Is Iceland the Most Literary Country in the World?

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Sjón, born Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson, has spent the past two decades writing a trilogy of books about a man who was born at the exact same time as him. Originally, he was influenced by what it meant to create human life, but over the course of 20 years, he expanded his scope beyond what he ever imagined.

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CoDex 1962 is a trilogy of books originally published in Icelandic in 1994, 2001, and 2016 under the titles Thine Eyes Did See My Substance, Iceland’s Thousand Years, and I’m a Sleeping Door. The three volumes weave multiple genres through a decades-long story of a family. While that general synopsis may sound like a typical generational family saga, Sjón moves far beyond that. The narrator, Josef Löwe, is the one who was born exactly when Sjón was, yet this is far from a work of autofiction. The author merely uses his experience in time to set the stage for what another’s life could have been in a different world. He explores Josef’s life (before and after) through three books, each with its own genre entirely. The first book is a love story while the second is a crime story. The third shifts to sci-fi thriller all while exploring the creation of life.

The Icelandic author has won numerous award for his fiction, including the 2003 Nordic Council’s Literature Prize for The Blue Fox. He’s been nominated for an Academy Award for his songwriting. He played an instrumental role in Björk’s early band The Sugarcubes. In addition to his long-gestating trilogy finally coming to completion, he was selected to write a book for the Library of the Future, which will publish novels 100 years from now.

I spoke with Sjón about the history of politics and literature of Iceland, how his trilogy shifted course over the last two decades, and his interests in eccentric world-views.

Adam Vitcavage: What is the background of the Icelandic literary history?

Sjón: Literature is the only constant cultural activity since Iceland’s settlement in the 9th century. They started writing prose narratives in the Icelandic language in the 12th or 13th century. Those were the Icelandic sagas along with historical narratives. It was the recording of the Germanic heritage of epic poetry; both mythical and legendary. On top of that, they started translating European literature such as the Arthurian romances.

This is what they were doing in the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries. This is the literary history we follow. It has always given us the license at the table of nations in terms of culture. We are an old literary culture.

Let’s say between the 16th and 20th century, Iceland was extremely poor. You could have called it a Third World country. We have very little to show for our existence here during those centuries. There are no cathedrals or any kind of buildings of stone until the 19th century really. There are no paintings or anything. The only thing that we kept working on was writing. We were always a written culture.

There was a great revival of Icelandic literature in the middle of the 19th century with the romantic movement. It was a big national ideal that was brought to Iceland from Germany via Denmark. That is when the renaissance of Icelandic literature.

During the 20th century we, of course, have many great writers. The big man of Icelandic literature was Halldór Laxness, who received the Nobel Prize in 1955.

AV: What sort of stories were being written during these centuries?

S: The sagas are really big prose narratives usually revolving around a real character from the settlement. For instance, there is one of a poet and warrior that tells his story, but also tells about the politics of the time between the Icelandic settlement and Norway. These stories are remarkable because they are told in a Hemingway-esque style. There is not an extra word put in. It’s very sparse. Authors weaved poetry into the text. They included supernatural aspects that were considered part of the world. You just had to battle a group of the walking dead and you’d continue with the story.

They are close to what later became the novel. At the time they moved away from folklore and mythological. They are stories about people and their struggles in the world.

AV: Was there any country in particular that had a heavy hand in influencing Icelandic literature?

S: The mythological base and the world-views that are present in the sagas are the Germanic myths. You have Thor and Loki there. The influence from Celtic mysteries and legends can be found in certain sagas. The people populating the sagas, the character gallery, are from Norway, Denmark, Ireland. They go from Iceland all the way to Jerusalem and North Africa. There is a large reach in those sagas.

They were written by Christian people. By the learned man and possibly women. It was around the 12th century and they were highly versed in literature and allegory. It was an incredibly tight web they weaved in those books. They were also translating very early on and would bring books from Europe to Iceland. For instance, the story of Tristan and Isolde was translated. Translation is nothing new. It has fueled literature always.

Literature is the only constant cultural activity since Iceland’s settlement in the 9th century. We are an old literary culture.

AV: The novels in this trilogy touch heavily on politics. How much has politics played a role in Iceland’s history?

S: For a few centuries after the settlement, Iceland was a rare case because there was no king. We were under the Norwegian crown and the Danish crown. For centuries, we were a Danish colony. We only became a fully independent colony in 1944 just at the end of the second world war.

The movement toward independence began in the mid-19th century. The romantic poets played a role in making people love their country and see the beauty in the harsh landscapes that were monstrous and hostile then. We became sovereign 100 years ago on December 1, 1918.

Because we went through this process of finding independence and then keeping it, there is always an underlying element of nationalism in politics there. It is constantly being juggled and people do not agree how to handle that. It was something we always explore.

AV: This set of books opens in World War II, around the time independence came to your country. The first book is also a love story. Were you thinking about the romanticism of that when you started writing this book two decades ago?

S: It started as one book. It was an idea to write Golem’s story in Iceland. A story that would bring the Golem of Prague to Iceland. I was interested in working with the artificial human. I started thinking about that when I had my first child, a daughter, in 1992. All of a sudden I wasn’t just a creator of words. I was the father to a human being. That’s when I started thinking about creation and what a human being is made of.

Because of my fascination with the Golem legend from Prague and Jewish fantasy from Europe, that was the form the book came. It was only supposed to be one book in the here and now. As I was working on the material, I got the idea to write a short chapter at the beginning to show where the character — this Golem operator — came from.

That started off the whole thing. All of a sudden, I had plotted out the first volume and I realized it would be the story of the impossible creation of this being.

I set it in the second world war because when I thought about where I came from, my beginning is in the war as my parents were born. My parents were born in 1936 and 1939. My existence in this world go back to then. I was born 18 years after World War II and I realized I was born into the aftermath of that horror. It was more about how the trauma of that war colored everything.

I realized I would need more volumes to tell the story. The first book is about the mother. The second is about the father. The third book is about the son. In a way, it’s a classic trinity tale. I also knew it was a race against time and the narrator would not live to tell his tale. That was clear to me from the beginning.

AV: Is mortality something you think a lot about when writing?

S: I never thought very much about the fact that the world will be here when I leave. I am more interested in books as things that only become alive when someone is reading them. That is more important to me that the way that books are the remains of me. A lot of the great works of literature are anonymous. That is something Icelanders are greatly aware of because the sagas are anonymous. We grow up with the idea that the work will become separated from the author.

I am more interested in the idea that while we are here, we need to interact with this world. Literature offers brief moments of clarity within the chaos. We need to help each other with that while we are here.

The narrator of the book is preoccupied with leaving a mark. However, he is aware that the mark he leaves may not be attributed to him. He’ll be satisfied with leaving it. He moved one pebble on the beach, you know?

I am more interested in books as things that only become alive when someone is reading them.

AV: These three volumes were written decades apart. You thought of it originally in the early 1990s. How has the project shifted throughout these years from what you thought it would be to what it became now?

S: When I finished the first volume, I think I believed it would be a more linear narrative. I thought it would be quieter and have more solidity. The first volume takes places over a few days and has a clear narrative. When I started working on the second volume and I needed to make a bridge, I realized it would become a work that disintegrates as we get closer and closer to the contemporary situation of the narrator. The second volume takes place over 18 years and the last takes place over 50 years. The discovery was the main change. That I would have to deal with change in some way.

AV: Earlier you mentioned the birth of your daughter was a big inspiration to kickstarting this idea. Were there any other events from the past two decades since starting this project that influences the work?

S: One thing that happened, which wasn’t on a personal level but in our country as a whole, was in 1996 an Icelandic doctor and specialist in genetic scientist returned from his studies in the U.S. started a genetic research company called deCODE. There was quite the political unrest due to it. He belonged to a generation and group of people who had recently come into power. His company was given license to operate on a level that you would never see in another country.

For example, the medical records in Iceland were opened up completely to this company and you as a citizen had to opt out for it. They didn’t need consent. You needed to opt out.

There was an idea that the research the company did would be the key to cure all illness in mankind. This would be the gift Iceland gave to the human species. They thought what they could do with everyone’s medical records could save the world. This was the dream of our small country that was trying to find our place in the world.

