I’ve been a film buff since before I could read or write. One of my earliest memories is, at age five, sleeping in the back of our station wagon while my mother took in a midnight showing of Michael Cimino’s epic western (and epic flop) Heaven’s Gate at our local drive-in. Restless and uncomfortable, I’d emerge every so often to climb into the front seat and catch a few minutes of Kris Kristofferson, my first and longest celebrity crush. My early film buff status was baptized in the fire of that sprawling attempted masterpiece, which is most famous for the myths and yarns about how wrong everything went behind the scenes.
The novelist in me has always loved reading about the drama behind the films as much as I like watching the films themselves: directors with eccentric or risky practices, actors prone to diva fits and temper tantrums, method actors refusing to break character, ambitious locations where the terrain or the weather ultimately proved impossible to navigate—these just make for great stories and entertaining characters. Was everything permissible behind the scenes as long as it yielded magic on the screen? Like in love or war, it seems all was fair on the set, and whatever it took to get a great emotional performance or capture a perfect shot, the means justified the ends. With time and a slightly more evolved understanding of the actual damage this left on the humans involved, many of our beloved masterpieces remain in a bittersweet cloud, marked by excess, cruelty, or even abuse.
This is precisely the kind of behind-the-scenes drama I wanted to investigate when I began working on my novel Porthole, about a film maker who has come to a tipping point in her career because of her working methods and her complicated and messy relationships with actors and her crews. Her unyielding but often myopic artistic vision has led her to some considerable success, and some colossal failures as well—she can no longer run from the damage. I was interested in exploring this fine line between the eccentric and the extreme when it came to methods behind the camera. At what point does this kind of exacting vision tip over into failure: a project that can’t ever be completed, or which outstrips any ability to recoup its costs—either monetarily or metaphorically? What leads to a situation where the ambition of the vision ultimately destroys the possibility of it ever succeeding?
There is probably a reason that I stuck to writing on the page, rather than for the screen—there’s safety to the anonymity of the author versus the fame of the film auteur. But this list has a few books that capture the best of both those worlds. Several are beloved favorites mostly by women with women protagonists, though some came to me through recommendations from other enthusiasts. All of these books offer some compelling explorations of the drama and intrigue of filmmaking.
This magnificent story of a woman in search of her dead or presumed dead or walking-dead husband is set to the backdrop of a horror film festival in Cuba and is reminiscent of Brian De Palma at his high point. As the protagonist of The Third Hotel follows a ghost through the streets of Havana in her own kind of horror story, Van Den Berg investigates the horrors behind horror film history, the cultural inheritance of gendered violence in the genre, and the mixed bag of seduction and dread inherent in the form.
Focused more on the relationship between book publishing and television development, the protagonist of Colored Television is a novelist trying to ditch the hungry artist lifestyle and narrowminded gate-keeping of publishing in favor of a nearly-utopian hope of the streamable serial: the new television. Hoping to reach an audience beyond the white, liberal paradigm of publishing and finally make an income, she quickly learns Hollywood always has a few tricks up the sleeve. With Senna’s signature turn of phrase, and scathing cultural coinages, Colored Television exposes the latest version of artistic exploitation: corporate studios and streaming platforms, art made by and for the market-economy, and a wild west attitude to intellectual property.
Set in a near-future Los Angeles, an era of late-stage climate disintegration featuring synthetic water, perpetual wildfires, and sinister wellness cults doesn’t prevent Hollywood film-making from lurching forward like an undead beast as the rest of the world burns. Something New Under the Sun follows a novelist working on the adaptation of one of his books for a film. Relegated to gopher, he is forced to watch every aspect of the work he created disappear in production. In flight from wildfires, he finds himself on a road trip with a messy starlet, whose prepper paranoia pans out amid Twelve Monkeys-esque anarchist plot twists in a mycelial web of global greed, artistic vacancy, and dystopian collapse.
The protagonist of Muriel Spark’s The Public Image is a mousy actress called Annabel who, despite a lack of talent, has managed to carve out a successful career on the strength of a public image (an infantilizing but hyper-sexualized typecasting) imposed on her by studio executives. Annabel is essentially a walking void, but things get complicated when her husband, a failed actor-turned-pretentious auteur, filled with resentment, casts her in his own film with a long game of ruining her public image. As with any Muriel Spark novel, just when you think things are dark, they go much darker, but you can never underestimate a dippy underdog surrounded by petty would-be patriarchs, and Annabel does not disappoint.
Dana Spiotta’s Innocents and Others centers a pair of female filmmakers, Meadow and Carrie, whose long-standing friendship must endure the pressure-cooker of corporatized filmmaking as they grow into their very different film careers. Peppered with film history and the anxiety of influence—Orson Welles looms large—the book uses formal experimentation in the flavor of cinematic montage to mimic the technological immersion of modern filmmaking, and the fragmented modes of composition and communication it demands. Spiotta challenges any simple, singular category of woman-as-artist and maker, highlighting nuanced differences in aesthetic, ideology, and methodology for the two friends, and a difference in their feminisms, and strategies for navigating the male-dominated industry.
Acclaimed French writer Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden—the first in a trilogy of books focused on women in art and performance—is partly an auto-fiction focused on her obsession with the American actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden, whose career and interpersonal dramas could easily have been a model for Muriel Spark’s The Public Image. Loden began as a bombshell-ingenue, whose glamorous Hollywood marriage to Elia Kazan was underpinned with insecurities and resentments. Léger focuses on Loden’s pivot from a trade in her sexuality toward a career behind the scenes. We see the ambiguities and unexpected moments that led to the making of her cinema verité cult classic Wanda. Weaving biography, film criticism and imaginative flights of fancy that take readers not just into the mind of Loden but into the mind of her character Wanda, Léger creates an intimate but Cubist portrait of an often overlooked artist.
Quebecois artist and filmmaker Valérie Bah brings the funny and fierce with their award-winning first novel Subterrane, set in fanciful New Stockholm, a Janus-faced city of bourgeois delights and post-industrial low-income wastes. It is these zones of exclusionary inclusion where protagonist Zeynab attempts to shoot their state-funded but relentlessly avant-garde documentary. In the margins, Zeynab finds a vibrant collective of artists, activists, philosophers, and holistic separatists centering Black and Queer voices. Bah uses her filmmaker’s eye to spotlight precisely those communities who get bracketed, but nonetheless resiliently maintain their esoteric and learnéd revolutionary scheming despite a dystopian squeeze, and the soul-killing drudgery of urban Renaissance for the few, rather than the many. A must read for the hunger artists looking for a witty and brilliant fix that doesn’t skimp on cultural critique.
What could I say about Chris Kraus’s classic Aliens and Anorexia that hasn’t already been said by Chris Kraus in Aliens and Anorexia? In her renowned third book, Kraus adds film-maker/film-theorist to the list of her other genre colliding monikers as she recounts an attempt to get her experimental film “Gravity & Grace” distributed and shown at the Berlin Film Festival. Self-centering (and self-decentering), this exploration of alienation in artistic ambition, in all possible connotations of “alien,” also manages to uplift “anorexia” to the conceptual and psychological stature of Deleuzean “schizophrenia,” for one of the earliest efforts to complicate the stigmatized (with just a hint of misogyny) condition.
For these women, the personal and political are intertwined.
Almost a decade ago, I fell in love with reading memoirs at a Life Writing class in college. We spent a semester around a circular desk discussing memoirs that I enthusiastically devoured. Since then, I’ve continued to reach toward memoirs to read about different perspectives and lived experiences, especially those written by women. The searing honesty and vulnerability with which women chronicle a specific period of their lives captivate and even nourish me.
The global rise of authoritarianism and Trump administration’s crackdown on free speech and immigration in the US made me reach for memoirs by women that grapple with political upheavals around the globe. In these books, I sought knowledge and solace from women who have lived through and assessed the male-dominated business of authoritarianism, war, occupation, and other forms of political violence.
The authors in this list have experienced or witnessed myriad hardships created by those in power, including state-sanctioned censorship, discrimination, and violence. Notably, these memoirists, in one way or another, are considered the “other” due to not only their gender but also ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality, offering unique perspectives that are often excluded in the Western canon.
Weaving political events and personal histories, these women bear witness to the political unrest that upended their lives and advocate for the disenfranchised in their families, communities, and countries. They offer an invaluable lens through which we can examine our current political turmoil.
Nobel laureate, lawyer, writer, and former judge Shirin Ebadi writes of her unconventional upbringing, marriage and family life, faith, and experiences as one of the first female judges in Iran. With vivid details, she describes the circumstances and ideals that led to the Iranian Revolution in 1979. A former supporter of the Revolution, she quickly became disenchanted with the new authoritarian regime that replaced the Shah, crushing dissidents through wrongful detentions and executions without any due process. Stripped of her role as a judge due to the new government’s gender-based discrimination, Ebadi became a staunch advocate for the oppressed, and in the face of political persecution, remained steadfast in her commitment to justice.
Ebadi fought a lengthy legal battle to have this memoir published in the US since American trade laws restrict writers from embargoed countries from publishing their works. Since 2009, she has been living in exile in London.
Zara Chowdhary takes the reader to the Ahmedabad of her girlhood in early 2002, when a train fire killed Hindu right-wing passengers in India. The chief minister of Gujarat at the time, Narendra Modi, and his political party rushed to describe it as an “act of terror,” instigating the massacre of over a thousand Muslims across the state. Many scholars would later describe this as a pogrom, state terrorism, and genocide. Like other Muslims in the state, Chowdhary and her family found themselves under a three-month siege as their Hindu neighbors turned into angry mobs, hunting, looting, raping, and massacring the country’s Muslim citizens.
In The Lucky Ones, Chowdharyexplores how the foundations of an authoritarian nation-state are laid down and furthered through its failure to protect its minorities. She offers essential context for understanding the contemporary political upheavals in India as well as the global rise of fascism.
In Baghdad Diaries, Nuha Al-Radi describes the horrors of living through the first Gulf War and its aftermath. Pieced together entirely through Al-Radi’s diary entries, this memoir creates an immediacy that transports the reader to Iraq as it was being bombed by a 42-country coalition led by the US following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Al-Radi documents the extreme poverty, shortages of medical supplies, and diseases that plagued the Iraqi civilians due to the UN embargo on their country, frequently questioning how the world could look away from their pain.
Filled with witty and unfiltered observations, her diary entries coalesce into a searing testimony of the high human costs of war. As a famed painter, sculptor, and ceramist, she channeled her trauma into her art. Shortly after her memoir was published, Al-Radi passed away from leukemia that she believed was caused by the depleted uranium left over from the war.
In this raw memoir, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio recounts not only her own experiences as a DACA recipient and daughter of undocumented parents, but also stories of other undocumented immigrants in various parts of the US, including Staten Island, New York, and Miami, Florida. Her stories shed light on the various abuses undocumented people face on a daily basis, thereby humanizing and highlighting the resilience of an extremely vulnerable group that is otherwise lumped together by all sides in the political sphere.
The author, who spent most of her childhood in the US, depicts how she and her family dealt with the changing political landscape in the country, spanning from the post-9/11 War on Terror era to the first Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Born in exile to a South African guerrilla father, Sisonke Msimang chronicles a life spent constantly on the move, traveling from Zambia to Kenya to Canada and then to the United States before she finally finds her way back home to the new post-apartheid South Africa. She writes of her personal struggles that are strongly linked to the wider political landscape she finds herself in around the globe.
Her unique family background ensures that she is never too far away from politics, but she has her political awakening in the US, where she learns firsthand the country’s unique form of racism. This sociopolitical consciousness follows her to South Africa where racism and xenophobia still find a home post-apartheid, as she gradually becomes disillusioned with the political party she once championed. Msimang’s ability to self-reflect about her privileges stands out the most.
In this lyrical and genre-bending memoir, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Palestinian refugees, explores her family history that is inextricably linked with the occupation of her ancestral homeland. Painful memories resurface when she is hospitalized due to an eating disorder, driving her to unearth and piece together her lineage fractured by multigenerational displacement.
With the rhythm of a poet and meticulousness of a journalist, Aziza weaves her struggles with anorexia together with the statelessness that still haunts her and her family. She peppers her narrative with citations from the works of poets and scholars, adding layers and giving texture to this portrait of a people displaced by a political movement that hinges on their erasure.
Leila Ahmed begins her memoir with an overview of the historical events that shaped the Egypt of her childhood. She writes of the ideals that led to the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 and what it was like to live through the aftermath of it. Gamal Abdel Nasser, a revolutionary turned president of Egypt, normalized political repression that directly affected Ahmed and her family. She describes a specific period of her life as “crucible years” filled with political upheavals that heavily influenced her life.
A Border Passage is less confessional, more academic (yet engrossing), perhaps owing to Ahmed’s background in academia: She is a scholar who became the first professor of women’s studies in religion at Harvard Divinity School, where she still teaches.
Social activist and writer Gita Ramaswamy writes a compelling account of how, despite belonging to an upper-caste, privileged family in India, she was drawn to the ideals of the Naxalite movement. She joined the Communist Party of India and was forced to go underground when the country’s then-Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, declared a state of emergency, resulting in widespread surveillance, imprisonment, torture, and even extra-judicial killings of Naxalites.
