An Autobiography in Anime

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W e came to them early. The foremost of these passions, for most everybody but especially the girls, was Sailor Moon — the English-dubbed version that came on at 2:30 in the afternoon right after Bananas in Pajamas, always too early for those of us who commuted to schools outside of the South Bay and only got home around four or five, after free daycare, after aunt’s houses, after being snuck into the hospital canteens until our moms’ shifts ended on the days when every relative who might have a few hours to spare for childcare alongside a beer and television, didn’t have a few hours: not for the child, the beer, the television.

At home my family didn’t have a working VCR; our old one had a tape stuck in it that no one had bothered to dig out a second time after the first attempt with a screwdriver nearly ended up electrocuting my cousin to death, the one ten years older who used to employ long tickling sessions at his mother’s house as an excuse to feel me up, but we eventually bought one towards the end of Sailor Moon’s first season. My great success of that year was successfully timing the VCR to record the season finale, the one where Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask reveal their secret identities to each other at last. This is who I really am. Me, too. I didn’t know. Me, neither. It was an early lesson on what mutual revelation and mutual witnessing might have to do with love. I watched the episode again and again and again, then recorded it onto another videotape at a friend’s house, just in case the first copy broke. It did.

I watched the episode again and again and again, then recorded it onto another videotape at a friend’s house, just in case the first copy broke. It did.

Once hooked on the English dub, we wanted more. There was a biracial girl in our sixth grade class, Yumi, who almost passed for white. She owned videotapes of most of the original Japanese episodes, unsubtitled, nearly all of which were unaired in America, and which she rented out to the rest of us — rented, not loaned. That was how she told us we weren’t really her friends. I could swallow enough pride to rent one videotape, just one time, and so that year I watched, without understanding a single word, three filler episodes from the Sailor Moon Stars arc, more than a hundred or so episodes further along in the series than what had been broadcasted in California on UPN, a network that no longer exists, having been turned into the CW. The Sailor Moon run in America ended after two seasons due to poor ratings, a fact that to me beggared belief, since back then it seemed like everyone I knew was watching, everyone in the whole wild world. But it turned out we were the only ones.

We didn’t watch those exotic shows, like Beverly Hills 90210 or Baywatch, the shows about Californians who might as well have been Martians, for all they were familiar to Californians like us — children of Filipino, Mexican, and Vietnamese security guards, nurses, cleaners, cooks. Crystal Tokyo felt both liberating and knowable, more than any show about California where no one ever eats Filipino barbecue in a strip mall, where no one’s parent works sixteen hours a day at the hospital bedsides of Korean War and Vietnam War veterans, except when they were having PTSD episodes and all the Asian nurses were ordered to avoid them.

Crystal Tokyo felt both liberating and knowable, more than any show about California where no one ever eats Filipino barbecue in a strip mall, where no one’s parent works sixteen hours a day.

In our seventh grade class there was even a white girl — rare — of the kind that read fantasy novels alone at lunch time, who upon finding out that we watched Sailor Moon, successfully befriended us by saying she had an extensive collection of tapes and books at home that she’d happily loan to us. Loan, not rent. Through her eager, faintly clammy friendship came Fushigi Yuugi: the full series, some of the manga, even some of the OVAs (Original Video Animation, made for DVD release rather than TV). The story was corny, but we loved it: girlfriends who found an old book that turned out to be a time-travel portal. Entered it easy, like passing through a door, or a rite. Found themselves in another world. Made friends, lost friends, fell in love, got molested, staved off the end of the world. High realism, for where I was at twelve.

My Life as a Berenstain Bear

It wasn’t always just the girls. In high school, they showed Neon Genesis Evangelion late at night on PBS, and one of my best guy friends and I watched the episodes while on the phone with each other; sometimes commenting, sometimes sheltering each other in the kind of bonded silence that was easier to bear back when you could still twist up the telephone cord in your hands. We held each other on the line. We must have been fifteen; both Pinoy, both moreno, both with nurses for mothers, both with skin stretched gossamer in places from years of abusing corticosteroids to treat lifelong eczema. We went to our junior prom together, him in a rented tuxedo, me in a gold sequined dress with a slit that went up to my thigh.

My favorite character in Eva was Misato. Katsuragi Misato: 29, rarely without a beer, wears a grin so calcified it’s actually become real. A great shot with the Heckler and Koch USP sidearm, eschewing the Glock 17 of her fellow Nerv personnel; taking life lightly, her shutters closed up tight. I still remember loving the small detail that Misato and her college boyfriend Kaji once locked themselves up in a room and had sex for days, stopping only for beer and food. Two-dimensional aspirations, a dream of desire. It sounded like heaven, only bearable.

I still remember loving the small detail that Misato and her college boyfriend Kaji once locked themselves up in a room and had sex for days, stopping only for beer and food.

Director and creator Hideaki Anno described Misato as a loser girl-woman, an adult Tsukino Usagi — which is to say, an adult version of the main protagonist of Sailor Moon. Katsuragi Misato is what happens when the magical girl, the beautiful soldier and messiah (all epithets by which Sailor Moon was often described throughout her eponymous show) becomes an adult. Has to navigate problems that aren’t about saving the world, but surviving in it: day to day, meal to meal, missed connection to made connection. In fact, in the Japanese versions of Evangelion and Sailor Moon, Katsuragi Misato and Sailor Moon are played by the same voice actress, Mitsuishi Kotono. But PBS showed the English dub, so we couldn’t have known.

It was weird, admittedly, that Sailor Moon was blonde. At the time, we didn’t know anything about the postwar aesthetics of anime in Japan, or about the country’s own reckonings with war, whiteness and America. Consciously or not, we had been seeking out universes that might be populated by people like us, and Japanese anime seemed as good a place to land as any, so we took the yellow and orange-haired protagonists the way a realist takes on life, bad with the good. Though over the years we learned, as young Filipinx morenos in the Bay, that people like us was both far more and far less mutable than we imagined: we’d all been told that Filipinos weren’t “real” Asians, always from the mouths of the more middle-class, light-skinned East Asian kids in school, who as I remember were some of the first people I ever heard refer to Filipinos by the n-word.

We had been seeking out universes that might be populated by people like us, and Japanese anime seemed as good a place to land as any.

And certainly there was some controversy, at least in my family, over the fact that anime was a Japanese art form in the first place. My grandfather had worked in Guam for the U.S. Army during the Second World War, and my grandparent-age uncle had been shot and bayoneted by Japanese soldiers during the Bataan Death March, surviving only by jumping into the Pampanga River, falling unconscious, and waking up in the home of the woman who had retrieved his body from the river, and who would later become his first wife. My grandmother still told stories about how she and every girl she knew had to smear their own faces with dirt and charcoal, wear rags, all in the brittle hope that Japanese soldiers wouldn’t steal them from their homes and sentence them to a life of imprisonment and rape. Asian America was a universe, as many-starred and many-scarred as the universes in Sailor Moon: there were no knot-free pleasures. Twists, compromises, flexing an image like a funhouse mirror so the reflection almost, almost takes your shape: that was how we had to watch things, sifting the pixels for gold. But if you give kids next to nothing, they’ll still make a world out of it. That’s something any magical girl anime worth its salt will teach you.

Even now, long after all the playground theater has ended, one of my favorite characters of all time is still Sailor Saturn. She doesn’t even show up in the English dub of Sailor Moon; I had to discover her in high school, after my friend and I ordered videotapes of fan-made English subs off the Internet, from some late 90s/early 2000s Angelfire website with a tinny MIDI file of the Sailor Moon theme song that would start playing when you loaded the home page. Sailor Saturn’s the one with the sickly constitution and the physician father who goes off the deep end, the one called the Soldier of Death and Rebirth, the one called the Soldier of Silence and Ruin, the one called the Goddess of Destruction — all of which sounded just melodramatic enough for my tastes at the time. Sailor Saturn looked like me in all my kid photos: thick black bangs, fighting, hoping that pretending to be strong might actually count as strength.

At the climax of one season, Sailor Saturn’s the one who makes the turning-point decision to jump right into the heart of pure groaning evil to do what Sailor Moon herself — yellow hair, blue eyes, pretty as a main character, believes in happy ending — can’t do. Accept death, including her own. Go into the ugly groaning of the world and not come back from it.

But the show isn’t called Sailor Saturn: a girl like her is always the sidekick, not the protagonist. That was one early lesson. Predictably enough, Sailor Moon does end up going after her — and saves them all in the end, including Sailor Saturn, soldier of death and rebirth, soldier of silence, soldier of ruin, goddess of destruction, sickly dumbass set on suicide via demonic abyss. Sailor Moon isn’t a show about anyone jumping into the heart of pure evil and losing. You’d have to learn about that later.

But the show isn’t called Sailor Saturn: a girl like her is always the sidekick, not the protagonist.

Still, when Sailor Moon comes back from her rescue mission, her eyes are vacant, her face slack with shock. The background music plays Sailor Moon’s beloved theme song, but a new, unfamiliar rendering of it, with a forlorn, music-box timbre; the sound of an adult woman facing the apocalyptic debris of childhood. In Sailor Moon’s rictus-stiffened arms is the successfully retrieved Sailor Saturn, now transformed into a baby, swaddled in cloth. Survival-new. Second chance-new. They’ve both seen some shit — but they came back. Here were the episode’s lessons, magical as true love; as being saved by a friend who won’t let you down; as girls who survive. Not all wrecked things are wrecked forever. You could return from the ugly. You could live.

Why Sherman Alexie’s Sexual Misconduct Feels Like a Betrayal

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I would have believed just one allegation about Sherman Alexie’s sexual misconduct, but the School Library Journal comment section that started it all had six of them (some of which he has non-specifically admitted in his strange apology). NPR reported that ten women approached the news outlet as victims of his harassment, three of whom risked their careers to go on record about these allegations.

My outrage at Alexie’s actions hits me harder than the news of other celebrities who had been accused of similar behavior. It wasn’t just that his writing was beautiful to me. The #MeToo and Time’s Up Movements have proven that magnificent things can be created by terrible men; I’ve already reckoned, many times, with finding out that someone whose work I admire is an abuser in his spare time. But Alexie’s misconduct felt like a personal betrayal because his work has been so personally significant. His work was formative in my ability to recognize and object to racial injustice.

Alexie’s misconduct felt like a personal betrayal because his work has been so personally significant. His work was formative in my ability to recognize and object to racial injustice.

I didn’t read Sherman Alexie’s young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian until my early twenties. It was assigned for my undergraduate writing seminar at the University of Pittsburgh, and it recontextualized my relationship with a toxic friend in high school. Junior, Part-Time Indian’s Spokane protagonist, has the plucky, curious voice of an irreverent teenager, one that sounded exactly like mine at that age.

