7 Books About the Interplay of Technology and Humanity

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Since Frankenstein first gave his creature the jolt — and the creature gave the scientist an existential jolt right back — novelists have been asking, “Will science save us or destroy us?” Ponder for a moment and you’ll find compelling evidence for each side of the question. Nuclear power on one hand, and nuclear warheads on the other. Antibiotics and superviruses. The Internet and…the Internet. What is certain is that science and technology are a part of our everyday lives and, therefore, a part of us. Take, as an example, yourself right here and right now: You are reading this article on a piece of technology, an item you fondle hundreds (thousands?) of times a day and gaze at for hours. Oh that your lover garnered such attentions!

Purchase the novel

In my novel Tell the Machine Goodnight, my protagonist, Pearl, works as a contentment technician for the Apricity Corporation, wielding a technology that promises to answer that most central yet elusive of human questions: How can I be happy? As Pearl sees the effect of this “happiness machine” on both her clients and her family, she questions what happiness is and if a device can deliver us to it.

Technology is by humans and it is also of humans. It is an expression of who we are, right down to the silliest app. Literature, too, is an expression of who we are. Here are seven books that explore the interplay of technology and humanity:

Feed by M.T. Anderson

In Anderson’s Feed, we’ve plucked our devices from our laps and selfie-sticks and planted them directly into our heads. This National Book Award finalist centers on teenage Titus and his school friends whose relationship with their Internet implants is, by turns, comic, chilling, and prescient. For example, the friends eagerly engage with a Coke promo that promises free soda if they work the brand name into their conversation as many times as possible. The kids feed on the feed; the feed feeds on them.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Emiko, the titular windup girl in Bacigalupi’s Hugo and Nebula Award winner, has been designed to move with a twitch, a legal requirement to visually mark her as a New Person, engineered, grown, and sold to wealthy customers. The novel follows Emiko, left behind in a brothel by the businessman who bought her, and Anderson Lake, a calorie man in search of heirloom seeds resistant to genetic blight, both of them trying to survive in a future Bangkok where the oceans rise and the crops wither. Emiko’s twitch is emblematic of the scientists’ fingers twitch-twitch-twitching in food, in people, and in nature with cascading effects.

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

Lovelace has been transplanted from her previous “body” as a spaceship’s artificial intelligence into human form in this Hugo Award finalist. Now, with the help of her guardian Pepper, she must cobble together a life planet-side. Working a day job, getting a tattoo, and dancing in a club might seem like small stuff, unless you used to be a spaceship. The acuity with which Chambers imagines Lovelace’s perspective shows a deep interest in not just how technology functions but how it feels. Note: A Closed and Common Orbit is the stand-alone sequel to the equally vivacious The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.

The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson

In matriarchal tech-hub Palmares Tres, Brazil, artist June Costa and her best friend Gil both fall in love with Enki, the Summer King, chosen to rule for a year and be sacrificed at its end. Enki wants to use his fleeting reign to agitate for political change, and June applies her artistic talents to the cause. Johnson’s National Book Award finalist shows young people using technology as a tool for artistic and political expression, a tricked-out megaphone for their real, raw voices.

Warcross by Marie Lu

Part World of Warcraft, part Quidditch, part Super Bowl, the virtual-reality sport Warcross is a national sensation, and bounty-hunter Emika Chen uses her hacking skills to catch people making illegal bets on the games. When Emika accidentally hacks herself onto the playing field of the Warcross Championships she catches, not her bounty, but a spot on the team and a target on her back. Fans of Ender’s Game and Ready Player One will want to hit “play” on Lu’s novel, the first in a planned trilogy.

The Binti Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor

Binti can “tree”; that is, she can do complex mathematics in her head until they become a meditation, a pattern, and a power. This ability has earned her both the position of master harmonizer for her Himba community and an invitation to attend school at the intergalactic Oomza Uni; however these paths diverge and she can only choose one. The technology in Okorafor’s trilogy reveals itself slowly, causing the reader to re-examine what they thought they knew, and that process of re-examining one’s beliefs and biases is what these powerful Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novellas are about.

Love, Robot by Margaret Rhee

In storytelling, robots are used both as the image of humans and the negative image; what a robot isn’t allows us to define what a person is. In this captivating and playful book of robot love poems, Rhee takes this idea and turns it about, suggesting that to recognize another’s personhood is one of the most human things we can do.

Two Debut Poems by Bennet Bergman

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THE WEATHER

Today it arrived in an unapologetic parcel.
I had decided to wait for it in bed

because it was taking so long,
it was February already.

Because I slept through the rain,
I didn’t know it had rained.

Meanwhile winter has gotten so big we need
special mirrors to see around it.

I don’t need to do things over and over again
before I know that I don’t need to do them anymore.

Didn’t need many nights to understand for example
the boredom of having sex with strange men.

There is a card game to teach you that,
how to deduce a pattern from any set.

But the weather does
subject us to repetition.

It arrives obliviously, as if we have
not already had some of that.

When I open it up —
what has come for me —

it is as anyone would have expected a cool bit
of iron ore, a sad anniversary.

I am going to loiter in the shower while it gets
dark out. Run my head through my hands.

BARRICADES

Each time he rose from bed before me in the morning to rinse
his face with cold water I wondered what he had done it for:
whether it was vanity, whether

this was unattractive to me. He would come back to bed
with water in his beard, mouth tasting like toothpaste,
eyes not so stopped with sleep.

He once said to someone else at a party that when he was
younger he had wanted to be in porn movies,
but Tel Aviv was such a small city. This

killed me. He had such a way of bringing exteriors
into the room with us, even when we had
lived together for many months

he would play these little shadow scenes of betrayal
across my imagination and always they were
painterly and robust:

how in the checkout aisle with our groceries he, looking
out the window at a man on the street, says brightly
but not to me, “I know him,”

and I know what he means. A unique feature of our life
together was that all its walls could be rolled down
like windows or thought of as not to exist.

As if you were just sitting in the kitchen when
the siding of your house was made
suddenly to face in;

you might think, How strange, that I am not outside
but somehow the outside
has come here.

About the Author

Bennet Bergman lives in New York and will soon be an MFA student in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. These are his first published poems.

“The Weather” and “Barricades” are published here by permission of the author, Bennet Bergman. Copyright © Bennet Bergman 2018. All rights reserved.

Winter Has Gotten So Big We Need Special Mirrors To See Around It

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Issue №17

THE WEATHER

Today it arrived in an unapologetic parcel.
I had decided to wait for it in bed

because it was taking so long,
it was February already.

Because I slept through the rain,
I didn’t know it had rained.

Meanwhile winter has gotten so big we need
special mirrors to see around it.

I don’t need to do things over and over again
before I know that I don’t need to do them anymore.

Didn’t need many nights to understand for example
the boredom of having sex with strange men.

There is a card game to teach you that,
how to deduce a pattern from any set.

But the weather does
subject us to repetition.

It arrives obliviously, as if we have
not already had some of that.

When I open it up —
what has come for me —

it is as anyone would have expected a cool bit
of iron ore, a sad anniversary.

I am going to loiter in the shower while it gets
dark out. Run my head through my hands.

BARRICADES

Each time he rose from bed before me in the morning to rinse
his face with cold water I wondered what he had done it for:
whether it was vanity, whether

this was unattractive to me. He would come back to bed
with water in his beard, mouth tasting like toothpaste,
eyes not so stopped with sleep.

He once said to someone else at a party that when he was
younger he had wanted to be in porn movies,
but Tel Aviv was such a small city. This

killed me. He had such a way of bringing exteriors
into the room with us, even when we had
lived together for many months

he would play these little shadow scenes of betrayal
across my imagination and always they were
painterly and robust:

how in the checkout aisle with our groceries he, looking
out the window at a man on the street, says brightly
but not to me, “I know him,”

and I know what he means. A unique feature of our life
together was that all its walls could be rolled down
like windows or thought of as not to exist.

As if you were just sitting in the kitchen when
the siding of your house was made
suddenly to face in;

you might think, How strange, that I am not outside
but somehow the outside
has come here.

About the Author

Bennet Bergman lives in New York and will soon be an MFA student in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. These are his first published poems.

About the Recommended Reading and the Commuter

The Commuter publishes here every other Monday, and is our home for flash and graphic narrative, and poetry. Recommended Reading is the weekly fiction magazine of Electric Literature, publishing every Wednesday morning. In addition to featuring our own recommendations of original, previously unpublished fiction, we invite established authors, indie presses, and literary magazines to recommend great work from their pages, past and present. For access to year-round submissions, join our membership program on Drip, and follow Recommended Reading on Medium to get every issue straight to your feed. Recommended Reading is supported by the Amazon Literary Partnership, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. For other links from Electric Literature, follow us, or sign up for our eNewsletter.

“The Weather” and “Barricades” are published here by permission of the author, Bennet Bergman. Copyright © Bennet Bergman 2018. All rights reserved.