Ramaswamy also reveals how she later became disillusioned with the party as its leaders became dogmatic, hypocritical, and power-hungry. After leaving the party, she became an activist for Dalit rights, supporting them in their struggle to reclaim land, secure fair wages, and gain freedom from bonded labor.
Aptly titled, Linda Sarsour’s We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders is a memoir that is also a call to action. A Brooklyn native of Palestinian descent, Sarsour depicts the trauma that stems from a family’s displacement by colonialism. As a Muslim, she recounts the early days of the War on Terror and its effects on the Muslim community in the US.
Sarsour’s detailed account of her evolution as a community organizer and political activist who helped Arab and Muslim men facing detentions, deportations, and disappearances across the country in the early days after 9/11 makes for a riveting read. Years later, she rose to prominence as one of the organizers and National Co-Chairs of the Women’s March held the day after Donald Trump’s first inauguration in 2017.
Yeonmi Park, one of North Korea’s most famous defectors, details a harrowing account of her life in her native land, where the vast majority live in poverty, starvation, and constant surveillance. The author describes how the smallest infraction could land one in labor camps by an authoritarian regime that categorizes people by a caste system based on their family’s loyalty to the “Great Leader.”
With immense bravery, Park recounts how she and her mother fled this brutal regime only to be trafficked and sold into sexual slavery in China before eventually finding their challenging way to freedom in South Korea. Park, who has found her home in the US, is a renowned activist today.
Jennifer is a storyteller with a gift for making associative connections between time, place, memory, and land. In Nightshining—the second in her diptych of memoirs that began with The Eighth Moon—she weaves personal and generational grief, mid-century weather experiments, community resilience, and many other threads into a multi-layered tapestry of a place and the histories that have shaped it.
After her basement in Margaretville, New York, fills with water from a burst creek and her town is deemed a federal disaster area, Jennifer discovers a bizarre connection between the catastrophic 1950 “Rainmaker’s Flood” and geoengineering experiments conducted in her town by Kurt Vonnegut’s scientist brother, Bernard, and the chemist and meteorologist, Vince Schaefer—two men determined to control the weather.
Jennifer also examines the loss of her father—a man dedicated to a utopian vision of cooperative society—the climate crisis, the question of who is asked to sacrifice what to whom, and finding community with human and other-than-human beings.
In reading it, I was struck by the timeliness (and timelessness) of Nightshining, much of which is set during the first term of President Trump. Jennifer contends with legacies of genocide and environmental manipulation as political polarization, global warming, and the COVID-19 pandemic rewrite the landscape. She writes, “all the smoke and war here. It feels like a portent, or a palimpsest whose traces you can read into this place.”
This interview is a composite of two conversations, the first over Zoom and the second at a book tour event at Split Rock Books in my hometown of Cold Spring, NY.
A Jack-in-the-pulpit is an elusive pitcher-shaped spring ephemeral wildflower.
Summer J. Hart:You open Nightshining with this paragraph: “You and I are with Iris and her baby on a cliff edge in the Catskills as I tell this story. Farm fields quilt the valley below. Looking down on it, other bluffs like this, long and flat, frame the view. I imagine the mountains all filled in and the land a thousand feet higher in the air, as if we are all floating, levitating together.”
I’m struck most by your use of collective pronouns.
Jennifer Kabat: The collective pronouns are intentional. I wrote that scene hoping it would feel cinematic because it’s on high. The opening of The Eighth Moon has a similarly zoomed-out-from-on-high sense to watch this shootout in a corral in drag. Here, I wanted this idea of us all being together in nature. That was also a pandemic experience. What I loved about the pandemic was that nature was no longer a white place. It wasn’t about one’s private experience; everybody was in nature together. I’m opposed to the white guy and his shining, romantic experience of nature—like the Emerson and Thoreau or Casper David Friedrich kind of experience—that is bullshit. I wanted a feeling of “us” and for it to be weird and strange. I use inclusive pronouns throughout the book to build that sense of collectivity. Writing almost feels like the fine point of neoliberal activity because you do it by yourself. But what I yearn for is collectivity—the shared and the social—the social part of socialism.
SJH: Much of this book is about absence. You describe your father not only as a powerful advocate for cooperative energy, but also as vapor, smoke, a trick of light, a ghost, snow, and blue butterflies. He is a man who spends his daughter’s childhood writing letters from the sky.
Do you see your father’s work as an act of love? If so, for whom?
JK: That is an amazing question and a beautiful reading of my dad.
I’m opposed to the white guy and his shining, romantic experience of nature. I wanted a feeling of ‘us.’
For me, he was this person who became a kind of ghost, who was with me after he died. We had this beautiful in-death relationship. I was lucky I didn’t fight it. I was lucky that he stayed with me. It’s one of those experiences where I have a hard time putting it into language because it sounds crazy. The rationalist language of my upbringing doesn’t have a voice for those experiences. I do think my dad’s work was about love. It was also problematic. He was a person of a certain era, you know, and throughout U.S. history, all the utopian dreams have had dark sides.
Capitalism also failed my father in every way it could. As a child, he lost everything. He suffered from antisemitism. A cross was burned on his lawn. His family lost their home, and he moved into his grandparents’ unheated attic when he was eight. His mother was institutionalized. He never talked about his childhood with me. He went to school on a scholarship and dedicated his life to cooperatives, which was both an evasion of family life, because he wasn’t there, and a deep belief that the world could be a better place with workarounds to capitalism. I found in his papers a speech that he gave in the eighties against individualism and the growing yuppie era. At the end, he quotes a letter I wrote him from summer camp. It was amazing to find myself in a speech he gave about the idea of us being better together. So, I do think it was love.
SJH:Jonathan Lethem writes, “Nightshining sifts a riveting exposé of the Cold War technocratic fantasy-state through lyrical family memoir …”
Do you think of this book as an exposé? If so, what did you expose?
JK: You know, I never thought of it as an exposé, partly because to me it feels like an essay. I go to an archive, then I respond to the archive. When the word exposé was used, I was like, wow, is it an exposé? We live in this moment where Marjorie Taylor Greene can tweet about how Democrats can control the weather. She’s not right, but she’s also not wrong. She’s batshit crazy, but the government can in some ways control the weather. Not how she thinks—it can’t prevent a hurricane. In my town, the government took what had been developed as a Cold War weapon by General Electric and used it at the wrong moment, which caused a devastating flood.
I was also grappling with the language of modernism and rationalism, and this world of pure science where Bernard Vonnegut and Vince Schaefer existed. Their work had no ramifications other than the pleasure of exploration, which is so colonial.
SJH: At first, I thought, these are brilliant guys. They’re conducting experiments to stop a drought. They’ll save people from dying in wars. They, too, are working for the greater good. Then, it became a sort of villainy. I was like, are they villains?
JK: Bernard is my bad guy. Vince is heroic. The only sympathy I have for Bernard comes from his brother and the deep love that Kurt had for him. Their mother committed suicide. Everyone thought Kurt was dead in Dresden. I can kind of understand, given that background, how he might have thought using weather to stop war was logical.
Vince loved being outside. To have spent enough time observing hemlocks and pine trees to realize that they exhale and that transpiration is a way to test for ozone is amazing.
To realize the same logic behind seeding clouds with silver iodide was poisoning the world through leaded car exhaust, and to dedicate his life to campaigning against leaded fuel, was beautiful. Then something dark happens. The Defense Department learns about this technology and takes it.
We’re a country that has used weather for war. We’re also a country that developed nuclear weapons, which create their own clouds. So, you know, basically the things that I expose are the ways research, defense spending, and dreams of a better world are tied together. There’s no way to get through this moment, through climate change, without sacrifices. The U.S. and many European countries have benefited from the extractive industries that created the crisis. We’re not talking about who is sacrificing. I live in a community that was sacrificed for the greater good.
SJH:People in your community watched as their homes were bulldozed because New York City needed water.
JK: “We have it. We give it to them,” one person who lost his home said about the water. “You can’t stand in the way of progress,” someone said in news footage just before his home was torn down for the reservoir. It’s profound living in a place where the trauma of being separated from the land that you identify with is carried and held alive. It’s not something that most people in this country have. Europeans came here with the idea that land is ahistorical. When it’s ahistorical, there’s no connection to place and no connection to that place’s meaning. It’s moving to live in a place that holds its histories tightly.
SJH:A palimpsest of memory, place, trauma, sacrifice, resilience, and …
JK: Love.
SJH:“I think about how the Rainmaker’s Flood happens in November 1950, when all time becomes present tense.”
Can you talk about this sentence?
JK: My husband, David, and I were hiking in winter, and it’d been raining. It’s warm. Winter isn’t winter anymore because we’re so far into climate change. So, the present is already crazily altered.
He tells me about this moment in 1950, where all time is declared the present. It has something to do with radiation and atomic testing. History ends because we can destroy the world, and time ends in terms of being able to carbon date things. Then there is this flood in my town.
That moment is also about arriving at a tipping point. At the same time, I’m thinking about club moss, which I love. They look like little fir trees. They aren’t mosses at all but are related to some of the very first plants on Earth. They have a very complex sex life, taking years to reproduce, and because their sex life is so tricky, they can replicate themselves by throwing out an arm.
SJH: You write beautifully about the flora and fauna of the Catskills. You describe the people in Margaretville with equal affection. While writing Nightshining, did your idea of community evolve?
JK: Yes. The backstory is, I wrote a novel that failed, and I turned it into two memoirs. My parents were dying and I wanted to write about the meaning in that loss. They were deeply committed to the public good and modernism.
Europeans came here with the idea that land is ahistorical. When it’s ahistorical, there’s no connection to place.
This book is also a way for me to write about the climate crisis because the geoengineering experiments conducted in my community are like what is being done to mitigate the climate crisis. There’s very little difference between cloud brightening schemes—where you put iodide in the clouds to make more clouds—and the kinds of floods geoengineering—rainmaking—causes. It’s the same technology. As I was writing, my sense of the community that I’m committed to expanded.
SJH:The river is alive. Everything’s connected. Everything’s meandering.
JK: It’s all hydrology. Hydrology and club moss.
I think also when you live in a place, you develop relationships with things in your environment. This feels true for me with the plants that I encounter. There’s this kind of magic hemlock forest that I live on the edge of. When you observe another creature intimately, it becomes a familiar. Like the phoebe nesting under my deck. Because I have a Nest Cam, I’ve formed a deep intimacy with her. She sleeps in her nest overnight. She settles in at 7:45 pm and leaves at 5:40 am.
SJH:I think we are all so isolated these days. There’s sort of a plague of loneliness—at least in my family—and especially during the pandemic. But not me, I think, because I have horses and art and walks in the woods, and you know, I’m talking to my ghosts, and I feel like I have this weird …
JK: Community.
SJH:I tracked 77 instances of the word “blue” in Nightshining. My favorites are: “a blue I learn that if not for vapor, for aerosols, would be black;” “Impossible blue;” “Blue of disaster;” “Blue of distance—of breathing trees;” “Even the blue, blue sky this day foreshadows darkness;” and “Karner blue.”
Can we talk about color as a throughline?
JK: Blue is an atmospheric color. Blue is often a figment of our imagination, too, when you think about it. Bluebirds are actually black. It’s just a trick of the light that we see them as blue. I was using this vaporous sky as a theme. And there’s also the endangered Karner blue butterfly. You probably have little blue butterflies around. To me, they’re indistinguishable from the Karner blue. I don’t know how Nabokov recognized that Karner blues are a different species, but he did, and they inhabit the same landscape where cloudseeding was developed.
I wanted to capture color as a way of being evocative. In The Eighth Moon, everything begins brown. There’s a drought—all is amber and earth. For Nightshining, I used blue because it feels like air and the atmosphere, and how we see distance. Blue is created either by absence or by various vapors in the air that reflect light back. Smoke will appear blue.
Of course, I was writing this during the pandemic, so we were all thinking about aerosols—these microns. I started thinking about them in terms of smoke and all these other things, and it became very rich for me. It was like this moment kind of doubled with our historic moment.
We are also in the Pyrocene, so we live with smoke all the time.
SJH:Blue has a quality of childhood nostalgia. Like the idea of the color of water.
JK: Or even the sky. Do you remember drawing the sky with Crayola crayons? I always used teal.
SJH: I read this poem called “Greensickness” by Laurel Chen, and it has almost the same sort of saturation of green as your blues, some of which are filled with loss, like the blue window that your father looks out of while flying somewhere. In this poem, the green of grief is agonizingly green.
JK:Nightshining is also a book of grief. I don’t like to ascribe emotions to colors because I think our perceptions of color are culturally bound. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how blue exists on screens and how neoliberal that is.
SJH: In The Eighth Moon, you described time held in lichen and in the bodies of efts. In Nightshining, you write about “Biblical time,” “redwood time,” and “glacial time.” But modernity and progress are thought to follow linear time.
Can you talk about the relationship between our varied experiences of time and historical progress?
JK: Well, linear time is a construction. The lived experience of time is cyclical. Linear time is based on this idea of the enlightenment and modernism that believes in progress, and progress believes we’re on a line, always improving. Like calendar time, our way of thinking is tied to that notion of chronology, but it’s a fiction, and it comes bound with violence. When you believe in that kind of progress, you believe the world is ordained. Once you have that kind of logic, you can believe that Indigenous Americans or Black Americans are less entitled to full and meaningful lives than white Americans, because they deserve to be where they are. That’s progress. There are all sorts of myths of power and about the way the world should be. I wanted to write against that.
