In Nella Larsen’s “Passing,” Whiteness Isn’t Just About Race

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Passing is a work of fiction, but it is a true story about the world in which its author, Nella Larsen, lived. To describe it simply as a novel about a black woman passing for white would be to ignore the multiple layers of its concerns. Passing is about the monumental cultural transformations that took place in American society after World War I. It is about changing definitions of concepts like race and gender, and the inextricable relationship between whiteness and blackness. It is a meditation on the uneasy dynamic between social obligation and personal freedom. It dramatizes the impossibility of self-invention in a society in which nuance and ambiguity are considered fatal threats to the social order. The novel is an indictment of consumer culture and the dangers it poses to personal integrity. It reveals the power of desire to transform and unhinge us, and the lengths to which we will go to get what we want. Passing is about hypocrisy and fear, secrecy and betrayal. It is a universal story of the messiness of being human as it is portrayed in the particularly explosive relationship between two black women, Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield.

‘Passing’ is a meditation on the uneasy dynamic between social obligation and personal freedom.

Irene and Clare have not seen each other in twelve years when they reunite by chance on the roof of the Drayton Hotel in Chicago, where both women are enjoying a respite from a blazing hot August day. The Drayton is an exclusive hotel, and not one in which African Americans, or Negroes, to use the parlance of the day, would be welcome. In fact, on the fateful day of their reunion, both women are passing for white.

In Passing, race is revealed to be, in part, a function of performance (the novel is structured in three sections — Encounter, Re-Encounter, Finale — much like acts in a theatrical piece), and blackness a matter of perception. Of the two women, it is Clare who appears to be so convincingly white that not only does Irene fail to identify Clare as a Negro, she doesn’t recognize her childhood friend at all. Even after Clare introduces herself to Irene, Irene still doesn’t recognize her or her blackness. When Clare uses her nickname, Irene searches her memory: “What white girls had she known well enough to have been familiarly addressed as ’Rene by them?” By contrast, Clare identifies Irene immediately. Irene squirms under Clare’s unflinching stare, terrified of being seen for who she is, and also afraid of the embarrassment that would result from being ejected from the hotel.

Passing by Nella Larsen

It is only when Clare emits her distinctive laugh, which is “like the ringing of a delicate bell,” that Irene finally recognizes her old friend. As the women talk, Clare appears more and more black to Irene. “Ah! Surely! They were Negro eyes! mysterious and concealing,” she thinks as she feasts her own eyes upon Clare’s stunning features. “There was about them something exotic,” she thinks. As she is observing Clare, Irene is simultaneously making her up, inventing her — and inventing race, too. Clare isn’t any more of a Negro after she reveals herself to Irene than she was before. As Irene confesses to another character later in the novel, no one can tell just by looking.

According to the guidelines of genealogy, Clare’s claims to blackness are tenuous. Her grandfather was white. Her father was the product of her grandfather’s dishonorable relationship with a black woman. Somewhere along the way, there had been money, but her grandfather squandered it. There is no mention in the novel of Clare’s mother.

Once her father died, his pious aunts took Clare in, not as an expression of filial love but rather a sterile sense of Christian duty. They treated her like a servant, and forbade her from revealing the truth about her racial identity. Their bigotry was frank. “For all their Bibles and praying and ranting about honesty, they didn’t want anyone to know that their darling brother had seduced — ruined, they called it — a Negro girl. They could excuse the ruin, but they couldn’t forgive the tarbrush,” Clare tells Irene. Clare was forbidden even to mention Negroes to the neighbors, much less discuss the South Side, where Irene and her friends lived in Chicago. It was easy for Clare to dispose of such an unhappy past, which was bankrupt of love as well as money.