The Main Character of ‘Ulysses’ Is Jewish, and That’s No Accident

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The winter I was 23, two things happened to change my relationship with a country I had long privately (wistfully, romantically, perhaps childishly) thought of as my homeland.

The first occurred as two of my male Irish — that is, non-Jewish — relatives were discussing English football in a pub in Dublin around Christmastime; I and my sister were visiting for a couple of weeks, and at the time of this conversation the two of us were sitting within earshot.

“Who do you support?”

“The Spurs.”

A smirk. “You like Jews?”

“Love ’em.”

Laughter.

The second happening was unambiguous, and unlike the previous scene I was an active interlocutor: it took place as I was telling two of my Irish relatives about Taglit, a non-profit that funds young members of the Jewish diaspora to visit Israel.

“Who pays for the trips they organize?” the wife of the couple asked.

“They do.”

“That’s unlike them.”

To my deep eternal shame I did not react; I continued on as though I had not heard her remark. In Ireland, after all, that is how one deals with troubles.

The Annals of Innisfallen, an Irish medieval chronicle, reports that in 1079 “five Jews came from over sea with gifts to Tairdelbach [the king of Munster]” before being sent back. The earliest known record of Jews in Ireland, then, is also a record of expulsion. If the history of Irish Jews is long, the size of the community has always been vanishingly small: the 2016 census reported that a little over 2,500 people (over half of whom lived in Dublin) identified Judaism as their religion. One could challenge the choice to restrict Jewishness, as the census did, to a religious designation; nevertheless, it says something about a group that its most famous member is a fictional character.

James Joyce probably based Leopold Bloom on Aron Ettore Schmitz, better known as Italo Svevo, the pioneering modernist who was born in Trieste to a German Jewish father and an Italian mother. The two met when Svevo was posted to London for work and needed to improve his English. After inquiring about tutors at the Berlitz language school, he was paired with the Irish writer, and friendship between the two quickly extended past vocabulary lists and conjugation tables. Svevo and his wife, Livia Veneziana, were among the first to hear the story “The Dead”; after Joyce had read the breathtaking closing lines, Veneziana presented him with a fistful of flowers plucked from her garden.

Like Svevo (and like me), Bloom is half Jewish, born to an Irish mother and a Jewish father: his surname is the Anglicized version of the Hungarian Virág, meaning “flower.” But Bloom was not brought up a Jew: as Ulysses relates, he has been baptized three separate times. His efforts to understand the rigidly Christian society around him are deeply moving, an example of the open-hearted spirit of inquiry that animates him as a character. Early on in his portion of the novel, Bloom enters a quiet church and sits looking around the empty space: seeing a crucifix with the Latin abbreviation INRI (Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum, or Jesus Christ, King of the Jews), he muses that it must stand for “Iron Nails Ran In.”

Bloom is never accepted: throughout Ulysses, numerous instances of antisemitism occur, from offhand comments to aggressive confrontations.

But Bloom is never accepted: throughout the monumentally unremarkable day during which the plot of Ulysses unfolds, numerous instances of antisemitism occur, ranging from offhand comments to aggressive confrontations. In the book’s first chapter, no one reacts when the Englishman Haines remarks that German Jews are becoming Britain’s “national problem”; towards its midpoint, in the chapter that represents the nadir of Bloom’s day, Bloom is chased out of a pub by a drunk (tellingly identified only as “the citizen”) who threatens to brain him for uttering Jesus’ name. Collectively, these incidents make clear that many of those around him view Bloom as a fundamental outsider, incapable of integrating no matter what he tries.

If the “overvisibility” of Bloom’s Jewishness is what courts antisemitic comments from other Dubliners, the undervisibility of my Jewishness was what permitted others to make such remarks in my presence. With the exception of a few cowlicks, I am the image of my mother when she was my age: several times when meeting her childhood friends or neighbors, I have known them to stare at me as though I were a ghost, a vision of the past stepped forth from a sun-faded photograph. My family in Dublin think of me as half-Irish, half-American, a description that is both accurate and incomplete. If I am permitted insider status, it is both because of and at the cost of this unperceived other side of who I am.

Because Ulysses transposes the epic hero’s journey into the quotidian mode, Bloom is often referred to as an everyman protagonist. Chapter Ten (or “Wandering Rocks”), with its polyphonic chorus of voice upon voice, seems to raise this matter directly: Could anyone be the protagonist of Ulysses? Could the Catholic priest be the focal character as well as the shop assistant, the daydreaming secretary as well as the gentleman placing bets on the horse races? The answer, I think, is no. Bloom is not a ho-hum man without qualities, and he is not the average Dubliner. Joyce’s choice to cast his main character as a member of a minority group about which Dublin society seems at best largely ill at ease charts the course for the entire novel.

Joyce’s choice to cast his main character as a member of a minority group charts the course for the entire novel.

In the same chapter that sees Bloom violently threatened by “the citizen,” another of the pub-goers contemptuously dubs him as a “mixed middling.” In context, this epithet refers to the perceived feminine qualities Bloom has, resulting in a “mix” of gender attributes that the speaker finds laughable. Yet it can also, I think, be stretched to include his ethnically mixed background. And the key mark of Bloom’s status as a “mixed middling” is his capacity for empathy, an idea expressed most forcefully in the final chapter, “Penelope,” which also constitutes a recapitulation of stream-of-consciousness narration. Structured as eight breathless sentences narrated by Bloom’s wife Molly before she falls asleep, much of the soliloquy’s attitude towards Bloom is anger, yet at one point, casting her mind back to her engagement, Molly softens, remembering that she chose him because he “understood or felt what a woman is.” This same wish to “understand and feel” is present everywhere, from when Bloom idly muses about how a cat must see the world to when, thinking about a female acquaintance who is in the hospital after delivering a baby, he considers the pain of childbirth and what social reforms might be enacted to ensure proper care for all expectant mothers. The quest to meet the other on equal footing is one that sets Bloom apart from so many of his interlocutors, and it is one that is engendered by his status as an outsider — the same spirit that sees him puzzling out Latin inscriptions in a church early on in the novel. Because immediate understanding is not granted to him freely, Bloom has learned the habit of imagining the world through other eyes. Those belonging to the majority — whether in Joyce’s fictional Dublin of the past or my real Dublin of the present — have the freedom not to have to imagine, a freedom which metastasizes into a desire not to understand others for whom their easy insider knowledge is not a given. To cast Bloom as an everyman, in other words, is to give short shrift to the crucial trait that distinguishes Bloom from the crowds through which he walks.

Joyce does not allow Bloom the triumphant return of Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus defeats the suitors who have swarmed around Penelope in his absence; Bloom, by contrast, knowingly allows Molly’s lover to visit her, justifying his decision not to act with the words “Prevent useless.” Not every homecoming can be a happy one.

The winter I turned 23, the winter I encountered antisemitism in Ireland for the first time, was not so much a homecoming as a realization that perhaps I was not home at all. It was not that I had thought antisemitism did not exist in Ireland (though up until that point the dooryard of my life had been swept mercifully clear of it). But in both instances mentioned above the speakers were my family, flesh of my flesh, people whom I loved. They knew me, knew what I was, what my father was. And still they spoke as they did. Though I had been raised in America, Ireland was where we spent our summers, where I celebrated most of my childhood birthdays; it was the place I had long imagined I would move to when I grew up. But the realization that the people I cared about most understood neither Jewishness nor, seemingly, the fact of my Jewishness forced me to rethink how truly I could belong there.

Belonging, curiously, never seems to be a question that Bloom contemplates directly in the novel; any possibility of self-pity seems defeated by his own curiosity. His mind flits ravenlike from thing to thing to thing; he imagines metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, and what if everyone were someone else, and if our spirits might all flow together over the bridges and through the streets, beneath the roofs of the city and the apathy of the stars in heaven.

Here Are the Books Every Recent Graduate Really Needs to Read

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You might have heard that Bill Gates is giving a book to every person graduating college in the U.S. this year. The book is Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Rosling was a Swedish statistician, physician, and global health advocate, who wrote the book to combat the attack against facts by illuminating the ten human tendencies that keep us from seeing the facts. Then he presents loads of data to back him up. Rosling passed away before the book was published, and it was completed by his son and daughter-in-law.

The book certainly has a valiant mission — and we do need to talk about facts (now more than ever!). But along with Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, Factfulness can also be understood as a book about why we are all doing better than we think we are. Which is just another way to say — “Hey graduates! Dive in to the status quo. The water’s fine enough.” Which of course, it isn’t. It’s important for graduates to feel freshly enraged. We need graduates to feel enlightened by their education and the history that precedes them, but we also need them to feel empowered to dismantle the systems the rest of us might feel like we’re already mired in.

We need graduates to feel enlightened by their education and the history that precedes them, but we also need them to feel empowered to dismantle the systems the rest of us might feel like we’re already mired in.