I used blue because it feels like air and the atmosphere, and how we see distance.
When you live somewhere for a while, you experience different scales of time held in that place. When your street changes, you hold the old memory. I love the idea of time held in space becoming expansive. Like, oh, I live in this place where there was a climate collapse 380 million years ago.
SJH:And that collapse was, in a way, progress. These ferns fixed the oxygen, and it caused this massive extinction event.
JK: Which made a world in which we could exist.
SJH:Your father was a member of many political organizations—some seemingly contradictory.
What has this taught you about patriotism? Especially now?
JK: It’s an interesting moment—when things seem so dire—to ask what patriotism can look like. And, to think about my dad, who wasn’t perfect, but I share many of his values. It’s like, in looking at my parents’ lives and their choices, I’m seeking a model for how to be a citizen now. What would it mean to say I’m patriotic? In my volunteer fire department, I have to say the Pledge of Allegiance, which I find strange, but less so now than I used to. A pledge doesn’t mean it’s true. A pledge means it’s something you would like to be true. I would like this country to be full of equality. It’s not true, but I want it to be.
I realized in writing The Eighth Moon that my rage about America and my neighbors’ rage are the same rage, expressed in different ways. Now I just wonder if somebody is going to come for me. It’s kind of this weird fear I have. I don’t know if you have this kind of epigenetic trauma, but I think I do. You know, my dad’s family escaped pogroms. There’s a part of me where somehow that fear is baked in. People react to trauma. React around it. Our wiring changes.
SJH:Bodies remember. I think of generational or inherited trauma as sort of like how the offspring of crows recognize their parents’ enemies.
JK: I would like to be a crow.
SJH:I would like you to be a crow.
JK: Can I just ask you, what bird would you be?
SJH:I think I am also a crow.
JK: As a writer right now, I feel scared. I’m political and open about being a socialist, and I live in a small community. I’ve been thinking a lot about things like freedom of speech, which I took for granted, but feels tenuous right now. I think it’s important to be patriotic. There was a beautiful moment last summer when I was at a fire call. A milk truck had crashed. If a milk truck crashes on a two-lane state highway, you’re going to be there for six hours. While I was directing traffic, a guy who’d been in the fire department for 50 years was like, “I read your book.” I asked, “What do you think?” He said, “Well, I finished it. That bit where you wrote about the pledge … I’ve been thinking that for years.” I was like, “Okay, my work here is done.”
SJH:And so, our work here is also done. Thank you so much for talking with me.
JK: I feel so lucky. The only thing that would make me feel luckier is if we were looking at Jack-in-the-pulpits together.
The summer we move into the crumbling mother-in-law suite, my daughter becomes fascinated with origami. It starts with a boat, then she graduates to other critters, and soon dozens and dozens of fortune tellers are strewn about the suite we rent for the summer. She writes esoteric phrases in place of the fortunes I remember from my childhood which focused on the possible attractiveness—or not—of a future husband or the size and quality of one’s house, hut, or mansion. One of her fortune panels reads plainly, “Let it go,” in curly, girlish script. This might be a Frozen reference but it’s also uncannily sage advice.
A year before our summer of fortune tellers, Amy tells me she will be on the school news with her guidance counselor. On the news, she will teach the other students how to make a paper fortune that contains different strategies to help them feel better when they are anxious or upset. But this time, her fortune-making is not as structured. This summer, her fortune-telling starts as a simple game to pass the time. We fold and fold as the clock ticks us deeper into summer, deeper into our unknown.
We rent the mother-in-law suite after secretly selling our blue house, and predictably, it is often stuffy due to the sweltering Florida heat. The place is just about to turn one-hundred and you can smell the years of cigarette tar encrusted onto the walls. So much tar in so much heat that eventually it drips down the walls, like blood from an old wound. A shared chlorinated pool sits between the French doors of the suite and the main house. The big rental house is rarely occupied, and when it is, the occupants don’t hang out by the pool much. At least one of the rotating cast of families seems unpleasantly surprised that there are people living in the backyard, though we try our best to be inconspicuous. One family piles black trash bags by the pool in a futile attempt to eradicate the bedbugs their daughter brought from her college dorm room. Between our two families, just that patch of stagnant water. A floatie continues its slow spin, an aimless raft waiting for someone to climb aboard.
To kill time, Amy and I head to the nearest air-conditioned book store. There, we come across a book with origami tutorials. The origami book is what ignites her renewed desire to create a near infinite array of folded creatures and fortune tellers. Like any story, a fortune begins as a blank page. Once crafted, written, and read, it becomes infused with meaning.
Back in the suite where tar and sweat still permeate the room, we hear the drone of my husband on the telephone working at the six-foot folding table in the lofted bedroom. He sits crooked, using the spring-mattressed bed as his chair, a posture that will later cause him pain. I cut up pieces of construction paper into squares so we can begin folding the origami. We make beavers and otters and roses. The instructions for the folds prove to be daunting. One otter looks more froggish than otter-like, one rose has a squashed side. Amy becomes frustrated at the imperfections, her fingers creasing the paper with a tense determination. Time and time again she goes back to the flower-like fortune tellers until she can nearly make one with her eyes closed. I ask her to teach me how to make one and she does so with surprising patience. “First like this. Then fold here,” she grabs my work-in-progress and flips it right-side-up as I fumble through memories of my own childhood creases. By the evening, a dozen of them are lined up on her digital piano’s matte black top. Finally there are so many we run out of room on the piano, so she makes an origami cup in which to put all of her origami fortunes. Folds within folds.
By mid-July, time in the mother-in-law suite slows to a stop. It has been a few weeks since I shoved the last of our belongings—high-heeled work shoes, clothes that didn’t fit in our suitcases, and unwanted dolls—into the trash bins outside the blue house. We’d been running out of time—the new owners would need the keys and we were due at the brokerage office. We’d been running—an ultra-marathon of police reports, hearings, visa paperwork, getting the family dog certified to travel, booking rental houses, and finally downsizing and selling the last of our things. When selling was too slow, we started giving. Then time ran out and everything became trash. There was a mandatory sequence of steps that followed a familiar logic: getting things done. But in the mother-in-law suite, all that is certain is the precariousness of forward motion: that a decision has been made and a swift cut followed. We are living in the interim—a lull between synapse firing, resulting thought, and action. The suite itself is a type of liminal space where all that exists is a summer, hot and tedious and barren. A summer like an enormous, pendulous mass. Like something about to burst. A cut before the blood comes.
I cut up pieces of construction paper into squares so we can begin folding the origami.
We make do with whatever entertainment we can find in between my hushed phone calls to airlines, my spreadsheet budgeting, all of which color the days before our final leap from one continent to the next. Between bouts of origami-making and sitting poolside by hordes of mosquitoes that skitter across the surface of the water, we take walks around a block of suburbia in a neighborhood so affluent we only ever see professional dog-walkers. Even the origami starts to grow tiresome, but Amy keeps folding, perfecting the petals of the roses and folding two papers at once so that each flower shows two colors. When the tedium hits a fever pitch, I grab one of her blank fortunes and sit down at the round kitchen table that doubles as a desk.
“I bet we can turn this into a story machine,” I say conspiratorially. “We can turn this one fortune into one hundred stories!”
She stifles a laugh and looks at me skeptically. That okay-mom-sure-you-can look.
Unfurled, a fortune is just a piece of paper with compartments for words and numbers. It is an innocuous object—a type of mirror onto which we project ourselves, with all of our expectations and aspirations, fears and apprehensions. Our visions of our future selves appear there, unscathed, heroic even. All of our complex problems are distilled into manageable archetypes. We twist and reframe the narrative shown by the fortunes, whether they are tarot cards, tea leaves, or folded paper, to mirror our hopes and neuroses, wishes and doubts.
On the outermost petals of the paper, I write the beginnings of sentences: “the dog,” “many pigs,” “two sad people,” and lastly, “one sad pony.” Inside these petals, the panel is split in two, totaling eight options for the next segment of sentence. Onto these I wrote verbs like “skateboarded,” “snored loudly,” “cooked,” or “skipped happily.” Then we open up the flower-shaped fortune and write along the triangular, splayed open petals, eight more phrases, each containing an adverb, so that we can situate our characters. Behind, inside, on top of. Underwater. In the center of the flower, I write eight more numbered phrases, this time focusing on a sense of place, whether abstract or palpable. A scary ice cream shop, a pink sky, a cold house.
I explain to her that from these petals we can make up silly sentences. “All you have to do is pick four numbers,” I explain.
“Four,” she says.
“Ok, ‘The sad pony…’”
“Four!”
“’The sad pony plopped…”
“Six!”
“’The sad pony plopped inside of …”
“Seven!”
“’The sad pony plopped inside of the dinosaur’s mouth!”
We twist and reframe the narrative shown by the fortunes.
Amy giggles. We tell each other lots of stories this way. We dub these fortune tellers story machines. Then we make another machine with as many variables as the first one. She asks me how many stories we can tell altogether. I pull up the calculator on my phone and dig into my foggy middle school memory of factorials. Using the current story machines we could make millions of stories.
I write it on the notebook paper’s header. A million stories.
As a joke I add, “By Mom.”
But the stories were there all along, ours for the taking.
Years before we sold the blue house, my husband and I found ourselves sitting across from our friends at a new year’s eve party where a hush had fallen over us. They brought each of us into their game room, away from the noise of the party, their faces almost comically intense. Carlos shuffled the cards. Heather peered curiously from under her waterfall of strawberry-blonde hair. Our host shuffled a deck of tarot cards for what, in my tipsy state, seemed like five whole minutes. Then he asked us to cut the deck. I cut once, then my husband. He laid out three cards with his long finger-nailed hands and sighed. I’m not sure if the sigh was an expression of his own anxiety—(should I tell them what they want to hear? the sigh seemed to say)—or what he saw in the cards splayed before him. He’d pulled the Nine of Wands, with an image of a worried male figure holding on to a staff, eight more staves visible in the background. He explained simply that, the problems we’d faced before, we’d have to face again—but we’d be better equipped this time.
We left and rejoined the rest of our friends, brushing off the cards as just another party game, the momentary quiet vanishing behind us. But I knew the problem represented by all those staves. It never seemed to go away no matter how much I prayed for it to be neatly stored away and forgotten, like a small, inconspicuous deck of cards. A sort of anxiety settled over everything like fine dust. Sundays were the worst. Each Sunday in the blue house, Amy awoke early. I made her breakfast and packed a bag with everything she would need for the day. We waited, both of us tense—I stood at the kitchen sink, nervously scrubbing a dish. She sat across from me, eating a piece of toast or drinking a glass of orange juice. Every few minutes, I glanced out of the bay window that framed our living room. Her father would finally arrive in a white sedan or a gray SUV, or some rental—whichever car hadn’t yet met its violent end—and I would strap on her court-mandated GPS watch and perform a silent, inward prayer. When she left, the prayer turned into paralysis. I often sat at the kitchen counter, wild-eyed, for the twelve hours he had her.
Those were our staves. But the symbolism of the Nine of Wands doesn’t just reveal strife. It’s also about grit and willpower. The ability to keep going even when the load weighs heavy on your shoulders, even when there is a feeling of running in place, of trying hard and getting nowhere. The futility of filling out another form, retelling the same, years-old story again, of spending another paycheck on yet another legal retainer. Many years passed in courtrooms, pleading with a rotating cast of judges to grant her protection, as they had granted me, from the man who harmed her. For many years, these requests for safety were made in vain despite investigations, an arrest, a conviction.
The card my friend pressed down onto the small table between us showed me our hurt, the worst of it happening again—but also our persistence, how close we were to peace, that yet unimagined promised land.
Carlos and Heather’s reading wasn’t my first encounter with the tarot. As much as I tried to stay away from any sort of mysticism, I kept running into it over and over, like a bird flying into unseen glass. A decade earlier, I had loitered around a tarot shop with two girls from school. We were in Cassadaga, a town in the heart of Florida known to some as the psychic capital of the world. Vicky and I were waiting for our turn to have our cards read. Blake, the girl who drove us and whose idea it was to skip school and drive to Cassadaga, was sitting outside drinking a tallboy and muttering under her breath about how ridiculous this whole town was. We tried to shush her disbelief before she disturbed the townspeople and we were forever cursed. An oddly cool wind seemed to blow.
I often sat at the kitchen counter, wild-eyed, for the twelve hours he had her.
We’d been trying to figure out something to do on a cloudy day in a strange Florida winter, a January in which I had seen tiny, incongruous snowflakes fall onto my grandparent’s back porch and into their pool. The rarity of the snow made us reckless. Our misadventures took on a new poignancy—as if we were trying to outshine the bad omen of the southern snow by smearing our bad decisions all over it.
The woman in Cassadaga read my cards first. My memory of her card spread is a blur, but I remember that she predicted my relationship with Vicky would change dramatically in the years to come. That we would no longer see each other like sisters. We’d grow apart, eclipse each other. For some reason this shocked me into silence—I never told her what the woman said. Or maybe I willed that narrative into existence, reflecting back on the meaning of the cards, and realizing our friendship was deeply flawed and unbalanced. Maybe the cards confirmed a feeling that already existed in me that our friendship was something outgrown and better left alone, like a stubborn weed.