I knew that when this was happening, that it would play an important role in the second volume. Of course, so many things have happened since 1992 when I started working on this book. With the effects of climate change, that brought the element of doom to the third volume. So it’s not just about the death of the individual, it’s about the death of the whole species in the end.

AV: Now that this trilogy is finally complete, what topics do you want to explore moving forward?

S: I am interested in the eccentrics. I am very attracted to world-views. I like to explore how man interacts with the world and how they try to find different meanings through thought. Whether that be philosophical, political, artistic, or religious. I’m very drawn to that field of human existence. Those elements are most clear and visible when those who hold particular views come into conflict in society.

At the moment I am exploring a story which grew from my interested in how the Neo-Nazi thought was possible after the Second World War. It’s something I worked with in the second volume of CoDex 1962, but I want to explore it with more seriousness than I did there.

The Quiet Drama of Chaya Bhuvaneswar

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Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s debut collection White Dancing Elephants (winner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize) is not a book you can succinctly describe. Her stories take on rich topics from mythology to assault to history to tenuous relationships. When you turn the page there is never one element tying these pieces together but a wealth showcasing a distinctness in characters, motivations, and language. What struck me most about Bhuvaneswar’s stories was an element of her own fearlessness as author to “go there.” She doesn’t hold back emotional truths, never relies on sensationalized moments for the reader to be entertained, instead we envision, and inhabit, the losses (and the joys) felt by those experiencing them. How will a rape affect a young student over the years? Will cancer be the death of a friendship? How does the loss of a child reveal the tears within a marriage? Where do we gain our strength on an individual level as people, as women? Perhaps the stories in White Dancing Elephants do not always provide readers a clear answer, yet they’re filled with probing questions (and experiences) encouraging us to read on.

Bhuvaneswar is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee whose work has been published widely on Medium, in Tin House and Michigan Quarterly Review to name a few. She and I had a chance to chat about her approaches, and feelings, on writing novels versus stories, creating “quiet” work that maintains resonance, and the necessity (and her hope) for kindness in life and in our stories.

Jennifer Baker: Can you speak a bit about White Dancing Elephants and recognizing which stories fit within a more compact space?

Chaya Bhuvaneswar: I think the space of a short story is permissive in a way that a project as long as a novel is not. I feel freer to completely experiment and not have any idea where I’m going

JB: I see.

CB: I feel that in general about the novel, but that permissiveness in my case has been an obstacle to finishing/structuring a novel. Whereas with a short story I feel more aware of something else taking over. I think with the first few drafts of a novel I feel that freedom, but then the process of structuring because it’s longer turns the whole endeavor into something so different than story writing whereas my revision process with stories doesn’t involve the same kind of uprooting

JB: So with the novel you don’t feel as free to experiment or due to the shorter nature of the short story there’s an element of “going with the flow” more easily?

CB: When I write a story I feel like it essentially works, and then I just refine, try and try to make things cleaner and clearer. And above all straighten out chronology so it’s clear what happens on the level of a story being “something happens as a result of which something changes.” Or else I feel like a story doesn’t really work, and I can’t yet see why, so i just put it aside. With a novel — because of how deeply I inhabit and dig into that world for hundreds of pages and how invested I feel in characters’ trajectories more or less paralleling my own — there are continuous years. I am more reluctant to put a novel aside once I’ve gotten 200 pages together. So, I think I deliberate more with a novel before killing anyone off, in other words.

JB: There can be a big go-round in either case, but I don’t know if it’s right to say a short story feels “safer” due to space limitations (or perceived limitations). At least it can feel a bit more finite in the road you’re headed to from beginning to end. Or maybe I’m making that up with my editorial mindset.

CB: I guess on a basic level I write so many more stories than novels, it feels like I would be able to move on from writing a story that completely doesn’t work. Versus a novel that completely doesn’t work pretty much devastates me.

JB: Is that because of the time investment or the larger picture of it in terms of “finishing”?

CB: A novel that doesn’t work can feel like a death. Really. Like I failed a person, my characters. I failed her/them. Not myself. If that makes sense. It could be kind of a medical way to think about writing novels. I don’t know, but I do feel that… that I am bound to the characters. They’re so important to me.

A novel that doesn’t work can feel like a death.

JB: But that doesn’t gestate the same way for stories?

CB: Somehow it feels like a story is a moment passing in time, a snapshot, an ephemeral thing, and if I don’t “catch” the person in that story, I could catch them in the next one. Whereas with the novel there are multiple moments, accrued moments, so many opportunities, and I feel like when it isn’t as clear how to capture the whole person within those, it could be that there is some flaw in the story being told, some flaw in larger construction, or some flaw I am just not able to perceive yet.

I love the challenges of both forms, in other words, but somehow novels and stories work on our emotions a little differently, I think, or maybe I just read too many essays by Kundera and Havel and other Europeans about the novel and subjectivity growing up.

JB: I think, sometimes, folks seek to find a “theme” in story collections, sort of like in an anthology. “What connects all these pieces?” I don’t want to pigeonhole. But I think for White Dancing Elephants it’s the necessity of who gets to tell their own stories as narrators/protagonists.

CB: To me the theme that resounded through all of them was one of experiencing violence and then somehow enduring it and making your way in the world “after.” I loved that the Kirkus reviewer pinpointed “aftermath” as a common theme of the stories. Living in the aftermath of some decision or event.

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JB: That is true. Stories like “Orange Popsicles” or “Talinda” (which stood out to me in particular), contain the essence of not knowing what’s next for anyone really, but in particular for these characters because so much was left open from what’s happened to them and/or choices they made.

CB: I find that a resonant quality of stories that I love. I’m thinking in particular of Alice Munro’s “Runaway.” Or Lauren Groff’s Atlantic story, “L. Debard and Aliette.” We don’t know what happens to that “kindly” woman neighbor hoodwinked by her beliefs about vulnerability, female loyalty, freedom. We don’t know what happens to Aliette per se. Will she be energized when she wakes up after those hours in bed with the hot water bottle? Will she be dreaming of him? Will she write to him about his poetry, and say that she was there? We don’t know, but in a living way. In the sense when we see any credible, living, fully-fleshed human character in a story, we don’t know what the person is going to do next. Just like in real life: We don’t know what any given individual will do next.

JB: While not wanting to discuss the ending of a story like “Talinda” there’s a certain level of resonance I appreciated that spoke to the dynamics of friendship. I think to some it may appear as a story of “betrayal,” but to me it really speaks to the importance and bond these two women had. And it strikes me from beginning to end how much they relied on one another. I’d love to know how you envisioned this balance of representing women of color in a way that is a tug-of-war. It’s not wholly good or bad, it’s complicated as friendships are.

CB: I think the first model for me of complicated female friendships was actually from watching my mother with her five sisters.

JB: Oh really?

CB: Incredible rivalries, alliances, “fights,” disagreements, some quite brutal. Always a lot of tears and laughter and high expressed emotion and shouting, super expressive. In comparison, not having sisters, but definitely having incredible female friendships and frenemy-ships starting from a young age, particularly with other girls of color, there was so much I felt and so much they felt that we rarely expressed. We were so contained by comparison. Even the Americans I saw with each other were mostly so contained. And not just when they knew I was watching. I say “Americans” by the way as such a sad reflex. I mean “white Americans.” Long years of inculcation (sigh).

So when I started writing about my own female friendships, dating back to a Chinese-American girl who bullied me and a Korean-American classmate so terribly, so mercilessly, that I wrote several stories about it. Then examining my friendship with that Korean-American friend, I started uncovering the emotions we didn’t express directly and becoming quite fascinated with those, with what you point to as the kind of substrate of meaning and closeness (and longing) that the two female characters have in “Talinda.”

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JB: There’s definitely something, I don’t know if unresolved is the best word or even unrequited, as it is unspoken. And that impacted me as a reader quite specifically of these two faces staring across the table at one another as one receives horrible news: the stoicness of one and the other reflecting that pain at her during dinner. Quite powerful.

CB: I’m also interested in “constructed” families. Familial bonds that can be substitutes. It counts, I guess, that both female characters don’t have fathers present in their lives.

JB: Someone has to be the strong one right?