Gates is trying to help, and I’m sure Hans Rosling’s book has really wonderful insights to offer. But if every graduate is gifted one book as they enter the basal monotony threatening the other side of adulthood? (And we imagine a utopia in which every graduate reads it?) Then they deserve a better book.

Maybe some of Tracy K. Smith’s poetry, to remind them to look up, pay attention, and observe structures that can contain the known and unknown. Or a children’s book — like Kenny’s Window by Maurice Sendak. Or The Dispossessed, to put ideas in their heads about alternatives to capitalism. It was hard to pick one, so I reached out to authors I admire, as well as Electric Literature staff and contributors, to ask: if you had Bill Gates’s philanthropic purse, which book would you buy for every graduate in 2018? After gathering their answers I started to take notes for my own summer syllabus to keep me forever young.

How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ

Because in it, she clearly and brilliantly demonstrates the ways dominant groups affect culture by (subtly, sometimes unconsciously) devaluing the art of women and other minority groups. If we gave this book to every graduate in the U.S. — or even better, assigned/taught it to every student in the U.S. — I think the world would actively become a better place. — Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties

The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race edited by Jesmyn Ward

Any and everyone should be aware of how race intrinsically affects people in America as we go into the world out of academia. Lessons learned in the classroom can be many, yet they may also be confined to a particular viewpoint. What we learn through expression as well as experience (and most importantly listening) can garner increased awareness on how to look at life but also how we each have a responsibility to be aware of how life affects others. I think The Fire This Time broaches those realities while also giving insight to a worldview that is not often taught in the classroom. — Jennifer Baker, contributing editor, Electric Literature

I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

About a young person starting out on the bottom, full of all the beauty, wonder, surprise, heartache and tragedy of a fully lived life. — Kelly Luce, editor, Recommended Reading Commuter

The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

Frankie Addams is desperate to be included in her sister’s wedding, and the “green and crazy” summer marks a painful and exhilarating inflection point in her life. But The Member of the Wedding is much more than a coming of age novel. Frankie, like so many young people, wants to escape her circumstances. She is interested in breaking boundaries of manner and tradition, but also of gender and race, and one hopes she preserves her strong mindedness into adulthood, just when she is most at risk for allowing it to fade. — Halimah Marcus, executive director, Electric Literature

Kindred by Octavia Butler

Too many high school graduates finish with fiction the minute they finish school, but this suspenseful fable about a woman sent back in time and forced to labor on the slave plantation where her ancestors toiled checks every post-high-school box: it’s instantly likable, perpetually timely, and readably accessible to young adults without even hinting at condescension. What a lot of readers — young and old — seem to need in fiction, clear-cut heroes and villains, are represented here, as are difficult moral choices, and life lessons that have the added benefit of being true. — John Cotter, author of Under the Small Lights

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

People will think I’ve only read one book but The Idiot is a good one — it’s wonderful to read years after college but also captures all the weirdness of being between the real world and still a student. — Lucie Shelly, senior editor, Recommended Reading

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

This is HIGHLY EMBARRASSING, but the first thing that sprang to mind was Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Not only a white guy, but one of those white guys white guys are always white-guying about! But one skill I think people of all ages need right now is the ability to be skeptical of the easy categories they’re handed (including “white guy,” not for nothing) — the ready-made affinity groups you can slide into and shut down thought. Sometimes finding those groups opens you up to yourself and the world, because you finally feel understood and accepted, which makes so many other things possible — but they can also warp your view of other people, both the “us-es” and the “thems,” and they’re such cozy cages that unless you’re alert to the dangers you sink right into whatever self-affirming viewpoint is being offered. At best, that gives us the beautiful explosion of proud identity groups the internet has facilitated, but at worst it gives us fucking Nazis, so you know: let’s be vigilant about granfalloons, okay? Handle with care. — Jess Zimmerman, editor-in-chief, Electric Literature

Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World by Timothy Morton

Instead of telling graduates “Everything’s fine!” I’m thinking “Mobilize the troops!” Timothy Morton’s writing is brilliant and weird and surprisingly accessible, and definitely has the capacity to blow some minds. This book is all about why it’s so hard for us to process global warming as a concept — its massive scale in time and space dwarfs human understanding — which lulls us into inaction. But “the hyperobject spells doom now”! Even if the kids can’t stop global warming, maybe this will help them come to terms with it. — Elisa Gabbert, author of The Self Unstable, The Blunt Instrument columnist

City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp by Ben Rawlence

City of Thorns chronicles the lives of the forgotten refugees stuck in limbo in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, some of whom have been there for 26 years. There are more forcibly displaced people now than ever before in history (65.6 million worldwide in 2017), but with the rise of anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment across the world, fewer and fewer countries are willing to provide resettlement. In an era of fake news and xenophobia, City of Thorns is a timely read that helps to humanize and provide insight into the global refugee crisis.— Jo Lou, assistant editor, Electric Literature

The World’s Most Beautiful Bookstores

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I love traveling, though sadly I suck at planning my trips. Whenever I get home whether its from another state or another country, I unpack my bags, settle in, then immediately hear of some fantastic attraction I was foolish enough to miss.

Some things I don’t mind skipping out on. Base jumping is always a pass since I’m terrified of heights. Fashion doesn’t really strike my fancy either. But there are few things more tragic than knowing I strolled through the streets of a far off city and walked right past a book attraction I may never get the chance to see again. How was I to know that inconspicuous, little doorway held a literary landscape beyond my wildest imaginings? Why couldn’t I have heard of it sooner?

I write this list with a heaping spoonful of regret. This is a collection of bookstores that got away. Each one is a marvel that I gather now in hopes that awareness of these outstanding bookstores will keep you from making the same mistake next time you travel.

Cărturești Carusel, Bucharest, Romania

Built back in the 1860s and later transformed into the headquarters for the Chrissoveloni Bank, this Romanian bookstore holds more than 10,000 square feet of library area, a bistro, and gorgeous white columned architecture that could put many art galleries to shame.

Shakespeare & Company, Paris, France

A lovely independent bookstore on the Rue de la Bûcherie in Paris, Shakespeare & Co was founded by an American George Whitman in what was originally a 17th century monastery. Fun fact: it was made to be a retreat for the literarily inclined, and early in its life, the bookstore welcomed Tumbleweeds — wandering writers, poets, and intellectuals — to sleep over on the store benches in exchange for mini autobiographies.

Merci Used Book Cafe, Paris, France

The menu might seem pricey, but their signature tea time scones and massive wall-spanning bookshelves make it all worth it. With a 10,000 used book library, guests are free to snag a book, munch on snacks, and enjoy the Parisian ambiance.

Livraria Lello, Porto, Portugal

The Lello brothers, José and António, were such big book nerds that in 1881 they opened a bookstore and publishing house of their own. Later redesigned by famous bookshop engineer Francisco Xavier Esteves, Livraria Lello’s beauty is almost overwhelming with elaborate wood carvings, stained glass, and busts of famous Portuguese writers.

Cafebrería El Péndulo, Mexico City, Mexico

Although two stories chock full of books and a delicious cafe are appealing, the real draw to this Mexico City bookstore is the greenery that sets a naturalistic mood. Leaves and vines curl around the shelves, giving visitors the experience of reading in the middle of a forest.

Libreria Acqua Alta, Venice, Italy

New and used books pile up in literal gondolas in this boat-themed book shop. And if a boat for a bookshelf isn’t wacky enough for you, then make your way to the back where you can find a tall stacked staircase of books—with a paddle for a handrail, of course.

El Ateneo, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Between the ceiling frescos, balconies, and luxuriously red curtained stage, books take the place of an audience in this repurposed theater. Renovated by architect Fernando Manzone in 2000, the book and music was once home to tango performances, a radio station, and a cinema before settling into its current form.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CNu2ECgLXk0/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Boekhandel Dominicanen, Maastricht, Netherlands

Located in a 13th-century Dominican Church, which happens to be a national monument in Maastricht, the “book flat” covers two floors and nearly 200 feet of bookshelves almost as tall as the Gothic style ceiling itself. Don’t forget to grab a drink by the coffee corner in the choir.

Poplar Kid’s Republic, Beijing, China

Definitely bring your hyperactive little ones along to this playground of a bookstore. Opened by a Japanese children’s book publisher, Poplar brings to life all the reading room fantasies I had as a kid with its rainbow decor and odd reading nooks.

Zhongshuge Bookstore, Hangzhou, China

It would be easy to get vertigo in this strategically designed bookstore. Constructed with purposeful optical illusions, height-based aesthetic, and mirrored ceilings, Zhongshuge gives the impression of an infinite space composed only of books (and conveniently placed cushions for plopping down with a book).

Albertine Books, New York, U.S.

Hidden inside the French Embassy in New York, this tiny bookstore features books in French, French books in translation, and upstairs, the most beautiful ceiling east of the Sistine Chapel. Regardez les étoiles!

Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, New York, U.S.

Nestled in the heart of Soho is this hidden gem that features a grand spiral staircase, decorative columns, and rows and rows of donated books illuminated under the warm glow of fairy-lights. The bookstore cafe is staffed entirely by volunteers and 100% of their proceeds go towards benefitting the homeless living with HIV/AIDS.

The 7 Most Amazing Tunnels, Towers, and Mazes Made of Books

The Last Bookstore, Los Angeles, U.S.

The largest new and used book and record store in California, The Last Bookstore’s name is a call out and a promise that classics like vinyl and (gasp) paper books will always be in style. The bookshelf labyrinth on the upper floor gives “getting lost in a book” an entirely new meaning.

Bart’s Books, Ojai, U.S.

As the largest independent outdoor bookstore in the U.S., Bart’s has so many books that the cases comes spilling out onto the sidewalk for passersby to browse. If you find something you like, feel free to drop a few dollars in can outside, and take it merrily on your way. No need to wait in line.

Atlantis Books, Santorini, Greece

With a tagline like “A Decade of Amateur Bookselling” you know this is a shop with personality. On top of an amazing view, Atlantis organizes numerous readings, screenings, and even dance parties.

Daunt Books, London, U.K.

Built in an Edwardian style and made for an antiquarian bookseller, Daunt prides itself on catering to travelers. With shelves organized not by fiction or nonfiction but by country, the main gallery provides a wonderfully unique browsing experience that feels like a tour around the world.

Barter Books, Alnwick, U.K.

An open fire may not be the best idea in a bookstore, but it sure does feel great in the winter time. Finding a home inside an abandoned Victorian railway station, this giant second hand bookstore is remarkably cosy for its size and will tempt visitors to sit back and relax after spotting the reading material of their choice.

Word on the Water, London, U.K.

This floating bookshop was in danger of shutting down not too long ago, but after six months of drifting around, the barge has set its anchor near Kings Cross in London. Books, jazz, and a friendly dog are always ready to greet those meandering by the water.

Leakey’s Bookshop, Inverness, Scotland

Another bookstore in a church, Leakey’s boasts of a fantastic cafe and rare prints. One of the largest bookshops in Scotland, the woodburning stove and two floors of stacked literature is ideal for visitors who wander in.

Book and Bed, Tokyo

Those of us who fall asleep while promising just one more chapter will feel perfectly at home in this “accommodation bookshop.” This hostel doesn’t just sell books—it sells shelves and bunks for the ultimate “night in the bookstore” experience.

I’m Not Here to Play the Suffering Minority for White Readers

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“Nice job!” says someone who’s come up behind me at the line for the bathroom.

I turn around — they’re smiling at me. A white friend of a white MFA classmate. Sara without an h, friend of Thom with an h. But I’m confused: what have I done to deserve this praise, however generically phrased? What is the job I’ve performed nicely? It’s intermission at a graduate reading and we’re standing on the second floor of a house that a group of MFA classmates share. Maybe I’m being praised for how patiently I’m waiting here to pee.

When I don’t say anything, h-less Sara adds, “That was a wonderful reading!”

And then I want to say, “Wait, whose friend are you, again?”

I want to ask, “You think I’m the one who just read? When I was in the audience, like you? You watched another Asian American writer for twenty whole minutes and then came to congratulate me? Because there can only be one?”

White writers say to me that they wish they had this kind of suffering to write about.

I have trouble remembering how I actually responded. A part of me tries to explain the incident away: Sara saw me from behind; registered my height, skin tone, and hair; made a quick guess. Still, the other Asian American writer’s hair was longer than mine, and wavy. We were also wearing different shirts, pants, shoes. I was wearing glasses. The house was brightly lit. I turned around after hearing “Nice job!”

I’ve been socialized to seek alternative explanations for white people’s erasure of me. I’ve been taught to see isolated mistakes, not a pattern of harm that began long before graduate school, a history of harm long before I came into the world. At the same time, white readers expect me to write about this harm. White writers say to me that they wish they had this kind of suffering to write about, since it’s what’s “hot” in publishing right now.

I wish the racism were not so predictable. I don’t want to seem predictable in my response. I fear that I’m playing into the image of the Suffering Minority that tends to garner praise from white readers. “Nice job!” Do they mean my wistful stare? My famously Asian stoic resilience? Do they even mean me, or do they mean someone else who looks like me — since all they’re paying attention to is a general, generic Asianness? I worry that even when I write with humor, with sarcasm and absurdity, a white reader will see only the Racial Woe. I worry that even when I write of delight and tenderness and pug dogs, a white reader will still proclaim, “This is clearly about how hard it was to immigrate.”

I worry that even when I write of delight and tenderness and pug dogs, a white reader will proclaim, ‘This is clearly about how hard it was to immigrate.’

After a recent reading, a white attendee came up to tell me how they were on their way to their Chinese friend’s place to make dumplings. They highlighted a poem of mine in which a mother and son make dumplings together; they were definitely going to mention this poem to their Chinese friend. On the one hand, I was glad this person found something to connect with in my work and I could tell they were excited by the coincidence — my poem, their plans for the rest of the evening. On the other hand, I’d thought the poem was investigating a much more complicated relationship to Chineseness, one that acknowledges the role of pop culture and texts like The Joy Luck Club, one that is hesitant to include a dumpling-making scene because of an awareness of white readers’ expectations.

I’d intended the poem to subvert such expectations. Instead, this white audience member seemed to feel that their expectations had been met. To them, the dumplings were an example of straightforward Chineseness, something that bonded two generations in their immigrant hardship. This interpretation felt like another instance of “Nice job!” — a form of praise that is about the white reader’s relationship to otherness, rather than about what the writer of color is exploring in their relationship to an identity category and the associated set of cultural practices.

How anyone ends up interpreting my work is out of my hands, of course; I can’t expect in-depth analysis every time, especially after just one reading event. I believe in the complexity of what I’ve created; I hope that readers will, in their own time, discover that. But here, too, is a pattern, a history: white readers tend to be the ones commenting on or asking about the obviously Chinese references in my work. Rarely am I asked by white readers about my references to Pablo Neruda or to Audre Lorde or to, in that same poem with the dumplings, Mahmoud Darwish. I don’t always expect close reading or listening. I’m asking for reading, listening. When I think back to that dumpling-loving white audience member, I wonder if they would’ve said exactly the same thing to Amy Tan, after a reading of hers. Is “I’m going to make dumplings with my Chinese friend” just a thing one says to any writer of Chinese descent?

When I tweeted the other week about some of these issues — in particular, how white writers say they wish they had racial suffering to write about, to get published for — I got another type of response that I’ve come to anticipate: “Those writers are just jealous of your success!” And this response was coming from white writers who seemed to understand my overall argument. I mention the “just jealousy” explanation here because it inadvertently implies that white writers are not really saying or doing racist things; they’re expressing an emotion that, while bad, is human. So once again white writers get to be fully human, full of emotions. The “just jealousy” explanation makes me think of all the times I’ve confided in a white colleague that someone said something racist and then the colleague said, “Oh they must be upset because…” or “They’re only acting like that because…” as though the problem is not racism but a personal issue, and I’m supposed to empathize.

I don’t want to do that emotional labor. And I don’t want to do a “nice job.” I want to keep digging into the messiness that is my relationship to race, as well as sexuality, as well as the napping rhino at the Seneca Park Zoo in Rochester, New York. I’m working toward a language that’s accurate about and embracing of the kinds of joy I feel, the kinds of sorrow, the kinds of emotion not visible to the white gaze. I want to say, this poem starring a napping rhino is an Asian American poem; in fact, despite it not being about how hard it was to immigrate, it is the most Asian American poem I have ever written.

7 Books About Escaping Religious Fundamentalism

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It wasn’t until the Episcopal Church ordained its first woman bishop in 1989 that I realized all the other bishops in our church, past and present, were men. I remember standing in our kitchen holding the newspaper clipping with Barbara Harris’s photo in my hand. I remember learning about the death threats and overhearing that a faction of the Church had decided to splinter off to protest her ordination. It was horrible. But what was worse, in my mind, was that the Church I loved and that I thought loved me, the Church for which my own father worked as a priest, had condoned a status quo equivalent to the sort of discrimination I thought it stood against. I was ten years old.

Purchase the novel

This feeling of awakening and betrayal is central to my debut novel, The Book of Essie, in which seventeen-year-old Esther Hicks is forced to question the authority of her own parents and her father’s cChurch when she discovers she is pregnant. The stakes are high for Essie, the star of her family’s reality show, but they may be even higher for her family, whose entire media empire would be threatened if the truth about Essie’s pregnancy became known.

In writing The Book of Essie, I drew from my own reading of other stories in which characters struggle to express themselves within the confines of a fundamentalist religion, some of whom find it necessary to break free. Here are a few favorites.