After high school, when her father passed away, we lived together for a short, turbulent period. Then, I focused on college and she moved up north. Our paths diverged. I heard from her in passing, but never saw her again.
Mysticism marked the edges of my childhood from the start. Early on, my mother traded Sunday mass for afternoons reading Allan Kardec in her best friend’s incense-laced apartment, while toddler-me pretended to take showers beneath an enormous hanging pothos. She had converted to Spiritism. She believed in past lives and soul mates and serendipity and fate. And she liked to have her cards read.
Once, on a foggy Rio afternoon, I was a four-year-old in a fortune teller’s tent, smelling the salt air and trash heaps—that rancidness that sometimes still reminds me of Rio—through the rips in the plastic. The woman drew cards in a cross pattern. Then, she gave my mother the grave warning that would haunt her for the rest of her life: that she would never marry happily. My mother took this as her life’s greatest challenge—one she pursued with incredible zeal. By the time her fortieth birthday rolled around, she had married and divorced four times. The first marriage was to my father, a man who sent her love letters from the bad side of town. The second was to a sweet Argentinian man with a pill problem and a safe full of secrets. The third was to my brother’s father whose blow with a two-by-four left a permanent, lightning-shaped scar through her left eyebrow. Lastly and most briefly, she married a man who claimed to be a dentist and donned tattoos written in Hebrew he never wanted to discuss. Within a month of their split he was married again. In trying to prove one woman’s prediction wrong, she only proved it right, time and time again. The pivotal moment of her life could be traced back to a single narrative she fought relentlessly against—a destiny predetermined in a spread of illustrated cards.
My mother traded Sunday mass for afternoons reading Allan Kardec in her best friend’s incense-laced apartment.
Despite my slow orbit around the world of tarot, I never had my own deck until after my thirtieth birthday. Perhaps because of the memory of my mother’s ominous reading, I was superstitious, thinking that someone would imbue the cards with bad luck, or even that asking a question myself was too selfish of a reason to have a deck of my own. I considered tarot a gift that had to be offered. Then, a literary magazine I read released a twentieth anniversary commemorative deck. Each card included an artwork or poem written by a contributor specifically for that symbol. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to begin a collection.
Still, I kept the cards close to my chest. I drew cards in the shapes of crosses in the walk-in closet while I pretended to get dressed for work or in the upstairs office, when no one else was home.
When we are finally ready to say goodbye to the cramped mother-in-law suite and move across the ocean, my daughter packs her fortunes, the story machines we’d made during the long summer, and the blank ones, too. I tell her we won’t be able to take all of them, so she places the ones she wants flattened into their green origami cup and packs them up in her rainbow backpack so that they almost take up no room. That she wants to bring the fortunes with her is a reminder that she, too, loves stories and all of their infinite possibilities. If, after everything, she can still hold onto the vastness of her own narrative, then she—and by extension we—would be OK. Our stories are still ours to write.
It was night, one of the last we spent in the blue house. My husband and I sat in the office room with its twinned desks amid the half-taped boxes with our years’ worth of stuff spilling out. Only a single lamp was lit. It smelled pitiful like cardboard and dust—the familiar scent of leaving. The giant oak in our backyard was being rocked by another summer storm, a summer that still housed within it the potential of forward motion.
“Ask it,” my husband said with an uncharacteristic tinge of nervousness.
I shifted uncomfortably on the comically small turquoise futon we had bought on our limited budget for houseguests.
“Then we can’t take it back,” I said.
“Just ask.”
I whispered a tentative, “Okay,” drawing in a slow breath. Then I cut the deck.
I drew a card. Then another. And then a third. I had always been skeptical of any sort of divination, but superstitious enough to get nervous, believing once we see a story in the cards, it is hard to turn away from the throughline. We will it into existence, good or bad. Suggestible as humanity is, we are liable to place everything on the line, the entirety of our faith, on a single, however implausible, story. I tried to concentrate on the issue at hand, the questions we couldn’t say out loud to each other but felt just fine asking an inanimate stack of cards: Will we be safe during our escape? Will this crazy thing we’re doing work?
The deck felt heavy in my hands. I cut and shuffled it over and over delaying the inevitable answer. Then I grit my teeth and cut it one last time, exhaled a final breath that hung in the air like a question. If we leave will we be safe? Will he reach us, somehow, from across the Atlantic? I let the thought fill my mind while I placed the cards down on the desk’s wood-like veneer. Five cards in a neat row. The past and the present, then the challenge. Advice. Lastly, there was the card of outcome. As I placed the cards, our eyes latched onto them as if they had a gravitational pull.
I had always been skeptical of any sort of divination, but superstitious enough to get nervous.
As soon as I pulled the outcome card, I felt the familiar sting of tears. The Six of Swords card of this particular deck has no image. It lay on the wood-veneered desk, a temporarily impenetrable object. In the place of an image was a sliver of prose by the novelist Rick Moody. In it, he described a surreal, shifting scene with a dreamlike narrative. It is hard to grasp the facts of the story. The reader knows there is a mother and a daughter. There is an investigation. There is a departure. We’re not sure who leaves or who stays, but there is the sense that, in the end, there was a messy break toward a new beginning. “Liza cleaved desperately to her mother, and they clambered aboard the skiff, backs to us, onto a river of forgetting,” wrote Rick Moody in his interpretation of the Six of Swords. I couldn’t explain all this to my husband, who sat anxious and silent, while I processed the card’s meaning. The weight of the six of swords appearing in the position of outcome was equivalent to the weight of the story of safety and freedom we were telling ourselves. It is always the story that happens first—that allows us to believe that anything is possible. Before any pivotal event there is a precursor, a primordial narrative that hovers above us, shimmering. We only have to reach for it, to hold it close enough to see ourselves in this mirror of possibility.
In the traditional Rider-Waite deck, the six of swords depicts a hooded woman and a child huddled onto a raft being directed by a man, who the viewer assumes is helping them to escape. There are six swords in the water, representing hardship, but depending on the deck, the swords are split between the space in front of the boat and behind it, suggesting there is more suffering to be had, but some of it has already passed. One can separate oneself from the unimaginable danger that is never depicted on this card, the secret part of the story only the querent knows. To see our story reflected back to us in the symbolism of this card gave me the sudden feeling of freefall. It gave credence to the story we had already begun to rewrite. What we wanted—what we already knew—was that our pain didn’t have to be the ending.
Later, when we make it across the ocean—all three of us and even the colossal white dog—I see the swords clearly, those we’ve escaped and those still ahead. No longer are we passive observers to our own calamities. No longer waiting. We are afloat now, basking in the warm certainty of the sun. From my place on the raft, I reach into the water and grasp the hilt of a heavy sword.
I realize a book that circles a woman’s desperate attempt to gain power, only for her dreams to be mortally dashed, feels a little on-the-nose, especially after the recent US election. But, reader, what if I told you I began working on this book long before the 47th President even became the 45th? In fact, I’ve been writing the story of this woman for a decade. She lived two-thousand years ago. Her name was Agrippina the Younger—she was a noblewoman cum empress who used men as puppets to run the Roman Empire with notable success, yet received no recognition. I found out about Agrippina through the peculiar circumstances of her death—her own son ordered her assassination. This fact hounded me, nipping at my heels. Agrippina was caught in a world of political intrigue, longing for what she was legally denied as a woman: power.
My poetry collection, Agrippina the Younger, is as much about the eponymous historical figure as my own fixation. I chase her through books and museums, scouring for every descriptive clause or partial portrait of the largely overlooked empress. I wrote lineated poetry to imagine moments of her life left out of the archive: her childhood on campaign with her Roman general father, the periods of her exile as an adult. Between these pieces are prose poems about my travels to Rome to learn more about Agrippina. Through these, I try to cast a sharp eye on our world shaped by regimes and social systems over thousands of years. If the victor writes history, it is particularly telling how few words from ancient women have endured. Agrippina wrote three memoirs before she died, but none were ever copied, leaving them among the heap of women’s lost words through the ages. The impossibility of knowing the pulsing details of Agrippina’s life showed me time and again how written history is hardly a dependable resource. Considering this reality, history—the stories we tell about events—can feel like a farce. Little of ancient history, especially, is certain. It provokes the sensation of grasping at something simultaneously enormous and slippery.
Each of the books featured here provide a mesmerizing focus on the past. The authors’s points of interest are often radical and subversive: a “feminist” epic; a poem protesting an ancient murder. These volumes grapple with the infinite legacies we have inherited. Histories, epics, wars, desires, myths, and colonial violence act as conduits for these authors to fathom humanity and, often, themselves. In one way or another, each book turned something I thought I knew upside down. I struggled to select only a few, as (perhaps unsurprisingly) literary books on history populate much of my library. Don Mee Choi’s Hardly War, Anthony Cody’sBorderland Apocrypha, Linnea Axelsson’s Aednan: An Epic(tr. Saskia Vogel), Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl, Claire Hong’s Upend, Myriam Moscona’s Tela de sevoya/Onioncloth (tr. Antena), Alison C. Rollins’ Black Bell, Kevin Young’s Ardency—each could stand among these thrilling titles. The books below attend to the lacunae in the archive, reorienting the way we perceive the historical, and ultimately reconstructing the way we understand ourselves today.
This “novel in verse” is about the titular Billy the Kid—a man who, despite seeming like someone out of a dime novel, was real. As a 19th century gunslinging outlaw, Billy is forever braided with ideas and American history. Ondaatje, inspired to push back against the glorification of the Wild West he encountered as a child reading comic books in Sri Lanka, wrote The Collected Works. He includes photographs, newspaper clippings, and interviews, as well as pages from those dime novels of his youth. Ondaatje’s poems are compressed, even restrained, against the expansiveness of his archival material. It is a stunning attempt to suss out who, exactly, was this living legend and how, as Ondaatje writes in his afterword, he was “turned into a cartoon.” Obdaatje explains, “I had to invent Billy from the ground up.” So Ondaatje gives us a man who catches a fly and holds the terrified buzz to his ear. “These are the killed,” Ondaatje’s Billy says before he lists those he murdered. “Blood a necklace on me all my life.”
This memoir is an extended meditation on Ní Ghríofa’s relationship with a keen poem from the late 1700s written in Irish alongside her modern experiences of love and motherhood. The keen is by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill in response to the heinous murder of her beloved husband, whom she realizes is dead whenhis horsewalks to their home with his “heart’s blood smeared from cheek to saddle.” The horse carries her to her husband’s corpse. “In anguish and in grief,” writes Ní Ghríofa, “she fell upon him, keening and drinking mouthfuls of his blood.” Ní Chonaill’s husband was shot at the order of a magistrate, illustrative of the oppression of the Catholic majority in Ireland. Though Ní Chonaill’s voice burns through the centuries, we know little else of her life beyond her entrancing descriptions of love and abject grief. In A Ghost in the Throat, Ní Ghríofa’s life whizzes around us as she raises four small children, her ratty copy of Ní Chonaill’s keen in her hands during late-night breastfeeds. Through the book, Ní Ghríofa never stops probing—the archive, the poem’s lines.
It pains me to say this book is no longer in print (though a large portion is in The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Elizabeth Alexander). Brooks’s poems are the type that stop you dead in your tracks, realizing you’re at the feet of a formidable teacher. Few things illustrate the remarkable chasm between where I am and where I hope to be more than reading even one of her couplets. Annie Allen traces the life of a young Black girl growing up poor in Chicago. Despite her situation, which most would consider circumscribed, Annie dreams of a life when she will have “melted opals for my milk. Pearl-leaf for my cracker.” Annie falls in love and her beloved goes off to war, described in a heroic, long poem entitled “The Anniad”—combining The Aeneidand our protagonist’s name. Ultimately, Annie finds herself alone, wrung out, “tweaked and twenty-four.” Annie Allen may be one of Brooks’s most formal collections, but its content and overarching themes regarding the dehumanizing realities of racism and poverty are radical. She illustrates how a girl who is caught in the thresher of these bigotries is a worthy protagonist of an epic poem, heroic if only for her survival.
An Indian missionary stalks into tribal Bengal to spread Christianity when he hears of demons living nearby. In reality, they are two girls adopted by a pack of wolves. The missionary “saves” the girls by killing the wolf mother, and attempts to reshape them into “civilized” humans. They both die young, buried in the graveyard of his orphanage. Incredibly, this story is true. In less capable hands, Humanimal would have been a book that “freaks” the girls further, dehumanizing them in ways the missionary did. Instead, Kapil delves into the brutal realities of the man’s attempts to domesticate girls whose survival was realized by their wildness. She travels to the orphanage and visits their graves, welcomes space for ghostly encounters. Their power overwhelms her. “I wanted to write until they were real,” Kapil explains. “When they began to breathe…I stopped writing.” In this spellbinding, hybrid collection, Kapil scrutinizes the ways in which children are simultaneously vulnerable and potent—and how adults misuse them. The latter tells us more about human behavior than almost anything else.
