that this is what I’m doing. William Gibson had a tweet a few years ago, after I had already started this book, and he just summed it up perfectly. He said, cyberpunk isn’t particularly relevant anymore, but the tools that cyberpunk created—those narrative tools—he said he would like to see literature use those tools to explore our current situation. I thought, “Ah, that’s what I’m doing!”

AN: So I want to tease this out a little bit. What are the specific political movements you’re thinking of? We have this autonomous community in Bristol, where we spend a lot of time in the book. Are they anarchists? Are they cyber-communists? How would you describe the politics of that group?

TM: Kind of all of the above, really. And that idea came out of the community that I’ve been knocking around in for the last few years. I get invited to events that are this weird mixture of academics and people who call themselves futurists and artists. And it really came out of seeing artists in Europe, going to events in places like Amsterdam and Berlin, or Eyebeam in New York City where I used to hang around a bit. It was really exciting to see artists engaging with these issues, sometimes in very direct and forthright ways.

A person who is a huge influencer on the ideas behind this is Julian Oliver. He’s a New Zealand artist based in Berlin. A lot of his stuff has to do with jamming the internet, disabling WiFi networks, or replacing WiFi networks with other content in public spaces or in gallery spaces. He did a piece that’s like a remote control tank and you can drive it round and it blocks all the WiFi networks within range. He was trying to get people to confront and look directly at these infrastructures that are affecting and monitoring and essentially controlling them.

That was the core inspiration behind New People’s Republic of Stokes Croft—which is a real thing, I should point out. There is an organization in Bristol on Stokes Croft called the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft who are a local anarchists and community group, who do a lot of work in that area. So part of it was growing up in Bristol and seeing that conflict between community groups and social justice groups and anarchist groups and the local community around them. Because Stokes Croft used to be a very working class and very non-white neighborhood traditionally in Bristol.

AN: Cities themselves become characters in this book, and I love the fact that you have city hackers instead of traditional computer hackers. Of course they’re hacking the internet, too, but it’s ultimately city infrastructure hacking. Bristol does become a kind of character, especially as the novel goes on, as we come to understand how it’s changed and how it’s survived the apocalypse. I wondered if you could talk about why you wanted to really hone in on city hacking as opposed to looking at, let’s say, Twitter or other social media.

The crux of the book is that this technology affects people who don’t understand it or even know that it exists and then abandons them.

TM: I was writing this book for a long time, and it changed thematically early in its conception. I personally became very focused on the concept of smart cities and then looking at and writing critiques of the smart city model. It’s interesting that you talk about the cities as characters because the critique of smart cities that interests me the most is that smart cities are generic solutions. They view cities as problems and that there is a generic, off-the-shelf solution for them. That’s kind of the smart cities philosophy. But cities aren’t all the same, in terms of their communities and conflicts. So partly my aim was to give Bristol, and Brooklyn to a lesser extent, a kind of feeling that it was a unique place and couldn’t be pigeon-holed like that. And secondly, it’s a good literary device to get away from boring hacking scenes. People complain that hacking does not translate to the screen, but it translates to novels even worse now. Anyone who tried to read that terrible Bill Clinton hacking novel that came out last year can tell you that.

AN: Wow, did you actually read that? Good job. [laughter]

TM: No! I didn’t, I didn’t. A friend of mine did, and screen-grabbed lots of pages of it to Twitter and it was like, “Oh my god. I hope my book doesn’t read like this.” Because it’s hard to explain hacking concepts, right? And there’s a couple of times in the novel I have to do an infodump and explain what ransomware is, or what the internet of things and backdoors are. And it’s not fun writing that stuff. It’s very hard to do it.

AN: One of the images that really stuck with me from the novel is quite early on when one of our hacker characters, Rush, is in Brooklyn, and he is helping a homeless guy who’s collecting cans. All the cans have RFID tags, and the guy can’t turn them in for money anymore because he can’t prove that he bought them. So Rush takes basically a magic wand out of his pocket, which is an RFID hacking device—it’s an antenna—and he waves it over the cans and quickly resets all of their IDs. And as you’re reading the scene and imagining it—he looks like a wizard, and he is part of, I think, this strong current in the novel of magic realism, where we’re seeing a lot of characters respond to technology as magic or describing it as magic. They even describe branding as magic. There’s a lot of imagery of magic in the novel, and I wonder why did you want to do that? Is part of your point that we have to have this apocalypse partly because we are getting caught up in seeing this technology as magic, or is magic actually a kind of hopeful way of looking at technology? Tell me all about techno-magic.

Spoiler alert! There’s a glimmer of hope in all my writing. 

TM: Exactly. Yes is the answer to both those things, I think. Some friends of mine, Natalie Kane and Tobias Revell, created a piece of work called Haunted Machines. Their interest is in how technology is perceived in magic, and what the intentions are for that. It’s something that goes back to the Apple catchphrase: “It’s just magic. It just works.” The idea of technology being magic also obscures how it works and where it is in the environment—it gets back to all those issues we have with urban infrastructure, especially surveillance.

What’s important about that scene where Rush is playing the wizard and magically fixing these cans is that the canner Frank doesn’t understand what the hell he’s doing and thinks Rush is crazy, right? And that’s the crux of the book, that this technology affects people who don’t understand it or even know that it exists and then abandons them. I kind of wanted the reader to be introduced to this character of the canner Frank, maybe have some empathy for him or maybe not because he’s a bit old and crotchety and maybe a little bit racist, even, if you read between the lines. But I wanted readers to see that he’s a person who has a role in society who has just been abandoned because of technological progress. And I think the magic thing plays into that. Magic is an interesting way of explaining technology as a metaphor, but it’s also a way of obscuring and denying us understanding of how it works and its implications.