CB: One thing I loved about writing this collection was being free to conceive of strength in all kinds of ways too!

JB: Beyond the husband in that story, of course, men seemed a bit inconsequential.

CB: I am grateful that some of the reviews [of White Dancing Elephants] were written by men, and they were so encouraging and felt the stories resonated with them. I think when we write from a fierce self-focused subjectivity, “not caring” what others think, it paradoxically can resonate so much with people completely different from us. In my case, with cis-het men.

At several readings, when I’ve done store walk-arounds right before the event, just checking to see if anyone browsing or drinking a coffee alone would like to come and be part of the event, it’s nearly always been white male readers who come along and stay and say amazing things afterward. They initially come saying something like “Oh yeah, I wanted to pick up something for my daughter/ wife/ etc.” And then end up coming to the signing line and talking about how they were into the stories. The drama.

I think when we write from a fierce self-focused subjectivity, “not caring” what others think, it paradoxically can resonate so much with people completely different from us.

JB: Meaning the drama of the stories?

CB: Yes, the “dramas” represented by the stories!

JB: I don’t think so much of them in the realm of “dramatics” so much as exploration with life thrown in. Not to say that life isn’t dramatic.

CB: I’m glad you don’t necessarily think of “drama” when you read the stories. Ideally, the drama is quiet, the pain visceral.

JB: That is exactly my thinking in terms of “quiet.” Obviously some stories are quite specific due to the level of brutality characters deal with but it doesn’t read as orchestrated at all. And it seems like with Jamel [Brinkley] for Black men, you aimed to look after the Brown women in your stories, yet also not shy away from a truth experienced by women of color.

CB: Yes! I definitely feel there’s an inherent beauty simply in truth telling. But also it would never occur to me to victimize or objectify my characters of color the way that some stories have done. That really shock me. Not as much in fiction, but in film. I’m still wrestling, for example, with The Bandit Queen. It’s a movie about a rape survivor turned bandit herself turned politician and writer. But there is such a strong historic legacy of sensationalizing rape in Indian cinema (really in world cinema) that I had very conflicted feelings about it. I hoped in “Orange Popsicles” by focusing so much on the woman’s experience, on my character’s experience, to avoid that. Avoid making it anything. Just tell it. Just show it as is. Just let the showing tell.

JB: Well, it’s a different case than with the film Foxy Brown where her rape is an instrument of white power and fighting establishment. There’s a brutality in the not “dealing” with the rape but in the performance or butchering of the rapist. It’s wrong and people should be punished, but I keep coming back to Lacy M. Johnson’s The Reckonings of: How do healing and justice truly occur? And how do we talk about this, especially through art?

CB: I’m full of joy and hope that these conversations are even happening. That we are not only creating spaces for people to come forward with their stories and not be shamed or pressured into telling them any specific way. But also we are creating space where we can examine “how we talk about” healing and justice without the fear that if we linger too long in any kind of examination, people will be forced back into silence again. The silence is never coming back. We’re never going back to that. Period.

We are creating space where we can examine “how we talk about” healing and justice without the fear that if we linger too long in any kind of examination, people will be forced back into silence again.

JB: Let’s hope so. Via your interview in Hobart I appreciate that they asked about ableism. You were happy to be able to discuss this as well in relation to your stories. Particularly in relation to the abled lens but also via the disabled lens as well.

CB: It’s such an important dimension.

JB: Being an able-bodied person myself I did come away from pieces seeing the brutality about to be thrust upon someone and thinking “Hmmm, are we seeing our composites here in the reaction to the person in this story?”

CB: It’s important to me to delve into the multidimensionality of “perpetrators” of violence. And I think the genuine fear we all have as human beings, of illness, of the mortality, factors into how cruel people can be to those they perceive as “disabled” rather than differently-abled.

That said, in a larger sense, I believe that the potential for cruelty exists in such a diverse array of human beings. It’s a miracle to me that people can for much of the time actually be very kind to me. And even more of a miracle at how much kindness I personally have experienced from others, from people I know as well as strangers. I feel like kindness should be more automatic than it is. Perhaps it’s something I take for granted.

A Reading List on Time Travel

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Time travel is the ultimate conundrum! Would you go back in time to kill Hitler? But …what if you prevent yourself from being born? What if you die of smallpox while you’re there?

Time travel with its infinite possibilities has captured the minds of writers and readers for generations. The ability to change the past, or the future, is intoxicatingly alluring to us humans who like to feel as though we can control the world around us and shape history.

Here are 10 books that will take your back (or forward) in time:

An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim

In this novel, time travel is possible in 1981. A shadowy corporation sends healthy people into the future to work in exchange for helping their sick loved ones. Polly enters this horrible contract in order to help her sick partner Frank. The novel follows Polly’s experiences in the horrifying future she is sent into, and the confusion of what exactly she has agreed to.

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North

You know when people ask you, “if you could only take one book with you on a deserted island, what book would you take?” If you substituted in “deserted island” with “stuck in the past because your time machine broke,” North’s book is exactly what you want. How to Invent Everything is a charming Kick-started funded manual for everything a stranded time traveler would need to know from how to get safe drinking water to making a printing press.

What To Do When Your Time Machine is Broken

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

Harry August finds himself back at his own birth after he dies. Not knowing what is happening, Harry eventually learns that he is part of an organization of people who are continually reborn. Using his lives to acquire all sorts of different knowledge, Harry ends up at Cambridge and makes the acquaintance of a student Vincent Rankis. Their relationship morphs from friends to nemeses and their story will absolutely break your heart.

Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates

Oates’ new book is her first dystopian novel. In a not so distant future, a high school valedictorian is exiled by her 1984-like government because of a “treasonous” graduation speech full of questions. Her exile? Back in time to 1959 in Wisconsin. Follow Adrienne’s mind twisting tale as she tries to figure out exactly what has happened to her.

The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer

Depressed and lonely Greta is at a hard time in her life and elects to undergo electroshock therapy in 1985. Greta expects her depression to go away, not the ability to travel back to 1918. In this alternate lifetime, Greta’s loved ones are there, but in different circumstances. The novel shows how Greta tries to save her loved ones, and discovers herself in the process.

Image result for kindred book

Kindred by Octavia Butler

Kindred is one of the great classics and Butler is a literary genius. In this novel, Dana, an African-American writer, travels back in time from LA in 1976 to a Maryland plantation before the civil war. Butler expertly spins a tale of the enduring impacts of slavery, both in the present and far future.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

This one is a classic throwback! One of the first time travel books that most of us have ever read, Meg’s journey to find her father is a heartwarming tale. Follow Meg, her brother, and her friend as they travel throughout different dimensions and try to avoid the evil around them. And now you can pair it with the new movie adaptation starring Oprah!

I Saw Myself in Meg Murry Even Before She Looked Like Me

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Outlander is a thrilling TV show with lots of hot actors, and the books are just as good! Claire, a nurse in WWII, is transported to 1743 when she steps through some ancient stones while on a second honeymoon with her husband. Set in the Scotland highlands, Claire finds herself immersed in war, border, and clan disputes. Claire becomes increasingly enthralled with James Fraser, a handsome warrior. But what about her husband? How can she get back home? Does she want to?

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut’s most popular work follows Billy Pilgrim’s journeys through time as an American soldier during WWII and its aftermath. Slaughterhouse-Five is a confusing and heartbreaking book to read, but absolutely worth it.

All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai

Mastai’s time travel book is the wish fulfillment everyone wants right now that our world is the wrong one. In the book, the world is suppose to be a beautiful utopian society, only the son of the inventor of time travel messed everything up. All Our Wrong Todays is an incredibly timely read when you’ve reached a point of just being done with this dumpster fire of a year.

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Jonathan Franzen’s Scorn for Social Media Keeps Him From Making a Difference

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I used to think Jonathan Franzen had the potential to change the world.

I found Freedom on a shelf in a hostel in Croatia. I read it on dark night buses through the countryside as I traveled Southward, and across a hemisphere, finishing it in a powerless hostel in Manila during typhoon Hiyan. I was at a low point in my psyche and with the world, the most emotionally isolated I’d felt in five years. The book alternately sent me into panic spirals, questioning the entire foundation of my relationships, and clarified beliefs about the larger world that had been obscured by years at an isolated college in the desert. I was shaken to my core, but I came out of the experience with a sharp focus on how I wanted to build relationships and relate to society.