Shimoda’s memoir traces the life of his grandfather Midori with a dogged curiosity and profound tenderness. “He was born three years in a row,” Shimoda writes early on, “depending on whose memory is being consulted.” Midori was born in Japan, immigrating to the U.S., alone, as a nine-year-old boy. As an adult, he was an able photographer, making ends meet through portraiture. Yet it is Midori’s camera that makes him vulnerable, suspicious, an “enemy alien” during WWII. He is eventually incarcerated in Montana. Shimoda knows these few facts, which are his lodestars as he travels to Midori’s childhood hometown in Japan, the places Midori lived in the US and was imprisoned after Executive Order 9066. Official documents, photographs, and other ephemera push us along on Shimoda’s relentless but gripping journey to understand a man who, by the time Shimoda was a child, already suffered from Alzheimer’s. The blurry uncertainty about finer details defines the book, while Shimoda’s searing insights into American imperialism, how war serves as permission for brutality in domestic as well as foreign arenas, is undeniable. “White settlers were the original aliens,” he writes while at the Montana fort-turned-prison.
Alice Notley’s brother returned from the American-Vietnam War severely traumatized, ultimately dying from a drug overdose. The Descent of Alette is Notley’s salvo toward the oppressive military system that wrecked her sibling and killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese people. The protagonist, Alette, lives in a grim dystopia in which people are forced to endlessly ride the subway by a tyrant overlord (indeed, many poems start with “On the subway…”). Each page gives a vignette of the trippy world she inhabits where Alette might experience a bleak and fleeting camaraderie before moving to another train. Quotations are used in order to slow the reader’s eye and point to a kind of chorus of voices reciting the events (but makes it difficult to quote). Powerfully incantatory, Alette drags you into its spell. One day, someone tells Alette she must kill the tyrant—the man who keeps everyone in the closed circuit of this world. She goes through a cave network, encountering more figures and scenes as she attempts to locate a means to successfully destroy someone so powerful. Notley maps Alette’s trajectory based on those of myth, epic, and the hero’s journey as she makes her way.
Jess runs laps around turn-of-the-century America, giving us portraits of the period’s brilliant Black artists and performers through persona poems and archival material. This is alongside the undeniable violences white America has cultivated and maintained surrounding the Black performing body, particularly in minstrelsy (one definition of “olio” is the second act of a minstrel show). In a poem from the perspective of the pianist and composer Blind Tom, he says of music, “It howls out / my fingers when I reach into God’s mouth / of piano.” Olio is also about the need for song among a community brutally denied literacy for centuries, the crucial moment between the American Civil War and the Great War. Yet Jess’s focus returns most often to Scott Joplin (“The King of Ragtime”). Jess’s invented avatar Julius Monroe Trotter conducts interviews with Joplin’s contemporaries, which Jess bases off of the wealth of literature he read. Jess says of Trotter in an interview, “he’s trying to find himself by tracing the history of Scott.” (I have also written about Olio here.)
Laura Da’’s poetry collection gives electric attention to the violent displacement and cultural genocide of the Shawnee people through following two of Da’’s ancestors: Lazarus (Shawnee) and Crescent (Anglo), both of the early 19th century. Lazarus is a victim of forced migration from ancestral lands as a child. His people attempt to forage for greens and herbs, groping through the foreign landscape “like a tongue / poking around // in the shrill vacancy / of a shattered tooth.” In Instruments, Da’ gives the textures of such life, the wildness of the landscape. (“Blood fused rain-soak / runs down in rivulets / to the grey mare’s / muddy fetlocks.”) She sets these tight, muscular poems beside prose pieces about herself and the historical events that lead to our modern moment. Throughout, Da’ illustrates the violences that curbed access to the landscape and its embodied realities, reducing them to measurements, numbers—surveryed and ready for the taking. As she writes, “Any treaty is an artifact of unimaginable suffering.”
For centuries, casta paintings were “New Spain’s” ornate, portrait-studded family trees. The purpose of these beautifully detailed paintings was repulsive—to determine if one was “white enough” to have civil rights. (“Casta” and “caste” rhyme in more ways than one.) The white need for the casta, according to Martinez, was “to visually represent ancestors…for public consumption and legal proof.” With castas as a point of departure in this blistering poetry collection, Martinez traces the ways in which white colonizers have brutalized mestizo and Indigenous Latinx people and put them on display. There are lynching postcards, the tour of Joaquin Murrieta’s “pickled head.” Poignantly, among this sharp scrutiny, Martinez includes photographs and descriptions of his family. Martinez’s father was exposed to Agent Orange during the American-Vietnam War and where the terrible chemical touched his skin, it “lost tint in patterned locations across his body, leaving him chalk-white markings—skin a war map of erasure.” This impacted his offspring, including Martinez. The ways Martinez’s body is racialized by trawling white eyes is the legacy of casta paintings of centuries ago.
I’m rounding out this batch of books with Griffith’s electric historical novel. Hild is set in seventh-century Britain during a period defined by change: battles are coalescing, political seats of power are up for the taking, the new Christian religion is gaining a foothold. The unlikely center of this story is Hild—a young girl who, through her capacity to read the wilderness and give advice based on what she divines, finds herself at her king uncle’s side as his seer. Hild was a real person. Through her royal role, Hild’s powers of sight made her a force in a time defined by desperate brutality. (One wrong divination, and the cost is her head.) Though Griffith is not an academic historian, she immersed herself in Hild’s life. A single document serves as the basis for the entirety of the first two books in this series—Menewoodis the second, and equally gripping—which is already longer than the entirety of Lord of the Rings. Griffith describes flora and fauna, mead and meals, battles and sex with such zeal I found myself lost in the events of 1400 years ago.
My mother lost her baby and my father lost his leg. So I tried to be her baby and I tried to be his leg. On both counts, I failed.
“You’re not a very good baby,” my mother said suspiciously. “You’re practically dead, you’re so old.”
“You’re not a very good leg either,” my father said. “On account of the fact that you’re an entire person, and not a leg.”
Still I tried. I let my mother spoon-feed me. I let her buy me Bibles and nightgowns. But I could not make the whole “baby” thing work. Babies are little dummies, and I am no dummy. I could not be a little dummy if I tried, and I did try. My mother would tell me where babies came from and I said “I know better than that.” She told me what would happen after I close my eyes for the final time, which I couldn’t disprove, but didn’t wholly believe and couldn’t fake it. She told me what sort of man to trust and which ones not to—“Never trust a man with dark hair and light eyes,” she said. I said OK, but she could tell I already had had some experience with men. She tried to tell me who to vote for, and that’s where I lost it. “Babies don’t vote,” I said. “Don’t try to make your baby vote. It’s not allowed.” “Why,” she said, “oh, why do you fight with your poor mother? Why can’t you be a real baby who never ever fights?”
I decided to put all my energies into being the leg, then. I held my father up while he pointed his gun at things. But I was too tall, much taller than a leg had any right to be. And, once again, I was no dummy. “Don’t point your gun at that,” I said. “You’re not the boss of me, Leg,” my father said. “Crouch a little so you’re level with the other leg.” I crouched and tucked my head. Now I couldn’t see what he pointed his gun at. But I heard someone crying. “Are you pointing your gun at a baby?” I said, not looking. “Not a real one,” he said. “Not real as in an animal or not real as in me pretending?” I said. “Not real as in, don’t look up, and you’ll never see it.” There was a blast, but the blast could have been the gun, or it could have been anything else that might make a blast sound. It could have been a typewriter. Or a firework. Or the beginning of the end of something.
There are writers one reads and then, rather disturbingly, there are those by whom one finds oneself read. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, it seems to me now, belonged from the outset to the latter category, though I only came to that recognition through prolonged resistance. It was in the summer of 2011, a liminal period for me and for South Sudan—a season of provisional awakenings, when our nation had only just been born and we had not yet learned how to be postcolonial—that I first encountered his work.
I was a university student then, home from America for the summer, shaped intellectually by the contradictions of my condition: a colonial subject belatedly emancipated, but educated in the refinements of Western literary sensibility; a reader steeped in Nabokov’s fastidious irony and Baldwin’s tragic humanism, tutored in the belief that the literary ought to elude, or at least subvert, political prescription.
By these standards, Ngũgĩ’s novels—Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross—seemed aggressive, almost propagandistic. Their characters declaimed rather than spoke, their plots surged forward not with psychological inevitability but ideological purpose, and their metaphors functioned less as vessels of mystery than as delivery systems for slogans. What I took then to be their greatest fault was their lack of ambivalence. He wrote, it seemed, not to flirt with complexity but to expose betrayal.
He wrote, it seemed, not to flirt with complexity but to expose betrayal.
And yet I could not put him aside. Even then, I suspected that what vexed me was not the unbridled earnestness but clarity—an implacable vision that refused to make the compromises to which we, in our seminar rooms and literary circles, had grown accustomed. It was only in 2012, as South Sudan began its descent into internecine strife, that Ngũgĩ’s work began to acquire a different weight. The revolutionary rhetoric that had animated our early independence soured into the tribal arithmetic of appointments and resource capture. It was amid these disillusions, by candlelight during the city’s now-frequent blackouts, that I returned—almost reflexively—to Decolonising the Mind. What had once seemed dogmatic now appeared diagnostic.
Ngũgĩ’s central claim—that language is not merely a medium of communication but the architecture of consciousness, and hence of domination—no longer struck me as theoretical extravagance. It was, I saw then, the description of an epistemic violence I had witnessed daily in the schools of our nascent republic. Children, taught to think in tongues foreign to their inheritance, fell silent—not from ignorance but from dispossession. The pedagogy of the empire had not ended; it had merely changed its flag.
And I thought again of The River Between. This powerful novel is not merely a parable of colonial disruption; it is a formal autopsy of the ways in which empire fractures thought. Set among the Gikuyu, the novel stages a crisis not merely between cultures but within syntax itself—the codes by which meaning, legitimacy, and power are constructed and enforced. Waiyaki, the ostensible unifier, is educated by missionaries under the premise that knowledge is a path to empowerment. Yet what he acquires is less a tool than a schism. “Learn all the wisdom of the white man,” he is told—an injunction that renders him inarticulate in his own tongue. His education produces alienation, not agency. His schools, conceived as instruments of liberation, become colonial simulacra—mechanisms of stratification disguised as enlightenment.
The novel’s central symbol, the Honia River, is both dual in meaning and duplicitous in structure. It is called the river that “never dries,” a source of life, and yet it becomes a fault line. It offers no resolution, only reflection: what flows through it is not reconciliation but recursive opposition. When Waiyaki falls in love with Nyambura, Ngũgĩ dramatizes a failure of translation—not between English and Gikuyu, but between ideological regimes. Their intimacy cannot be sustained because it is grammatically impossible within the colonial lexicon. Joshua, Nyambura’s father, speaks the King James idiom with evangelical violence. Circumcision is framed as sin, not because of inherent moral weight, but because the colonial church has rendered Kikuyu rites linguistically criminal. The tragic synthesis of Muthoni, a young girl who insists on remaining Christian while undergoing initiation, is not an act of rebellion but of fidelity to both her worlds. It is the system that cannot bear her, and so she dies. By the novel’s end, the Kiama—a body meant to preserve Gikuyu tradition—mirrors the authoritarianism of the very missionaries they resent. Waiyaki is condemned not for apostasy but for ambiguity. In Ngũgĩ’s vision, justice is impossible in a world where even the means of expression—schools, rituals, rivers—have been co-opted by imperial design. Language itself becomes betrayal. There is no revolution, only recursion.
Ngũgĩ was not attempting to redeem history through art, but to insist upon literature as the recordof history’s cost.
Where once I had accused Ngũgĩ of ideological overreach, I now began to perceive instead a kind of consistency, the rigor of a writer who refused the division, beloved by privileged literati, between aesthetic subtlety and moral clarity. Ngũgĩ’s fiction did not flatter the reader’s intelligence with ambiguity for its own sake. It confronted one with the burden of truth-telling in contexts where equivocation had long passed for sophistication. Ngũgĩ was not attempting to redeem history through art, as so many of our idols had attempted, but to insist upon literature as the record of history’s cost. Not the decorous gesture of memory, but its reckoning. Not sentiment, but responsibility.
Even his later works—Wizard of the Crow, for example. It is often mistaken for whimsical allegory, but its exaggerations reveal, with clinical precision, the deformities of postcolonial power. Set in Aburĩria—a caricature only in name—the novel dissects tyranny through grotesque realism rather than conventional psychological nuance. Kamĩtĩ, an accidental mystic, and Nyawĩra, a quiet revolutionary, resist a regime so bloated it plans to “march to heaven” via a skyscraper. The Ruler, afflicted with literal inflation and diagnosed as “pregnant,” embodies the self-consuming absurdity of autocracy. These are not flourishes but diagnoses—power portrayed not as ideology, but as disease.
Ngũgĩ’s satire is not escapist; it records the surreal logic of dictatorship, where buttocks become protest and court flatterers chant nonsense with liturgical zeal. In such a world, absurdity becomes the most faithful mode of realism. That the novel remains free of bitterness is its most withering critique. It laughs not to soothe, but to expose. In its grotesque clarity, Wizard of the Crow speaks more truthfully of African postcolonial life than realism bound to interior psychology ever could.
To write in the language of one’s colonizer, he argued, was to dream with someone else’s symbols.
Ngũgĩ wrote in Kikuyu, a choice I had once thought to be a kind of atavistic purism. What good, I had asked, is a literature unreadable to the very youth it seeks to awaken? But that too was a misreading. It is no more strange to write in Kikuyu than in Irish or Hebrew. Ngũgĩ was not attempting to isolate himself from his readership; he was attempting to re-found the very conditions of readership. To write in the language of one’s colonizer, he argued, was to dream with someone else’s symbols. To write in Kikuyu was not a rejection of others but an insistence on starting from home. And what, after all, could be more generative?