Junior loves when his dad sings country songs and jokes about masturbation with his friend. He makes fun of his sister’s taste in romance novels and listens to his girlfriend list the places she’ll travel to once she leaves her small town. After a classroom outburst results in Junior’s suspension, he deals with the same apocalyptic thoughts that plague every teen’s mind when they’re faced with impossible situations: “My hopes and dreams floated up in a mushroom cloud. What do you do when the world has declared nuclear war on you?”

Junior was the first protagonist of color I read in a young adult book who sounded the way I wanted to write, and nothing like how my white high school friend Dara wanted to think of me.

Dara had always been confused by my inability to fit her Asian stereotypes. Over a conversation about my dad’s love of football, Dara stated matter-of-factly that watching football was “not an Asian thing.” When I started dating a white boy, she complained constantly about the loneliness I put her through and referred to the “difficulty” of being in an interracial relationship. She became obsessed with Korean pop music and gushed nonstop about songs I couldn’t sing because I am Filipina-American. To her, I wasn’t the “right” kind of Asian. The last straw came after I received minor accolades for my writing. Dara rallied friends to comfort her, wishing for my future failure. I was supposed to be a sidekick, after all, and she had only ever seen herself as the hero.

Part-Time Indian made me reflect on my time in mostly white writing workshops, writing stories about white characters so I would be taken seriously by white writers.

What I found most compelling about Part-Time Indian is how deceptively simple its premise is. Junior starts high school as an underdog in every way. He’s a poor, disabled new kid at school who’s been bullied all his life. By the end of the novel, Junior has new friends and a beautiful girlfriend, leads his basketball team to the playoffs, and earns the respect of both the communities of (white) Reardan and (Native) Wellpinit. It’s the quintessential All-American coming-of-age story with a Native teenager taking the spotlight in a usually white hero narrative.

Part-Time Indian demonstrated the power of diverse protagonists and made me reflect on my time in mostly white writing workshops, writing stories about white characters so I would be taken seriously by white writers. It was responsible for the first time I shot a death-glare at the white boy in my seminar who repeated ad nauseum how the novel was “only unique because the hero isn’t white,” and the first time I rolled my eyes openly at the white girl who agreed with him while working on her ancient Egyptian mythology adventure novel and didn’t think she needed feedback from anyone of Egyptian descent. Reading and digesting Alexie’s book was also the first time I saw Dara as a mediocre white woman who saw her friend of color as a threat, and the first time I realized that I didn’t need any of these people’s approval to write myself onto the page.

Part-Time Indian allowed me to notice and disavow injustice in my life — and this experience isn’t unique to me. Alexie’s works have long been praised for upending racist assumptions in the literary world, and Alexie has spent his career championing unheard voices across all marginalized communities. Unfortunately, he has disappointed us repeatedly in this powerful role, even before these latest accusations. When Alexie issued a vague, unsatisfying apology in late February regarding the sexual harassment allegations, I found myself screaming at his face on my computer screen: “This isn’t the first time we’ve seen you apologize!”

The last time Alexie apologized publicly was in August 2017, when he announced that he would be cancelling the rest of his book tour for his memoir You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, citing the depression caused by reliving his mother’s passing in each city he toured. But for me, as an Asian-American woman writer, the most significant apology before the latest accusations came when Alexie was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2015. One of the 75 poets he chose for the anthology was revealed to be a white man using the pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou, wearing literary yellowface to take the spot of actual Asian-American poets in order to get published.

In a post on the Best American Poetry blog, Alexie apologized profusely for the pain he caused when his strategy to introduce more underrepresented voices to a large audience backfired. In his apology, Alexie laid out his approach to choosing the anthology selections, breaking down how many other voices he was able to include: “Approximately 60% of the poets are female. Approximately 40% of the poets are people of color. Approximately 20% of the poems employ strong to moderate formal elements. Approximately 15% of the poems were first published on the Internet” and so on.

It was this apology, its tone both defensive of his methods and sincerely appalled at the outcome, that convinced me that Alexie’s determination to bring attention to more marginalized voices was coming from a genuine, empathetic place. At the time, I was an intern for the National Book Foundation, and Alexie was a judge in the Poetry category for the National Book Awards. He helped give an Award to Robin Coste Lewis, a black woman poet whose collection was the first poetry debut to win since 1974.

It’s difficult to dismiss someone who, at least in the public eye, put in the work to create and bring more diverse voices into that world, and yet it’s necessary to recognize we’ve been placing too much significance on him.

I wanted to believe that this win absolved him somewhat, that he knew to take his mistakes to heart and could still use his authority in the literary world to put traditionally unheard voices in front of his own. I hadn’t thought that perhaps it was his authority that exacerbated the Best American Poetry scandal, nor that his authority was an inherent problem that stemmed from the white, patriarchal system that upheld him as the standard against whom other Native writers were measured.

What infuriates and upsets me about these recent allegations is the utter hypocrisy with which Alexie wielded his incredible power and influence within the literary world to prey on young, emerging women writers, some of whom were Native writers. It’s been very difficult for me to dismiss someone who, at least in the public eye, put in the work to create and bring more diverse voices into that world, and yet it’s necessary to recognize we’ve been placing too much significance on him.

Others are having difficulty dismissing Alexie as well. As of this essay, Alexie has evaded the punishments undergone by other authors who have been accused of sexual harassment. Unlike Jay Asher and James Dashner, Alexie has not lost his agent or his publisher. Publishers Weekly interviewed a number of independent bookstores to ask whether they would continue to stock his books, considering that Alexie himself launched the Indies First campaign to support such bookstores. There was no strong consensus among the bookstores interviewed about what to do in the wake of these allegations. The harshest consequences that Alexie has faced have been self-inflicted: he has declined the ALA 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and has requested that his publisher postpone the paperback release of You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.

The essence of my struggle, and surely many others’, is in navigating the complexity of Alexie’s immense power and how we enabled him to exercise that power. We stand to lose much more in a conversation that focuses only on Alexie’s disavowal from the literary community and not how we, that literary community, allowed him to consolidate power in a way that hurt Native women writers.

The pain of these allegations, while repugnant and unforgivable no matter how powerful and talented Alexie is, wouldn’t have been so acute had we given more room to other Native writers.

We’ve let this apology cycle play out before, and we’ll see it happen again unless we learn how to stop concentrating power among just a handful of writers from marginalized backgrounds. Had it not been for our willing, enthusiastic praise of Alexie’s efforts in fighting racist norms, this labor could have been distributed among many other systemically silenced voices, and we would all have been better for it. The pain of these allegations, while repugnant and unforgivable no matter how powerful and talented Alexie is, wouldn’t have been so acute had we given more room to other Native writers.

This is part of the ugliness of living under a white patriarchal system as a person of color: when we’ve been taught to listen to white authority all our lives, it’s often difficult to hear other people of color from communities that aren’t yours. Alexie understood this dynamic well, but he betrayed our trust and hurt a community whose voices we need. However sincere he was about creating a more diverse literary landscape through these conversations between different communities of color, this work can and must continue without him.

In the midst of this scandal, I’ve found myself returning to the time when I first read Part-Time Indian and felt recognized. My nostalgia is burdened with the fact of Alexie’s harassment, but more than that, I wonder why it took until adulthood for me, a person of color, to feel connected to a young character of color. The lessons in Part-Time Indian were ones I didn’t have access to until I had already been inundated with experiences that taught me I wasn’t important enough to read about. In perpetuating Alexie’s legacy, even in infamy, by failing to question the way he rose to power, I let his victims and the communities he hurt feel the same way I did before reading his book: ignored and insignificant.

I wonder why it took until adulthood for me, a person of color, to feel connected to a young character of color.

Rather than waiting for apologies from my heroes, I need to reexamine whose voices I myself have felt were worth reading and who I’ve left out. I don’t plan on reading Alexie’s work anymore, nor recommending it to friends. Part of my reasoning is because of these allegations, and part is simply because I should’ve been reading more widely all along. Instead of viewing this as a loss to myself, I see this as an opportunity to look down the path that Alexie should have provided to other Native writers who create outside the comfort zone of the white establishment — writers whose stories are far riskier, far bolder, far more reflective of that community’s myriad narratives.

Why Are So Many Gay Romance Novels Written By Straight Women?

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Seeing yourself, whether it’s on the screen or on the page, is a powerful experience. So often, though, for queer people, the options are either super whitewashed or rooted in hurtful stereotypes. In gay romance novels, it’s both, and straight women writers are responsible.

When I started working as a book reviewer in 2009, gay romance was exploding as a popular romance genre. (Technically what I’m talking about is called “male/male romance”; “gay romance” is written by gay men for gay men, may not focus on a romantic relationship, and doesn’t guarantee a happily-ever-after. But outside the industry, these distinctions are elided, and most people think of all male-male romance novels as “gay.”) I was excited to see more indie presses focusing on LGBTQ stories and choosing romances that were complex, interesting, and dealt with issues like domestic violence or adoption. As a queer, trans reader, I looked forward to seeing myself in their pages. But I was surprised to find that some LGBTQ-focused stories were reflecting not me, but a straight person’s imagination of me.

I was surprised to find that some LGBTQ-focused stories were reflecting not me, but a straight person’s imagination of me.

The vast majority of gay romances are written by women. White women. Straight, white women. Straight, white women who, in their “about the author” sections, talked about their husbands, children, cats, chickens, and love of artisanal cured meats. The first time I noticed this, I flipped the book over in my hands, back and forth, looking at the ultra-gay cover art, and then the author’s photo on the back. I couldn’t reconcile the two. I may not be a gay man, but I know appropriation when I see it.

How could straight women feel that they have the authority to write gay romance? Because they’ve been told so by a culture that has long treated gay men as a neutered, fetishized object of curiosity. The trope of the tame gay man is a favorite in straight culture. Everywhere, the media gives us the gay-best-friend dynamic: straight women treating cis gay men like pets. “It’s just us girls,” they croon to each other, holding hands at the nail salon. A gay best friend is shown as the perfect accessory for any hip straight woman. He’s expected to be her personal shopper, fashion advisor, shoulder to cry on, sex therapist. His identity is not defined by him, but by how well he props up her ego.

In this dynamic, which I see enacted in gay romance novels, the truth of the man’s queerness is erased, because the character is gay only in the ways the straight woman author can imagine. She censors his sexuality by filtering it through a heterosexual lens. The author handles her gay characters like dolls, using them to act out her desires. She shoves the rubber faces together and smudges them against one another: Now kiss. The characters, who are labeled as gay, are only fantasies — -straight women’s fantasies, shared with an audience of straight women. The first time I read a novel like this, from its sex scenes to its deep, emotional dialog, all I could think was, Is this what we are to you?