AN: One of the ideas in the book is the radicals have destroyed the internet through what is basically a magical piece of technology. We have this magical reset where we don’t have the internet anymore, and then one of the themes that we see again and again in the book is that even though there has been this huge change, people keep making the same mistakes and trying to rebuild the machines that caused their problems in the first place. This fits in with your idea of magic, because it appears that we never really understand what the problems were in the first place.

TM: Yes, exactly. And it’s that lack of understanding about what we’re doing that leads to [the radicals] not having a plan for afterwards.

AN: Yeah, that was so interesting to me. I wonder if you could talk about that idea of not having a plan for afterwards.

Dystopias are about imagining change because the characters are trying to imagine something different to what’s being presented.

TM: So, as I was coming towards finishing the book, I wasn’t quite sure how to tie it up at the end and I knew I wanted to make a point about failed revolutions and stuff. Around that time, Astra Taylor wrote this fantastic article for The Baffler called “Against Activism.” It was about the difference between activism and organizing, and it was just brilliant. Everything clicked into place, and I said, “This is what the ending of my book needs to be about.”  Protesting is important, it’s vital, it’s empowering, but without organization alongside it, without long-term organization, it doesn’t often count for much. A similar argument was made by Adam Curtis in his last film. He makes the argument that in the sixties, a lot of bourgeois white people dedicated their lives to the civil rights movement. They dropped out of their careers, they turned their academic and legal practices over to just the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. Because they were able to have the white privilege to go to do that. But he argues that now, because of network culture, we’ve moved away from that. You can easily be involved in protests, but it doesn’t have a lot of the same long-term impact.

I was at an event giving a reading last year, and someone asked, “Do you consider yourself an activist?” I said no partly because of Astra Taylor. I’m not an activist. I write fiction, which is an incredibly selfish and narcissistic thing to do. Real activists, real organizers, dedicate their lives to these issues and I think that’s a really important distinction to make. In the Curtis documentary, he talks about “Occupy” a lot and how “Occupy” was incredibly exciting at the time. I was back in the U.K. when it was happening but little Occupy movements were springing up over there and it was very exciting to see people come together and kind of give up their lives to a certain extent. But the lack of focus and organization beyond that is why it didn’t work. That’s the argument Adam Curtis makes. I wouldn’t want to be as dismissive to Occupy as he probably is, but what he says rings true to the larger extent. Occupy is criticized a lot for not having a firm set of demands. And what came next? Well, what came next was a few people, the leaders of the movement, have lucrative speaking careers or work at Google. So I kind of wanted to tap into that a little bit and say, “Look, it’s exciting for us to have moments we can participate in activism through the internet, but unless we have a long term plan about what we want to see as a replacement for it, it’s almost as useful as being apathetic.”

AN: I want to circle back to something that you said just earlier. You said fiction is navel-gazing. But at the same time, you’re saying, well the problem of these movements is that they want to tear something down, but they don’t have this long term plan. Don’t you think fiction is part of the process of coming up with the long term plan? You first have to imagine something coming next. You can’t—

TM: Yeah, I think you’re right. And the aim of the book wasn’t to do that specifically, but it is there, right in the very end, on the final pages. Spoiler alert! I think there’s a glimmer of hope in this book. There’s a glimmer of hope in all my stuff. I get called dystopian a lot which is a term I don’t feel particularly comfortable with.

AN: Yeah, I always tell people it’s more like “topian.” There’s some good and some bad, just like the present. [laughter]

TM: Yes, exactly. I think that there’s a glimmer of hope in dystopia from the start if you’re going to use that term. Dystopias are always about someone trying to push back against the system even if they fail and that is hopeful. Dystopias are about imagining change because the characters are trying to imagine something different to what’s being presented. So yeah, I think fiction’s incredibly important in doing that and, like you say, it’s a really good structure for exercises about alternate futures. Will I write one specifically like that? I don’t know, maybe. I might have a book somewhere down the pipeline that’s almost explicitly doing that but right now it feels like the urgency is on pointing out problems. The point of Infinite Detail is that it’s vital that we have alternatives.

Other Literary Concepts That Should Be Met Gala Themes

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

“Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility––unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it––that goes by the cult name of Camp,” wrote Susan Sontag in 1964, in her now-famous essay “Notes on Camp.” Camp, of course, existed long before Sontag ever put pen to paper, as Lena Waithe’s brilliant outfit pointed out on Monday night, but the concept itself is so evasive, so difficult to grasp for those not already part of the “private code” of camp, that an attempt at elucidating it took Sontag the length of an entire essay. By way of Sontag, camp has become a term used (and often misused) in literary analysis—and now, to align with the new Met exhibition “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” it has also become a Met Gala theme. In other words, a bunch of celebrities had to turn a concept so nebulous that people build whole cultural criticism essays and art exhibits around it into a single outfit. This mostly didn’t work. Not least because Rihanna, who usually nails every Met Gala theme no matter how oblique, was nowhere to be seen.

The hilariously impossible assignment of matching a black-tie getup to the concept of camp made us wonder what some other Met Galas might look like if they continued to be themed to literary concepts. Here are just a few examples.

Magical Realism: Florence Welch wears a lady-wizard outfit just like she wears every year. Sarah Jessica Parker wears a dress by a South American designer that in no other way references magical realism. Rihanna wears a costume of the Met the size of the Met itself, a la Borges’ “On Exactitude in Science.”