There are, to be sure, places where Ngũgĩ’s political judgments seem too categorical, too bound to the certainties of Marxist analysis. He can, at times, appear to reduce the infinite intricacies of African existence to the binaries of class struggle. But to dwell on this is to miss the essential generosity of his work. Ngũgĩ did not write to be agreed with. He wrote to equip. His books are not blueprints but permissions— permissions to think in the idiom of our own experience, to treat the oral as philosophical, the local as literary, the African as a subject of history, not merely its object.
To read him seriously is to be reminded that literature, particularly in postcolonial societies, is not an indulgence but a duty. Ngũgĩ gives us no refuge in cleverness. He demands, rather, that we remember. That we mourn. That we articulate our condition not to explain it away but to expose it to light.
He is, I now see, not a writer one outgrows, but a writer to whom one returns—chastened, wiser, more exposed. The kind of figure who, like an elder too easily dismissed in youth, proves with time to have been speaking the truest language all along.
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Anyone who works in a library, in particular an academic library, knows that knowledge is not neutral. The own-the-snowflakes cry of “facts don’t care about your feelings” is not merely rude: it is untrue. A library is not just a repository of knowledge: it is a repository of certain kinds of knowledge, presented in particular ways, and constantly rejigged to be aimed at particular audiences. Over the twenty-odd years since I first started working in libraries I have been regularly surprised by the speed with which academic trends and interests change, and the ways in which a good library is reactive, almost alive, in how it can respond to shifts in the kaleidoscope of opinion or academic fashion.
My two collections of short fiction, Lost Objects and Out of the Window, Into the Dark, both recently published by Calque Press, collect most of the stories I have written over the past decade. With no prior planning, it turns out that a number of my protagonists are librarians and archivists, repository and museum curators, work on planet-sized libraries and in academic settings. Apart from the planet-sized libraries (one can always dream…) these characters reflect what I have worked at since entering the job market. It’s no wonder that my experience as an institutional librarian and library assistant informs the topics I am interested in exploring as a writer.
This isn’t just a roundabout way of saying that I can pull together a kickass display for Black History Month, or that I can support academics who suddenly get a yearning to look at trade routes in medieval Central Asia. It is more that the disconnect between what a library looks like to its users (shelves, order, classmarks, Spanish to the left, German to the right) and what a library looks like to the people it is entrusted to (the materials shifting like the walls in the movie Labyrinth, huge deposits of just-in-case ephemera, the constant fight against entropy and mission collapse) is something I find artistically and intellectually productive. Some of my favorite books—as the following list of genre-leaning fiction reflects—engage with what I see as a library’s yin-yang nature: order shored against chaos, chaos containing the seeds of its own regulation.
Twenty years after its publication in English in Lucia Graves’s delectable translation, The Shadow of the Wind hasn’t lost any of its charm, and remains a classic of the “secret library” sub-genre of books (such as Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s El Club Dumas and Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith) which imagine the library as the physical shape of occult or mystical desires. Its young protagonist, a bookseller’s son, becomes obsessed with Julian Carax, an obscure, cursed author, and starts investigating what could have happened to him along with his vanished bibliography. When the young bookseller’s life becomes intertwined with the truths he starts to discover about Carax, reality and fiction are shown to be different sides of the same coin. At its heart, this engrossing novel is an ode to the transformative power of books and storytelling, masterfully articulating that wondrous moment of discovery we’ve all experienced when finding the book that turned us into readers. But The Shadow of the Wind is not simply about books—the library at its centre, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, serves as a heart-wrenching metaphor for all that was lost under the long shadow of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, and in particular for the shameful “pact of forgetting” that the democratic transition imposed on Spanish citizens, removing the possibility of restorative justice around the horrors of Franco’s regime. This is a novel that became a modern classic for all the right reasons.
A body is found in a London museum dedicated to the interwar years. Adam Dalgliesh, a senior police officer and respected poet, is sent to investigate along with his team. Then another murder occurs. The two crimes don’t quite emulate, but seem reminiscent of certain murders exhibited in the museum’s own “Murder Room,” where artifacts relating to famous crimes are presented to the public in their historical context. If a museum functions as a dark mirror to society, then this chamber of horrors and its curated psychoses develop into a horrid mise-en-abyme where Dalgliesh can trace the woes of all those connected to the crime. For a writer of P. D. James’s talent, this set-up brims with possibility: under the guise of a cozy murder-mystery, she passes a lens over UK society at large, dissecting class, domestic arrangements, loneliness and aging, the changing nature of the London landscape, and even the sorry state of the National Health Service and care system. All this furthers the question at the novel’s core: what is a museum actually for?
Many of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books poke serious fun at the academic life: the wizards who run Unseen University are venal, petty, aggressive rung-climbers, gathering power for themselves over the bodies (living or dead) of their rivals. Unseen Academicals is in many ways more of the same, and should be treasured for its queasily recognizable portrayal of the power struggles and rivalries over unimportant matters that infect so many institutions. But, as always, Pratchett looks at different sides of the issue with compassion and empathy. The plot of the novel involves the university faculty having to play a football match in order to keep hold of a large endowment—enough to cover eighty-seven point four per cent of their food budget (“Three cheeses isn’t a choice, it’s a penance!”). Of course, this offers scope for parody and broad satire, but, underneath the impotent babbling of the academics, Pratchett gives us a portrait of life below stairs in a large institution, and makes his key point—that everybody deserves a chance, not for who they are but for what they can be—with economy and heart.
Ropa Moyo has a gift: she can see the dead. We’ve all read stories with this premise, but don’t be dissuaded: this novel, the first in a series, offers a refreshing take on the trope. This is a world where ghost talkers and the supernatural are part of society and the bureaucratic world, while the Edinburgh depicted feels realistic, gritty, and recognizable. Add to that a setting on the verge of apocalypse, where an “incident” of some magnitude has already taken place, yet normal life is still more or less intact—a delicate balance that I find far more interesting than a full-blown post-apocalyptic world—and you find yourself with a rare thing, a novel that is as subtle in its approach to worldbuilding as it is kick-ass in its plot. This fast-paced supernatural mystery contains many entertaining subplots: vanishings, family dynamics, a terrifying haunted house, and more. But leaving the action and the protagonist’s unquestionable charm to one side, Huchu’s writing shines when interrogating major questions that are brought to the reader’s attention almost via sleight of hand: servitude, gatekeeping, or even which magic (a.k.a. knowledge) is more “proper.” This is an atmospheric story that asks the right questions and packs the right punches.
The Alkane Institute doesn’t make an appearance until mid-way through Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction classic, Nova, and yet its presence is ubiquitous in the book’s plot and worldbuilding. When Captain Lorq van Ray decides to challenge physics and enter a nova, he is less interested in gaining the tons of Illyrion that he expects the adventure will provide him than in settling a long-standing score with his childhood frenemies, Prince Red and his beautiful sister, Ruby Red. Delany’s vibrant imagination brings science-fiction topics about the struggle for resources, mass migration, and humanity’s relationship to technology and places them alongside Tarot readings and other occult mysteries. The central library, the all-powerful Alkane, is a massive, dome-like institution, whose influence is felt over the galaxy—it’s a larger-than-life centre of learning that encompasses all the knowledge of Delany’s multi-system universe Today, Delany’s SF classic feels more prescient than ever (“Oh, for the rebirth of an educational system where understanding was an essential part of knowledge”), and acts as a window for imagining what the heritage politics of the future may look like centuries from now.
There’s always room for one out-and-out fairytale, and Murakami’s brief, beautiful book joins the list on those grounds. Like all the best fairytales, it reads as though it is being made up on the hoof, and yet follows an internal logic to which we cannot but consent. Our unnamed narrator goes to the library to return some books and take out some new ones, only to find himself imprisoned by a vicious old man and tasked with studying a number of thick books about taxation in the Ottoman Empire so that the old man can eat his newly-educated brains, “because brains packed with knowledge are yummy.” How he escapes—of course he escapes—is a story that fits neatly into traditional narrative structures: loyal animal-ish sidekicks, shapeshifting girls, a touch of Robert Louis Stevenson, a pinch of Borges. But the final few pages offer us a twist that recontextualizes everything that has come before, and the story about being kidnapped turns into a narrative of grief observed: a sideways punch that you should see coming but which will floor you nonetheless. The book is illustrated throughout with collages and found images, which adds to the impression that we are reading not just a text found in some archive somewhere, but a text which is itself that archive: a beautiful object as well as a moving story.
One of the reasons jokes work is said to be that they offer us sidelong ways into things that, if contemplated seriously, would drive us mad…or to tears. I put Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog very firmly into this category—it’s one of the funniest novels one could ever read, yet the air of melancholy, of climate grief, that stands behind its best scenes gets me every time. We begin in the ashes of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a bombing raid in November 1940, with a group of time-travellers sent back to find various McGuffins that their patron, the impossible Lady Schrapnell, needs to fulfil her unnecessary plan to rebuild the cathedral as it was before the Blitz. But what sets the novel’s plot in motion is a sharp dig at the perpetual state of academia—the projects that can only get underway because of external support (for Schrapnell read Sackler), and the way in which use-value is prioritized above everything else when money is concerned. The main body of the novel, a reworking of Jerome K. Jerome’s perfect comedy, Three Men in a Boat, takes place with this disastrous future always lapping at its edges: a bittersweet reading experience.
The Legends of River Song by Jenny T. Colgan, Jacqueline Rayner, Steve Lyons, Guy Adams, Andrew Lane
Professor River Song is, arguably, one of the most beloved characters in the Doctor Who universe. The wit with which she comments on clothes and lipstick, while rejoicing in intellectual matters and her own research, are among the sides of her charm that any bookish girl can rejoice in. She comes into this list as a triple threat: the character first appeared in the now-classic episode, Silence in the Library; at least one of the stories in this book takes place at a museum, Madame Tussaud’s in London, and of course Song also happens to be a scholar, a Professor of Archaeology, and “the acknowledged expert on the long-extinct precursor races to have evolved in the galaxy.” River Song has been gifted with more than one book of adventures, audio-plays, etc—used to great effect within the larger Doctor Who universe to fill in the gaps of her multi-layered narrative—but this little volume of five tales is one of my favorite outings. The pocket-sized adventures it contains read like little jewels, even miniature episodes; and, even if they are written by different people, the stories are not jarring: each one of the authors has managed to convey River Song’s voice, the pizzazz and deadpan retorts that are the character’s trademark. Expect the usual adventures—heartbreaking time-loops that last an eternity and realities that warps in on themselves. The stories here also give us a glimpse into Professor Song’s life in prison, instances in which she makes use of her scholarly knowledge to save the day, or moving musings on topics such as possible parenthood with The Doctor, or the trials and tribulations of having the time lord as a boyfriend/husband. This is an enjoyable read for Doctor Who fans anywhere.
Everyone was given a path. There were shifters and sweepers, sorters and feeders. There were pickers and porters and air drivers. There were loaders and unloaders, ramp workers and water spiders, grounders and stowers and freighters.
Emmett was declared an unloader. Third shift, where they always “needed bodies.” He signed the paperwork, wrote the word “VOID” on a check.
The woman who gave his interview said there were levels to every path, opportunities for advancement, for greater benefits. She made it sound like a game you could win.
Nothing’s binding, she said. People bounce around, find their niche.
Emmett came to realize, as she spoke, that your path meant nothing, really, except the position where you started. It was only a piece of jargon.
I don’t have a permanent address at the moment, he told her. But I will soon.
That’s fine, she said. You’re not alone.
There was nothing but farmland where they built it, and it rose up now from the fields of dead corn like a vast anomaly. A dozen warehouses, two runways. A parking lot fit for a stadium. It looked, from the window of the shuttle bus at night, like a lonesome galaxy in the borderless dark. The sodium lamps in the lot gave off orange coronas, and the fainter beacons of the taxiways arranged themselves in trembling constellations.
The people on board the shuttle were too visible in the harsh light, the shapes of their skulls apparent in their faces. They tightened the Velcro straps of back braces, ate strong-smelling soups and curries from Tupperware, struggling to reach their mouths with their spoons as the bus shook and jounced. They watched porn on their phones—slack-faced, mouths ajar. They played word games, poker, Candy Crush. They spun the reels of cartoon slot machines. They rubbed at scratch-offs with pennies. They stared with glassy resignation at absolutely nothing.
The guard shack was chaotic, men with wands shouting over the high-pitched keening of the metal detectors, herding the workers. The guards were not TSA, belonging instead to a private security firm, and they looked to Emmett like Neo-Nazis who’d recently finished prison sentences—Viking braids, bleached goatees, tattoos of Iron Crosses on their forearms.
He sat with the other recruits in an office annex, listening to Scott, their “Learning Ambassador,” break down the workers’ basic duties and the company’s expectations. He was a small and energetic man, pacing to and fro, his lanyard ID badge swinging pendulum-like. Broken blood vessels lent his cheeks a rosy appearance, and he had a little boy’s haircut, his bangs clipped short in a perfectly straight line.
You might think of this place as a warehouse, he said. But here at Tempo, we like to think of it as a ware-home.