The we is queer people: those of us who traditionally occupy the supporting roles in straight stories. When a straight woman decides to “redeem” the gay narrative by making her main characters mainstream-hot, cisgendered, able-bodied guys, and “gives them” a happy ending, she is not making progress. She’s not even being subversive. She’s merely repeating the age-old trope of straight people controlling queer bodies, and she’s doing it to make money and titillate the audience of straight women who buy her books. That’s right: gay men, the stars of these romances, aren’t the intended audience. Straight women are. So where does that leave gay men? Again, supporting straight women’s desires.

Gay men, the stars of these romances, aren’t the intended audience. Straight women are. So where does that leave gay men?

Now, far be it from me to pass judgment on someone else’s masturbation fantasies. God knows I’ve done plenty of politically incorrect things, in and out of the bedroom. My criticism of straight women co-opting gay bodies for their own pleasure is based on the belief that no person can ethically use other people, especially marginalized people, to benefit themselves. Claiming that gay romance written by straight women is somehow “LGBTQ representation,” only makes things worse. Sunny Moraine said it best: “Don’t you dare claim that you’re doing something progressive on behalf of populations to which you don’t belong. Because you aren’t. It’s not your progress to make.”

Straight women seem to feel entitled to write gay characters because they think homosexuality is simply an inherent desire to attract and please a man. She may think, “He’s just like me because he likes penetration and getting his hair done.” A gay character is just a straight woman with different genitalia, right? According to Lambda Literary, one male/male romance author said, “I write characters that seem to appeal to both genders without a problem. I just make sure I write men as men and not women with dicks.” And the sex scenes? She said, “I’m a nurse, I know where things go.”

Is that what we are to you?

This is why I gravitate towards publishers like Interlude Press, which consistently seeks out and champions LGBTQ voices — not just stories that feature queer characters. Olympia Knife, a historical romance, was a real standout. Riptide Publishing produced the lovely and subtle Hopeless Romantic, about a gay man who falls in love with a trans girl. These gems are the fulfillment of what gay romance can be: LGBTQ authors, writing about LGBTQ characters, for an audience of all kinds of readers, including straight women. I suggest that a greater diversity of authors might enlarge the mainstream’s understanding of what it means to be gay. Highlighting only people who conform and express themselves in a safe, straight-friendly, toothless way, neuters and erases LGBTQ people. As George Michael told The Guardian in a 2005 interview: “Gay people in the media are doing what makes straight people comfortable, and automatically my response to that is to say I’m a dirty filthy fucker and if you can’t deal with it, you can’t deal with it.”

Straight characterization of queerness that is written to appeal to straight readers by straight writers is bigotry. It may be gentle and well-meaning, and keep chickens in the backyard, but it benefits from oppression. The argument that “we’re all human” and united by a common human experience falls apart under closer scrutiny. If you dehumanize one group or place your personal wishes over their dignity, you have voided your creative license. There are responsible ways to write out of your lane. Hiring someone to be a sensitivity reader can be helpful, especially if that person isn’t out to stroke your ego.

Of course, that choice has its problems, too. Instead of perpetuating the dynamic of gay men educating straight women, or cosigning their choices, straight women who want to write gay romance might ask themselves the questions any writer should: Why am I writing this? Who is my reader? Am I adding something valuable to my genre? Is this story mine to tell? A sexy, frisky story about two firefighters may have commercial potential, but that doesn’t mean the writer has to pursue publication. If a straight writer is really that devoted to queer progress, the right action may be to step aside.

Why do we need a queer reimagining of straight stories, or a straight interpretation of queer stories, when we can create our own?

Most of all, it’s so important to center queer love, as understood by and lived by queer authors. Why do we need a queer reimagining of straight stories, or a straight interpretation of queer stories, when we can create our own? If straight women gravitate towards gay romance, that’s great,: but it should be romance on our terms. Instead of occupying space in a genre that objectifies gay people, it is better to support gay authors, especially writers of gay romance and other LGBTQ-centered stories.

Gay men, however they choose to present, or integrate into society, or maintain their relationships, must be respected. Celebrated. Centered. I’m hopeful that we will see more LGBTQ voices in romance, telling meaningful stories about love, trouble, and happy endings.

7 Books About Crafting and Creating

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Iam pretty much never not knitting. When I’m on my way to work, I knit on the subway; when I arrive, I knit during meetings (my workplace is fairly chill). When I meet my friends at bars and shows, I knit as long as it’s not a glaring distraction, and when I am home by myself I like to knit a couple of rows before bed.

Purchase the collection.

Knitting, in short, permeates every part of my life. I learned to do it, the story goes, before I learned to read, and so it’s fittingly the central subject of my first book, The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater. The book is a collection of personal essays about crafting, but beyond the yarn and the needles it’s about how making things of all sorts has anchored me in the world, and helped me make sense of nonsensical things like grief, anxiety, joy, and even boredom.

Knitting came first, yes, but the reading was a close second. What follows are the books, some of which I’ve returned to again and again, that I frequently have to put down because they make me so excited to make everything from sweaters to essays to dinners.

The Knitter’s Almanac by Elizabeth Zimmermann

Really this entire list could just be books by EZ (as she’s affectionately and reverently known in the fiber community). This one is my all-time favorite. Not only is it just a mechanically great knitting book — filled with easy yet surprising patterns and techniques — it’s also a compelling narrative about the philosophy of knitting: when to hold tight and when to let go, when to freak out and when to allow yourself to make mistakes. I can’t say with 100% certainty that avowed non-knitters should read it, but if you find yourself at all curious about our world, it’s the perfect entry point.

Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hills

This book, first published in 1936 and commensurately outdated / at times outright offensive, isn’t about making objects so much as it is about making a life. My crafting has always been of a piece with my homemaking (lol), about how the objects I make look and feel in a space I’m building for myself. And whether you’re a crafter or not, if you are a person who lives alone (particularly a female-identifying one), this book is funny and clear and wise: “Be a Communist, a stamp collector, or a Ladies’ Aid worker if you must,” Hills writes, “but for heaven’s sake, be something.” It’ll make you want to instantly run out and put together a dinner party on a budget, or at least iron all of your shirts.

The Secret of Platform 13 by Eva Ibbotson

The only knitting that appears here is in the hands of an assassin named “Soft Parts” Doreen, who kills her victims by stabbing them in the temple with her needle. She is very squarely terrible and yet I don’t remember the name of any other character from this book, which I know I loved and reread maybe a dozen times as a child. I didn’t (and don’t) condone murder nor general villainy, but I do like the essential point that crafters, despite our twee outward appearances and reputation for calm, are not to be trifled with.

Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting edited by Ann Hood

My knitting and writing muscles have always been located very near each other — when I’m stuck on a difficult sentence or description, the solution has often been found when I pull out my needles and knit a couple of rows. It’s an easy, repetitive motion, which makes the motion of writing feel somehow simpler as well. This collection of essays by different writers who knit (Ann Patchett! Barbara Kingsolver!) confirmed for me that I’m not alone. It’s like listening to a chorus, watching how all these different perspectives and voices weave in and out, echoing and at times contradicting each other. It laid the groundwork for a lot of what I sought to do with my own (albeit solo) book.

At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman

Another book that is not at all about crafting but echoes exactly what I feel when it comes to writing about it: that small things are worthwhile and interesting, and it can be both luxurious and useful to meditate on them for a while. It’ll make you see ice cream, the postal service, sleep schedules and butterflies in a sharper yet fully familiar light. And if you’re a writer, you’ll most likely want to train that light on your own small favorites.

In the Company of Women edited by Grace Bonney

This book, composed of interviews with female entrepreneurs and artists and ~makers~ of all stripes, will inspire you to craft something, yes, but also to open up a charming storefront and start peddling your work to all your friends and neighbors and maybe Oprah. The collection brings together an accomplished, intimidating group, but it’s a testament to the idea that no one approach to creation is the same as another, and that everyone fucks up a few times before finally getting it right.

Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland

My sister is also a crafter — in fact, a far more professional one than I. She makes baskets and sells them in stores, online, and at craft fairs around the country, but, like me, she uses the motion to help soothe and ground herself in the face of mental health struggles. She recommended this book to me years ago, as an antidote to some creative blockage I was feeling, and, I think, as a bit of an insight re: how she thinks of her art. I like to read it in brief snippets whenever I need to push through a scary moment, be it during an essay or a new sweater pattern, and also when I’m thinking of her.

Salman Rushdie Helped Me Recognize Myself—and the Love of My Life

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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 that made you fall in love?

My phone buzzed at 5 a.m. I squinted at my screen, struggling to keep my heavy eyelids open. It was my fiancé, who was living in New York at the time. I was in Hong Kong. Our relationship was stretched taut around the globe and texts at odd hours were keeping it from unraveling. I sat up immediately.

“If you could have dinner with anyone, who would it be?” it read.

“President Obama,” I shot back.

“Not Salman Rushdie?”

“Oh duh — of course Rushdie, hands down,” I said.

“And if you could ask him anything, what would you ask him?”

The question left me confused because there is so much I want to say to him, so much I want to ask.

Where would I start? The moment I first picked up Midnight’s Children in high school? That was a part of my life that I now label as BR (Before Rushdie). Back then, I was a lanky nerd in Hong Kong trying very hard to run as far away from my Indian roots as possible. I would leave my mum’s hand-cooked lunch of potato-stuffed rotis uneaten and buried at the bottom of my backpack because of its embarrassing aromas of turmeric, coriander, and garam masala. I would strip, pluck, wax my arm hair and eyebrows, the thickness of which are so intrinsically tangled up with being Indian. I would lock away my love for Bollywood to make space for the Goo Goo Dolls, Oasis, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And until then, I had never read anything by an Indian author; I just assumed they were inferior to the Chaucer, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde classics we were studying at school.

I had never read anything by an Indian author; I just assumed they were inferior to the classics we were studying at school.

One day, I stumbled across a display at a bookstore that was dedicated to award-winning Asian writers. A friend of mine who had already read three of Rushdie’s books picked up Midnight’s Children and pushed it into my hands. “You need to read this,” he urged. I stroked its unbent spine, read the blurb, and decided to give it a shot.

A few chapters in, I was under Rushdie’s magical realism spell. I highlighted and annotated almost everything — every pun, every quip, every sharp observation of life, every riddle twisted into the plot. I bent its spine out of shape to a point where individual pages threatened to break out and flutter away.