Clare Kendry has not used her fair skin to make a political statement; she has not been passing in order to undermine and subvert the system of white supremacy. There has been no greater good. Instead she has been passing purely for personal gain. Although she grew up in the same racial world as Irene, her social circumstances were radically different. Among their cohort of middle-class girls, “Clare had never been exactly one of the group.” Her father had gone to college with some of the other girls’ fathers, but he had somehow wound up a janitor, and “a very inefficient one at that.” He was also a violent alcoholic who would ultimately die in a bar fight. Among Irene’s earliest memories of Clare are images of “a pale small girl sitting on a ragged blue sofa, sewing pieces of bright red cloth together, while her drunken father, a tall, powerfully built man, raged threateningly up and down the shabby room, bellowing curses and making spasmodic lunges at her.” The stubborn little girl boldly stitching together the bright cloth in defiance of her father’s rage would grow into a young woman who defied fate, custom, and white supremacy by crossing the color line. But it wasn’t racial self-hatred that catapulted Clare into whiteness; it was the shabby room. Clare passed for white because she hated being poor, not being black.

Clare passed for white because she hated being poor, not being black.

All passing narratives are about class as much as they are about race. One never passes down the social ladder; black characters become, or pose as, white in order to improve their material circumstances, or gain access in general to opportunities for personal, social, and professional advancement. The choice of individual comfort over the advancement of the race as a whole is always rendered as wrong; in most passing stories, material ambition and moral ruin are directly correlated. By the time some passing subjects recognize the truly degraded implications of their decisions to engage in racial masquerade, it is too late. In the film Imitation of Life, the main character comes to her senses only after she finds out that her choice to pass has literally killed her mother. The denial of the black mother is often the surest sign of the low character of those who choose to pass. The narrator in the short story “Passing” by Langston Hughes gets a better job as a white man but his financial success requires him to ignore his own mother as they pass each other on the street. “That’s the kind of thing that makes passing hard,” the narrator sums up in a letter to his mother, “having to deny your own family when you see them.”

Clare is a gambler, playing the high stakes game of racial roulette. For her, passing is a sport, and she is unrivaled in her technique.

Clare Kendry is markedly different from other passing subjects in American literature. For one, she is not concerned with the moral implications of passing for white. Unlike other black characters whose passing enables them to marry white people, Clare does not pass for love. Even though she views passing through the lens of rank materialism, ultimately she sees passing as play. Clare Kendry is not an incarnation of the “tragic mulatto” figure, inherently alienated and adrift, whose mixed blood dooms her to racial purgatory. She is not wandering in the interstices of black and white. Instead, Clare is a hunter, stalking the margins of racial identity, hungry for forbidden experience, “stepping always on the edge of danger.” She is a gambler, playing the high stakes game of racial roulette. For her, passing is a sport, and she is unrivaled in her technique. Clare desires many things, among them to be among Negroes again. But ultimately, the true nature of her driving need is as opaque as the “ivory mask” she wears.

Irene is tied to race out of duty; Clare’s relationship to blackness is affective. “You don’t know, you can’t realize how I want to see Negroes, to be with them again, to talk with them, to hear them laugh,” Clare confesses to Irene. As a woman motivated by passion and excited to cross lines of propriety, Clare has a lot in common with the writer who dreamed her up: Nella Larsen.

Nella Larsen in 1928

Nella Larsen was born Nellie Walker in 1891 in Chicago. Her mother was a Danish immigrant and her father an immigrant from the Danish West Indies. Nella’s father disappeared from her life when she was young. Her mother married a fellow Danish immigrant, Peter Larsen, with whom she had another child. Like many fiction writers, Larsen incorporated elements of her own life into her writing. She shared with Clare the experience of being unwanted by white family members; neither Peter nor her half-sister acknowledged the ties that bound them. Like Clare, Nella was born poor and on the wrong side of town. Not only did Larsen spend her childhood in the vice district of Chicago, she was confronted by other dangers: a city in which the crossing of racial lines was unwelcome and cost those who disregarded them dearly. The rigid lines were officially underscored when, in 1920, the category “mulatto” was dropped from the census. There was no room for individuals whose bodies failed to conform to convention.

Nella was introduced to the world of the black bourgeoisie — the world in which Irene moved easily — when she was a student at Fisk University. There she bristled at the strict codes of dress and conduct. In her 1928 novel Quicksand, Larsen describes the disdain that the main character Helga Crane has toward the smug, insular world of the black elite at the fictional college of Naxos (an anagram for Saxon). “These people yapped loudly of race, of race consciousness, of race pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naïve spontaneous laughter.”