They were made to click through a series of training modules on computers from the early aughts. They watched video clips, wherein a softspoken female narrator highlighted recent company achievements over a soundtrack of jazzy Muzak. The clips underscored Tempo’s ethical commitment to creating a better world. But if Emmett learned anything from them, it was the extent to which the company’s maneuverings had touched all realms of commerce. They were in the business of both fulfillment and distribution, shipping their own parcels—the orders boxed and sorted at smaller regional hubs—along with the parcels of anyone willing to pay. They’d begun to build retail warehouses, in competition with Walmart and Target. They’d been buying regional supermarket chains, and would use their network of distribution centers and their fleet of trucks to deliver groceries directly to the doorsteps of eager customers. In the video, a Tempo delivery driver in her familiar evergreen uniform handed a paper sack of bananas and grapes and baguettes to an elderly woman, who smiled and waved as the green electric truck pulled away.
Officially, it was called the Tempo Air Cargo Distribution Center, but Scott called it simply “the Center.” It was Tempo’s largest distribution hub, and had been built here in Nowheresville, Kentucky, because of its geographic centrality. Some of the workers commuted from Bowling Green or Elizabethtown, but most came from the forgotten hamlets of the surrounding counties, places with names like Horse Branch and Sunfish, Spring Lick and Falls of Rough. There had once been coal mines and tobacco stemmeries in that area, auto plants and grist mills. But all those enterprises had fled or shuttered. Now Tempo had arrived to take their place.
What we’re doing here is regional rejuvenation, Scott said. We’re creating long-term opportunities.
The recruits were called upon to introduce themselves and offer a “fun fact” about their lives. When Emmett’s turn arrived, he said he spent his free time writing screenplays. Really, there’d been only one screenplay—an evolving, never-ending autobiographical work that he’d abandoned and revived a dozen times. But he feared that admitting this would make him sound insane.
How bout that, Scott said. We have a screenwriter in our midst. What are they about?
Just my life, he said. They’re autobiographical.
Hey, I better look out, Scott said. Maybe one day you’ll write about this. Maybe one day we’ll see it on the big screen.
Then he called on the next recruit, whose “fun fact” was that a miniature horse had kicked him in the head as a young boy, leaving him without a sense of smell.
Emmett moved to the warehouse—the ware-home, rather—and began what Scott called the “Skill Lab” portion of training. An enormous digital clock hung near the entrance, red numerals burning through the haze of warehouse dust. Beneath it, a scanner and a flatscreen monitor were mounted. You held your badge to the criss-cross of lasers, and when the system read the barcode, your image appeared on the screen. They’d taken the photos on the first day of orientation, the trainees backed against a blank wall, unsure whether to smile. They looked like mugshots. When you saw yourself appear onscreen—the past-self who’d taken this job, who’d embarked on this path—and you gazed up at the red digits, measuring time by the second, you knew, unmistakably, that you were on the clock. It was the only clock, as far as Emmett knew, in the warehouse.
On the wall, near the break room door, a large sign read: WE’VE WORKED 86 DAYS WITHOUT A LOST TIME ACCIDENT! The number was a digital counter. Emmett wondered what had happened 86 days ago. Each night, the number rose—87, 88, 89—and whatever had caused this loss of time receded further into the Center’s collective memory.
It was a huge, hangar-like structure, an intricate maze of conveyor belts, all churning and chugging at once. The racket was like a subway train perpetually arriving at the platform—the clattering rhythm, the screak of friction. Bays for trucks took up one side; on the other: loading docks for planes. The floor was studded with steel ball bearings and rollers, so the shipping containers—”cans”—could be towed easily from the docks to the belt lanes. It was all so labyrinthine and vast that Emmett felt what he might begrudgingly call awe. He’d never gazed at the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral, sunlight turned to scattered jewels by stained glass, but he imagined the feeling might be similar.
When it came to the work itself, there was not much to learn. If they remembered nothing else, said Scott, they should remember the Eight Rules of Lifting and Lowering.
Approach the object, feet shoulder width apart, bend at the knees, test the weight of the package, grip opposite corners, lift smoothly, pivot or step without twisting, use existing equipment.
Unloading the containers of air cargo onto conveyor belts was the one and only dimension of his work, the same task repeated, ad infinitum. They showed him how to latch the cans into the lanes, how to break the yellow plastic seals. They showed him the little hydraulic knob that lifted and lowered the conveyor belt. (This was the “existing equipment” mentioned in the last of the Eight Rules.) They showed him the “small-sort” belt for loose envelopes and small parcels, and the “irreg” belt for unboxed freight—tires, axles, machine parts, etc.
And that was it.
It’s a simple job, really, said Scott. Put boxes onto a conveyor belt until the can is empty, then bring over a new can. Do the same thing. Rinse and repeat.
Most nights, as he left, he saw the Blood Bus—an RV outfitted by the Red Cross to function as a mobile blood donation center. A fat man stood outside, calling out to the workers as they spilled from the shuttles. Hop on the bus, give your blood to us! he shouted. Hop on the bus, give your blood to us!
The man was always slick with sweat, his face purple and gorged from the exertion of shouting. No one ever seemed to enter the bus, and Emmett wondered why they came here. The last thing he’d want to do, leaving his shift hungry and aching, was donate blood. But there must be a few, he thought, to make the blood man’s efforts worthwhile. Those who heard the call and said, What the hell? They were already spent. Why not open their veins, give a little more?
He met his supervisor, a man named Jason Flake. Everyone called him “Flaky.” He was younger and much taller than Emmett, his arms too long and skinny for his frame. He reminded Emmett of a praying mantis. You could tell the supervisors from the union workers by the clothes they wore—Tempo golf shirts tucked into pleated khakis—and by their radios, shoulder mics clipped to their collars. In the beginning, Flaky kept a close eye on Emmett. Turn your badge to face out, bud, he’d say, and Emmett would rotate the laminated ID badge Velcroed to his upper bicep. They were supposed to unload twenty boxes per minute, and the supervisors knew the precise average of each package handler. The boxes placed on the conveyor passed through a bright, mirrored scanner, each barcode logged in the system.
You’re at 18.3 per minute, bud, Flaky would say, without looking up from his iPad. Try to pick it up a little.
Each night, as his shift wound down, Flaky came to Emmett’s lane, stood in the doorway of the can, and asked him to recite the Eight Rules of Lifting and Lowering. When Emmett had gone through them, Flaky would scribble something on a clipboard and ask Emmett to sign. He came to realize, gradually, that the Eight Rules were an insurance policy; this is why they mattered so much to management. All the other safety protocols—hazmat handling procedures, what to do during a tornado, etc.—would so rarely come to any use that their presence in the modules was almost a formality.
But the Eight Rules—they governed the only sanctioned movement of Emmett’s body on the clock. And if you understood the Eight Rules—if, in fact, you signed your name to a piece of paper attesting that you understood them—then you could never be injured in such a way that blame fell on the company. If you ruptured a disk in your back, or blew out your knee, or crushed your fingers, it would be because you’d failed, in some way, to follow the Eight Rules.
There was a village within walking distance from the shuttle pickup—an “unincorporated community” called Middle Junction with a motel. This was where he’d been living, paying a weekly rate. He’d lived in New Orleans before, had lost his job there at an Outback Steakhouse, and come home to Kentucky knowing that Tempo would hire anyone. He had not yet told his mother, Kathy, he was back. But his money had nearly run out; the motel life was not sustainable. He called her after six months of near silence, sprawled out on the bed’s pilled comforter in the tiny room that stank of cigarette smoke.
I’m home, he said.
Emmett? she said. Are you okay? Where are you?
I’m home, he said again.
In Paducah?
No, I’m in this nowhere town—out past Beaver Dam.
What in the world are you doing there?
Getting a job, he said. At the Tempo hub. I’m almost through with orientation.
What happened to New Orleans?
It’s a long story.
Where are you living?
In a motel.
Well, that won’t do, she said. That won’t do at all.
She made him promise to come home, said she’d buy him a Greyhound ticket. I’d fetch you myself, she said, but your brother and his wife are coming this weekend.
Joel was Emmett’s half-brother, but Kathy never made the distinction. He lived in New York, where he taught “cultural studies” at a small college—a subject Emmett had never been able to make heads or tails of. He’d published a book a couple years earlier and had married his wife, Alice, right after. The last time he’d seen them was at their wedding.
I don’t know, he said. Spending time with Joel had a way of making him feel sorry for the state of his life.
This is a blessing! Kathy said. Both my boys home—we’ll have a family reunion!
The next day, he waited for the bus as twilight fell. The town was little more than a crossroads: a gas station, a farm supply store, a Dollar General with Amish buggies in the lot. Beside the Greyhound stop, in a patch of grass, someone had put up three flagpoles and a gazebo, and there were white wooden crosses in rows, bearing the names of locals who’d died during the pandemic. Emmett waited alone, reading the names, hearing the rasp of wind in the dry corn, the faint melodies of country music drifting from the vacant gas station.
The bus arrived and took him west. He drew a book from his backpack, a manual on screenwriting. It was called The Eternal Story: Screenwriting Made Simple. He read for a while by the light of the overhead lamp till he grew tired. Tinny music came from the other passengers’ headphones. When he closed his eyes, his dreams for the future played like movies. New York, Los Angeles—he’d never seen them in person, only in images on screens.
Traveling by Greyhound had a way of inflicting realism on even the most ardent dreamer.
He watched the scrolling world and thought about his life, how he’d gotten to this point. The Center. One thing he was sure of: they were far from the center. One saw this, clearly, from the window of a Greyhound bus. One saw the brushstrokes of irrelevance in the landscape itself. The rhyme of towns, the patchwork fields. The illusion of movement. Most of America was like this, though Emmett sometimes forgot, spending so much of his life in fantasy. Traveling by Greyhound had a way of inflicting realism on even the most ardent dreamer. One saw, as Emmett saw now, the glowing corporate emblems, the names and symbols hoisted on stilts. One saw prisons that looked like high schools. High schools that looked like prisons. One saw the blaze of stadium lights above the tree line, heard the faint echo of the anthem, of military brass and drums. One saw the salvage yards of broken machines. The mannequin of Christ pinned to a cross. The moon-eyed cattle, standing in smoky pastures at dusk. One saw huge flags rippling above car dealerships. Combines blinking in fields at night. One could see all this, unreeling frame by frame, and understand, as Emmett understood, the immense bitterness of exile.
His mother greeted him at the Greyhound depot. Kathy was a small, sinewy woman, her hair in a silver bob that grazed her chin. The back of her Town & Country minivan was heaped with clothing.
Don’t mind that, she said. That’s all going to consignment.
She hugged Emmett and pulled back to get a good look at him.
The prodigal son returns, she said. You look tired.
I’ve been on the night shift all week.
Your eyes—you look like a raccoon.
It’s good to see you, too, Emmett said.
Kathy lived in West Paducah, between the mall and the old uranium enrichment plant. Much of the farmland there had been subdivided. What had once been tobacco and soybeans was now crowded with lookalike homes and sun-parched lawns, where not even the constant chittering of sprinklers could keep the grass from browning in summer. There was a billboard above I-24—MCCRACKEN COUNTY DREAM HOMES, with a number you could call. This is what Kathy had, a vinyl-sided prefab, much like all the others on the street. They delivered your Dream Home to you in pieces, fitted them together, and then you had a place to live. There were thousands going up like that in Kentucky, more respectable than a mobile home, if only slightly. MAKE YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE, said the billboard, and that’s what everyone seemed to think they were doing. Their dreams were readymade and easy to assemble. They cost very little and were worth almost nothing when you were done with them.
She let him sleep in the next day. He woke at noon and sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee left over from breakfast he’d warmed in the microwave. Kathy fixed a cup for herself and sat with him. They looked out the sliding glass doors at the backyard. Though it was only August, the walnut trees over the patio had begun to drop their fruit, green husks the size of tennis balls thudding against the cement, some already black and rotting, some floating like buoys in her tiny koi pond. He was glad to see his mother, to be here in the Dream Home, even if it signified another defeat in his life.
So, Tempo, she said. They pay good?
Not really.
Benefits?
Emmett nodded.
Do you miss New Orleans?
The answer was complicated. Though he’d liked New Orleans, he hadn’t really had the money to live in the city itself. He’d lived in Metairie, near I-10, where he’d worked at the Outback Steakhouse. His dream of the French Quarter, of a brightly painted Creole cottage, a banana tree in the backyard, had been just that—a dream. Faraway and unattainable.
It wasn’t a city where I could reach my full potential, he said.
You can reach your full potential working at Tempo?
That’s just to pay rent. What I really want to do is screenwriting.
Like writing movies?
Or a TV show. Whatever.
What happened to becoming a songwriter? Kathy said. That was the last thing you decided you’d be. Before that, it was professional chef. Before that, it was stand-up comedian.
He hated to be reminded of his failed creative pursuits, his veering from one passion to another, but he could always rely on Kathy to bring it up.
Those were naïve goals, Emmett said. I can see that now. But with screenwriting, there are steps. You just follow the steps.
You’re like a kid sometimes, she said. One day, he wants to be an astronaut. The next, a baseball star. The next day, a cowboy.
A screenwriter is hardly the same thing as a cowboy.
Well, I wish you’d go back and finish school.
You can’t major in screenwriting.
You could start with basics at the community college. You could live here.
I plan to live near the Center.
The Center?
Tempo. That’s what they call it.