Illustration of the Met with tiny legs coming out the bottom
Illustrations by Jared Pechacek

Plato’s Cave: Kim Kardashian wears a Grecian-draped goddess dress made out of latex. Gisele Bundchen and about seventy-two other female celebrities wear Grecian-draped dresses made of normal Grecian-draped dress material. A bunch of men all wear suits because, um, philosophy? Rihanna somehow constructs an effect in which she herself does not actually physically appear at the gala, but her shadow is projected onto its walls.

Postcolonialism: Benedict Cumberbatch wears a Thom Browne take on a 19th century British officer’s uniform and is subsequently cancelled by Twitter. Lena Dunham wears a suit embroidered entirely with quotes from Edward Said. Rihanna, understanding that it isn’t possible for the Met or anything involved with the Met to be post-colonialist, does not attend.

Fashion illustration of a thin white man who could very plausibly be Benedict Cumberbatch wearing an ornate 19th-century military uniform
Illustrations by Jared Pechacek

Deus Ex Machina: Kylie Jenner wears a naked dress studded with steampunk machinery. Lana Del Rey wears Gucci’s take on the Old Testament god (full beard, white satin ballgown). Beyonce wears something that isn’t on theme at all but she looks so beautiful, like an angel. Rihanna simply arrives at the last minute, as she usually does.

Orientalism: Oh wait, sorry, the Met Gala already did this one in 2015.

The Death of the Author: Lady Gaga wears a slinky dress with an illusion that makes her middle appear cut-out a la Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her. Lizzo wears a couture Grim Reaper cape and scythe with custom La Perla lingerie under it, and continues to wear it for the next two days, running around New York in it and scaring people on the subway. Cara Delevingne wears a latex bodysuit covered in fake blood. Jared Leto wears his same costume from this year. Rihanna wears a ballgown on which the “personal life” section of the Wikipedia entry for the designer has been printed, with all of the text struck through in red editing pen.

A fashion drawing of Lizzo wearing lacy lingerie, a robe, and a necklace of skulls, and carrying a scythe
Illustrations by Jared Pechacek

Free Indirect Discourse: Hailey Baldwin wears a Jane Austen costume. Harry Styles wears a Jane Austen costume. Ezra Miller wears a Jane Austen costume. Awkwafina wears a Jane Austen costume. Rihanna wears a better Jane Austen costume than everyone else.

Pathetic Fallacy: Billy Porter wears a beautiful golden Christian Siriano tuxedo gown that maybe represents the sun shining. Taylor Swift wears a blue dress. Rihanna wears a hat that automatically pours rain every time Anna Wintour frowns.

The Panopticon: Janelle Monae wears a dress covered in eyes that seem to follow you wherever you go. Lady Gaga wears a gigantic hat in the shape of a swivelling camera. Karlie Kloss wears a sexy mini-dress, but in grey, because the carceral state is serious. Kendall Jenner wears a couture sexy-cop costume. Anna Wintour, as herself, is the only person who is truly on theme.

Great Authors’ Letters to Their Long-Suffering Moms

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

The letters and biographical ephemera of the (dead white male) stars of the canon are like Us Weekly for English majors. Literary stars: they’re just like us!.  They forget to pay bills! They need to figure out how the laundry is going to get done and how to deal with the annoying sister who never reads any of their work! They also kind of suck at dealing with their moms!

Listen, it brings us no joy to tell you this. (Well, maybe a little joy.) Originally, when we set out to find letters written by authors to their moms, we hoped the literary greats could teach us how to express our inexpressible love (and maybe guilt) on holidays that demand those kinds of things from us. What we found instead was a series of letters from authors who were snarky, groveling, bored, and a whole host of other feelings towards their mothers.

While the letters we’ve excerpted here are not, exactly, ideal sentiments for your Mother’s Day card, they do provide further proof that a) the Dead White Males of the canon are, indeed, Just Like Us and b) moms put up with a lot of shit. Let’s be grateful for them today and always.

Edgar Allan Poe apologizes for not measuring up

In a letter to his mother-in-law/aunt “Muddy” (remember he “muddied” that line when he married his cousin), E.A. Poe first explains how much he loves her by way of imagining something horrible has happened to her, and then apologizes for being poor:

May God grand that this letter, so long delayed, may find you well—I ask no more—for I have been tortured, almost to death, by horrible dreams, in which I fancied that you were ill and helpless and I so far away from you. Oh, my dear, dear, good Muddy, I never knew the depth of my affection for you until this long and terrible separation. If you could but know my bitter, bitter grief at not being able to send you any money. But you know your Eddy’s heart, darling Muddy, and you feel that I would send it if I could get it in any way in the world.

Mark Twain is passive-aggressive with his mom

Mark Twain’s mother had a tendency to write letters to him on a series of scraps of paper. In one letter he admonishes her “Ma, write on whole letter sheets—is paper scarce in St. Louis?” But Ma goes on, doing as she damn well pleases. So Twain decides to give her a taste of her own medicine and write a letter on a series of nine scraps of paper, torn from other letters he had received. He goes above and beyond. Scholars at Berkeley have digitized them and you can read the full text here. But here’s Twain, at the end of the letter, gamely pretending that this work of metatextual snark is actually intended as an intellectual conversation:

Ma, I think it likely that some men are so constituted that they will, under certain circumstances of an irregular nature, manifest idiosyncrasies of an irrefragable and even pragmatic and latitudinarian character, but otherwise and differently situated the reverse is too often the case. How does it strike you?