Mrs. Braganza’s “gigantic pickle-vats and simmering chutneys” smelled like my mother’s kitchen at home. The twisty-turvy plot felt just as melodramatic as the Bollywood movies that I secretly, reluctantly loved. The ridiculous Sinai family were mirror reflections of my own family.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

In the book, a pregnant Amina sits in the back seat of a taxi and descends into Old Delhi to meet Ramram, a fortune-teller who may be “a huckster, a two-chip palmist, a giver of cute forecasts to silly women” or “the genuine article, the holder of the keys.” My mother, perched on the back of a Vespa, headed to her trusted palm-reading friend as soon as I was born to see what the stars had in store for me. He told her two things of note: I will live far away and I will meet a man who will take me there.

When my parents moved to Hong Kong — barely a year after my prophecy — my father worked hard to give us a life he never had. An apartment in the bustling neon city, an international education, the luxury to follow my dreams. I, in return, wanted to live up to his expectations. He poured his soul into my future. I wanted to make it worth every penny.

When I picked up Midnight’s Children, I was nearing the end of high school, contemplating my future, tossing and turning just thinking about repaying my father’s sacrifices. Rushdie reached out through the book and into my heart to give words to the thoughts spinning around my conscience: “I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning — yes, meaning — something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.”

How did Rushdie know exactly what I was going through? How did he understand me so well? I wasn’t the only person who connected so intimately with Midnight’s Children. Reviews of the book when it first came out famously described it as “a continent finding its voice” because it was so richly Indian, so truly relatable for the country. How did he understand us so well? Is that the question I wanted to ask him?

Perhaps I should tell Rushdie about my journey after Midnight’s Children (also known as AR, After Rushdie). The book cracked open a door ever so slightly and I pushed through with gusto, finding more pieces of myself in his other books as though Rushdie was now my fortune teller giving me, the bewildered hopeful, answers.

I leaped from Midnight’s Children to Shalimar the Clown. There I saw elements of myself in India Ophuls because I had reached an age where I yearned — like she does — to learn about my roots. Instead of shoving questions about my family’s history and my country’s past aside, I now wanted to confront them. That book painted the picture of the raw hatred that to this day tears India apart in a way that even my family who grew up there couldn’t put into words.

The book cracked open a door ever so slightly and I pushed through with gusto, finding more pieces of myself in his other books.

Then, at the start of university in London, I started to sink my teeth into The Satanic Verses. As I struggled to turn this rainy, moody city into my home, the protagonist Salahuddin Chamchawala was trying to do the same. My education there turned into a financial burden for my father. So my three years were glorious and unforgettable but also weighed down by “a nightmare of cash-tills and calculations.” Salahuddin’s realization that “England was a peculiar-tasting smoked fish full of spikes and bones, and nobody would ever tell him how to eat it,” was one that resonated with me too. At some point, like Salahuddin, I figured out how to eat the fish.

Again and again, at every juncture of my life, Rushdie was reading me while I was reading him.

By the time I landed on Joseph Anton, Rushdie’s memoir of his time in hiding, I was two years into my journalism career. My family wasn’t convinced this would be a long-term and fruitful path. The professional moves I wanted to make next were met with doors slammed in my face. Almost every route I took led to a dead end. I felt boxed in and worried that I would end up being just another absurdity, a blip, a speck, a disappointment. And right when I thought I had hit rock bottom, my previous boyfriend broke my heart. That one-two punch snuffed out the lights.

My cracked being turned to Rushdie for consolation. In Joseph Anton, I learned that India — his country, my country, our country — was the first to leave him twisting in the wind for writing The Satanic Verses, a fact that is so frequently overshadowed. India’s narrow-minded knee-jerk ban on the book placed the country on a slippery censorship slope that it is still riding today. I got a detailed look at his personal life under the Iranian Fatwa, which was so quickly destroyed as though he was a meaningless paper figurine that can be scrunched up and tossed aside. The entire world told him to put down his pen for the greater good. Yet he persisted. The path of self-doubt and dejection I was on was nothing compared to his. His strength through it all, which roared loud and clear in Joseph Anton, encouraged me to keep going. But I never figured out how and why he managed to find that determination and push through, despite such high stakes, while I in my own small world was willing to give up so easily. That — that’s what I would ask him.

“Why he kept going when the whole world told him to stop,” I texted my fiancé.

My fiancé. I was still getting used to saying that. I first met him exactly a month after I got through Joseph Anton. It was Halloween. He was dressed as a mad scientist, with fake blood splattered all over his lab coat. I was dressed as a sheriff, star badge and all. I was floored in five minutes. He was nonchalant and uninterested in me. He didn’t even ask for my number. So I gave him my sheriff badge, hoping that in the sobering morning light it would make him think of me.

At every juncture of my life, Rushdie was reading me while I was reading him.

It didn’t.

I found him on Facebook and realised the origins of his resistance were tied to an exam he was studying for.

Three weeks later, after back and forth messages, after his exam, we went on our first date. He charmed me with his humour, his puns, his quips, his sharp observations of life. We went for an Escape The Room game with nothing but riddles to find a way out. It all sounded like a Rushdie novel. And I was falling in love.

Three years later, his company flung him across the world. But he didn’t leave me behind. He rented out a room at the glitzy Ritz Carlton and turned it into our very own Escape The Room. A box with a clue led to another then another then I found that same sheriff badge and, taped to the back, a diamond ring. I couldn’t contain myself.

So here we are now. Me in Hong Kong, my life packed up in boxes ready to move far away. Him in New York, texting me about hypothetical dinner dates.

Three months later, it’s our wedding day at a small Hindu temple. We’re walking around the ceremonial fire. We’re exchanging garlands. We’re bowing our heads in prayer. Now, we’re united and sitting in chairs to take pictures.

My husband hands me a neatly wrapped present. “Remember what you told me you’d ask Salman Rushdie?” he said. I ripped through the wrapping and found Rushdie’s latest book, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. Inside, on the first page, a response:

“Alisha,

Free speech matters more.

Salman Rushdie”

Tears blur my vision and my jaw drops. “But how…?” I ask my husband. That moment confirms what I already know — I am going to love this man forever.

“I know people,” he says, shrugging and smiling.

I wonder, now, what would have happened if Rushdie didn’t care enough about free speech. I might not have read him at every one of my crossroads. And then what?

I may have never made space for an understanding of who I am and my country. I could’ve ended up hating London rather than embracing it. I may have locked my broken heart up in my chest, closing it off from the man who would bubble wrap it and take me far away.

In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie poses the question “where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos?” For me, it seems like fate.

A New Documentary About Gabriel Garcia Marquez Highlights the Joy He Brings to Readers

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I know how much of a cliché it makes me to say that Gabriel García Márquez is my favorite writer and Hundred Years of Solitude my all-time favorite book. As a Colombian, I worry that this preference reads as mere knee-jerk regionalism or worse, an example of a stunted literary taste. But what else am I supposed to think of an epic work that is at once so astonishing and so familiar? When I first encountered this sprawling novel in 9th grade, we were scheduled to spend an entire semester reading it, but I went ahead and finished all 400-plus pages in one weekend. It was the very first book I devoured, as unlikely a page-turner (will the dirt-eating bastard girl ever find happiness again? will the doomed butterfly-surrounded lovers make it, after all? will anyone really be born with a pig’s tail?) as I’ve yet to encounter. In the intervening seventeen years I have come to think of Gabo as a familiar presence in my life, someone whose prose can transport me back not just to that blissful weekend I spent reading the story of the Buendías for the first time, but to my own family experiences and conversations, which he was somehow able to conjure up in his novel.

As I watched Justin Webster’s reverent documentary Gabo: The Creation of Gabriel García Márquez, my relationship with the Nobel Prize winner came flooding back. Even though (or, perhaps, because) I’d already heard the many anecdotes and stories being shared in the film by his siblings, his colleagues, and fans around the world (including President Bill Clinton), Webster’s documentary reminded me how much of my teenage obsession with Gabo has grown into an appreciation for the way he captured the Colombia I grew up with and which I now long for from abroad.

Serving as a kind of abridged biography-cum-critical-overview, Gabo: The Creation of Gabriel García Márquez tries to analyze what it is that made the novelist so unique. This is, as it turns out, an insurmountable task, not least because the answer lies more within his pages than in his life — though the impetus to think of the two as intricately intertwined is precisely why his novels resonate so far beyond the borders of my native country. Like many studies of Gabo’s novels over the past several decades, Webster’s documentary focuses on wanting to offer viewers many of the “real life” stories of his life that went on to be immortalized in his words. Readers of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, for example, get a chance to see the actual town square where a young man was, indeed, knifed down by two drunken brothers, while fans of Love in the Time of Cholera get to hear (perhaps yet again) the story of how Gabo’s parents got together, which went on to inspire that 1985 novel. Except, since he was such an expert chronicler as well as such a keen raconteur of his own life (his two memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale and Memories of My Melancholy Whores, are nothing short of required reading), any attempt to illuminate his life and work cannot help but leave one wanting. The anecdote is never quite as beguiling as the chronicle; the former remains unpolished and credible, the latter — especially in Gabo’s hands — emerges as perfectly whittled and almost preposterous but also, and this is crucial, believable. (Unsurprisingly, Webster’s doc is infinitely more engaging when delving into the writer’s often under-discussed journalistic career.)

But there is one thing the documentary captures better than anything I’ve read on the Colombian writer: the utter joy readers find in his work. The most heartwarming and engaging moments of the film come courtesy of the passages of his writing that are read out loud by Webster’s many talking heads.

I’ve lived with Gabo’s words for much of my life. He was an ubiquitous presence throughout my high school years—the kind I imagine Pablo Neruda is in Chile and Shakespeare is, well, everywhere in the English-speaking world. Despite having moved no less than eleven times (twice to different countries), I still have my textbook paperback copy of Hundred Years, a torn corner of its cover serving as a makeshift bookmark. In its pages I can trace my own 2000-era musings on the Buendías: the very first blank page of the novel, in fact, has a key to the many symbols I used to flag important moments and recurring motifs that, even as a 9th grader, suggested I had a critical inclination that made the rest of my classmates snicker in contempt. Some are pretty self-evident; a heart symbol can be found next to highlighted passages where love was concerned, an “S” marks places when García Márquez talks explicitly about solitude, an exclamation mark stands next to “important moments” (which, apparently, I doled out with abandon, all but making this indexing an almost futile exercise). Others were more needlessly complicated: a tiny book with a B emblazoned in its cover signalled moments when the Buendía story echoed, mirrored, or read like a Biblical tale (I don’t know where I was going with that), two butterflies appear next to scenes where “yellow” (yes, just the color) appeared as a visual motif, and a comically small tombstone charted the many (oh so many!) instances when death was mentioned. To rifle through these pages is to witness firsthand just how bewitched I was by this novel and how eager I was to unlock its many secrets.