She made a fretful sound, blew on her coffee, and took a sip. A walnut dropped on the metal roof of the garden shed outside, sounding like a gunshot. They both startled and turned their heads to look.
So what’s Joel coming home for?
He’s doing a lectureship at Murray State, she said. Just for the fall semester, as I understand it.
Are they leaving New York?
It’s up in the air, Kathy said. But Lord, I hope so. I pray every day they don’t get shot or stabbed or blown up.
He’ll never come back to the South.
I have so much to do before they get here, she said, ignoring him. I have to clean the house. I have to fix your brother’s cake.
What cake? Why does he get a cake?
It’s a homecoming cake, she said, as if it should be obvious.
Where’s my homecoming cake?
Well, how was I to know you were coming home? You vanish and reappear. You never call.
Even if you’d known, there would be no cake.
Why shouldn’t I celebrate Joel’s successes? He’s very accomplished. I wish you’d talk to him more. You could ask him for advice, about writing and whatnot.
I don’t need his advice.
Well, can I give you a piece of advice then? she said.
He sighed theatrically. I’m listening.
Write down your goals. Take a sheet of paper, write “My Goals” at the top, then put everything down. That way, you have it as a reference point. You can’t betray yourself. You can’t let yourself off the hook.
Emmett wanted to ask what her goals had been at twenty-eight, if she’d aspired to anything more than raising her children in this town where nothing much happened and no one expected it to. Instead, he said all right, he would write down his goals, and this seemed to satisfy her.
Emmett’s car had broken down in New Orleans. This had precipitated, in part, his decision to leave. His grandmother, Ruth, was too old to drive. She was too old to do anything except watch Fox News. She had a 1997 Mercury Mystique with a lineup of Beanie Babies in the back windshield, and she told Emmett she would sell it to him for a dollar.
Kathy dropped him off, and he found her in the backyard with Lijah, the exterminator. There had been a long-standing issue with groundhogs, her little house abutting a wooded creek where they bred. They gnawed through the lattice surrounding her deck and tunneled beneath the foundation. Lijah was a church friend. She’d been calling him for years to set traps in the woods, snaring rabbits and cats as often as groundhogs. It came to be their habit, over time, that after he’d discharged his official duties, she’d invite him to sit a spell and drink coffee.
She saw Emmett coming and went to greet him. Her hair was dyed coal black, her eyes as small and dark as currants. An intricate crazing of broken blood vessels had turned her nose and cheeks purple.
Lijah’s spraying dope, she said. Lijah, you remember Emmett, my grandson?
Lijah waved. He stood beside her garden shed, holding a sprayer wand attached to a backpack tank, his gray hair tied in a ponytail. His T-shirt said CRITTER KILLERS—the name of his company—though he seemed to be the only killer of critters on the payroll.
The traps were empty, so I’m fixing to spray, he said.
Spray for what? Emmett said.
Lijah shrugged. Anything.
It’s a constant battle, Ruth said. Varmints, termites, snakes. They all try to get inside. Then you’ve got prowlers. Dottie Driscoll down the street caught a prowler in her backyard.
Fraid I can’t spray for that that, ma’am, said Lijah.
What prowler? Emmett said. Who was it?
How should I know? Dottie’s grandson ran them off. He’s a sheriff’s deputy. Her grandchildren visit her every day.
I doubt that.
Emmett is Joel’s brother, Ruth said. I’s just telling Lijah I’ve got me a famous author for a grandson.
I’s just telling Lijah I’ve got me a famous author for a grandson.
I always wanted to write a book, Lijah said, squirting poison along the base of the shed. Problem is, I never liked writing.
That would be a hurdle, Emmett said
When you’re done, I’ll warm us some coffee, Ruth said.
I’ll be covered in dope spray, ma’am. You don’t want me tracking all that in.
Never mind that, Ruth said. I’ll show you my copy of the book.
The smells of her house—her White Diamonds perfume, her geriatric ointments, the jar of congealed bacon grease by the stove—brought Emmett back to the boredom of summer mornings when Ruth would keep them, his mother at work, Joel entertaining himself with the World Book Encyclopedia. The days had seemed so long, his life so long ahead of him.
Down the hallway, in the bedroom, Emmett and Lijah stood before her bookcase. There were three copies of his brother’s book, wrapped in plastic, wedged between Erma Bombeck and Nora Ephron. It was called Going South: The Descent of Rural America. She took one down with great ceremony and placed it like a fragile artifact in Lijah’s open hands.
Going South, he said. Well, I’ll be.
We always knew, didn’t we? Ruth said, squeezing Emmett’s arm. Our Joel was special. He used to recite the presidents. Five years old.
A memory: Joel with his bowl cut and secretive smile, standing on a chair, surrounded by adoring faces and the remnants of Thanksgiving supper. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison. . . .
He was always reading, Ruth said. And Emmett was always watching movies.
I don’t suppose you became a movie star? Lijah said.
Emmett’s still finding his way, she said. Aren’t you?
Emmett managed to smile.
She returned the book to its place and asked Lijah how a cup of coffee sounded.
I’d never turn it away, he said.
Tell you what, I’ll make a fresh pot.
They’d started to leave when something caught Lijah’s eye. He went to the old laundry chute in the corner and crushed a spider on the wall with his meaty fist.
We’ve got a problem here, he said. He opened the chute door and peered inside.
I never use that thing, Ruth said. It’s been blocked for years. You put something in and you never see it again.
It’s a breeding ground, Lijah said. They love the dark. I’ll spray before I leave.
When Lijah had gone, she led Emmet down to the carport and showed him the Mercury Mystique. The Beanie Babies were still arrayed in the back windshield, their colors sun-faded. Do I get to keep the Beanie Babies? Emmett said.
Oh sure, Ruth said. They were supposed to make me a lot of money but they ain’t worth a cent now.
They sat in the living room after, eating Danish cookies from a tin, dipping them in coffee. Fox News was playing. It was never turned off, only muted. They were interviewing the recipient of a face transplant. The man had been disfigured by an accident, and now he wore the face of a dead man like a mask. It was convincing, though his mouth did not work quite right, and you could see where the sutures had been along his forehead.
Ruth was half-deaf. She leaned forward, straining to hear. They took off his face, she said, and gave him another man’s face?
A dead man, Emmett said.
She bit one of the stale cookies in half and shook her head at the marvel of it. They do everything now, don’t they? she said.
She relayed the latest gossip. He learned who of his cousins was pregnant, who was getting married, who was headed for divorce. She sometimes mixed up the names, but Emmett knew, more or less, who she meant. Once the family gossip had been covered, she moved on to the deaths. Grandma Ruth kept a relentless mental catalogue of all the strange and grisly deaths in McCracken County.
A man in Symsonia got himself killed on a four-wheeler, she said. Two boys drowned at Kentucky Lake last month. Two foreigners shot each other at a bar. Let’s see, what else. Oh! There was the man who caught himself on fire.
He what? Emmett said. When Grandma Ruth said the word “fire,” it was like the word “far,” and it took him a moment to catch the meaning.
Fire, she said. He pulled up at the filling station down the street, covered hisself in gasoline, and lit a match. They showed the footage on the TV.
Jesus. Why’d he do it?
He was protesting.
Protesting what?
She bit another Danish cookie and shrugged. Just life, I guess, she said.
She excused herself to the restroom, and Emmett went down the hall and stood before the shelf that held Joel’s books. He looked at the cover: a caved-in church in a field, the stacks of a coal-fired power plant in the hazy distance. He’d read it a while back, though perhaps it was more accurate to say he’d skimmed. The essays were about Kentucky and the mechanics of what Joel called “rural despair.” The running theme throughout was the privatization of mental health. He used terms like “neoliberal” and “post-Fordist,” the meanings of which Emmett understood only foggily, and argued that depression was not simply a chemical imbalance, but a normal human response to the vulgarity of late capitalism.
The book alternated between abstract theory and a more personal style. One of the essays explored Joel’s relationship with their mother and her spiral into QAnon conspiracy theories. Emmett had always felt it was unfair; it exaggerated her views and made her seem like something, or someone, that she wasn’t. Now Joel had some money and a job. He had his smug-looking photo on the jacket of a book.
In a flush of sudden anger, he took all three copies of Going South from the shelf, opened the laundry chute, and let them tumble from his arms into darkness.
The first place he drove, in his new Mystique, was the Kmart parking lot in Lone Oak. The Kmart was no longer in business, though you could still see the pale impression of the letter K on the stucco where the sign had been. Now it was a place where people bought drugs. The only dealer Emmett knew was a grade school acquaintance called Fuzzy. Hed hit puberty at nine years old and grown a thick pelt of reddish fur on his back and arms. The nickname had followed him ever since.
Fuzzy pulled up in a maroon Buick LeSabre and Emmett got inside.
How you been, Fuzzy? Emmett said.
You know me, bro, he said. Stuntin to keep my grind strong.
On one level, Emmett had no idea what this meant; on another level, he sort of did.
Fuzzy complained about the recent legalization of pot in the state of Illinois. People don’t come to me no more, he said. They go across the river.
He wore a flat-bill cap and a T-shirt that said AFFLICTION with a skull on the front. There were snakes writhing out from the mouth and the eyes of the skull. He was as hairy as he’d ever been.
You wanna hear my latest verse? Fuzzy said.
Sure, Emmett said.
Fuzzy put on a beat, the subwoofer in his trunk so forceful that the sound vibrated deep in Emmett’s bowels. The verse was about no one understanding him, how one day he would prove everyone wrong and release a multiplatinum album. This was all part of the ritual. If you wanted weed from Fuzzy, you had to listen to him rap. Then, when it was over, he would say you were his favorite person.
You’re my favorite person, man, he said. I mean that.
Thanks, Fuzzy.
Fuzzy gave him a quarter ounce of brick-pack weed and said, Hey, love you, homie. Keep that chin up.
Emmett found himself saying, I love you, too, and when the Buick pulled away, he stood absolutely still for a few minutes in the too-bright sun, a warm wind blowing napkins and fast-food trash across the lot.
At home, he found Kathy in a frenzy of preparation—vacuuming, mopping the linoleum, standing on a stepladder to dust the fan blades. Emmett cleaned the toilet and the tub, wearing yellow dish gloves, pausing now and then to drink from a can of beer. It seemed like overkill, but Joel had always been their mother’s favorite—her firstborn, her college graduate. It would not be obvious to anyone from the outside, for they argued fiercely about everything. But this fierceness stood as proof of their bond to Emmett. It was like they desperately wanted to save each other. She wanted to save him from worldly pursuits. He wanted to save her from right-wing politics. And when neither made progress on these fronts, they took it as evidence of insufficient commitment to the war effort, and entrenched themselves further, holding fast to the vain hope of victory.
They were supposed to arrive by suppertime. Kathy made fried chicken, black-eyed peas with ham hock, cornbread in a cast-iron skillet—all of Joel’s favorites. Frying the chicken had been onerous and left the counter dusted with flour, the stovetop spattered with buttermilk and oil. She’d made a hummingbird cake, normally reserved for Joel’s birthday. It was a dense cake with banana and pineapple and layers of cream cheese frosting. Emmett had never had a taste for it. She set the table and displayed it on a cake stand of cut crystal, the engraved patterns in the glass catching sparkles of sunlight.
Is this the only dessert? he said.
Well, yes. It’s Joel’s favorite.
What’s my favorite cake?
She pretended not to have heard this and hurried over to stir a decanter of sweet tea, the wooden spoon clinking against the glass. I’ve got butterflies, she said. My heart’s going a mile a minute.
They’re not foreign dignitaries. It’s your son and his wife.
You’re not helping, she said.
In the guest room, he crumbled the weed on a sheet of notebook paper and put some into a glass bowl. He opened the window, took a hit, and coughed softly. Lawnmowers were buzzing in the distance, the scent of cut grass wafting on the breeze.
Kathy had two lifelong obsessions: Elvis and Hawaii, both of which were reflected in the guest room’s décor. She’d been to Hawaii once with a church group, years ago, and had longed to return ever since. There were carved statuettes of the goddess Pele, velvet paintings of Diamond Head. Glossy shards of volcanic glass in souvenir ashtrays. A poster of the 1961 film Blue Hawaii hung over the bed, Elvis in tiny pink shorts and a pink lei, surrounded by fawning women.
Feeling anxious, wishing to distract himself, he swept the powdery kief from the notebook paper and wrote “My Goals” at the top. He thought for a minute, then jotted down the first few that came to mind. Find apartment, Make money, Pay off debts, Meet someone new. He wrote down, Buy a car, just so he’d have something to mark off. Then he thought for a moment and wrote, Do something creative, something meaningful that will leave a lasting legacy and allow you to face mortality without fear.
Emmett took his old Bible from the bookshelf. It was the copy he’d been given as he entered Youth Group at age twelve. On the cover, a skateboarding kid, mid-kickflip, made the universal gesture of “rock on.” It was called The Bible: For Teens!
He stretched out on the brass bed with The Bible: For Teens!, his bare feet warmed by a square of sunlight, and thumbed through the onionskin pages till he found the parable of the prodigal son. He’d forgotten the prodigal son had asked for his inheritance up front, to spend on prostitutes and wild parties, and had come home penniless. It relieved Emmett to read this, for he had asked for nothing up front. He was not like the prodigal son at all.
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