Ernest Hemingway is kind of an ass to his mom

While we know that Hemingway didn’t attend his mother’s funeral and his parents weren’t totally on board with his career as an author (they returned his books to his publisher when they were sent to them), the letters acquired by Penn State over a decade ago add more dimension to that relationship. In short: Ernest might have kinda started it. After his father died, Hemingway, while living abroad, became the “head of the household,” and was managing finances for his mother. His mother was apparently not keen on the role reversal, and was resisting some of his advice. Hemingway mansplains:

Praying for advice and guidance is an excellent thing but advice and guidance even though unprayed for when accompanied by cash can be an excellent thing too.

Proust throws a tantrum and apologizes

Proust’s mom wanted to advise him on everything, if her letters are a suggestion of anything.  As Colm Toibin noted in an exhibition at the Morgan Library some years ago, Proust’s mother once wrote him to ask what time he got up and what time he went to bed, leaving blanks next to each question so he could fill them in and return them to her. But as Michael Wood notes in the London Review of Books, Proust wasn’t always willing to conform to her instruction. Believed to be around 1897 (when he was 26 years old), Proust flipped out after a particularly bad fight, slamming the door behind him. The glass panes in the door shattered. While his apology has been lost, his mother’s response hasn’t been:

My dear little one

Your letter did me good—your father and I were left with a very painful sense of things…Let’s think no more and talk no more about it. The broken glass will merely be what it is in the temple—the symbol of an indissoluble union.

Your father wishes you a good night and I kiss you tenderly.

J.P.

I do however have to return to the subject in order to recommend that you don’t walk without shoes in the dining room because of the glass.

Thoreau tells his mom New York is going SO GREAT, really

In 1843, Henry David Thoreau, in an attempt to establish his individualism by way of financial independence, set off for New York, where Ralph Waldo Emerson got him a couple tutoring gigs so he could have time to write. It went well excerpt for the part where he was supposed to make more money writing, which he didn’t really. In a letter home to his Mother, he explains:

I hold together remarkably well as yet, speaking of my outward linen and woolen man, no holes more than I brought away, and no stitches needed yet. It is marvellous. I think the Fates must be on my side, for there is less than a plank between me and—Time, to say the least. As for Eldorado that is far off yet. My bait will not tempt the rats; they are too well fed. The Democratic Review is poor, and can only afford half or quarter pay—which it will do—and they say there is a Ldy’s [sic] Companion that pays—but I could not write anything companionable. However, speculate as we will, it is quite gratuitous, for life never the less, and never the more, goes steadily on, well or ill fed and clothed, somehow, and “honor bright” withal. It is very gratifying to live in the prospect of great successes always, and for that purpose, we must leave a sufficient foreground to see them through.

Ezra Pound can’t be bothered explaining why his mom knows nothing about art

Pound is nothing if not concise. In one short letter, he figures out how to insult his mother’s artistic tastes, suggest the inconvenience of writing a letter to her at all, pat himself on the back for being a good poet, and insult America (even though she was the one who took him to Europe for the first time), all in just a few lines:

Dear Mother: It is rather late in the day to go into the whole question of  realism in art. I am profoundly pained to hear that you prefer Marie Corelli to Stendhal, but I can not help it.

As for Tagore, you may comfort yourself with the reflection that it was Tagore who poked my ‘Contemporania’ down the Chicago gullet. Or at least read it aloud to that board of imbeciles on Poetry and told ’em how good the stuff was.

I do not wish to be mayor of Cincinnati nor of Dayton, Ohio. I do very well where I am. London may not be the Paradiso Terrestre, but it is at least some centuries nearer it than is St. Louis.

T.S. Eliot is forced to tell his mom how great he is

In 1988, The New York Times printed a selection of T.S. Eliot’s letters. Eliot loved his mom. He was not afraid to express how much he needed her as he’s careful to mention in a letter shortly after his father died: “’I do long for you. I wanted you more for my sake than yours – to sing the Little Tailor to me.” Ever the child, in one particular letter, he is forced to be the one to tell her how great he is:

I only write what I want to—now—and everyone knows that anything I do write is good … There is a small and select public which regards me as the best living critic, as well as the best living poet, in England … I really think that I have far more influence on English letters than any other American has ever had, unless it be Henry James … All this sounds very conceited, but I am sure it is true, and as there is no outsider from whom you would hear it, and America really knows very little of what goes on in London, I must say it myself.

Roald Dahl is just right

There are plenty of well-founded criticisms to make about Roald Dahl as a person (mostly the antisemitism), but the beloved children’s author knew from an early age how to talk to his mom. As recorded in Love From Boy, the collection of Dahl’s letters to his mother, Roald Dahl took to writing his mother every week from the age of nine years old through the next twenty-plus years. In the first letter from the book, Roald Dahl, nine years old, is careful to cover all his bases: apologies first, justifications next, concern for the family, and then, the real ask, which is still careful to be conservative:

Please could you send me some conkers as quick as you can, but don’t send to meny [sic]. Just send them in a tin and wrap it up in paper

Love from

BOY

8 International Novels about Migration and Xenophobia

Posted on by Jo Lou

I live on a large underpopulated island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It’s ripe for the taking said our politicians yesterday, today, the day before, since two hundred years ago when early colonial settlers first came down the river behind my house and the Indigenous warrior Pemulwuy tried to chase all those ghost white invaders and their boats down the river and back out into the sea.

According to the T.V. we are always in danger of being invaded–at one time it was from the Asian countries to our north and now it’s by the refugees, or Muslims (the T.V often doesn’t distinguish between these two groups) but always, always there are hordes of people massing somewhere just outside our territorial waters waiting in their boats for that moment when we let our guard down.