For years, I defended Jonathan Franzen from his crew of dedicated haters on the basis of this experience. I knew he was an avowed hater of social media, a thing that I, despite many arguments to the contrary, loved. I believed there was a compromise — that one could roll their eyes at his curmudgeonly tendencies while appreciating his work on behalf of the environment, and I thought that his work could encourage people to engage seriously with the threat of climate change.

This month, Franzen publishes his first book since Purity, a collection of essays: The End of the End of the Earth. It’s a title that fits with Franzen’s grim outlook, which, unfortunately, is probably a correct one: without major and unlikely changes, the earth that we know will soon be unlivable by our current standards. Franzen’s obsessive climate knowledge combined with his sizable platform theoretically puts him in an excellent position to communicate the alarming facts of climate change. But from the beginning of The End of the End of the Earth, it’s clear that Franzen’s disdain for the modern world kneecaps his ability to respond to a collapsing society and a dying planet.

Franzen begins the book with an essay-on-essays, “The Essay in Dark Times.” We’re treated to a new iteration of the old “Webster’s dictionary defines…” trick, in which Franzen breaks down the etymology of “essay”:“something essayed — something hazarded, not definitive, not authoritative; something ventured on the basis of the author’s personal experience and subjectivity — we might seem to be living in an essayistic golden age.”

But Franzen does not, actually, believe we are living in an essayistic golden age. Rather, this is his segue into one of his favorite topics: his distrust of social media.

Franzen’s disdain for the modern world kneecaps his ability to respond to a collapsing society and a dying planet.

“The presumption of social media is that even the tiniest subjective micro narrative is worthy not only of private notation, as in a diary, but of sharing with other people. The U.S. president now operates on this presumption. Traditionally hard news reporting, in places like The New York Times, has softened up to allow the I, with its voice and opinions and impressions, to take the front page spotlight, and book reviewers feel less and less constrained to to discuss books with any kind of objectivity.”

I’ll put aside the fact that this is a book written in the first person. Franzen makes accurate points about how Twitter and Facebook have affected policy and privacy, but his ideas about how they’ve affected the average human narrative (in a word, badly) are not particularly well argued. His defense of the essay over the tweet is that the essay’s roots are in literature.

When I read this, I thought: “Okay. Is that it?” That is indeed his entire defense, at least as outlined in that particular essay.

He implies that sharing thoughts on social media is useless without considering its positive alternatives: that social media carries its own narrative about our time, that the collective consciousness can understand things that a person wrestling with a problem solely in their head cannot. I’m not suggesting that tweets are better than essays or books, only that ignoring them altogether can disable a person from understanding the full spectrum of human communication and collective understanding in the year of our lord 2018.

This is a peril of being so cut off from the general population — Franzen has stated in the past that social media is the thing that separates people from each other, that he loves to watch people argue on the street because it means they’re experiencing a real emotion. But cutting yourself off from social media might have a worse effect — if you have no idea how your peers outside of your intellectual group of friends are thinking, how can you hope to reach them through your art?

What if Twitter and blog posts are not meant to eradicate essays and books, but are rather an alternate way of communication? There’s value in the person micronarrative, in its immediacy and accessibility. Not everyone has the resources to read an essay every day, let alone write one or publish it in a venue that will reach an audience. Few people have the time and resources to write a book. Far more people have access and time to tweet, and this allows them to participate in a cultural conversation that would have previously been inaccessible.

The time it takes to write a book, and the nature of the publishing cycle once the book is completed, means that we don’t have many books yet that were written during this abject political nightmare.

What if Twitter and blog posts are not meant to eradicate essays and books, but are rather an alternate way of communication?

One of the first, written in a frenzied three months, is Olivia Laing’s Crudo. It chronicles the late summer and early fall of the first year of the Trump presidency, when the instability was both fresh and high key. Crudo engages with social media in all its variety — and in doing so, highlights the ways in which Franzen falls short.

As Laing’s narrator, a loose version of a still-alive Kathy Acker, gets married late in her life, in the year 2017, she runs into constant ephemera of the Internet:

“The priest gave a sermon in Italian in which the word WhatsApp was frequently discernible.”

“[She was] examining the world by way of her scrying glass, Twitter.”

In some ways, Laing’s narrator is just as distant from the average person’s life as Franzen is: she’s an intellectual honeymooning in Europe, eating porchetta and lavender yoghurt creme and picci with pork ragu. The difference is, she chooses to engage with the discourse that Franzen disdains as background noise. Whether or not you think the flurry of chatter around politics is a useful tool, it’s hard to deny that most people are involved in the presence of politics on social media. Laing’s decision to have her narrator engage with it thus makes her a more accessible point of relation to the average reader.

With pithy aphorisms describing the strange phenomena of living through the first year of the Trump presidency, Laing captures a year that we’ll look back on with a surreal gaze: now we’re somewhat attuned to this news cycle, for better or worse, but Crudo serves as a record of the strange transition into this reality.

“Everyone talked about politics all the time but no one knew what was happening.”

That’s what last year was like, wasn’t it? She tracks the events as they happen: Kathy walks down 1st Avenue when Comey is fired, and a friend texts her: “Twitter is ABLAZE.” “We’ll remember what we were doing at the moment years from now, but we’ll know how it all panned out,” the characters say to each other over foie gras. We know now that there have been so many micro-moments of insanity that the specifics of the Comey firing are lost in the fog, but that only underscores the value of the book: a portrait of an exact moment, ways of encountering the influx of news that we may have already forgotten. Between the aphorisms and her reality effects, we have a portrait of what it was to be alive in this moment, a time capsule. Kathy puts a voice to our collective confusion on how to appropriately respond to chaos: “None of it was funny, or maybe it all was.”

To me this captures what it feels like to be alive now more than any single Franzen line.

Though The End of the End of the Earth ostensibly takes climate change as its main subject, the lens is narrow: climate change through the vantage point of Franzen’s favorite topic (say it with me: birds) and reviews, essays, and miscellany culled from the prestigious publications to which Franzen periodically contributes. His goal is obvious: he wants to elevate the public consciousness about climate change. But doing so through the discussion of one of his pet interests is less effective than using techniques that are proven to connect with today’s readers. Franzen makes hating social media part of his “brand” (and I’m sure he would bristle at my use of the word brand), but this blanket refusal to engage has blinded him to the potential uses of the various tools of social media.

At one point, somewhat facetiously, Franzen recalls how in his youth he wanted to overthrow capitalism through the application of literary theory. He appreciates the absurdity of his younger self, and ideally even the most Franzen-hating reader can laugh at this moment of self-reflection. It does serve a purpose other than humor at our idealistic youths: Franzen has always been civic-minded, with a desire to write towards change. But it seems within this volume that either he never learned how to do it effectively, or he’s demonstrating a form of writing that isn’t the ideal form for social change.

I have a friend who likes to poke mild fun at the literary community by saying, “When has a book ever changed the world?” It’s not really a question I can answer. I know books can change individual lives, and Franzen’s Freedom changed mine, but this book didn’t, and I don’t think it’s likely to for others. I think Franzen wants to change the world — it’s why I’ve loved his work — but maybe he’s gone too far from the average person’s life to retain the ability to respond to the rapidly disintegrating social order. Or perhaps he’s too jaded. You can’t really change people if you’re expressing derision for them, and for the tools they use to engage with progressivism.

I think Franzen wants to change the world — it’s why I’ve loved his work — but he’s gone too far from the average person’s life.

I want Franzen’s climate change writing to be able to change public perception, but I don’t know if that’s possible. He deeply understands how the American political system stymies all efforts to react to climate change, and that is information that the average reader needs to know — but he’s unwilling to adapt himself to communicating that information effectively. I think he could retain his pessimism, because it’s an accurate, realistic pessimism, while working harder to connect, breaking away from tradition and working to connect with the reader rather than rote dismissiveness.