Ultimately Larsen was expelled from Fisk, most likely for violating dress code. Larsen went from Fisk to Denmark, where she had spent time as a child. She returned to the United States and enrolled in nursing school, taking a position as head nurse at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the incarnation of the vision of Booker T. Washington, and along with Fisk, a model for Naxos. It was known as the “Tuskegee machine.” In Quicksand, Helga reflects on her school: “This great community, she thought, was no longer a school. It had grown into a machine.” Larsen found the working conditions at Tuskegee untenable. She resigned in 1916.

A few years later, she married Elmer Imes, who was at that point one of two African Americans to have ever held a Ph.D. in physics. The couple moved to Harlem, where Larsen took a job at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Soon her life as a writer would begin.

As Elmer’s wife, Nella began to spend time with intellectual and cultural luminaries of the 1920s, black men like James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and W. E. B. Du Bois. These men were architects of the Harlem Renaissance, authors of crucial philosophies that captured the concerns of black intellectuals of the moment. They were also central figures in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an organization for black progress that Du Bois helped to found in 1909. Irene Redfield, who prides herself on being a ticket taker for a ball for the Negro Welfare League, would have been impressed by the company Larsen kept.

It is safe to say that both Nella Larsen and her character Clare Kendry would have had easier lives as mixed-race women in the 21st century. If the 1920 census, with its removal of “mulatto” as a viable racial category, officially erased the experience of being mixed-race in the United States, the inclusion on the 2000 census of categories that allow individuals to identify for the first time in history with more than one race has already generated new stories. According to the 2010 Census Brief, since 2000, the population reporting multiple races increased by 32 percent. Already, the structure of the new census has enabled people with complex racial backgrounds to more aptly define themselves.

It is safe to say that both Nella Larsen and her character Clare Kendry would have had easier lives as mixed-race women in the 21st century.

Unfortunately, the script had already been written for Clare. She was a woman who insisted on being free, and she paid for the crime of her hunger not only to defy racial convention but also the customs of gender, as well. The men in the novel are world explorers, or yearn to be: Jack Bellew is an international banker; Hugh Wentworth has “lived on edges of nowhere in at least three continents”; Brian Redfield longs to abandon American racism and move to Brazil. Clare is the true adventurer, however. Her wanderlust is domestic but perhaps more dangerous in that it is not structured by travel or outlined in a map but rather a function of her everyday life. Her literary descendants, such as Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; Sula in the eponymous novel by Toni Morrison; Birdie in Caucasia by Danzy Senna; and the protagonists in Interesting Women by Andrea Lee, also live dangerously by pushing the boundaries of social convention. But in the high stakes games that Clare plays in 1929, the house always wins.

“What is Africa to me?” muses the speaker in “Heritage.” Where does race reside? In blood, ancestry, or emotion? How can it be identified, much less quantified? Is it absurdity or a mystery? Race is a function of law, history, and politics, not science. Yet there is an ineffable quality to blackness, a mysterious factor that drives Clare to risk everything in order to “see Negroes, to be with them again, to talk with them, to hear them laugh.”

It is this ineffability, the mystery that Clare embodies, that Irene cannot bear. She curses race as a yoke, but what she ultimately rejects is not a racial bond with Clare, but the awareness that identity itself is transitional, as mobile as the trains that made it possible for millions of African Americans to leave the South during the Great Migration, and the railroad car that provided the platform for Homer Plessy’s historic confrontation. The self itself is unstable, just like the concept of race.

At the end of the novel, Irene finishes her final cigarette and throws it out of a window, “watching the tiny spark drop slowly down to the white ground below.” It is impossible not to associate the cigarette sparks with the vitality and danger that Clare brought into her life. But Clare Kendry is unforgettable. After all, when a fire goes out, one does not necessarily remember the ashes. But one certainly remembers the brilliance of the flame.

Adapted from PASSING by Nella Larson, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Introduction copyright © 2018 by Emily Bernard.