The great majority of migrants and even refugees to Australia do not arrive by boat but the facts of things don’t matter much in these debates. What matters is that wide open sea which symbolises our vulnerability and the boats we place our real and imaginary fears onto.

My dad’s people came here by boat too. This was in the 1950s, a time when we reluctantly let them in because we needed cheap migrant labour to help build things and mine things. My dad’s family was a hodgepodge of foreignness, my grandmother being a Greek from Egypt who migrated to Ethiopia where she met my grandfather in Italian-occupied Ethiopia at a very complicated time when people like them ended up in British internment camps. They got on the first boat out of there. To cut a long story short, they faced a lot of the usual hardship and racism successive generations of outsiders have faced when coming to Australia. Then my dad met my mum, a woman of Scottish/English stock whose family had never met a migrant before my mum married one.

Buy the book

All this brings me to my book No More Boats and the books I want to recommend to you here. In writing No More Boats, I wanted to write something really complicated, something about how ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’ navigate all that fear of our borders in complicated and unpredictable ways, from the protagonist of the novel who is an Italian migrant who joins the far-right anti-migration movement in Australia, to his daughter who is on the left side of politics but forgets to really care about human beings, to his son who just grew up in a highly multicultural community and doesn’t think about it very much, to his Anglo-Australian wife who will never understand the trauma that migration leaves inside of you.

While writing my book I looked for similarly complicated texts that dealt with nationalism, identity, borders and belonging and, of course, do what really great books do, which is to give the very personal, very human story of the complicated times we live in. Here are 10 novels about our borders and our fears:

The Good Life Elsewhere by Vladimir Lorchenkov

The Good Life Elsewhere by Vladimir Lorchenkov is a wholly original satire about the citizens of a small town in Moldova who are constantly attempting to immigrate to the more prosperous Italy. As most of the town is turned away from the border one by one, we begin to understand how borders and boundaries can shape the collective imagination. This is a book about big issues like a supposedly united Europe and the Soviet legacies that still hang over the former Eastern Bloc but it tells those stories by taking a microscope to the small lives of people from a small town.

Cockroach by Rawi Hage

Cockroach has this wild energy in the way that Hage throws a dizzying kaleidoscope of image after image down on the page, the accumulative effect of which is to make the reader profoundly and deeply feel the conflicted and contradictory world of the protagonist. He is the immigrant outsider, the bully, the thief, someone who exposes the hypocritical and overprivileged world of the non-migrant in Montreal and someone who simultaneous longs to be bourgeois himself, someone who engages in the exploitation of other migrants and who plays on the guilt of dogooders by exoticizing his own foreignness and poverty. He also believes he is half cockroach, an effective metaphor which emphasizes his invisibility and the lack of compassion in the world around him. I love that you can never pin him down.

Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita

Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita is a novel that shows what a complicated and complex discussion of what identity can look like and why fiction is often the best place to stage these discussions. Her novel is filled with the kind of transnational identities I grew up with but very rarely see in fiction – Singaporeans growing up speaking Spanish in Latino neighborhoods in the US, undocumented Chinese characters who arrive over the Mexican border–it even has a magically real character called “archangel.” All these figures wander somewhere around LA reworking and rewriting it’s geography in surreal ways that decenter both our understanding of race and place.

Splithead by Julya Rabinowich

Splithead by Julya Rabinowich is told from two intriguing first-person perspectives both of which tell the story of Mischka and her family’s migration from Russia to Vienna and their fraught attempts to find a home in the Austrian capital. While Mischka, the main narrator, relates the story from a purely subjective position, Splithead, a surreal all-knowing character, gives the readers insight into Mischka’s Jewish family history. He intervenes whenever one of the characters is overwhelmed with life. He coldly comments on all the members of Mischka’s family, exposing their hidden fears and harrowing family memories. This novel takes that old adage that to be a migrant is to always be split in two, quite literally.

The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh

The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh explores the rise of borders in the regions of India and Pakistan. Every character in this novel is in the process of crossing and recrossing or even of demanding new borders. In poetic prose Gosh looks at the way that borders not only set people apart but displace people from their own home. What is most interesting is the way that he explores the idea that borders force constrictive national and religious identities on people and the violence that often results in the state telling us who we are and who our enemies must be.

Adua by Igiaba Scego

Adua by Igiaba Scego opens with the main character Adua contemplating if she should stay in Italy or return to Somalia after her father has died and she has inherited the family home. Adua once fled a brutal regime but she also fled her overbearing father and the constraints placed on women in her home town only to find that Italy was not the free and radical place she was looking to find herself in. What I find most impressive in this novel is the way Scego merges African fable and folklore, family anecdotes, and a sophisticated knowledge of both African and Western literature and cinema to explore themes of colonialism, racism, sex and power.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid is the story of Nadia and Saeed, two quite different young people gradually falling for each other when war breaks out in the unnamed Middle Eastern country they inhabit. The novel is stripped back and unsentimental. It doesn’t scream its politics at the reader, which is what makes it such an uncompromising and affecting book about the individual realities of war, migration and refugees. Nadia and Saeed are flung into perpetual movement as they discover fantastical doors that act as portals to other places outside their war zone, places which are at once both comforting and unwelcoming. I don’t think I’ve stopped thinking about it since I read it.

The Lines We Cross by Randa Abdel-Fattah

When Michael Met Mina (published as The Lines We Cross in the US) by Randa Abdel-Fattah is that very rare kind of work that delves into both sides of the story with the same level of insight and compassion and therefor asks harder questions of the reader and it’s those hard questions that ultimately allow this book to be so powerful. Michael comes from a family of far-right anti-immigration activists, Mina is from a refugee background. A relationship between them gradually develops as they meet on the opposite side of rallies and end up at the same school. What unfolds between them is a meditation on race, class, nationalism and the damage parents can do to their children by passing on narrow minded and uncritical perspectives of the world.