Disobedience by Naomi Alderman

The author is currently receiving accolades for her best-selling and timely novel The Power, but her debut (newly adapted into a movie) is equally lovely. In it, Ronit Krushka narrates her return to London from New York following the death of her father, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. Prior to her moving away, Ronit had a brief and forbidden affair with her friend Esti, who is now married to Dovid, Ronit’s cousin and her father’s heir apparent at the synagogue. Ronit must negotiate these relationships and their complicated history, while at the same time learning how to grieve a father from whom she had been so long estranged.

‘The Power’ Is the Perfect Book for the #MeToo Movement

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

In this groundbreaking tale, the narrator is referred to only as Offred, her own individuality having been forcibly supplanted by her role as handmaid to the commander, Fred, whose name she assumes for the duration of her assignment. We learn that the Republic of Gilead was established after a religious revolution in the former United States and that fertile women are scarce. To combat low birth rates, these women are assigned to high-level government officials, a form of sex slavery rationalized by its Biblical origins. Offred’s ordeal is horrific, but it is also based, according to the author, on historical precedent. In addition to being adapted into an award-winning Hulu series, the novel is sadly more relevant than ever.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

This classic, frequently taught in schools, is the story of Hester Prynne, who is shamed for an “illegitimate” pregnancy in 17th century Puritan Massachusetts, an area I call home. When she refuses to name her lover, Hester’s judgment is decided jointly by government and church officials and they consider putting her to death. Ultimately, in a sentence considered merciful, Hester is instead punished by being forced onto the town’s scaffold for a period of public scorn. She is also forced to wear a scarlet A on her chest, marking her as an adulteress forever.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

The Price family — mother, father, and four daughters — travel as missionaries to a remote village in the Belgian Congo in the late 1950s. The novel is largely narrated by the Price girls, each of whom is impacted differently by the move itself and by their father’s fumbling attempts to deliver the local villagers from what he sees as Godlessness and ignorance. Kingsolver does an excellent job of dismantling Nathan Price’s white savior complex and leaves the reader with a richer understanding and respect for the region in which the story is set.

Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

In this haunting memoir, the author describes her own experiences after the Iranian Revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nafisi, a professor of English literature, was teaching at the University of Tehran in 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini decreed that all women must adhere to the Islamic dress code, including compulsory head covering. Nafisi refused and was expelled from the university. She later adopts the mandatory dress and teaches elsewhere for many years. After resigning, she teaches privately in her home and her students read, among other works of western literature, Nabokov’s Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov Taught Me How to Be a Feminist

Ruby by Cynthia Bond

Liberty Township is a small and isolated African American community in east Texas when the novel opens in 1974. Ephram, the late preacher’s son, lives with and is worried over by his sister, Celia, who aspires to a position of prominence in their church. Ruby, with whom Ephram played as a child, has returned from New York and is widely understood to be crazy, an assessment based on her tendency to walk naked through the streets. Ephram is drawn to Ruby and, through their touching and unconventional love story, the two are able to piece together her traumatic past. They are opposed, however, by their congregation, who prefer to ostracize Ruby rather than help her heal.

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

This graphic novel is a memoir set against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution, which occurred when the author was ten. Satrapi recounts how schools became segregated by gender and girls were forced to wear veils. The revolution was followed by the Iran-Iraq War, during which a Scud missile destroyed a neighbor’s house and killed Satrapi’s friend. In the wake of this loss, she becomes more rebellious, even speaking out against the regime. Eventually, fearing that Satrapi could be arrested or even killed, her family decides to send her to Austria to complete her education. Persepolis 2 describes the author’s homecoming and young adulthood in Iran.

Believe It or Not, I Learned Something About Love and Virtue from “Atlas Shrugged”

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

I misunderstood three things the summer I ran off to New Orleans in 2009. The first was love. The second was goodness. The third was Atlas Shrugged.

It was my first summer after college, and I returned to my small town in Wyoming to work at a local grocery store and deli. I chopped and stacked piles of cured meats and pulled the guts out of rotisserie chickens for eight hours a day. It was a monotonous $7.50/hour, punctuated only by daydreams about the big story that I was going to write.

After about a month on the job, I learned that my female co-workers were making 50 cents less than me an hour. I promptly confronted the store owner about this, and when he denied any knowledge of what was going on, I typed a strongly-worded letter, taped it to his door, and quit my job. Then I ran away to New Orleans to build houses with Habitat for Humanity.

At this point, you’re probably getting a pretty good sense of the type of person I was. I was a perpetual do-gooder, blindly throwing myself at any cause that happened to get in my path. Building houses post-Katrina, building latrines in Kenya, mentoring troubled youth — this was where I put my energy. At the time, I believed that my participation (or lack thereof) in things was important, that in order to be good you must perform goodness.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that my feelings about do-gooding were inextricably tied to my self-hatred.

But before we can talk about that, we have to talk about how Atlas Shrugged and I made our way to New Orleans. I’d ordered the book online after I’d seen an internet forum thread that practically yodeled its praises. A big part of my performing goodness was reading books that I believed would teach me how to be good. And what better book to bring on a trip to do good than a door-stopping guide to capitalism?

I remember fondly the colorful front facade of the small hostel that greeted me when I stepped from my airport taxi. While I forget the name, it had a small placard hanging from the front that just welcomed you right in. The place had a constant influx of new arrivals from various countries, plus a few old hands. The former were people like me (Rand-boy) and a young chain-smoking man who was emulating Kerouac; the latter included a recent USMC veteran who sat by the pool that nobody swam in all day and a pot-smoking couple who worked in movies.

I smoked pot for the first time with that couple, I got drunk for the first time with the veteran (we ate watermelon soaked in vodka). While I did all this, I read and misinterpreted what Ayn Rand was saying, all the while trying to look deep while I was doing it.

Rand was writing that all our problems arise from us not doing capitalism right. Worth, in Atlas Shrugged and her other work, is directly connected to creating things in your mind and making them real objects. Your worth is in what you do. It sounds nice, especially to a teenager. I think this quote (when we’re being introduced to John Galt’s utopia) sums it up:

Miss Taggart, we have no laws in this valley, no rules, no formal organization of any kind. We come here because we want to rest. But we have certain customs, which we all observe, because they pertain to the things we need to rest from. So I’ll warn you now that there is one word which is forbidden in this valley: the word “give.”

For Rand, the ultimate failing of the world is that people do things for other people rather than themselves. We create worth for others, in her metric, by creating it for ourselves with impunity. In this framework, cooperation is not the thing that got us out of the caves — will to power and creativity did.

I read somewhere once about the teenage impulse to point at the world and call bullshit. My teenage impulse was different. My impulse was to point at myself and call bullshit. Every single page, from John Galt’s ridiculous million-page monologue to the most unromantic relationship of all time between two characters whose names I’ve forgotten, felt like an indictment of who I was. A useless do-gooder. A “giver.” Secretly, I believed it. If I truly wanted to help others, I would help myself first.

During the day, I would install soffit (the material that allows a roof to vent on the eaves of a home) on the sides of quick-build relief housing for victims of Katrina. At night, I would read a bristling fusillade criticizing the weak and the downtrodden. At the time, the contradiction meant little to me.

Then, I met Renna.

Renna was German. She was beautiful, but that was secondary. She had seen the movies I had seen, read the theater that I cared about, and carried herself with a grace and intelligence that I still try to emulate. The first second I met her, I was in love, and in the second second, I knew that I was never going to be enough, because a person that thinks in binaries is uninteresting to those who don’t.

The first second I met her, I was in love, and in the second second, I knew that I was never going to be enough.

We met because people meet in places like this, and I had borrowed scissors from the front desk to cut my fingernails (like a barbarian, which the desk clerk informed me of after she snatched them from my hands having seen what I was doing). After this little tiff, Renna walked over and struck up a conversation with me. She did not agree with the clerk’s shaming.

For the next few weeks, I adapted to a routine: wake up, go build houses and explore the city a bit, return to the hostel, and follow Renna around like a puppy dog.

When you’re a teenager, all you can see is the bullshit and the suffering. When you become an adult, you learn to ignore it. You learn the impracticality of caring when it comes to suffering. How can one person take on the weight of the world? One person is so small, so insignificant, so overblown with their sense of importance.

What I hadn’t realized at the time was the bald-faced cruelty of a philosophy like Objectivism. It caters to self-hatred, and the hatred of the other because it divides people into the weak and the strong, the capable and the incapable. You are in one camp or the other. And when you can only see the world in two extremes — bad and good, love and hate — it’s a simple switch from one extreme to the other.

When you can only see the world in two extremes — bad and good, love and hate — it’s a simple switch from one extreme to the other.