He was an ubiquitous presence throughout my high school years — the kind I imagine Pablo Neruda is in Chile and Shakespeare is everywhere in the English-speaking world.

The many underlined passages (I could never bring myself to use highlighter and opted for the clean lines of a mechanical pencil, and hated marginal comments which is why I doodled symbols instead) trace my very first instincts as a critical reader, wanting to connect disparate moments, bringing together images that recurred, and hoping to piece together the puzzle that was Hundred Years. Now, though, they serve as a time machine of sorts. Sure, these highlighted passages served a scholarly purpose. They were a way for me to call up needed quotes in the essays and exams I wrote on the novel during that semester (the only other novel that the Spanish department allotted more time in their curriculum was, unsurprisingly, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote which took up one’s entire senior year). But they also function as a window into my high school self. I can glimpse, for example, why I was drawn to several underlined passages — “Only he knew at that time that his confused heart was condemned to uncertainty forever” is the kind of sentence a sensitive lovesick teenage boy would be drawn to — while others surprise me: what did I make of a line like “Little by little, however, and as the war became more intense and widespread, his image was fading away into a universe of unreality”? Reading it now, out of context and in translation, I’m struck by how perfect a description of Gabo’s work it is.

‘Phantom Thread’ Is the Love Story for Assholes We’ve All Been Waiting For

Like many of our Spanish textbooks, my edition of Hundred Years was published by an imprint called “Cara y Cruz” (Heads and Tails). The book included the full length of the novel on one side (“Cara”) and a series of helpful texts, including the author’s biography, standout quotes about the novel, a suggested bibliography as well as a short essay on the novel at hand (“Cruz”) on the other. For García Márquez’s 1967 text, the editors chose a feature by Carlos Fuentes titled “La Segunda Lectura” (On Second Reading). Nearly two decades after I first read it, the piece continues to color my own appreciation of the novel. With One Hundred Years of Solitude, Fuentes argues, García Márquez had given Latin America the chance to be mythic, making the many pasts and presents of the region come alive at the same time. “In each of these acts of fiction,” he writes, “the positivist time of the epic (this really happened) and the nostalgic time of an utopia (this could’ve happened) die and give birth to the absolute present time of the myth: this is happening.” It’s the only line in his essay I underlined and one I’ve gone back to revisit over the years — I used it for an essay on magical realism in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks in my freshman English course and recycled it again to talk about Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying the following year. Even as Webster never quite puts it in those words, the central thesis of his documentary merely echoes Fuentes: we may get the sense that the creation of Gabriel García Márquez requires us to revisit his hometown and talk with his family (and even with his Parisian girlfriend whom he left eventually to marry his sweetheart Mercedes), but only so that we will be better able to admire the way his prose borrowed but by some literary alchemy the likes of Melquiades in Hundred Years, he bore a new way of looking at his life, his country, and the world.

The promise and premise of a book like One Hundred Years of Solitude is the way it represented Colombian reality in the guise of novelistic myth. And so, in order to offer an origin story for a writer like García Márquez, one must work backwards, tracking the inspirations that led to the beguiling stories that have made him a worldwide sensation. The world of Macondo, the fabled small town that’s at the center of Hundred Years, functions as a microcosm of Colombia (and, by extension, Latin America). Framed by actual historical events — the civil war that beckons Aureliano, the banana massacre that only José Arcadio Segundo witnesses — Macondo exists at the intersection of reality and allegory. The magical realism that it helped globalize depends on reevaluating how we tell stories about what “really happened.” It’s no surprise that, to many who did not grow up in households where talk of spirits wasn’t uncommon (my grandmother spoke plainly about how her sister could divine who’d be dying next in the family as they’d appear to her in dreams) and in a country where one’s own national history seemed plausibly implausible, where a massacre could be both urban legend and historical fact, the impetus to understand Gabo’s work would focus on universalizing his words while at the same trying to anchor it in the mundane.

The promise and premise of a book like One Hundred Years of Solitude is the way it represented Colombian reality in the guise of novelistic myth.

“He chronicled, in a thousand different ways,” Clinton muses at one point in Webster’s film, “the futility of denying the promise of the human spirit.” Except, of course, Gabo’s books, no matter how universal they may feel, are, in essence, snapshots of a region. They’re so specific, so grounded in the particular, that their universality feels almost accidental. He said as much while accepting his Nobel Prize in 1982. Speaking in Stockholm, Gabo positioned his work as but an attempt to capture the implausible history of Latin America, with its mythical fauna, its delirious mundanity, and its virulent violence. “I dare to think,” he said, “that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune.” Having moved abroad shortly after reading Hundred Years, I’ve continued to find in its pages a sense of a lost home, one nurtured both by my own childhood imagination as by my nostalgic reminiscences as an adult. An “unreal” Colombia that nevertheless feels like home.

8 Literary Perfumes for Book-Lovers Who Want to Smell Good

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Perfume and literature have long been entwined, each one referencing or seeking to summon the other. Many famous books center on or are based around perfume, from Patrick Suskind’s 1985 novel Perfume to the numerous books in which scents become plot points or character development. And perfume, for its part, is frequently obsessed with literature. Scent is a storytelling genre, one seeking to transport the wearer to a different time or place, a memory or an imagined history. Perfume makers are often directly inspired by literature, too; many perfumes are based on specific authors or characters, more general ideas of literary eras and history, or on the imagined scent of books and libraries themselves.

Here are eight suggestions of perfumes for the book lover. Whether you’re already fragrance-obsessed, or have never worn perfume before reading this, these scents will pair perfectly with a love of reading, and cater to a range of literary interests.

Photo via Lucky Scent

Cape Heartache by Imaginary Authors

Portland-based perfume company Imaginary Authors makes arguably the ultimate perfumes for book-readers. Each of their scents is based the story of a made-up author — name, date, works and all — and matches the fragrance to the imaginary author’s imaginary world. “The Soft Lawn” invents Fitzgeraldesque Claude LeCocq writing about the silver spoon and tennis whites set, while “Bull’s Blood” imagines a hyper-masculine Hemingway stand-in famous for a book about bullfighting and his father. But my favorite of their collection is Cape Heartache, a perfume based on an invented 19th century American novelist named Phillip Sava who wrote about his teenage expeditions to the Pacific Northwest. It evokes the old growth forests and foggy mornings in that part of the country perfectly, shot through with unexpected sweetness, like the smell of nostalgia.

Photo via CB I Hate Perfume

In the Library by CB I Hate Perfume

Book lovers often begin their interest in perfume by seeking out a scent that smells like old books. For many of us, our love of reading started by cracking open old paperbacks, whether from the library, or school, or borrowed from a parent’s bookshelves. In the Library evokes that dusty scent, the smell of yellowing pages and ink, but also the warm-body, indoor smell of a library, with notes of leather, paper, and wood polish. The scent is part of Christopher Brosius’ I Hate Perfume line, in which each scent is meant to evoke a particular memory, and he based this one on the smell of a 1927 signed first edition of his favorite novel.

Photo via Memo

Quartier Latin by Memo

Paris is a famously literary city, and Memo, a perfume line based on evoking ideas of place, focuses its depiction of Paris specifically on the city’s literary history. The Quartier Latin, from which the perfume takes its name, is the student district, known for all-night cafes where artists and intellectuals fought and flirted and debated philosophy. This perfume is meant to smell like paper and ink, like scribbling furiously in a leatherbound notebook. Notes of tonka bean, sandalwood, amber, and cedar come to together to evoke this vision of a romantic intellectual city.

Photo via Osswald NYC

Memoir Woman by Amouage

Memoir is a controversial genre, and one that has perhaps gotten a bad reputation in recent years, with the rise and fall of the confessional online essay. But this perfume — a rich, weird, androgynous scent with notes of absinthe, white flowers, cardamom, pink pepper, labdanum and leather — is memoir in a more old-fashioned sense, the recollections of someone fascinating who lived a long and weird life, with instructive and sometimes frightening stories to tell. The contrasts in the scent imitate the contrasts in a life story, with its twists, turns, hard lessons, sharp ups and downs, and moments of unexpected sweetness.

Photo via Lucky Scent

1804 George Sand by Histoires des Parfums

Histoires des Parfums’ fragrances are based on single years in history, often with a literary flavor. Other fragrances in include 1828 Jules Verne (a citrus marine fragrance) and 1740 Marquis de Sade, but 1804 is named for the year George Sand was born. A gorgeous white floral bouquet, the scent is clean, welcoming, and gracious, evoking the novelist’s famous generosity and love of nature.

Photo via Lucky Scent

De Profundis by Serge Lutens

Oscar Wilde wrote “De Profundis” (which translates “from the depths”) from prison, a letter to the young loutish lover who had put him there. It is a heartbreaking confession — and a confession in a literal, religious sense, as it draws closely on biblical ideas of sin and creation and depicts Wilde’s identification with Christ — mourning both his and his beloved’s vanity and weaknesses. It stands in contrast to Wilde’s popular plays and quips, as though his buoyant wit had turned inside out to reveal the wounded heart beneath it. From storied French perfume house Serge Lutens, created by famous perfumer Christopher Sheldrake, this perfume is inspired equally by Wilde’s famous letter and Psalm 130 from which it takes its name (“from the depths I have cried out to you, Oh Lord”), and is meant to be the smell of confession and resurrection, moving from the scent of ash and musk to the smell of Wilde’s signature chrysanthemum, and into greens, earth, and new growth.

Photo via Lucky Scent

Baudelaire by Byredo

Charles Baudelaire was perhaps the quintessential French dandy-poet, today famous as much for his persona as for his poetry, and Byredo’s perfume is a tribute to that persona, at once lushly floral and dark with sticky incense, like the interior of an intellectual salon being hosted in a wealthy home, full of smoke and booze and flowers.

Photo via Roja Perfumes

A Midsummer Dream by Roja Parfums

A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream is the Shakespeare plays most likely to be performed at an outdoor festival where the audience brings picnic blankets and sits on the lawn and gently swats at mosquitoes all night, and the particular joy of this specific experience is maybe the best thing about this play. Roja’s perfume in tribute to Shakespeare’s famous comedy evokes exactly that experience, combining moss, floral notes, vanilla, vetiver, and deeper cedarwood, benzoin, and musk, like the experience of dusk settling blue over a lawn full of community theater actors playing fairies and lovers.