What Does It Mean That Woody Allen Couldn’t Sell His Memoir?

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Last week the New York Times reported that Woody Allen tried and failed to sell his memoir to four of the big five publishing houses. In the past, Allen’s book would have been an obvious sale; celebrity memoirs are one of the more robust genres of publishing, providing reliable and occasionally gargantuan sales, and most celebrities of Allen’s renown receive at least six-figure deals for their memoirs. On top of that, Allen has experience as a writer—he started his career as a magazine writer and has authored multiple humor works—and apparently had a full manuscript ready, which is more than a lot of celebrities can offer. And yet he’s now poison to publishers. Executives who spoke anonymously to the paper acknowledged that publishing Allen’s personal account in the #MeToo era would be daunting if not outright “toxic.” In other words, the story of his rejection isn’t just a salacious bit of schadenfreude. It introduces a bigger question: has the publishing industry finally changed?

Allen has been subject to abuse allegations for a long time without damage to his career. The accusations first came in 1992 when his daughter Dylan Farrow, then seven, claimed that he molested her at her mother’s home in Connecticut. Allen denied there was any truth to the story, but Dylan repeated her claim over the intervening years, during which time Allen married his own adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, and continued to be a box office draw, making dozens of movies and working with a raft of famous actors. Publishers courted him, too; in 2003, Allen turned down a $3 million advance from Penguin because it was too low. Real pushback only came after the start of the #MeToo era, most notably in December 2017 when, following revelations about Harvey Weinstein, Dylan wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times titled “Why has the #MeToo revolution spared Woody Allen?” After that piece, celebrities from Greta Gerwig to Colin Firth publicly regretted having worked with Allen, while others from his just-shot film A Rainy Day in New York, such as Rebecca Hall and Timothée Chalamet, pledged their salaries to charity.

Generally speaking, when it comes to writers, personal conduct has never mattered much to either publishing houses or the consumer. Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot were notorious anti-semites; Herman Melville beat his wife; William S. Burroughs murdered his wife; David Foster Wallace stalked, abused, and tried to push his girlfriend Mary Karr out of a moving car. In fact, being a badly behaved (male, usually white) writer has long been seen as attractive. I recently came across a 2012 Flavorwire list of “Bad Boys in Literature,” which includes the controversial and racist French author Michel Houellebecq and literal wife-stabber Norman Mailer. What was clearly written as a harmless piece of click-bait now feels like an artifact from another era. The term “bad boy” itself reflects a culture which supported abusive men and excused their behavior.

The publishing industry has historically rejected any responsibility for not giving abusers a platform—and readers have, for the most part, not made this into a liability. For example, Stephen Rubin, the president and publisher of Holt, told The New York Times that “the corporate stance is that it’s not our job to judge our authors”—especially when those authors are best-sellers like Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly was fired from Fox News and dropped by his agency, WME, following his admission that he’d paid off women to cover up years of sexual harassment, but Holt continues to publish his books, presumably because his Killing series has over 17 million copies in circulation. Similarly, Grove Atlantic and Hachette Book Group said they were “surprised and troubled” by the allegations of sexual harassment against author Sherman Alexie, but they will continue to publish his earlier books. (An additional example is Dan Mallory aka A.J. Finn, who didn’t sexually harass anyone but was revealed by The New Yorker to be as gross a liar and manipulator as you can find outside fiction. HarperCollins will still publish the follow-up to his best-seller, The Woman in the Window.)

Only recently have we begun to seriously consider if an author’s behavior should affect their career.

Only recently have we begun to seriously consider if an author’s behavior should affect their career, either through a self-directed consumer boycott or the industry formally cutting ties. So far, the former seems to be driving the latter; the publishing houses who rejected Allen likely did so at least in part out of self-protection. Investing in an author accused of sexual harassment has become a gamble; authors have been pulled from shelves, had their literary awards revoked, or been dropped by their agents. Online protests and boycotts can become a real thorn in the publisher’s side and a bad reputation can damage profits: Allen is currently locked in a battle with Amazon, who he is suing for $68 million after they canceled a four movie deal claiming that his reputation and actions, such as dismissive comments about the #MeToo movement, would make it “impossible to profit from Allen’s work.” If Amazon worries about being able to recoup its investment in Allen, then publishers have a legitimate reason to be wary.

Exactly how legitimate? It’s hard to say, as individual consumers are still grappling with the question of how to treat the work of an artist whose personal conduct is ethically objectionable. The trend in book sales seems to be that allegations of sexual harassment or assault hurt an author’s sales immediately after they break, but the books often rebound when it becomes old news.  Look at Publishers Weekly’s 2018 review of the sales numbers for three children’s books authors who had been accused of sexual harassment. Only one, Sherman Alexie, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, saw his book sales steadily decline after the news broke. Sales for James Dashner, the author of the extremely popular children books series Maze Runner, immediately dropped but have since picked back up, whereas sales of Jay Asher’s popular YA novel Thirteen Reasons Why actually spiked following the news, although it’s important to note that the Netflix series of the novel launched at the same time as the allegations of sexual harassment broke, and it’s likely that many people who found the book through the series weren’t aware of the accusations against the author. The same goes for the trend towards a rebound in sales; if a book isn’t pulled from the shelves or marked with some kind of warning sign, prospective readers (especially children or teens) likely don’t know the author’s history. The case of Bill O’Reilly actually sums up much of the situation for the publishers. His books did take a serious hit; the first installment in the Killing series published after his scandal sold less than half the number of copies in the first week than its predecessor.  But at 65,000 copies versus 144,000 copies, it was still enough to put him in the number two slot of BookScan hardcover adult nonfiction list. Holt made a lot of money by its decision to stick by him, even if it was less than they’d hoped.