“The reason the American political system can’t deliver action isn’t simply that fossil-fuel corporations sponsor denialists and buy elections, as many progressives suppose. Even for people who accept the fact of global warming, the problem can be framed in many different ways — a crisis in global governance, a market failure, a technological challenge, a matter of social justice, and so on — each of which argues for a different expensive solution.”

He goes on to suggest that democracy perhaps is the problem — a democracy is designed to respond to the needs of its citizens, and citizens benefit from cheap gas and global trade. These long explanations are absolutely necessary, but they’re lost in a space between an academic writing style and the ability to appeal to the wider public.

When Laing confronts climate change, it’s with the same immediacy of the rest of the book: what’s happening today, in the world.

“An iceberg the size of Delaware broke off the Larsen C ice shelf and floated away. The gulf of Mexico was full of dead fish, there was a trash heap circulating in the ocean that would take a week to walk across. She tried to limit her husband’s addiction to the tumble dryer, she never flew to anywhere more than eight hours away, but even here lying on her back she was probably despoiling something. What a waste, what a crime, to wreck a world so abundantly full of different kinds of flowers. Kathy hated it, living at the end of the world, but then she couldn’t help but find it interesting, watching people herself included compulsively foul their nest.”

Perhaps books like these work together best in tandem: one to record, one to work towards change. Franzen has made change with his writing before, though distinctly in the realm of his favored birds. One of the essays, about birds in Italy, did help enact a ban on bird hunting.

In the context of a conversation with an editor, he implies that he wants to change the climate of environmental understanding over time, rather than the weather. I agree that this is a worthwhile and noble cause, but I’m not sold on the idea of him completing it. I think to do that, he’d need to get closer to the present, to real people, to their desires and modes of communication, and to quit his rote dismissiveness of social media.

Hidden within one of this longer paragraphs is this quote:

“My only hope is that we can accept the reality in time to prepare for it humanely, and my only faith is that facing it honestly, however painful this may be, is better than denying it.”

That sentence is a practical and to my knowledge accurate proclamation on how we’ll relate to the future and climate change, but it gets lost within the essay, which gets lost within the book. Dare I say, it might have reached a wider audience as a tweet.

Franzen believes that efforts towards progressivism have failed. Laing makes no pronunciation at all. Which of these is the role of art in the face of catastrophe? Though we can’t know for sure yet which path towards a responsive literature will resonate as the world barrels towards an unknown future, I believe it is one that that understands how new modes of communication can reflect upon a changing world.

How to Properly Eulogize a Left-Behind Body Part

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“The Ghost of the Leg” by Billy Fatzinger

We were eating hoagies at Pap’s, which is a place I like. Teddie had been screwing up her courage all afternoon to say something. At long last, as we were finishing the chips and pickles and wadded shreds of iceberg lettuce, she sighed a little self-effacing sigh and asked me if I believed in ghosts.

“Well,” I said, “I used to be into what they call ‘ghost spots’ or ‘ghost encounters.’ Places where you can see the headlights of a ghost car running you off the road or hear the sounds of Civil War soldiers shrieking from across the ages and what have you.”

I went on to tell Teddie about this restaurant on High Street in downtown Braynard — great food, real reasonable — it’s called Daddy’s Place. Back in the 1800s, Daddy’s Place was a bordello called the Kit and Caboodle where a prostitute named Sissy Friedenstahl hanged herself in the closet under the stairs. Supposedly, the construction crew renovating Daddy’s Place experienced all kinds of off-the-wall ghost activity. They found their tools dumped out and arranged in strange occult patterns. They found, in the middle of summer, in the center of the floor, a freshly packed snowball. One worker felt the wet jet of some ghostly presence gleeking on his neck.

As a youngster, I was really into this story. So, late one night, I broke into Daddy’s Place in hopes of encountering the ghost of Sissy Friedenstahl. I set off a silent alarm and, long story short and I’m not proud of this, but I’ve got a restraining order against me from Daddy’s Place. It was in the local paper and they made fun of me on the morning zoo radio show.

Teddie and I polished off our food and returned to Teddie’s house, where she pulled a string on a hatch in the ceiling and we both climbed into the attic. She kept saying she wanted to show me something but wouldn’t tell me what. Then she handed me something heavy wrapped in a beach towel. It turned out to be a prosthetic wooden leg.

“That is the leg,” she said.

“Well, yeah,” I said, bending the knee-joint back and forth like a herky-jerky marionette.

“It moves at night,” she said. “I can hear it up here trying to walk.”

Everyone knew about the previous owner of Teddie’s house. Fred Ossemer was his name and he did, kind of famously, have one leg. This leg, I thought, must be his. Something the estate sale people couldn’t sell and they probably felt weird just throwing it away. So, they wrapped it in a beach towel and stowed it in the attic. At least that was the theory I developed on the fly, standing there holding the creepy thing.

How Fred Ossemer died was, he got strangled by a mechanized contraption of ropes and pulleys he’d designed to get himself in and out of bed. He was not a real popular guy, so nobody noticed him dead for quite a while. He was eventually discovered by a burglar. The burglar was so freaked out at the sight of the corpse in the contraption that, without thinking, he called the police. So that guy got arrested for being a burglar.

In the burglar’s defense, it was a pretty horrific sight. Ossemer’s poodle, Mickey, had partially eaten the corpse, which is something a dog will do.

“It only happens at night,” said Teddie, “I can hear the leg, you know, hob-nobbing around up here.”

I asked what she expected me to do about it. We agreed I’d help her bury the leg.

We brought the leg to the baseball diamond behind the old bank and I dug a hole. It was by then very dark outside with a weird fog rolling in. Teddie suggested I shoot the leg for good measure. I told her I didn’t carry a gun.

“What!” she said, “You kiddin’ me? A guy like you!”

Teddie, as it turned out, had a snub nose .38 strapped to her ankle all this time.

“You do the honors,” she said.

I really didn’t want to, but she was very persuasive, pressing the gun into my hand and nodding vigorously and saying, “Yup, you got this, it’s all you, blast that ghost to kingdom come.”

I probably fired five or six rounds into the leg — however many bullets come in a gun. Then we decided to say a few words.

“You go first,” said Teddie, who was, by then, again holding the gun.

I stared at the leg in the hole. I thought about the life of the leg. How to properly eulogize it. An immense pointlessness washed over me. To this leg, we were strangers. And this is what galls me at a funeral: Strangers trying to be nice. When my stepdad Buzzy was killed, the pastor they got didn’t know a thing about him. He read aloud from a book called Bible Quotes for Funerals and talked about what a sweet guy he bet Buzzy was. Later, he pursed his face into a sympathy smile, shook my hand, and said simply, “No problem.” I was too wobbly to say anything.

“Listen,” I said to Teddie, “I don’t go to a lot of funerals. It’s not that I don’t know dead people. My people drop like flies — ”

“Be free, leg!” said Teddie, “I hope you find what you’re looking for out there in space.”

I pictured in fast-forward the leg sitting in the hole until eventually they turned the baseball diamond into some stores. Teddie saw the look on my face. She touched my hand. I followed her eyes to the sky over centerfield where a little bat flitted and dove, hunting some prey in the grass.

About the Author

William Fatzinger Jr. grew up in Pennsylvania. He now lives in Austin, TX. Twitter: @billyfatzinger.

“The Ghost of the Leg” is published here by permission of the author, William Fatzinger Jr. Copyright © William Fatzinger Jr. 2018. All rights reserved.

Deborah Eisenberg on the Best Way to Read a Short Story Collection

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Read a short story collection, and you can defy time. There are several beginnings, several middles, several endings, but no singular beginning, middle, and end. You don’t have to read the book from linear cover to cover. In Deborah Eisenberg’s short story collection Your Duck is My Duck, her characters deal with the problem that life does not work like a short story collection, although many wish it would. They cannot skip around; time marches on. But memory makes moving through time from the “cover to cover”of life more difficult. Because memory works more like a short story collection than a novel. Memory skips, it repeats, it collects into moments, into stories. In the eponymous short story “Your Duck is My Duck,” a painter is “hurtling through time, strapped to an explosive device, [her] life.” In “Taj Mahal” an aging actor reflects on the gilded days of his youth in Hollywood, asking a friend “Can you believe that all that turned out to be then? At the time I somehow thought that it was now. Did it occur to you that it was going to be then?”