Ramona Ausubel Writes About What Bodies Do in Secret

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Stop. Think. There must be a harder way.” So reads a letterpress sign that hangs in the kitchen of Ramona Ausubel’s mother, which the author recalled at the launch evening for her previous book, The Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty. The message resonates with much of Ausubel’s writing: it’s funny, but it captures something absolutely true about how most of us navigate life—specifically, about the ways women reckon with being lovers, mothers, and artists.

Such reckonings have proven to be Ausubel’s fiction sweet spot. Her 2013 story collection A Guide to Being Born (featuring the story “Tributaries” published in Recommended Reading), is organized by the stages of life but in reverse—in the end, the reader arrives at birth. And now, partnership and memory, pregnancy and motherhood drive the stories in Ausubel’s tapestried new collection, Awayland.

Purchase the collection.

The author’s fascination with motherhood and all its phases and emotions could be understood as part of a larger exploration: to understand feelings by transforming them into things physical and bodily. The emotion that lends itself best to such transformation is the one with the most complexities: Love.

In Awayland, the 11 stories are grouped into four sections that cover several territories of love and anguish: yearning for a partner, perhaps for a child; allowing for distance in the pursuit of intimacy; waiting as an inevitable phase in every kind of relationship; and lastly, the dream of something that lasts forever. It takes a powerful imagination to realize these sensations as physicalities, but that is something Ausubel has in abundance. Loneliness is cast into a Cyclops creating a dating profile in “You Can Find Love Now”; separation is death at an all-inclusive resort in “Club Zeus,” or the lovers trading hands in “Remedy”; and in the penultimate story, mummified animals in an Egyptian museum manifest Till Death Do Us Part.

Awayland is a collection of many voyages and many lives. The stories take us around the world, and to whatever is beyond. Only a woman endlessly compassionate and curious could produce such fiction. That was exactly who I met when I talked to Ramona Ausubel. Somebody who took her feelings, and stopped, thought, and followed them a different way.

Lucie Shelly: A lot of your writing explores motherhood, but this collection has a particular focus on the precipice: pregnancy. To me, there’s a connection to be drawn between the gestation of a baby and the gestation of a story; I think it suggests something special about the woman as artist, she is a creator in both senses. Can you talk a little about your work’s focus on motherhood and pregnancy?

Ramona Ausubel: My writing does often come back to pregnancy, and I always think to myself, am I done with this topic? It is this fantastical thing that our bodies know how to do. I have two kids and I do not know how to grow a child. It’s not something that I understand, and yet my body knows this thing and can do it. Similarly, being a woman in the world, we’re asked to keep a lot of our lives under the surface. You have to be nice, you have to take care of everybody and do all this surface work, and everything else happens in the dark corners. With many of these stories, I was thinking about the way that art grows out of those dark corners. I have to write about that, I have to sink a bucket down into that dark well and figure out what’s been happening below the surface. There’s so much concealed and tangled and complicated. It’s just not what the world, in my everyday life, wants to hear from me. To me, art is the way that stuff can come up.

Tributaries

LS: Your first collection considers motherhood, too, but I believe you’d written it before your son was born. Writing this collection, having gone through two births and being a mother of two, did that change how you wrote about the experiences of being pregnant, raising a child?

RA: I feel like because I’m looking from the other side, I have a lot more information. These stories cast out beyond the surprise of “What?! You can grow a thing inside you?” With these stories, I knew what it was to then care for that creature, do all of the work to make that human survive and hopefully live happily. They also consider the many transformations that a woman will make in relation to her child, because the child will change, and she is required to change with it. It’s this tumbling wheel of constant change, and deformation and formation again.

LS: To me, there are cycles of deformation for both women and men, in bodies and character, in this collection. There’s a line in “Do Not Save the Ferocious, Save the Tender” that describes, “A body severed from itself.” We see bodies pulled into pieces in several stories, we’ve got the hands removed from the couple in “Remedy,” the fallen uterus of the aging woman in “High Desert,” ankles pop up throughout. I’m wondering what you were trying to explore by looking at the body in pieces rather than an inevitable whole.

RA: I’m fascinated by bodies and what we ask them to do, particularly what we ask them to do in secret — it goes back to that question of what we aren’t saying out loud and what we aren’t able to talk about. Those unsaid experiences, that all wind up in our bodies somewhere. So in my work, I try to turn the volume up on that a little so we can hear it more clearly.

With the couple in that story “Remedy,” the woman thinks she’s dying and it’s just not okay with her that she’s going to leave her beloved. It’s the beginning of their relationship and she knows they’re meant to be together, so she decides that she wants to try, surgically, switching hands so that they can be together forever. I didn’t intend it, but that story is the most autobiographical story in this collection. I remember so clearly when I was first with my husband and feeling that one lifetime was not enough. It was really upsetting to know we had this limited amount of time and one of us was going to die first. As a solution, I was thinking we’ll inhabit each other’s ghosts and that’s how we’ll handle that problem! The point is, that idea of limited time felt absolutely unacceptable to me, so I tried thinking through it in a bigger way: what if I took that real feeling and brought it to its maximum size — how could it physically express itself? And that’s always something that I’m coming back to. What happens if we put this feeling in the body and allow it to be as big physically as it is as a feeling?

It goes back to that question of what we aren’t saying out loud and what we aren’t able to talk about. Those unsaid experiences all wind up in our bodies somewhere.

LS: The couple in “Remedy” also seem totally happy in their own world, and I felt a lot of the couples in this collection exist in a separate realm or a liminal space. In “Mother Land,” the couple leaves California for the man’s far-flung family home in Africa; in “Heaven” we have a man and a spectral woman in some magical or spiritual place. When you write through and explore relationships, do you consider them as bubbles, at a remove from the world, or experiences that bring people closer to humanity?

RA: Totally both. We all have some kinds of relationships, whether that’s family or friendships or romantic relationships. We have these things that are one way on the surface, and a different way in private. There’s the official story, you chat to someone at a cocktail party and say, “Here’s who I’m married to and this is what he does.” But you never talk about the full strata going down the canyon wall of that relationship, and all of the things that relationship is about, has ever been about, and all of the things you hope or worry it will become about. It’s my instinct to move these couples around through space and time and say, “What does it feel like to be very, very far away and with only each other?” It’s another feeling that exists on the inside that I want to try and translate into some kind of physical realm.

The Rich are Different from You and Me

LS: Writers often talk about the limitations of language and words. I hear this nugget people drag out, that the Eskimo language has 32 words for love and English only has one. And that is an interesting difference, but I don’t think that if we had more words for love, and even if we didn’t use modifiers like “a mother’s love,” I don’t think we’d stop writing stories to expand that word and explore the feeling. Your interest in realizing feelings as physical experiences, for instance, is a very different method of understanding. But do you feel confined by language, or do you feel freed by it?

RA: I feel much more freed by it. I am a fiction writer, so I get as much invention as I want. And because my work has a lot of weirdness in it, I’ve created a pretty big territory for myself. That means I don’t require language only. I get to use language, but language is also the vehicle that enables a kind of magic trick: to take a small thing and make it big and see what it looks like. The language is my favorite part, it’s the most satisfying thing, and getting a precise image is the most gratifying part of the work. But language is also the outlet into a lot of other tools that I get to use. For the same reason, I don’t write nonfiction, though I’ve tried. There are some short essays that I enjoyed writing. But for me, writing longform nonfiction, language would not feel like enough; I wouldn’t be able to say, “We’re gonna cut our hands off and trade them,” because that’s not something you would do in nonfiction. So I see how language might not be quite enough, but for me it’s the clay that makes everything possible.

LS: I would say one of those other tools you use so well is humor. “Club Zeus” is a funny and poignant story about death, and the mother in it is comical but she’s key to the sense of loss. After sending her son to Turkey for the summer, the son tells us, “What she means is that I am on my own. What she means is that tragedy is also currency. That enlightenment depends on grief. That love grows in soil that has been tilled.” “Template” is also a comical story, but could be read as dark, maybe dystopian, with the idea of baby-making becoming a government directive. I’ve heard you say before that you don’t necessarily try to write funny, but it’s something that comes forth. Can you talk about using humor to access the layers of emotions and relationships?

RA: I love using humor when it’s right. It’s like adding salt to a food, it makes everything else that’s there feel stronger — especially something that’s in opposition to humor, so the darkness and the sadness. If you have something funny, it breaks a reader open and makes all of the sadness and darkness sort of flood into that space. You can get those moments of opening in different ways, but humor is one of them.

The tension between sadness and humor is really beautiful to me. “Template” started because I read an article about a real situation in which a mayor of a small town in Russia created a day off for couples to have sex. That really did happen, but I couldn’t find much follow up about it, so I had to imagine. At first I started writing it set in Russia, but I was like, I don’t know enough about Russia. So the question was, is there a place that’s so bleak that no one is even bothering to have children anymore? That people are really afraid to? So much that a mayor might decide, we’ve got to give them some kind of incentive — and that incentive might be giving them a day off to have sex. That felt like it could happen in any country.

The funny part to me was thinking, what if this mayor was a copycat mayor — taking another mayor’s idea from another bleak place. But it had to be real. It had to be about actual hopelessness and the true feeling that people might have that they’re not sure there’s enough to sustain another life in this place. In the writing of it, the pleasure was in going back and forth between the funniness of the situation and the real hurt underneath, the real fear.

If you have something funny, it breaks a reader open and makes all of the sadness and darkness sort of flood into that space.

LS: From bleak towns to Turkey to Africa, the stories move around a lot, to places real and imagined. I felt, particularly for the real places, that the collection was Eastward facing. Beirut comes up several times — two mothers, in “Freshwater” and in “Mother Land” go to Beirut to die, essentially. What’s the background on your interest in the East?

RA: Well, I started the story, “Club Zeus,” after I got married and we went to Turkey and Greece on our honeymoon. We had a day at this all-inclusive resort and I was like “What?! This is a real place? This is not something from a George Saunders story?” I knew that I wanted to set something there but it took me a long time how to figure out how to make this story something more than just like, “This is weird place.” So, that was the first story that was sort of cast out into the world.

A few years later, my husband and I took a trip that lasted almost a year and a lot of the places we went are in the book. When we were travelling, I thought I was writing a book of nonfiction, I thought that it was a book about the idea of starting a family at this moment on the planet what with all of the terrible things that are happening. And I was thinking about that for myself — is having children even a good idea, is that okay to do? I did a lot of interviews with people all over the world, but about halfway through I realized that I didn’t want to write a nonfiction book. That it wasn’t my book to write at all. If somebody else wrote it, I would absolutely read it but it just didn’t feel like my work to do. Writing a book is such an investment, you have to be willing to hold it in your heart for years and years. I realized I was not willing to do that with that book.