Given the money still to be made by selling Woody Allen’s memoir, publishers must be acting on ethical concerns, too—or at least acting out of a different kind of self-protection, less about their investments and more about their reputations. I think it goes back to 2017, when Milo Yiannopoulos, a writer for Breitbart and an established alt-right troll, was signed for a six-figure book deal with Simon and Schuster. Author Roxane Gay pulled her book from S&S, saying she wouldn’t be published by the same company that was putting hate speech into the world. S&S was forced to publicly grapple with the ethics of publishing Yiannopoulos, and in the end it dropped him. The conversation around the ethical side of publishing is ongoing, a crucial question that can no longer be ignored.

I don’t think publishers are going to suddenly become watchdogs for progressive values (and arguably, they shouldn’t). But thanks to financial and public pressure, we do seem to be entering a moment when it’s not worth a publisher’s time and effort to give hateful ideas or abusive people an uncontested platform and hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars. I see this as a heartening sign that publishing, by no means flawless, is working to be an industry that values ethical consciousness at least a fraction as much as it values profits.

An earlier version of this article mistakenly said that Allen is suing Netflix rather than Amazon.

5 Great Books by Women, Recommended by Nicola Griffith

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Nicola Griffith, most recently the author of So Lucky, may have the distinction of being our first Read More Women participant who’s also been recommended by another participant: Robin Sloan described Hild, her novel about a gifted young woman in seventh-century England, as “deep, cat-purr pleasure.” So Lucky, a semi-autobiographical novel about chronic illness, brings the action much closer to home, but with the same depth and generosity.

Read More Women is Electric Literature’s series, presented in collaboration with MCD Books, in which we feature prominent authors, of any gender, recommending their favorite books by women and non-binary writers. Twice a month, you’ll hear about the five non-male authors who most delight, inspire, and influence your favorite writers.

Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave

Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave

As a child I read and still occasionally reread Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave, a potent and atmospheric entry in the Matter of Britain—Uther, Merlin, Arthur and the fight of Light and civilization vs. Dark and barbarism. It is heady stuff: menhirs looming from the mist, the scent of woad and wet wool, and moonlight gleaming on chased hilts and chainmail as noble warriors gather to stoop down on invaders like wolves from the fold. So far, so Dark Ages. But unusually for the genre, women are not rape toys—in fact they are largely absent, leaving 10-year-old me to imagine myself in the hero’s saddle. And the hero is not a warrior but Merlin.

Stewart chose well. The prevailing historical wisdom of the time was that in an era of petty kings and warlords, women of any class were victims without sufficient agency to do anything interesting. So Stewart writes about a man, one who is twice royal—but a bastard; straight but not a man of the sword. Rather Merlin is an instrument of divine power, his sexuality subordinated to his priestly role as mouthpiece of the Light. He is mocked by his princely contemporaries for gender noncompliance but, even as they laugh, the reader—that is, 10-year-old me—knows that he holds a far greater power than any blade. It’s enormously satisfying when he gets to flash that awful power and make those manly men go white around the eyes and tremble. Basically he’s a witch in boy drag.

What I really loved about this book, though, is how Stewart immerses us in nature. We feel it, smell it, and hear it; it seeps into our bones and infuses us with a sense of immanence and wild magic. It was this book, and Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff, and Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault, that fired my longing to experience the landscape where I grew up without contrails and car exhaust, to feel how it might be for a woman, in a time when might was right, to be powerful enough in, of, and for herself to make a difference, to be a hero.

Mary Barnard, Sappho

Mary Barnard, Sappho: A New Translation

In my early twenties I was reading a lot of novels but writing only lyrics: songs for the band I fronted. When the band faded away, as all bands do, I found I didn’t want to stop writing. So I wrote poetry; I wrote nonfiction. Something began to gather in the back of my brain but I couldn’t access it. Then I found Mary Barnard’s translation of Sappho.

Without warning
As a whirlwind
swoops on an oak
Love shakes my heart

Her bold, vertiginous leaps shocked me awake and open the dam in my head. I wrote 30,000 words of a novel in five days. This, I realized. This is what I will do with my life.

But, like Stewart’s, it was Sappho’s language of the the natural world, specifically using that language to talk about the body, that lit something in me. Her lyrics are fresh and astonishing. As Barnard herself says in her footnote, some of her words feel invented in that moment for that line alone. She was writing more than 2,500 years ago, yet her works speaks directly to us even today. So many of what we consider literary clichés were her original imagery: silver moon, rosy-fingered and rosy-armed dawns and moonrise, turning pale, being tongue-tied. She shaped our understanding of what it is to be human.

Suzy McKee Charnas, The Slave and the Free

Suzy McKee Charnas, The Slave and the Free

Poetry by and about women has never been too hard to find, but for a while I could find no historical fiction and very little contemporary fiction about women that was not romance. So I started to read about the future—but that, too, was about men, with the occasional space bimbo or scientist’s daughter thrown in to be explained to or rescued. I despaired until I discovered feminist science fiction. Here I’m going to cheat and talk about The Slave and the Free, an omnibus volume of the two first and best novels in Suzy McKee Charnas’s Holdfast Chronicles, Walk to the End of the World (1974) and Motherlines (1978).