It violates one of the most important values I now hold dear: that every human being is a unique entity. There will never be another like you, twee as that sounds. That is the true crime that a philosophy like Objectivism caters to — it tells the weak (i.e. everyone) that to bond, to cooperate, to serve others and ask the same in return, is the tack of the feeble-minded and frail. Contributing to capitalist machinery that is driven by human suffering is not a choice for most of us, but to pump our fists as it chews its way through our neighbors and loved ones is a special type of dark and cruel ideology.

Renna and I connected on social media at the end of her trip, and I think she felt something for me before she left, but I don’t think that matters. Don’t mistake this for some sort of story about how if I’d been enough of a bad boy, enough of a man, I would have gotten what I wanted. That’s violent, masculine nonsense, driven and reinforced by works like Atlas Shrugged. Weak loses, strong wins. That philosophy is reductive and demeaning. I did not understand it at the time, but the truth was that I had no idea what I wanted. I was a blank slate, allowing others to paint my beliefs for me.

Because of this, I failed Renna and myself. The truth was that I couldn’t even see her. My inattention made her a non-character, an object on my path to whatever I was seeking — sex, attention, validation, I still don’t know what it was. But what likely happened was that I was so consumed with my thoughts about self-worth, my thoughts about whether I was valuable or not, I failed to see a person.

I had no idea what I wanted. I was a blank slate, allowing others to paint my beliefs for me.

In the height of my self-hatred, I actually believed and internalized what this book had to say. That we are transactional beings, that our worth is in our labors and our service to our goals and God-given skill. That somehow, if I quit my job in service of a principle, that if I went and did ostensibly “good” things, that if I was kind enough, nice enough, skilled enough, what I wanted would simply make itself available to me — the labor itself would craft a way forward. I would get the girl, and I would get love. Because I had earned it. Ultimately, it was not my doing good that was the problem, it was my reasoning.

Something that I’ve learned after many long and painful lessons (and continue to learn daily), is that the beating heart of love is in asking. It is not in proving or earning. You don’t “get” love. Loving and being loved is a profound act of bravery and vulnerability because you ask simple questions that can never be fully answered: “Will you care for me? Will you think about me before yourself? Will you cooperate with me?”

Maybe I didn’t read Atlas Shrugged wrong at all. Maybe I read it exactly the right way. But reading in this way leaves you with an empty heart. There is always more work to be done. Goodness is hard, and there is no reward for it. There is no reward in a life well-lived. Goodness and kindness are only worthwhile because the alternative is an impoverished life spent reducing everything to objects and obstacles, including things you claim to love.

Somehow, John Galt didn’t manage to get that across.

Alissa Nutting Recommends a Story About the Aftermath of Abuse

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“Lady Tigers”

by Nick White

Rusty sat behind the wheel of the bus and watched the sky turn sour. A year ago, when his father had coached the Lady Tigers, he’d been expected to serve as the team’s water boy in addition to his regular duties as their bus driver. But Coach Culpepper, bless him, had no such expectations. He told Rusty he could stay on board. After all, Rusty was a senior and probably had important tests to study for. He didn’t.

Last night, after her shift at the Piggly Wiggly, his mom had brought him home the latest Catwoman to help him pass the time during the ball game, but his attention had been sidetracked by the onslaught of sky bracketed within the bus’s windshield. Skies were bigger in the Delta than in the hilly country he was used to. He knew that — everyone did — and yet its bigness still surprised him. The sky pushed on and on. Great swaths of blue every which way. It was a marvel the Lady Tigers could hobble bases and throw balls with so much vastness bearing down on them. Eventually, he spotted in the distance a blue so deep it was purple. Only not purple, no. A sootiness inching toward the ballpark. An infection.

For two innings, the thundercloud spread, billowing out of itself like smoke, soaking up light as it grew. The bus didn’t face the diamond, but Rusty could make out the sounds of the game, the clink of metal bats, the random chants from the opposing team, the Lady Stars. Now hush, you don’t want none of us! Before he realized it, late morning looked more like early evening, and a vein of lightning cracked through the cloud mass. Fat raindrops followed, slapping hard against the windshield, warping the world liquid.

Then he heard them: the Lady Tigers, as they slammed against the side of the bus like blind cows, hollering to be let inside. He pulled the lever above the stick, and the accordion-like door squeezed open. In they hurtled, one by one, smelling of sweat and hair spray, popping Bubble Yum, clad in their black and gold uniforms. Number 12 lumbered up first. Eyeblack smeared down her rosy cheeks, her topknot all but destroyed. The bat bag strapped to her shoulders nearly clocked him in the side of the head as she plodded by. More of them were close behind, pushing to get in out of the rain: Numbers 45 and 62 and 33 and 8. They were yammering on about a female ref’s bad calls and possible “dykeyness.” “Licky, Licky,” said Number 16, the only black Lady Tiger, causing her teammates to squeal.

By the time the coach shoved on, he was soaked. His black polo clung to his torso, his nipples poking through. He held a clipboard in one hand and toted an orange Gatorade cooler with the other.

“Naw, your poor coach don’t need any help,” he said, fake mad and huffing.

The Lady Tigers tittered. “You’ll melt in the water, Coachie,” Number 36 said. “You so sweet.”

Rusty tried to grab the cooler, but the coach waved him away with his clipboard, dousing Rusty’s glasses with rain water.

“Crank us up.” The coach threw the clipboard onto the seat behind Rusty and slung the cooler down the aisle, colliding it with Number 8’s hindquarters.

“Hey!” she said. “That’s my caboose!”

He told her he knew good and goddamn well what it was and to shut up about it and set the cooler on top of the spare tire while she was at it.

Turning back to Rusty, he said, “Why ain’t we movin’?”

The bus door was still open, and rain spat in.

“Looks kind of bad, don’t it?” he said. “Shouldn’t we, um, wait it out?”

The coach leaned forward and removed Rusty’s glasses. He called over Number 2, who was somehow remarkably drier than the others, and used her jersey to wipe off the lenses. As he placed them back onto Rusty’s face, his fingers grazed Rusty’s ears, sending a shock of gooseflesh down his back.

“You get us on home now,” the coach said, using the same steady voice he’d used the week before when reciting a Miller Williams poem to Rusty’s AP English class.

“Well,” Rusty said. “Sure thing, Coach.”

He woke up the engine, balancing his feet between the clutch and brake. The bus roared alive, two parts diesel, one part magic. He could feel it in his groin, the energy all throttled up. Before he let off the brake, the coach yelled, “Hey, Rus, you may want to close the damn door.”

Door, yes. After it had been snapped shut, he shifted to first and guided the massive enterprise toward the road. The exhaust pipe popped off like a shotgun blast, the noise so deep he felt it in his molars. He was already on the interstate before he realized the sound had not been the bus backfiring at all, but thunder.

Only about five feet of road showed itself to Rusty at a time even with the headlights on bright. The rest was coated in murk. They were going along at forty, sometimes slower when approaching pockets of muddy water pooled in dips in the road. It was a solid two hours from home at a normal pace, but at this rate, it would be dinnertime before they rolled up to the high school.

Not that anyone on board seemed to mind. The Lady Tigers he eyed in the big circle mirror had donned headphones. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s latest CD E. 1999 Eternal had been making the rounds on some of their Walkmans. To Rusty, their music was softer than what the girls normally listened to. Eerie lullabies more spirit than music, as if the singers were performing their melodies somewhere between the here and the hereafter. Two seats back, Numbers 12 and 8 sang along to parts of “Tha Crossroads,” their voices not as ethereal as the original but just as mournful and loud enough for him to make out over the kerplunking rain and almost, almost, enjoy.

The coach lay on the seat behind him. Prime viewing in the rectangular mirror directly above Rusty when he leaned forward a little and cocked his head. A dangerous position, he knew, since it took his focus off the road, but he allowed himself a few glances anyhow. Not likely to have another chance like this one anytime soon: The coach had stripped down to his khaki shorts. He was dozing with his legs bridged across the aisle, his bare feet resting on the seat where his polo and socks had been draped to dry. He’d peeled his clothes from his pink and hairless body with a slowness Rusty had thought impossible in real time.

Lord, he said to himself, remembering it, and put his eyes back on the road. Wind was batting harder against the bus now. An invisible hand nudging them sideways. The coach had claimed the rain would slack up once they’d put some distance between themselves and the Delta. The god-awful Delta, he called it. Like with so many things, the coach had been wrong. The bus seemed bound for perdition, not away from it. Rusty believed in two versions of the coach: the one who taught literature to seniors and wrote poems for the school newspaper, The Growl, and the other one who was desperately over his head and had led the Lady Tigers to the end of a thankless season with no wins. During the era of Rusty’s dad as coach, there had been trophies, special segments devoted to him and “his rowdy girls” on the local news channel, interested recruiters from as far away as Nashville and Hattiesburg. The Lady Tigers had been unbeatable their last season, state champions.

Rusty didn’t like to wallow in thoughts about what went on last year, so he was glad when the coach came to and asked about their location. When he told him, the coach said, “My god, the Delta — it just goes on, don’t it?” Before Rusty could respond, the coach nestled back into his napping position and closed his eyes.