Every Inheritance Has a Shadow

At first I was very despairing and I thought that I’d squandered this opportunity and the little fellowship I’d gotten, that it was all a waste. But when we came home, I started playing around with some stories, and the first one that I wrote after that was “The Animal Mummies Wish to Thank the Following.” And I really liked those animals. I thought, these guys are going to hang out with me and they are going to be pals and they are going to help the next thing happen. Slowly the stories started to emerge, and I realized they were set in all these different places and in fact all of that work I had done, the interviews, were part of a book. It was just a very different book than the one I imagined — instead of thinking about it from the outside as something I thought the world might want, it came from very much inside. I needed to write for my own reasons, and that’s exactly why it’s such a weird collection.

We were only in Beirut for a few days, but there’s just a quality to the city. Buildings are basically bombed out but it’s right on the ocean and everyone’s hanging out, jumping into the water. It felt like there was a very strong feeling of love for the place, and an ever-present fear of what has happened and what could happen. As a total outsider, I imagined loving somewhere like that, how that might be such a strong magnet in a person’s life.

LS: Were many of the destinations seaside countries? I ask because water features really prominently in this collection, and in a way that’s specific to women. A number of women emerge from the sea, and are drawn to the sea. Do you feel very drawn to the ocean, to water? Or do you think there’s a special connection between women and the sea?

RA: I do feel very drawn. Partly because I grew up in the desert. I lived the first half of my life in New Mexico and the second half, up until last year, in California, so all of a sudden, the sea was part of my existence. It’s just so, so vast, such a huge presence and so unknown to us; beautiful but dangerous. We’ve explored something like 10 percent of the world’s oceans, and we really don’t know a lot about what’s down there, which feels like a beguiling mystery but also like a threat. If there’s a storm or if you go out beyond where you are safe, you will be subsumed and completely disappear. I’m interested in what happens in this realm that exists on the edges of our world, and all of the things alive down there.

I needed to write for my own reasons, and that’s exactly why it’s such a weird collection.

LS: There was a real sense in the last section of this book that the stories took place in a realm or a bardo of some sort, or maybe purgatory. Can you tell me the decision to end the collection in a place that is the least defined, in a way?

RA: I played around with the arrangement a lot. I wanted it to be in some recognizable places, like the first story, “You Can Find Love Now,” is about a cyclops but he is very much in Washington State. The funniness of the piece is that he’s this strange otherworldly creature who’s supposed to be in Greece, but he isn’t, here he is in Washington. I wanted it to start with sort of the weirdness, but the rootedness at the same time, and then come back around to these places, to leave this earth, basically.

The last story, “Do Not Save the Ferocious,” sort of takes place in the North Sea and is maybe somewhere in Scandinavia a long time ago, but it isn’t at all defined. It feels like it could be any time and it maybe could be a place on this planet at all after all. The characters have, in their minds, certainly left the planet. It’s clear that they have made some kind of departure, and I wanted to make that story about departure. I also wanted it to be about the way our imaginations and the places we live in in our minds are separate from the world. Our feet are on the ground, but we’re also existing in other places, and maybe some of those places are real, but some are imaginings that don’t exist. There’s another world happening at the same time the regular world is happening. I wanted to go take us all the way outside.

14 Diverse Graphic Novels About Coming of Age

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Everyone has a coming-of-age story. We have all been on the cusp of adulthood struggling to find our identity, balancing the societal pressure to conform and fit in with the mainstream with the innate desire to rebel and stand out. Yet the publishing world tends to collapse these multifarious, complex transformations into the same cookie-cutter narratives, leaving out a whole lot of variations on what it means to become an adult.

One place where diverse coming-of-age stories are thriving, though, is graphic novels. (Although we didn’t find any by black authors—so there’s a hole in the market!) These visually beautiful tomes also offer a richer view of life in adolescence. From an Iranian girl rebelling against the oppression of post-revolution Iran to a “tomboy” refusing to conform to gender norms, these 14 graphic bildungsromans blend gorgeous artwork with the written word to create a diverse multiplicity of narratives telling of the confusion, joy, and hardship of growing up.

Nylon Road: A Graphic Memoir of Coming of Age in Iran by Parsua Bashi

Bashi left war-torn Iran 2004 for a safe haven in Switzerland, but adapting to a new life in Zurich comes with challenges. She struggles to find a good job, to learn German and English and to make friends. Unable to engage in “real life” in her “new society”, she feels “like a useless asshole.” Her ennui materializes in the form of a 6-year-old girl in her kitchen, her younger self. She is haunted by various incarnations of her past—the teenage political rebel who rants about class oppression, the religious young wife in an abusive marriage, the defeated, grief-stricken mother, the hopeful migrant, and more — who disapprove of her current lifestyle. Her arguments with her adversarial past selves reveals painful episodes from her past, explains the choices that lead to her present, and shows Bashi’s gradual transformation into the person she is in the present day. Bashi’s thought-provoking graphic memoir criticizes not only the abuses and oppressive aftermath of the Revolution, but also denounces the West’s claim to moral superiority, highlighting the racial prejudices and rampant consumerism of the West.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

Bruce Bechdel is a third-generation funeral home director and a high school English teacher. He spends his time feverishly restoring the family’s Victorian home and engaging in covert affairs with his male students and the family babysitter. Oh, did I forget to mention he’s also a closeted gay man? Alison craves the affection of her emotionally withholding father who pours all his love into their mausoleum of a home. As Alison comes of age and embraces her sexuality, she struggles to come out as a lesbian as tragedy in the family strikes. Fun Home is a heartbreakingly funny and honest graphic memoir of a daughter longing for closure and piecing together memories of her father through the lens of their shared, but unexpressed homosexuality.

Pashmina by Nidhi Chanani

Priyanka “Pri” Das harbors many questions: Why did her mother move to America? Why has she has vowed never to return to India? Where is her father? Why won’t her mother speak of him? Pri’s mother refuses to answer, telling her: “That subject is permanently closed.” Soon, Pri finds a silk shawl hidden in a forgotten suitcase. When wrapped around her shoulders, the pashima transports her from the black-and-white tones of her mundane California life to the India of her dreams, bursting with a kaleidoscope of color. But Pri knows this romanticized India is not real. She journeys to her ancestral homeland to uncover the hidden truths of her past with a little help from Shakti, the Divine Mother Goddess. Pooja Makhijani interviewed the author for Electric Literature about “magical realism, South Asian families, and how Pashmina came to be”.

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood & Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi

Divided into two parts, Persepolis recounts the story Satrapi’s childhood in Tehran at the dawn of the Islamic Revolution and her coming of age as an unwanted foreigner in Vienna. The outspoken daughter of loving, liberal parents, Marji turned 9 during the deposing of the Shah and witnesses Iran’s rapid fundamentalist transformation. The oppressive regime makes the veil mandatory for women, abolishes secular co-ed education, imprisons and executes political prisoners (including Marji’s beloved friends and relatives). In an act of rebellion, Marji takes to wearing black-market Nikes as a symbol of freedom. As the Iran-Iraq war worsens, her family reluctantly sends her away to complete her education in safety. Alone in Austria, Marji struggles to fit in and find belonging in a xenophobic country that conflates her with the extremists she escaped from. Persepolis is a raw, heartbreaking, and enthralling graphic memoir of a headstrong, tenacious girl fighting oppression and pursuing independence in post-revolution Iran.

Town Boy by Lat

Town Boy is a sequel to the charming and wistful Kampung Boy, a graphic memoir of a Muslim boy growing up in an idyllic village in rural Malaysia in the 1960s. Lat moves to the city to attend boarding school, leaving behind the familiar rubber plantations and tin mines of his hometown for a new life amidst the colorful shophouses and grand colonial buildings of bustling, multicultural Ipoh. He quickly forges a strong friendship with Frankie, a Malaysian Chinese boy, bonding over their shared love of rock-and-roll. Over the next seven years, the teenage duo experience the universal challenges of growing up — falling in love, hiding in the back row of classrooms, discovering new passions, rebelling against parental wishes — depicted through beautifully drawn artwork.

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

American Born Chinese weaves together three disparate coming-of-age stories that converge with a clever twist. The first chapter reimagines the legendary Chinese fable of the Monkey King attempting to transcend his monkey nature to earn a place in heaven after being kicked out of a dinner party for gods. An action-packed fight scene with creator god Tze-Yo-Tzuh ends with a humbling defeat with the Monkey King realizing that “to find your true identity…that is the highest of all freedoms.” The second narrative features Jin Wang, who moves from San Francisco’s Chinatown to a vanilla white suburb. Jin just wants to be an “all-American Boy” and fit in instead of having to answer dumb questions like “Do you eat cats?” and enduring the racist taunts of schoolyard bullies. In the last story, blue-eyed, blonde-haired Danny turns into the school pariah during an embarrassing visit from his fresh-off-the-boat cousin, Chin-Kee. Chin-Kee, a “chinky”-eyed kung-fu warrior clad in traditional attire with a waist-length braided ponytail and a pidgin accent (“HARRO AMELLICA!”), is a cringe-inducing caricature of prejudiced stereotypes perpetuated by American pop culture (I’m looking at you, Sixteen Candles). American Born Chinese reveals the prejudices of a society that simultaneously pressures Asians into assimilating into whiteness and rejecting their heritage, but refuses to accept us as anything but perpetual foreigners; a necessary read to understand the struggles of being Asian in America.

Tomboy by Liz Prince

As a child, Liz wore jeans and a T-shirt and played baseball with the boys while other girls played princess in pink tutus. She hated anything “girly” to the point of chauvinism before realizing she did not want to become a boy, but desired the independence associated with masculinity. As she hits puberty, Liz struggles to fit in and find acceptance in her high school, becoming the target of ridicule and bullying, and crushing on boys who reject her over for “feminine” girls. Spanning early childhood into adulthood, Tomboy is a humorous and heartbreaking account of staying true to yourself in a black and white world that demands conformity to stereotypical gender roles.

Skim by Mariko Tamaki & Jillian Tamaki

Kimberly Keiko Cameron, known as “Skim” because “she’s not slim,” and her best friend Lisa are both chubby and biracial, making them outcasts in their all-girls private Catholic high school. The two teenagers experiment with Wicca and dress in goth attire, reveling in their outsider status until Lisa get a chance to join the popular clique of blonde, peppy white girls. A panicked uproar over the suicide of the (possibly gay) boyfriend of a popular classmate leads to the school treating Skim as a suicide risk (just for being different). Amidst the forced therapy sessions and fake hugs from “concerned” classmates, Skim develops a crush on neo-hippie English teacher, Ms. Archer, who unwisely allows their friendship to bloom into an illicit romance.