Purchase the book

What Eisenberg shows us is that while time marches on, life is made up of the clots of memories we cling to, and how they hold together when we offer them to someone else with their very own collection of memories. We mess up each other’s ideas of one another in ways that are sometimes good, sometimes hurtful, but always vital. The characters in Your Duck is My Duck can’t help but circle back to a “then,” cannot resist imagining what will be “later.” Eisenberg’s stories which manage to be both rich in substance and economic in execution, give us time to look at how all of our “then’s” and “later’s” clatter into one another to see that it’s okay to take our time trying to make sense of life because no one’s got the story straight. Maybe they never will. And in the hands of someone like Deborah Eisenberg, maybe it’s better that way.

Eisenberg and I spoke over the phone about why you shouldn’t read stories in order, the piece of writing advice no one wants to hear, and how to confront how terribly long it takes to write anything worth reading.

Erin Bartnett: After putting together five collections of short stories now, I was wondering if there’s something new that came to you. On the level of the collection, was there anything new about putting this collection together?

Deborah Eisenberg: Well it was really just like putting all the others together. I don’t think in terms of collections at all. I just do one thing and then I do the next thing and then I do the next thing and then somebody says to me, “well that’s a collection.”

EB: So it’s more of an external assignment? I often wonder what it’s like writing one story and then saying okay this story now lives next to this story and behind that story, and so on…

DE: Well yes, I don’t do that, but I think one’s mind does it. I mean one goes from one thought to the thought that is born of the previous thought. Or the concern that is born of the previous concern, and I have never set the order of the stories in my collections. I’ve left that to my editor, and so what you see in a book is not a chronological compilation.

EB: So perhaps in the same way you write the stories that become a collection, do you think when someone is reading a short story collection, there’s a chronological way to go about reading it? Or do you think it’s more fruitful to let your curiosity lead you “out of order?”

DE: I would recommend that. Because it’s not — a collection of stories is not a novel — it’s different expressions of the same mind within a circumscribed period of time. I certainly would recommend against sitting down and reading any collection of stories in its entirety at once. I think probably the “best” way to go about reading a collection is to pick it up when you feel like it and let your mood dictate what title speaks to you at the moment.

The “best” way to go about reading a collection is to pick it up when you feel like it and let your mood dictate what title speaks to you at the moment.

EB: That is often how I read short story collections, and yet I also feel this urge to “finish” reading a collection in the same way I would a novel. Like I’ve gotten to “know” an author when I’ve read an entire collection. Which of course, isn’t possible just through reading one collection, as your stories in Your Duck is My Duck reminded me.

So many characters in this book experience the discrepancy between the story that they’ve held onto about a person they love, and the entirely different life that their beloved actually lived. A lot of these characters also happen to be tangentially famous — like Adam in “Recalculating” who is the nephew of a famous scholar, or Emma the daughter of a Hollywood icon in “Taj Mahal.” Adam and Emma each experience a third kind of betrayal — they read some new thing that some stranger has written about a person they love. Can you talk more about these relationships in your stories? How did these relationships shape the way you began to understand these characters, and write them?

DE: That is such an interesting question, and I have absolutely no answer for it. [Laughs.] You know I don’t really think analytically in that way as I’m beginning to write. I don’t think “well, here is a Question, or here is a Situation, how do I best address it?”

EB: So how do you start?

DE: I start by sitting down and just seeing what my hand does, really, on a piece of paper. One’s needs to tell a certain thing, to communicate a certain thing, surface despite one’s inhibitions against it. So the best thing — well for me — the best way to proceed is not to think about controlling what I intend to do, but just to do and then see where it is I’m going.

EB: And how do you know when you’ve arrived at the “end” of a story?

DE: You know it’s so amazing to me that people are always — young writers, specifically — are very anxious about that question. “How do you know that you’ve finished?” I would say there’s absolutely no uncertainty in my mind when I finish something. I just know it’s finished. I once heard Mavis Gallant say something that is instructive possibly: “You’re finished when anything you do makes it worse instead of better.” That’s not an exact quote but it’s something like that. But I feel that really most of the time I take to write something — and I do take a lot of time — is spent trying to understand what it is that I’m actually interested in. And I’ll tell you a story about the story called “Recalculating” that you referred to earlier. I mean it’s been true very frequently that I’ve thought I finished something, and then I can’t think of a title, and that is instruction to me, that I don’t really know what I’m doing. So I think I finished the last draft. And yet, if I don’t know what to call it, I surely haven’t finished it. So I had just finished writing the story that is called “Recalculating” and I was being driven somewhere and I was trying, I was desperate to think of the title for this story, and I was sort of using the drive to try to think of the title. And you probably don’t remember the GPS that would take a wrong turn and they say “recalculating, recalculating recalculating — “

EB: Oh yeah — we had a Garmin.

DB: Yes! So I was sitting there in the car, thinking to the GPS “be quiet! I’m trying to think!” And the GPS kept saying “recalculating. recalculating. recalculating.” And I kept thinking “be quiet! be quiet! be quiet! I’m trying to think of something important.” “Recalculating.” And I thought, “Oh, I see. Now I understand.” And I understood the story! And I rewrote it then. I mean I didn’t have to change much but I had to sort of clarify what it was about, and you know I just was able to make it that much more coherent and sharper and that was exactly, I mean that word meant to me exactly what I was doing in the sense that the GPS uses it. So often the search for the title tells me what I’m missing. And then I have to look.

EB: I love that story, knowing that the last line of “Recalculating” is “Don’t Move.”

DE: Yes.

Your Duck is My Duck

EB: What are you reading right now?

DE: Right now I’m just reading my students’ work, and work for a seminar that I’m teaching. My reading habits are just awful. It’s terrible. When I’m teaching I really can’t read aside from what I need to read for school. I’m an extremely slow reader, and when I’m writing it’s very hard to read. So I have periods when I’m doing neither and then I can read, which is very pleasurable.

EB: Coping with the academic reading schedule is so hard. When I was teaching, I knew I needed to read something other than student essays, but didn’t have much time, so I promised myself I would read poetry — just one poem each night. It helped.

DE: That is a great idea, just to reach for the poetry, and circumscribe one’s ambitions to say “I’m going to read one poem and just be utterly refreshed.” How wonderful!

I think for almost all writers, it takes much more time and much more patience than is almost possible to believe.

EB: In your role as a teacher, what do you think is the advice that young writers need, but don’t hear, or even don’t want to hear?

DE: I think that it is that it takes a tremendous amount of time. Now I know almost every writer writes more quickly than I do, so maybe it’s inapplicable to most people but I think for almost all writers, it takes much more time and much more patience than is almost possible to believe. And also it is extremely embarrassing not only because one reveals to oneself one’s deep interests, which might not be the deep interests one would most like to present to the world or to oneself, but also because one does it so badly at first. And it really takes time to make something good. When you sit down you write, I don’t know a page or whatever you write, two pages, a paragraph, and you think “Ah! Isn’t that marvelous. I’ve expressed myself so utterly and beautifully.” And then you look at it the next day and you can’t believe what an idiot you were! I mean you just can’t believe it! It’s so mortifying. But I think it’s very very important to develop the confidence through experience that you can make things almost infinitely better than they start out being. If you keep working on it, it’s going to get good. And the fact that it’s bad at first doesn’t mean that you’re ill-suited to do it, it just means that it takes time.

If you keep working on it, it’s going to get good. And the fact that it’s bad at first doesn’t mean that you’re ill-suited to do it, it just means that it takes time.

EB: I’m so glad to hear you talk about that. It’s refreshing to hear it takes time and that’s okay.

DE: Oh it’s absolutely okay and you have to be able to sustain the humiliation of seeing what it is that you do at first. And the humiliation of the time it takes. Because I think one of the things that we hope for when we get something down on a page when it’s finally satisfactory is that it looks like it took no effort at all. And that takes a tremendous amount of time and effort. And the embarrassment of seeing how clumsily one writes.

EB: Do you think that’s a “new” feeling? That humiliation of the time it takes? Do you think we’re in a moment where we’re particularly proud of how quick and efficient and zippy we can be? Or do you think that’s just kind of something that writers have had to deal with always?