Rusty tilted forward and stole another glance. The coach was not much older than he was. Twenty-three or twenty-four. Fresh out of a nearby regional university with a teaching license. Rusty had been prepared to hate him out of some lingering loyalty to his dad. But his dislike evaporated during his first class with the coach, who came in reciting the famous soliloquy from Macbeth: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” Forney Culpepper — the name stuck in your throat. But otherwise he was beautiful. A boyish face, sandy hair he kept pushed behind his ears. According to The Growl, the coach was from the Delta, which maybe explained why he hated it so much, and a poet, which was what first drew Rusty’s attention. According to Rusty’s mom, who’d seen the coach milling about the Piggly Wiggly, he was also a lover of garbanzo beans and tofu. “Hippy-dippy shit,” she called it, but not unkindly, for she wished him well, thank you very much, and didn’t care who knew it.

Around the end of the first nine weeks of school, The Growl published one of the coach’s poems. A sestina called “Hooch” about a dog killed by a couple’s willful neglect of the animal. After reading it, Rusty bolted from study hall for the bathroom to wipe the wet from his face. He decided not to look at it a second time, though he could recite the repeating end words without even trying: muscle, map, song, touch, trap, break. Rusty mumbled them now as he plunged the bus deeper into a storm that showed no signs of letting up. He noticed the coach was changing positions, sitting up. He was scrutinizing the goings-on outside, and Rusty thought he was about to tell him to pull over. Instead, he placed a foot on the running handrail that separated the driver’s seat from the passenger’s. The foot was not in range of any of Rusty’s mirrors, but he could picture it regardless. The smooth sole, the color of sunrise, relaxing against the chrome bar. The neat toenails, the instep, the delicate wrinkling of skin at the knuckles.

His eyes stayed ahead of him on the road, but he might as well have been turned around, ogling the foot, the naked foot, with his tongue hanging out like that woebegone dog in the coach’s poem. Because he never saw it coming. Whatever it was — a chunk of asphalt, hail, god’s own right fist? A diagonal crack slicing from the bottom left to the top right of the windshield was the only evidence it left behind of itself. After it ricocheted off, Rusty lost control and sent them careering off the road.

The week after he had told his mom he liked boys, his dad confessed to inappropriate behavior with one of the Lady Tigers.

Rusty was stunned.

Not because it had happened, but because he had been around his dad and the Lady Tigers for years and hadn’t suspected a thing. After he showed no talent for sports, Rusty was tasked with being his dad’s lackey, going with him to all the games, keeping stats, pretending to care. His parents were worried about him, the way he did things like a girl, though that’s not exactly how they put it. “Curious,” they called it. When Rusty turned seventeen, his dad insisted he try earning a commercial driver’s license and add chauffeur to his list of duties for the Lady Tiger’s ball club. To his surprise, he passed both the written and driving portions of the test. So he spent his junior year carting the Lady Tigers around the state all while his dad had been sparking with one of them right under his nose.

Rusty had been distracted by his own secrets that year. His name was Robert, but everybody called him Sparse because he was so thin. He was black and wore glasses and had a tongue as red as a canary. When Sparse’s parents found out about them, they sent him to live with an aunt in Memphis, and Rusty had been so depressed he confided in his mom, telling her everything. His mom said at first that she didn’t believe in homosexuals. Rusty told her he was real enough all right, but they both knew what she meant. She suggested that they keep this between them.

So when Rusty’s parents had called him into the living room one evening for a conversation, he assumed he knew the reason. His mom had caved. His dad knew. But no: He was all wrong. In fact, he probably couldn’t be more wrong. His mom did most of the talking. Very factual. The details: His dad had done this and this, and now this was going to happen. Rusty recognized the words but couldn’t comprehend the language.

“Which one?”

Rusty’s dad wouldn’t say at first, and when he finally told him, the name meant little to Rusty. Because they were more pack than team and more team than individual people, he never bothered to learn their names.

“Who?”

Rusty’s dad said, “The pitcher.”

“Oh.” He knew then. “Double zero.”

“What?” His mom said. “What did you say?”

“It’s not important.”

She grabbed her purse and stormed outside. They heard the car pull out of the driveway into the street.

“She’ll be back,” Rusty’s dad said.

Rusty had his doubts.

“Dad, right, so I’m gay.”

“What? No. What?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?” Rusty nodded.

“Hmmm.” His dad walked into the kitchen and poured himself three fingers of Crown Royal.

The next morning Rusty found his mom on the couch, dipping the ashes of her Virginia Slim into an empty can of Tab. “Your father,” she said. “He’s skedaddled.”

“Where to?”

She didn’t know, or if she did, she wasn’t telling.

His glasses had been knocked off, his shirt torn. His nose had taken the worst of it, smashing against the wheel. He remained semiconscious throughout. Conscious enough to realize the coach had been thrown into the stairwell. At first, the coach appeared more flustered than hurt. He clambered out of the entranceway and proceeded to call the Lady Tigers a bunch of bitches and Rusty a shit for a driver. Then his eyes rolled. His feet came out from under him, and he tumbled back down into the stairwell. The Lady Tigers rushed toward him, Number 12 barking orders to everyone else.

Meanwhile, Rusty tasted copper. Blood was eking from his nostrils into his lips. Without asking, Number 45 plugged his nose with tampons. When he tried to stand, Number 8 pushed him back down. She shined a small flashlight into his pupils and declared him to be concussed. He felt okay and tried to say so, but Number 8 said for him not to waste his breath — her mom was a nurse and she knew things, okay? His arms and legs worked. No cuts or bruises. Slowly, surely, the world settled down around him, and he began to understand a few things. For one, the bus rested at a slight angle, its grille buried in the gully of a ditch, the whole front end leaking smoke. For another, the Lady Tigers had divided into two groups. One to see about him, and the other to tend to the coach.

The sight of the shirtless coach being toted out of the stairwell by Numbers 12 and 2 reminded him of a painting. Christ being carried down from the cross. The artist and title of the work escaped him though it was a favorite of his. Just zipped out of his ear into the ether. Maybe he was concussed. They took the coach to the back of the bus and propped him up on the last seat. Because of the incline, they had trouble with his head — it kept drooping forward. Number 62 tried slapping him. When nothing happened, she did it again. Rusty got to his feet and lunged toward them. “What are y’all doing?” he wanted to know. Numbers 45 and 8 blocked the aisle. So he took to the seats, monkey-climbing from one to the other. The whole team swarmed him. Hands grasped at his clothes, and he twisted his body through the melee, pushing against the tangle of arms.

“Coach!” he cried, as Number 45 tackled him, knocking the tampons from his nose. After a mild struggle, she pinned him to the floor.

“I cannot breathe.” Number 45’s heft muffled the edge in his voice.

Number 12 said, “That’s the point.”

A slap of thunder rattled the window latches, and they all seemed to remember the storm outside. Number 2 wondered aloud if they’d ever see a sunny day again. Both Number 8 and 16 remembered passing a gas station a few miles back. One of them even recalled its name: the SpaceWay. “Sounds like salvation to me,” Number 12 said. A plan began to form. They’d wait out the weather, and as soon as it was clear, they’d backtrack to the Space-Way and phone for help. “911 and no fooling,” Number 12 added. Number 62 worried about the coach looking so puny. She suggested another slap to rouse him. Number 8 disagreed, claimed she’d seen something on 20/20 about how violent people got if you woke them up from being knocked out. “That’s sleepwalkers, dummy,” Number 45 said, before asking Number 12 if she thought it was all right if she got up off the sissy. “My ass,” she said, “is falling asleep.”

“I second her proposal,” Rusty said from beneath her.

Number 12 squatted and wanted to know if he was prepared to behave himself. He replied that he didn’t see how he had much of a choice, being outnumbered and all. Which seemed good enough for her. She nodded, and Number 45 pushed off. He leaned up, the blood rushing back to his skull. He yawned so big that his jaws popped. Now closer to the coach, he noticed the knot on the man’s forehead. The Lady Tigers regarded Rusty warily, as if he were a wild animal they weren’t sure would bite or not, as he made his way over to the coach. Rusty rubbed his fingers across the swollen skin. The coach felt warm. Feverish.

“He looks so peaked,” he said. “And we could be here a while.”

“I’m open to suggestions.” Number 12 crossed her arms.

He shook his head. “I’m fresh out.”

“So did you just run us off the road for fun or what?” Number 45 asked.

“Or what,” he told her.

Something like a smirk fixed itself on Number 12’s face, and she told him to call her DeDe.