Blue Is the Warmest Color by Julie Maroh

The film Blue Is the Warmest Color, winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, began as an eponymous graphic novel of tragic love. High school junior Clementine catches the eye of Emma, a confident blue-haired art student on the streets. After a chance encounter at a local gay bar, Clementine and Emma fall in love. Emma is an outspoken activist, seeing her sexual identity as an integral part of her social and political life while Clem hides her homosexuality from the outside world. Their divergent views of coming out leads to cracks in their relationship, culminating in tragedy.

The Arab of the Future Series by Riad Sattouf

Cartoonist Riad Sattouf spent his childhood in the Middle East under the shadow of three dictators. At the tender age of two, Sattouf and his parents emigrated to Libya where Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was known as the eccentric “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution.” The second was Hafez Assad of Syria (predecessor to the current Syrian megalomaniac), president of 4-year-old Sattouf’s new home. The last tyrant was his father, a Syrian professor who met his French wife in the cafeteria as students at the Sorbonne in Paris and swept his family up in his grandiose dream of ruling as president over a pan-Arab utopia. In Tripoli, the family lived in an unlockable house (courtesy of Gaddafi’s abolishment of private property) and returned from a walk to find squatters residing in their home. The scarcity of food meant the family survived solely on bananas or eggs for weeks. The relocation to his father’s home village in rural Syria proved even harsher. The local kids denounced little blonde Sattouf as a Jew and started beating him up. In the third installment explores the tension between his mother who, fed up with austere village life, wants to return to France and his father who still firmly believes in the promise of a prosperous and modern Arab nation. Sattouf uses cartoonish characters with exaggerated features and pops of color (light blue for France, yellow for Libya, pink for Syria) to show the perspective of a child growing up in the Middle East.

Fetch: How a Bad Dog Brought Me Home by Nicole J. Georges

Nicole J. Georges was a sixteen-year-old high school drop out when she adopted Beija, a shar-pei/corgi puppy, from a shelter as a holiday gift for her boyfriend. That boyfriend didn’t last, but Beija, a neurotic “bad dog” who hated men and attacked small children, stayed by Georges’s side for the next fifteen years. As Georges navigated a tumultuous young adulthood, heartbreaking relationships, a changing sexual identity, and a move from the Midwest to Portland, Beija and her “Don’t Pet Me” bandana remained a steadfast companion, who as she describes it, “loved me even when I lapsed in loving myself.”

Snapshots of a Girl By Beldan Sezen

Snapshots of a Girl is a humorous, heartrending graphic memoir about the author’s coming of age and coming out in both Western and Islamic culture. The daughter of Turkish immigrants in Germany, Sezen explores the conflicts of growing up as a queer person of color in modern Europe. The first part of the book, “The Denial Years,” navigates Sezen’s sexual awakening as she tries to date with men, only to find disappointment. After much self doubt and denial, Sezen gradually embraces her attraction to women and attempts to come out to her conservative parents. Charming and quirky, Snapshots of a Girl is a moving story of a young woman’s pursuit of happiness as she learns to embrace her body and her sexuality.

a + e 4ever by Ilike Merey

Asher, a shy newcomer to his high school, becomes the target of his classmates’ ridicule and physical violence because of his androgynous appearance. Drawn to his fragility, Eulalie develops a friendship with Ash after rescuing him from lunchroom bullies. A tough-talking, heavy-metal listening butch girl, Eu understands the intense loneliness that comes with being different. Bonded by a love of drawing, raves, alternatives music, the genderqueer outcasts navigate love, friendship, and sexuality to discover who they really are.

Mis(h)adra by Iasmin Omar Ata

Isaac is an Arab American college student in New York City, battling epilepsy. He pushes himself to play the role of a normal college student, partying hard and studying for midterms until a violent seizures hospitalizes him. Drawn in a Manga-inspired style, Ata depicts the onset of Isaac’s seizures as a pack of floating one-eyed daggers, surrounding him menacingly and then stabbing him into oblivion. Isaac feels increasingly isolated and defeated as his friends and teachers downplay the severity of his diagnosis and medical professionals question the legitimacy of his illness, but he finds a sympathetic new ally in Jo, a friend-of-a-friend. Mis(h)adra provides readers with a vivid and intimate look into the day-to-day life of a young man with epilepsy doing his best to survive in an apathetic world.

In Honor of the School Walkout, Here Are 8 Books About Young People Making Political Change

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O n Wednesday, March 14, at 10 a.m., nearly one million students across the nation walked out of school to protest gun violence. Some hundreds received detention, others walked out alone, and still others broke through locked gates in defiance.

The walkout was inspired by the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, where seventeen students and staff were gunned down one month ago. Since then, Parkland students have been getting attention as anti-gun organizers, following in the footsteps of less-lauded young activists of color. In an inspiring moment at a rally shortly after the shooting, Marjory Stoneman Douglas senior Emma González called BS on all the “adults” in the room, who continued to frustrate or ignore efforts to prevent more school shootings. Instead of waiting on adults to act, she urged young people to get involved. Maintaining his role as Commander in Hope, Barack Obama tweeted: “Young people have helped lead all our great movements. How inspiring to see it again in so many smart, fearless students standing up for their right to be safe; marching and organizing to remake the world as it should be. We’ve been waiting for you. And we’ve got your backs.”

This week, we wanted to honor the young people who are continuing to fight for the doomed world we’ve handed them: the children walking out of class, the Parkland students, and Black Lives Matter and other young activists before them who blazed a trail. We’ve rounded up 8 books — both YA and adult fiction — about and for young people who will save the world.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Starr Carter is sixteen years old and trying to figure out how to balance her life in the suburban, mostly-white, private school where she spends the day, and her neighborhood back home, afflicted with poverty, where her father “Big Mav” works to make the neighborhood a safer place, and her mother wants to move because it isn’t. When Starr is the witness to her best friend Khalil’s shooting by a police officer, everything falls out of balance as Starr recalibrates to a reality where her unarmed friend is transformed by newspaper headlines into a “thug” and “drug dealer.” The walls between her two worlds disintegrate as she is forced into the public spotlight, and becomes a witness for the Grand Jury in Khalil’s murder. Meanwhile, people are protesting in the streets in Khalil’s name. Protesters, local gang members, and police alike want to know what happened on the day Khalil was killed, and the only person who can answer that question is Starr. The characters and richly and intimately drawn, as Starr deals with her first long-term relationship and mean girls at school, all while trying to figure out the implications for standing up for what she believes in — for herself and her communities — and telling the story of what happened the day Khalil was killed.

The Fragile Flag by Jane Langton

The president of nine-year-old Georgie Hall’s America is thoughtless, hawkish, obsessed with glitz, and in love with praise, like absolutely nobody we can think of. He’s redesigned the American flag to be covered with sequins, and has announced a contest for children to write him letters in praise of how great it is. Oh, and he’s also building a missile capable of destroying the earth. Georgie and her family and friends — including, as it happens, the president’s grandson — decide to march from Massachusetts to D.C. in protest of the missile, carrying a tattered old non-sequined U.S. flag. Along the way they pick up new adherents, and their march enters the city as a Children’s Crusade. This is a middle-grade book, but charming and refreshing in its optimism about young people’s political power.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

In the dystopian future America of Panem, the children of poor communities are forced to fight to the death in a gruesome reality competition, for the entertainment of the rich and the anesthetization of the oppressed. (It’s a fun book for teens!) Protagonist Katniss enters the Games to spare her sister, but when the rules of the game require her to kill her friend instead, she goes off-script — and unwittingly becomes the hero of a political resistance.

Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan

It was a challenge to narrow down to just one David Levithan title on this list, because he has written so many vital books that address the power of love and identity in making political change. Based on a true story and written by the beloved author of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, The Lover’s Dictionary. After seventeen-year-olds Harry and Craig call it quits on their relationship, they partner up on a new project to beat a Guinness World Record by kissing for 32 hours straight. They’re spurred on by a Greek chorus of the generation of gay men lost to AIDS, who narrate the novel. While Harry and Craig near the record-breaking hour, they become a personal and political channel for other boys dealing with their own desire on the internet, the consequences of coming-out in public, and what it means to have feelings for another person at all. For more David Levithan on politics, power, and young people make serious change, check out Wide Awake, too. (See, I couldn’t help myself.)

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Rushdie’s novel, is exactly as old as India’s independence from Britain and partition from Pakistan: he was born at midnight on August 14, 1947. As he grows, he discovers that he and all the other Indian and Pakistani children born between midnight and 1 a.m. on that day have special powers, including the ability to communicate telepathically with each other. Saleem brings these 1,001 gifted children together in a psychic parliament, and their loves and friendships and conflicts both reflect and heal the traumas of Partition. But even with their enormous magical and political potential, are the Midnight’s Children strong enough to save the country from a monstrous prime minister?

A Mad Wicked Folly by Sharon Biggs Waller

In this historical fiction, we meet another seventeen-year-old woman grappling with larger political forces limiting her personal and professional mission to go to art school and become an artist. It’s 1909 and Victoria Darling is willing to do anything to make it happen. But when posing nude for an art class gets her kicked out of boarding school, she finds herself back in London. There, she gets involved in the suffragette movement and falls in love with a working-class boy (her muse), secretly applies to art school, and tries to figure out what she is willing to sacrifice for her dreams before her parents seal her fate as a well-married woman. It’s geared towards young adults, but a compelling read for any woman who’s pissed off and has ever felt compelled to live how she wants to rather than how she is supposed to.

The Power by Naomi Alderman

What happens when womanhood suddenly becomes a weapon? Alderman’s novel is a nuanced and gripping exploration of that question. Its premise: teen girls across the world develop the ability to create an electrical charge with their bodies, strong enough to harm or kill a man. They teach this skill to older women, and women as a whole start to fight back in a way they never could before. One troubled teen becomes the kingpin (queenpin?) of a crime family; another becomes the head of a new religious movement made up of powerful girls. Alderman investigates the political, social, and interpersonal ramifications of this new power, both immediately and millennia into the future; it’s both thought-provoking and impossible to put down.

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

Song of a Captive Bird by Jasmin Darznik

Another critical story about a young woman choosing the life she wants to live, which is its own political act. This one is based on the life of the 1960s Iranian feminist poet Forugh Farrokhzad. In Song of a Captive Bird, young Forugh balks at the command to be a good young Persian woman — modest, quiet, meek — and instead engages in illicit conversations with young boys at cafes, swaps gossip with her sister in the garden, and writes poetry. After running away from a horrible marriage, Forugh falls deeper in love with poetry (and other men), and seeks out an independent artist’s life that creates political inspiration and outrage. It’s an homage to the indelible Iranian feminist poet and filmmaker, whose poetry and life continue to inspire women around the world.