DE: Well, I wonder, actually. I was thinking about something of that sort the other day. I mean I think it is something that people have always had to deal with, but it’s such a privileged position to be able to write, that probably most of the people who’ve done it until recently were very very privileged, had a lot of time, had phenomenally polished educations, did find it easier to put a sentence together, and were tremendously driven. Now there’s so much pressure for everybody to write and everybody thinks ‘Oh I’m a writer,’ or ‘I should be able to be a writer’ or something of that sort. I’m betting that you are right that there is more pressure — you’re supposed to do things fast, you’re supposed to do things well, and people just aren’t prepared for what it really is. And they don’t know. And it isn’t much spoken of.

7 Books on the Joys of Doing Nothing

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Sometimes, the world gets to be too much and you just want to check out—but reader types often have trouble shutting off our brains. Thankfully, we can always look to literature for solace in the stories of idlers, sleepers, and ponderers. In these books, you’ll find inspiration from characters who prefer sleep or idleness over action, and essays on how to use the act of doing nothing in order to find comfort or relief from the inundation of bad news in the headlines.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

In her most recent novel, Moshfegh depicts the story of a woman who believes sleep to be an antidote to the physiological effects of current affairs and personal misery. Though set in the unsettling years leading up to September 11, Moshfegh uses the intensely observational style that she’s become known for in her previous books, such as Homesick for Another World and Eileen, to encapsulate a feeling that many people may share today; the desire to sleep. Or, more specifically, the desire to go right back to sleep after waking up in the morning to an onslaught of notifications from various news outlets about the natural, and not-so-natural, disasters happening around the world. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfegh protagonist turns to sleep-inducing prescription medication in order to fulfill her aspiration to do nothing.

A Novel About Sleeping Through the '90s, Designed to Wake You Up in 2018

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

If sleeping isn’t the right antidote for you, another one you could try is to get lost. As in her other essay collections, such as Men Explain Things to Me and Call Them by Their True Names, Solnit brings her skill for expert and persuasive writing to discuss the topic of getting lost. In this collection, Solnit explores the question: “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is unknown to you?” Disguised as essays about doing nothing, this field guide brings the reader through seemingly unrelated thoughts and anecdotes, arriving at answers that are be obscure to the person that seeks them out with intent.

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin

20th century poets and authors popularized the term flâneuse when writing about the modern urban experience — for men. It denotes a man who takes to wandering the streets aimlessly; a man taking advantage of his privilege by walking around, doing nothing, in metropolitan locations without the worry of being harrassed. Lauren Elkin’s memoir takes the same concept — of aimless wandering — and applies it to the female experience. Drawing on her own practice of meandering the streets of modern cities, Elkin writes about the history of the female flâneuse.

Visiting Sephora with Walter Benjamin

The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet by Myrlin Hermes

In the Shakespeare canon, Hamlet is the archetype of a non-doer. His uncle kills his father, his mother marries his uncle, his love life goes up in flames, and yet, rather than exacting revenge on the man that incited it all, he chooses to read books and speak in soliloquy. Myrlin Hermes’ novel takes the form of a prequel to the play, offering the reader a look into Hamlet’s university life before the notorious tragedy strikes. Using the same characters that live and suffer in Shakespeare’s world, Hermes reimagines that world in a modern novel imbued with Shakespearean references and plot devices — such as mistaken identities and love-triangles.

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett

Bennet’s debut novel suggests a life of contemplation in lieu of action. The narrator lives by herself and shares her inner monologue with the reader about the daily routine of living in solitude, and the ordinary events that surround her cottage on the west coast of Ireland. With a perceptive focus on atmosphere instead of plot, Bennett’s style pushes the boundaries of what we consider short stories, prose poetry or even essays. In doing nothing much but contemplating, the narrator of Pond brings us outside our own egocentric world to consider the world around us.

Morning, 1908

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Persuasion, Austen’s final work, explores the typical themes in her canon — culture, society and marriage in 19th century England. Whether or not the characters in her books are doing anything actually productive, at the very least they’re doing something. However, this particular novel showcases a character with an expertise for doing nothing; Mary Musgrove. Repeatedly, she feigns illness in order to get out of responsibilities and, rather than taking full advantage of the free time, she does nothing instead. Then again, maybe that is exactly how one should be spending their free time.

The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang

Lin Yutang uses philosophy and wit to enlighten his readers about the way to lead a simple life; valuing idleness over wearing oneself out. He draws from Eastern ethics, such as Taoism, which entails letting go of impossible expectations and unattainable goals in order to live a life akin to a river — going along with the unplanned and unstructured way life takes you. Though written in the mid-1900s, this book of guidelines for a peaceful life is as timely as ever in navigating this chaotic modern world.

That Guy in Your MFA’s 10 Rules for Novelists

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I f you’ve ever taken a creative writing class, then you know who I am: I’m the guy who showed up 10 minutes late, with a chiseled jawline covered in half a week of stubble, unwashed hair under a beanie. When ever anyone makes a point, I roll my eyes and offer a contrarian opinion. I mean, if you read David Foster Wallace, you’d realize that the point you’re trying to make is completely obtuse. I’m working on the next Great American Novel in my Moleskine notebook, gazing contemplatively out the window every few lines so everyone looking at me knows how deep I am. That’s who I am. Jonathan Franzen is the guy who thinks winning one National Book Award a 15 years ago means he’s entitled to making rules for writers. Well, Jon, I read The Corrections. And let’s just say I would have made a few.

Course Catalog from the Jonathan Franzen Night School

I, on the other hand, have placed a short story in a very prominent literary journal that may or may not actually exist. And so, as a public service, here are my rules for writers.

1: Anyone who ever rejects your work is wrong. The same goes for anyone who gives you notes. They just don’t understand you. I mean, really: punctuation? It’s like they’ve never even read Cormac McCarthy.

2: If you write for money, you’re a capitalist sell-out hack. Real writing is done in one’s notebook and read only after one’s death, probably from starvation. Or just do what I do and live off your trust fund.

3: Writing in the first person is played out. Same with writing in the third person. If you really want to be an original voice in the foction landscape, try writing in the second person plural future tense. “The group of you all will go in the crumbling Victorian manor.”

4: If you introduce a female character, be sure to describe (in detail) the size and shape of her breasts.

If You’re Not Sure How a Male Author Would Describe You, Use Our Handy Chart

5: Real writers don’t need headboards. The mattress on your floor is a perfect conduit for creative expression.

6: You have to have darlings before you kill them. That’s a quote from Faulkner. I’ve read Faulkner

7: Female characters are hard for readers to relate to. Try making your protagonist a man.

8: Trains are a metaphor for: (1) time (2) escape (3) fascism (4) the unstoppable speed of technological advancement (5) trains

9: If The New Yorker still hasn’t responded to the unsolicited fiction submission you sent them in the mail, follow up for the eighth time.

10: Write drunk, edit never.

Alexander Chee Recommends 5 Books that Aren’t By Men

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You already know that women writers love Alexander Chee—earlier this year, we published a conversation among four Asian American writers, three of them women, about how inspiring they’ve found him. What you may not yet know is that the feeling is mutual. Here, the award-winning and bestselling author of The Queen of the Night and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel introduces some of the five books by non-men that he finds most inspiring.

Chee is involved in the writing world as an editor and an educator—he’s a contributing editor at The New Republic, an editor at large at VQR, and a professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth—which means he gets a chance to be influential in promoting women and non-binary writers. And he is, of course, a celebrated author in his own right; his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, T Magazine, Tin House, Slate, Guernica, and Best American Essays 2016, and he is winner of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose and a 2010 MCCA Fellowship.

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

City of Angels, or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud by Christa Wolf

This was one of the most consummate aesthetic and political experiences I’ve had while reading in years. Wolf’s last novel is based on a character like her, arriving to the U.S. from Germany after the fall of the Wall, on her way to a residency in California. There’s a Weimar Under the Palms feeling to it, as the East German writer wanders the California landscape in conversations with her fellow fellows, and herself, and engaging in a project based on the correspondence she’s found between two women during the East German regime. Highlights include being astonished at the homeless problem, amazement at a former CIA Director winning the presidency, and listening to a young Californian explain to her, an East German, the idea of Basic Income. The novel seems to be the way she undertook writing about the scandal that rocked her career — the discovery that she had been an informant after the release of her Stasi files. It is an investigation of self deception, at the personal and the national level, and with time I love it more and more.