Karl Ove Knausgaard On Writing Habits, Conversation, and Why They’re Both Kind of Dumb

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Karl Ove Knausgaard’s book Winter, which will be published on January 23, is the second in a series of four seasonal books, in which the Norwegian memoirist collects short essays, meditations, and letters to his as-yet-unborn daughter. The subject matter in Winter ranges from toothbrushes to Norse deities to Santa Claus to the moon, but of course it circles back many times to words and writing—Knausgaard’s passion and profession. In the following excerpts, Knausgaard talks about his writing habits—not what time he starts work every day, mind you, but what a habit actually is and where our need for them comes from—and discusses the difficulty of interpreting a conversation when all you have to go on is words.

Habits

For some reason writers are often asked about their routines and habits, such as what time they get up to write, whether they write by hand or on a computer, whether there is something they can’t do without while they are writing. What it is about the writer’s role in particular that awakens public interest in their daily lives is hard to say, but there must be something, since this doesn’t happen with other comparable professions. Maybe it has to do with the fact that everyone can write and read while at the same time there is something exalted about the role of the writer, and that this gap, which seems incomprehensible, must be bridged. Or it may have to do with the fact that writing is voluntary, and that a person who writes can always refrain from doing so, which is unthinkable in the case of an employee, and therefore obscure or tempting. When I was young I read interviews with writers with avid interest. I wasn’t looking for a method, I don’t think; what I wanted to find out was rather what it took. A pattern, a common denominator: what makes a writer a writer? Now I know that all writers are amateurs, and that perhaps the only thing they have in common is that they don’t know how a novel, a short story or a poem should be written. This fundamental uncertainty creates the need for habits, which are nothing other than a framework, scaffolding around the unpredictable. Children need the same thing, something has to be repeated in their lives, and this can’t be something inner, it has to involve external reality, they must know in advance at least some of what is happening around them. That repetition is not innate to us, the way it is to most other beings, but has to be created and maintained by acts of will, is perhaps the main difference between animals and humans. Animals such as dogs who are taken from their natural surroundings and introduced into new settings have nothing to parry unpredictability with, and get caught up in insane repetitions, tics and other compulsive acts. If it is great enough, children react to unpredictability in similar ways. Anxiety, aggression, antisocial behavior. Dante held that we can never understand the actions or feelings of others by reference to our own, as the baser animals can, and that this is why God gave us language. In other words, to make the differences visible, so that they become predictable and functional and enable social relations. But if differences are repeated, they become similarities, that is their own opposite. This makes language treacherous, it serves two masters, and that and no other is the reason literature exists. And that is why only people who are unable to write are able to write it. For if habit is allowed into literature and not kept outside, it is no longer literature, merely still more scaffolding around life.

Conversation

A great deal of interpersonal communication takes place outside language. If one records a conversation and writes down what was said, it becomes clear how important context is to what is spoken, which in itself is incomplete, characterized by hesitation, lacunae and allusions, and not seldom borders on the meaningless. This is so not only because we employ our whole body to complement our words when we speak, or because in a conversation we are attentive to everything the other bodies convey soundlessly, but because the conversation itself is usually about something quite other than what the words express. A conversation about something that has intrinsic value, where what is said is both important and interesting in itself, occurs so rarely that it clearly isn’t the main objective of human intercourse. “It sure is raining outside” is a fairly common statement, and clearly perfectly meaningless since everyone who hears it can see the rain for themselves. “It certainly is” might be the equally meaningless reply. Then there might be a pause before the next statement is uttered. “They say it’ll improve a little tomorrow.” What this conversation is really about is impossible to determine until we know where and when it took place, who took part in it and what kind of relationship there was between them. If it occurs in a large house the morning after a party, most guests having left to visit the small coastal town nearby, between two people who have chosen to stay and take it easy, maybe read a little, and who don’t know each other but are now in the same room, and he is looking out of the window at the shiny wet green lawn and the heavy grey sky, where dense streaks of rain hang like a gently wavering curtain, and she, who was in a chair reading until he entered the room, but has now risen, walked over to the large tiled stove and put a couple of logs into it, and who, as he says that tomorrow’s forecast is better, tears off a piece of newspaper and pushes it in beneath the logs, then the exchange of words about the rain might be a way of establishing a shared space, of affirming that though they don’t really know each other, they aren’t strangers either, since they have common friends and are now here together. In that case they will each soon go their own way, and before long both the conversation and the situation will be permanently forgotten. But if their eyes met several times during the party the evening before, without any words being exchanged, just these crossed glances, then the conversation in the living room, where she is now striking a match against the rough edge of the big matchbox, and he turns to look at her, and she feels his gaze even though she is crouching with her back to him and poking the lit match into the paper, which immediately catches fire and starts to burn with a thin flame, then it might mean something very different. When she tosses the still-​lit match into the fire and stands up, unconsciously rubbing her palms up and down along her thighs as she meets his gaze, and he smiles quietly as he cups the hand that is hanging at his side, and she says, “But it’s good for the farmers at least,” it is turning into a conversation neither of them wants to end, because they are in the process of finding each other through it, and if they do, then perhaps her line “But it’s good for the farmers at least” will later become a classic in their personal mythology, when the first time they met has been turned into a story they remind each other and perhaps also the children of once in a while, to strengthen the bonds that ineluctably weaken over time, and conversations that on paper look flat finally carry no other charge, expressing only indifference.