Thirty minutes later, Number 45 spotted a funnel cloud and screeched. The other Lady Tigers scrambled up and pressed their faces to the windows, looking. Rusty and the coach remained where they were, the very last seats in the back of the bus, Rusty on the right seat and the coach on the left. The coach’s head had tilted against his window, his breath fogging the glass, a dewdrop of spittle in the corner of his mouth. Rusty didn’t like the look of the knot. All shiny, it seemed to grow bigger each time he eyed it. He looked away. He imagined they are still on the road, bound for home. He’s driving and the coach is talking. Not the way he does around the Lady Tigers, but in that quiet, hungry way that falls over him when he considers poetry. “A genuine word eater,” he once described himself, and Rusty tells the coach about Sparse. The time in the park, the time at his house after school. The way it burned the first time he touched himself after Sparse had been sent away. Eat these words. The coach, he understands. All too well, he says. The coach has known heartache too. Their eyes meet in the bus mirror — let’s say the circular one. A hand finds Rusty’s shoulder, squeezes.

The Lady Tigers hadn’t moved for some time. Their faces were turned from him, on alert for cyclones outside. He tried speaking, I am in a dream!, but the words wouldn’t come. The Lady Tigers turned as if they had heard him anyway. They turned and their mouths dropped open and they spoke with thunder.

He jumped awake.

Number 8 sat beside him, cussing. “You have a concussion, dumbass,” she was saying. “No sleepy time for you.”

“What about the coach?”

She told him the coach was a different matter but didn’t bother to elaborate.

A greasy jar of peanut butter was making the rounds. The Lady Tigers used the same spoon to dig out a fat dollop and eat. Number 45 had opened the cooler and was passing out paper cups of whatever liquid was inside it — something purple. Seeing her reminded Rusty of the funnel cloud and he asked Number 8 about it.

“False alarm,” she said, whispering. “She sometimes says things for attention.”

DeDe, who was lounging in the seat in front of them, leaned over and told Number 8 she had an idea for how to keep the sissy awake. They’d tell stories, like around a campfire.

Number 45 trotted back down the aisle. “What kind of stories?”

“The kind with words,” DeDe said, and everyone groaned.

Patting Rusty on the knee, Number 8 proclaimed she had one. “A real doozy,” she said. “And it relates to our current predicament.” She went on to describe this girl she knew in the first grade. “She had brown hair and was tiny, tiny. She rode horses and her parents were veterinarians.” She snatched the jar of peanut butter and shoveled some brown goop in her mouth.

Number 16 gawked. “That ain’t no story.”

DeDe said, “And?”

Number 8 finished chewing and offered Rusty the jar. He declined.

Number 45 said, “What the fuck is even happening right now?”

As if that were her cue, Number 8 said, “Oh, yeah, a tornado killed her.” She paused, and when nobody said anything, she continued. “Well, not the tornado itself. See, she slept with her mouth open.” She paused, and again, when nobody spoke, she added more. “So when the tornado ripped off her bedroom wall, her mouth filled up with all this, what do you call it, debris?”

DeDe interrupted her to ask the point of the story.

“Point?”

Rusty clarified: “Why are you telling us this?”

“I guess — I don’t know — bad things can happen? Shit.”

Number 16 grabbed the coach’s limp hand and waved it at Number 8. “Hello, I think we know that already.”

Even Rusty laughed while Number 8 waved her middle finger for all to see.

Number 62 said, “Coach Culpepper is the storyteller.”

Rusty said, “He’s a poet.”

“Same difference.”

DeDe told them to hush. She had one.

“Your nosebleed,” she said, looking at Rusty. “Reminds me of Carrie-Anne.”

Number 45 said, “Oh, jeez: the nosebleeds.”

Rusty remembered. Nosebleeds had been her trademark. As she warmed up her throwing arm before a game, she sometimes got them. “Nerves,” his father had called it. But they became the stuff of superstition. She was a force on the pitcher’s mound anyway, lobbing balls past hitters twice her size. But during the games her nose oozed blood, she pitched perfect shutouts, not allowing a single player from the opposing team even a base hit.

Rusty said, “Double zero.”

DeDe’s eyes narrowed. “I saw her mama last month.”

Number 16 said, “Thought they moved.”

“Just to have the baby.”

Rusty thought about the time he’d found them alone in the field house before a home game. His dad and Double Zero. He was holding a bag of ice to the bridge of her nose, trying to clot the bleed. He was up to his elbows in red, and the sight made Rusty feel sick. His dad should be more careful, he remembered thinking, letting her bleed all over him like that.

“I didn’t know,” he blurted out.

No one heard him: They were listening to DeDe. How she was in the Sunflower. How she was minding her own business, looking at crochet needles for her mom, when who rounded the corner? Carrie-Anne’s mom, that’s who. For a moment, a split second, DeDe considered hiding. “But I thought to myself: No. We didn’t do nothing to be ashamed of, did we?” So they spoke. First about the weather. Then Carrie-Anne’s mom said her girl was doing “just fine.” Had earned her GED. Was taking classes at the community college. “And the shit of it is — she just pushed her cart on, went to the next aisle. Pretty as you please.”

“I didn’t know,” Rusty repeated. “Promise.”

Numbers 16 and 45 glanced his way. He couldn’t make out their expressions. Something between pity and contempt. He didn’t have the word for it, but he knew it well. It was the same look his mother gave him when he told her about Sparse.

“I used to drive by y’all’s house after I found out.” This was Number 8. She looked at her lap. “I used to think about driving my car into his bedroom.”

“I used to think worse,” said Number 45.

“Me too,” said Number 16.

“I promise, I promise,” Rusty was saying. He saw his mom dipping ashes in the soda can. She was telling him they’d be better off. With his dad gone. “It never happened,” she’d said. “And I refuse to speak on it anymore.”

Number 45 spoke up. “What I can’t understand is why you kept driving us?”

Rusty nodded to the coach across the aisle, still unconscious. He wasn’t sure if they understood what he meant until Number 8 said, “Figures.”

“Her mom had the baby with her.” DeDe was wiping her face. “Looks like you too. Same eyes.”

“I promise,” Rusty said again. “I promise, I promise.”

DeDe reached toward him, and he violently jerked back. She was only placing a sweat rag against his nose. “Here,” she said. “You’re bleeding again.”

The Lady Tigers stuck to their plan. As soon as the weather cleared, some two hours after the wreck, they were trailing down the interstate toward the Space-Way. None of them wanted to stay behind with Rusty and the coach. Number 8 assured him they were both out of danger. Her mom was a doctor after all. When Rusty said he thought she was a nurse, Number 8 squinted. “Nurse practitioner,” she said. He doubted very much that he was ever in danger, but the coach was a question mark. His knot still looked nasty. He came to when the girls were out of earshot and stumbled outside to puke in the ditch.

Rusty searched the front of the bus until he found the Catwoman comic wedged under the gas pedal. He looked it over: The raven-haired Selina Kyle had found herself in the jungles of South America, fighting drug lords with her usual mix of stealth, sass, and double-jointedness. The coach had put on his polo and was shoving his feet into his New Balances when Rusty stepped off the bus.

The weedy ditch felt soggy beneath Rusty’s feet, a loud sucking sound with each step.

“I think they may try to fire me over this,” the coach said. He stumbled to his knees when he tried to walk over to Rusty. The ground made more ugly noises as he straightened back up. “Second thought, I think I may just quit.”

Rusty climbed the small bank and stood on the edge of the interstate. Bits of sunlight burned through the remaining overcast. Birds wheeled around in the big sky, crazed by the stillness left after the storm. Not a single car coming in either direction. That was the Delta for you: so empty it could convince you it was big. He rolled up the Catwoman and peered through it. The Lady Tigers were about half a mile away, toting their bats in case of trouble. But Rusty knew there wouldn’t be any. They would probably confuse the hell out of whoever was working the Space-Way until DeDe explained everything. First to the Space-Way attendant, then to whomever she got on the pay phone. When Rusty got home tonight after being checked out by the hospital, he wouldn’t begin with the wreck. He would cut to the quick: the baby. Why didn’t anybody tell me? he would ask his mom. He tried imagining her answer, but none came.

“Rus?” The coach had managed to make it up the ditch somehow and stood beside him. “We got to think about what we’re gonna tell them. What we’re going to say.”

Rusty kept looking at the Lady Tigers. The Delta was flat enough that he could watch them walking away for a long time. He dropped the comic and stretched out his palm. Like this, in forced perspective, he held the Lady Tigers in his hand.

“You wrecked us, but my ass is the one on the line, you see.” The coach picked up the comic and swatted at Rusty’s hip. “We need to be friends on this. Stick together. You know what I mean?”

Little by little, the Lady Tigers shrank. He regretted not learning all their names. Maybe there was still time. At school, around town. But he couldn’t exactly picture them hanging out with him after this. Carrie-Anne. He knew that name. Sister. Well, he knew that one too. The coach kept on talking, and Rusty didn’t listen to a word of it. He wanted to hold the team, all of them, in his palm for as long as he could, as they continued to get smaller and smaller until, at last, they were no more.