An Autobiography by Janet Frame

Only the wonderful bright spirit that was the late Janet Frame would choose the simple title, An Autobiography, for this three volume wonder, collecting To the Is-Land, Angel At My Table, and The Envoy From Mirror City. It is an arresting, experimental journey into the life of New Zealand’s greatest writer, beginning with her working class family upbringing, her false diagnosis with schizophrenia, her struggle to be treated with respect as a woman writer, and how she made her way in this world. You may know of this from the masterpiece of a film made by Jane Campion, adapted from this book, but the book itself has so much wise and insightful writing advice that did not make it onto the screen.

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

Jones has a piece of writing advice I love — “When there’s two sides to the story and both sides are right, you have a novel.” This novel embodies this, powerfully, in the story of two sisters, each sharing their side of growing up in 1980s Atlanta with a shared father, a bigamist, and how they were each shaped in part by how and when they learned of each other, and became, for a time, something like antagonists. I came to love them both and root for them both, which is part of the novel’s magic trick. For readers new to her looking for more of what they loved in her current bestselling novel, An American Marriage, they should easily turn here next — I also think this is a great place to begin reading her.

Tayari Jones’s Favorite Books By Women

I’ll Be Right There by Kyung-Sook Shin

A young woman receives a phone call from an ex-boyfriend eight years after they last saw each other, telling her that their former professor is near death though he is not receiving visitors. She is drawn into memories of how he kept her and their friends inspired as they navigated the tumultuous period of student protests and state violence in South Korea during the 1980s authoritarian rule of South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan, in part through the study of European literature. It is both a portrait of their friendships and relationships, their desire to escape the world they are in, and their desire to transform it. “Literature and art are not simply what will carry you; they are also what you must lay down your life for,” the professor tells his students, and the novel is the story of how they try.

Saint Joan of Arc by Vita Sackville-West

A biography by the woman writer who inspired Woolf’s Orlando, about the famous French Saint. It has been accused of being a little fictionalized, but you may not care. I didn’t. The result is a drama about gender, power, the church, French culture, and the question of whether it is a heresy punishable by being burned at the stake to say a saint can console you in jail by holding you. It is also a powerful and poignant meditation on patriotism, heroism, and martyrdom — and a myth that is a tentpole of Western culture.

7 International Novels for Food Lovers

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With the holidays upon us, tables across America and the world will be heaving with delights. Your Thanksgiving banquet and company might hit the commercially-sanctioned “happy” mark. However, if you’re less than enthusiastic about the season of forced gratitude and have all kinds of feelings about its settler colonialism origins, we have suggest (naturally!) literary escape. Here’s a list of yummy prose with generous sides of dysfunction and lavish sprinklings of hilarity to get you through the season. With zero sugar, gluten, cholesterol, and no animals hurt in its making (we hope), this reading list should easily and seriously indulge your literary appetite.

Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbery

“I am the greatest food critic. It is I who has taken this minor art and raised it to a rank of utmost prestige,” claims Gourmet Rhapsody’s dying protagonist. In his final hours, he is trying to recall a taste that is the “final and ultimate truth of my entire life and that holds the key to the heart that I have since silenced.” Barbery’s novel explores the food critic’s quest through his upper bourgeoisie Parisian eyes and via those with the less savory perspectives of him, in some seriously delectable prose. Of his first memory of Japanese food, he writes: “Yes, it is like a fabric: sashimi is velvet dust, verging on silk, or a bit of both, and the extraordinary alchemy of its gossamer essence allows it to preserve a milky density unknown even by clouds.” His take on a side is something you might find at your holiday dinner table: “A few green asparagus stems, plum and tender enough to make you swoon.”

The Birdwoman’s Palate by Laksmi Pamuntjak

A dreamy — each chapter begins with the main character’s sleep time adventures — offering from Indonesian author Laksmi Pamuntjak, this novel trails an epidemiologist Aruna who’s tackling bird flu. Of the original outbreak, Pamuntjak writes: “It is worth noting that there was at this time a conspicuous upsurge in the production of homemade abon ayam — dry-fried shredded chicken. Simply to die for when sprinkled over rice or toast.” Pamuntjak charms with Aruna’s chattiness and the unlikely pairing of a bird flu investigation and a foodie road trip across the Indonesian archipelago. The Birdwoman’s Palate is a buffet of diverse delicacies with some regional politics thrown in the wok.

Umami by Laia Jufresa

In the Mexico City of Umami, a building layout mimics the map of the human tongue — Bitter, Sour, Sweet, Salty, and Umami — while its residents grapple with grief and loss. No major banquets here but instead, there’s an urban milpa (the varied, cultivated fields of the Mesoamericans), the pseudo-cereal amaranth, MSG, and meditations on tastes via Alf, the building’s owner who’s written a book on Umami, the fifth undefinable sensation of deliciousness. A taster of Alf’s thoughts on the matter: “Umami starts in the mouth, in the middle of the tongue, activating salivation. Your molars wake up and feel the urge to bite, beg to move. Not that different in fact, albeit less powerful, from the instinct that drives your hips to move almost of their own accord during sex. In that moment, you only know how to obey your body.” And then: “If we delve back to the beginning, perhaps umami doesn’t start in the mouth at all, but rather as a craving, at first sight.”

Pow! by Mo Yan

Meat, the pumped-up industrial animal kind and the fleshy, desirous human sort, are fixations of Nobel Laureate Mo Yan’s 2010 novel, Pow! Lustful and lavish, the narrative charts the changing times in an archetypal Chinese village through a tale told by a young novice to an older monk. Depending on your persuasion, the book will either cause indigestion or remedy it with its hilarious and ever-hallucinatory turns. Vegetarians and the squeamish, however, might want to pass.

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo by Ntozake Shange

Poet, playwright, and novelist, Ntozake Shange was most known for her choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. In this novel, Shange follows three eponymous South Carolina sisters as they navigate womanhood and make their way in their worlds as artists. Interspersed are darling letters written to them from their mother. Beginning with the baby Indigo and “a moon falling from her mouth,” Shange in her delectable, incantatory prose peppers the novel with recipes such as “Cypress’ Sweetbread: The Goodness” and “My Mama & Her Mama ‘Fore Her: Codfish Cakes,” plus an epic Christmas breakfast menu. For later reading, pick up Shange’s culinary memoir of African diaspora food traditions, If I Can Cook/You Know God Can, which features recipes from her travels in Cuba, Nicaragua, and elsewhere.

Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong

Monique Truong’s tale of Linda, a Vietnamese adoptee’s life in North Carolina, is stuffed with traditional American fare, as well as its attendant 1980s fusion attempts. She writes of her white mother’s cooking ventures: “when DeAnne was experimenting with ‘exotic’ flavors, her weekly menu also included a three-layer taco casserole (one of the layers was the contents of a small bag of corn chips) and a chow mein surprise casserole (the surprise was several hot dogs cut up into matchstick-size strips, which when cooked, would curl up into little pink rubber bands). No matter the recipe, a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup, the All-American binding agent of disparate foodstuff, was mixed in. The Great Assimilator, as I call it now, was responsible for the uniform taste of all of DeAnne’s casserole.” Throughout the novel, Truong serves up sensorially-layered turns of prose, stirring Linda’s word-tasting synesthesia quirk, such as “Nograpejelly desert for selfishcornonthecob.”

The Passionate Epicure by Marcel Rouff

The chef of exacting gastronome Dodin-Bouffant dies and he has to find a replacement. Since he’s a very thorough gourmand, this is no easy task but he succeeds — only to gain a rival for his chef Adèle’s culinary charms. Also, Dodin-Bouffant prefers to eat alone to properly enjoy the epic gastronomy. Whether you wish you were alone this holidays or are alone but wish you weren’t, this slender novel should satisfy, and will certainly, educate with its erotica of French cuisine, including the humble (but apparently elevated in Adèle’s pan) pot-au-feu, or beef stew.