Flood, Fire, Fish

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FLOOD

A hurricane came and everyone left, except for Roy and George. George was eighty years old. He had survived hurricanes before and considered them a massive inconvenience, as well as an opportunity for the poor to loot his home. Roy stayed because he was a dog: a Dachshund, a very loyal breed. Anyway, the hurricane landed and proceeded to cause, as the newscasters put it, “historical devastation.” The more fanciful and apocalyptic stations favored the term “biblical,” but the point was not argued.

Meanwhile, the hurricane had flooded George’s home. George was treading water and holding onto an air mattress, while Roy sat atop it. George had lost his glasses and the dim shape of his old tufted armchair rocking woozily in the brown water was terrible, terrible. The water rose until Roy and George’s heads were just below the ceiling. It was night now, and difficult for George to keep awake. But Roy did not abandon George, licking his face every time he drifted off or let go of the air mattress. By late morning the water had receded slightly, and Roy and George escaped from the house.

By noon the next day, this was being broadcast as a miracle. Certainly it was a good bit of spit-shine for something people liked to believe in. The man had stayed to protect his home, the dog to protect his master! There was something about the odds — George’s age, Roy’s short legs, the forces they were up against — that warmed people’s hearts. The rest of the footage, splinters swirling in rippled murk, dark faces mouthing soundlessly from a patchwork of roofs, chilled them to the bone.

Soon however the news moved on, and so did Roy and George. George was sent to a facility for the elderly. Dogs were not allowed there, and Roy began a tour of schools for disabled children to continue his work, whatever that was. George’s home was not looted, but the furniture was swollen and stained, the walls soaked right up to the rafters. In the end it was torn down with the neighborhood, the lot scraped clean as a bone. Something new would be built there. It was said that the same mistakes would not be made again.

FIRE

A group of men plotted to blow up a building, a high building where high finance went on. On the appointed day, they lit themselves like fuses, setting the twin spines of the hijacked elevator shafts alight. Smoke and flames and sprinkler systems began to wreck their urgent havoc. Marcel and his guide dog, Nina, were in a conference room on an upper floor, where the fund Marcel worked for was discussing seaweed. Marcel had an uncanny knack for predicting the market, and his opinions about nascent trends were highly valued. Privately it was said that his blindness had something do with it, something sonar-or-other, “like bats”; maybe he could hear the money moving around. In the conference room, people began to panic, but Marcel and Nina stayed calm.

Nina, a sleek retriever with aloof blue eyes, rose and guided Marcel out of the conference room and into the rising hysteria of the hall. She led him to the stairwell and down many flights of crowded stairs and out of the flaming building into the street. Traffic had gridlocked around empty cars with open doors and the metro had stopped running underground. The streets were all movement, awash with sirens and people who had begun to run, though they didn’t all know what from. Unperturbed by the chaos and the rising clouds of smoke and dust, Nina led Marcel across the city all the way to his apartment uptown.