Walk to the End of the World commits to an implacable sci-fi logic of post-apocalyptic gender war. The world is largely arid and inhospitable, with small isolated populations clinging on here and there. In one region men hate women, and fuck them not for pleasure but to make babies. Women are domesticated animals: bred as both beasts of burden, and food. We follow the story of one pregnant slave, Alldera, and her eventual escape. We have no idea what she’s escaping to, if anything, and if she’s walking into certain death in the desert, it seems like a reasonable choice because Walk to the End of the World makes The Handmaid’s Tale feel like a tidy little bedtime story. Like “Cold Equations,” a story that shocked a generation of science fiction readers with the relentlessness of physics, it does not flinch from its premise. It will give you nightmares, and those nightmares have teeth.

But Alldera does escape, to the world of Motherlines, a world of all women who breed their own domestic animal: not fellow humans, but horses. This is a much less terrifying book but it, too, looks right into the face of brutal choices and doesn’t blink. It was the first book I read with no men in it at all, and refutes essentialism effortlessly. For a new writer it is a marvelous introduction to, and almost perfect exemplar of, show-don’t-tell: a master class disguised as feminist legend that never was.

If you want to understand the shape of 21st-century science fiction, read Charnas and Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake (1978). They are the others of us all.

Octavia Butler, Kindred

Octavia Butler, Kindred

I loved reading Charnas’s and McIntyre’s futures in which women had space to roam, but I was also getting hungry for fiction by a woman about a woman set in a recognizable present. I remember picking up a copy of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, marveling at the cover illustration—a black woman who was neither half-dressed nor being threatened by a man. I had to read it—and instantly finding myself in familiar science fiction territory: time travel.

In 1976 Los Angeles, Dana, a young black woman married to a white man, is somehow called to the antebellum South to save a young white boy from drowning. She does and, bang, she’s back in L.A. But the boy, Rufus, ends up summoning her to save him every time he’s in danger. And Dana has to keep saving him to ensure her own existence, because he is the father of one of her ancestors. Each visit to the past—in which the people in the past age while Dana does not— is worse than the last, until she finally frees herself by killing the adult Rufus, already a father. What makes all this work as realism is that Dana does not escape unscathed, and her loss is tangible, not just internal and metaphorical: she loses teeth, and her left arm.

This is a book for all those women (and queer folk, and people of color) who look at their elders and sneer: I wouldn’t have knuckled under like you did! Why didn’t you fight back?? Butler shows that people in every time often do the best they can in the circumstances—probably better than you or I could—and it’s a miracle they survive, never mind conquer. History is never the inevitable, magisterial story we’ve been told; history is contingent upon circumstance, and the circumstance here is structural oppression.

This had a big impact on my work, as did two other things. One, the way Dana learns the reality of master and slave via personal, visceral experience: somatic knowledge that helps her unlearn the extra-somatic modes of dry text and TV representation. Two, that the notion of a protagonist as lone hero is bullshit; survival is all about being a member of a group, embedded in a network of others—and one’s actions have consequences beyond oneself.

In terms of craft I was fascinated by Butler’s nicely calibrated Othering. Dana suffers; her life as a slave is brutal—but not too brutal. Clearly Butler understood the nature of narrative empathy: put the reader inside your character and the character inside your reader, make them feel what they feel and learn what they learn, but don’t make it too hard, because if you do, the reader will put the book down and walk away, or at least barrier themselves up emotionally. Butler knew you can’t change the world unless you change the reader, and you can’t change the reader unless she stays open to your fiction’s great power of empathy.

Joanna Russ, Extra (Ordinary) People

Joanna Russ, Extra (Ordinary) People

Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” (1972) was the short story that perhaps had the most immediate impact on me (Ammonite could not exist without that story), but here I want to talk about “The Mystery of the Young Gentleman,” (1982) a novelette in her brilliant collection, ExtraOrdinary People. It’s my favorite piece by Russ: fast-moving, thrilling, and sly.

It’s set on a clipper ship sailing from England to the U.S. in the late 19th century, narrated by a—well, I’ll have to say “woman,” because if you follow the textual clues that’s what makes most sense, biologically speaking at least. Though s/he could, just possibly, be an alien. And of course the point of the story is to deconstruct the notion of gender’s pernicious binary, throw out the Either/Or and replace it with Neither/Nor and a sprinkle of Yes/And. The narrator does not identify as gendered at all but, Wittig-like, insists that among their people there are no men and no women: if all refuse gender, there’s no need to perform it.

So, It’s about a woman with a young charge—who is definitely a girl, or more precisely a young woman, but in any case most certainly not a lady, oh no—who are traveling as father and daughter. Though, oh dear me, their relationship is not filial. At all.

So, It’s about a woman and girl on a transatlantic crossing who use gender performance to stay safe. Not safe from bad men. Safe from the dull-eyed herd, each plodding behind the placid beastie ahead. Our protagonists, you see, are telepaths. And Russ has a tremendously fine time fucking with everyone’s gendered heads as she ratchets up the stakes.

So, It’s sharp, witty, genderqueer science fiction. But we are talking about Russ, so that’s not all it is. It’s pulp adventure fiction, with sex and gunplay and gambling, money and reversals and danger. Also a parody of Victorian porn. And, literally, a comedy of manners. Exhilarating stuff.

Another great piece in this collection is “Souls.” Abbess Radegunde slices open the clichés of Dark Age Britain, salts them, and eats them.

Finally, if you want to know why, despite campaigns like #ReadMoreWomen, women still aren’t read, respected, or rewarded when we write about women, read Russ’s magnificent How to Suppress Women’s Writing. And then take the Russ Pledge: whenever you talk about books, talk about books by women about women.