Later, it emerged that Marcel was the only man from his morning conference to make it out alive. Was the blind man blessed? People had to wonder. For a week or two man and dog were much photographed, but something about their eyes — the one pair blue, the other blind — was a little creepy on camera. Though he had emerged unscathed, something had changed in Marcel. His market predictions became spotty, erratic. When the crash came later that year, he found he was thoroughly unprepared.

FISH

On a clear, windless day a dolphin swimming off the coast of Florida got caught in a crab trap line, where she sustained horrific injuries. Some time later a crew of activists arrived and, after much exclamation and photography, disentangled the dolphin and transported her to the Marine Aquarium onshore.

Along with marine species from around the world, the aquarium was home to a highly respected team of biologists and veterinarians. In the intervening weeks and interventions that followed, the dolphin’s tail was removed along with two her vertebrae, and she was named Wanda by the staff. What now? They wondered. It did not seem like the right place to stop: too far from the start, too short of something. Luckily there was a war on, and the technology for prosthetics had never been better. Wanda was fitted with a prosthetic tail and, amazingly, trained to swim in a new pattern that would accommodate it.

Wanda had much opportunity to demonstrate this feat in the tank on the main floor where she swam back and forth against the glass, smiling. Children of all sorts were brought to see the dolphin: sick children, school children. Species were labelled with their proper names at the bottom of each tank, and colored interactive maps distributed them according to preferred regions and climes. Most children however seemed happy enough not knowing the names of things, and ran heedlessly from tank to tank, pressing their hands against the increasingly blurry glass.

One little girl however, Martha, visiting the aquarium with her mother, spent some time studying the wall text that accompanied Wanda’s tank with peculiar intensity. The girl’s mother was a medievalist and the child had absorbed a notion that dense texts illuminated a great many mysteries, including her mother. “The fish was saved from the sea, Ma,” Martha said when she had finished reading. Martha’s mother frowned; she had a perfect phobia of paraphrase — that was how she put it, a perfect phobia of paraphrase — but in this instance it seemed essential to correct the particulars, rather than the ill shape of summary. Believing that a child must understand the world sooner rather than later, she made it quite clear to her daughter that a dolphin was not a fish.

About the Author

Olivia Parkes is a British-American artist and writer currently based in Berlin. Her work has been published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, American Chordata, The New Haven Review, Gone Lawn, Bosque Magazine, and Blue Five Notebook, and is forthcoming in Zyzzyva. In 2016, she was awarded second prize in The Exposition Review’s Flash 405 contest.

11 Incredible Books by Writers from “Shithole” Countries

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According to The Washington Post, our stable genius president complained in a meeting that the U.S. is admitting too many people from “shithole countries.” At issue were visas granted to immigrants from African nations and countries designated as “temporary protected status,” including Haiti and El Salvador. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump reportedly complained (he now says he didn’t, but come on: he absolutely did). We should, he said, instead admit more immigrants from Norway—a nation nobody would voluntarily leave for the U.S. since its health care, quality of life, and GDP per capita leave ours in the dust. Who’s the shithole country now?

This is obviously racist bullshit for a number of reasons. But it’s a good reminder to celebrate the work of writers from Africa, and from Haiti, El Salvador, and other protected-status countries. As writers, readers, and human beings, we would all be intellectually impoverished by the lack of these voices. Here are some of our favorite novels, memoirs, and poetry by authors from the countries Trump disdains, many of whom celebrate their complicated homelands in their work.

The Art of Death by Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat is an award-winning Haitian-American author, Macarthur Fellow, two-time National Book Award nominee, winner of the National Book Critic Circle award, and national treasure. The author of numerous novels, short stories, young adult novels, essays, memoirs, and even a picture book, there is seemingly nothing this woman cannot write. Her most recent work, The Art of Death, is both a personal memoir of her mother’s death and a philosophical investigation of representations of death in literature.

Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

No matter what the racist president might tell you, nobody understands—or embodies—the American dream better than immigrants. Cameroonian-born Mbue’s compelling debut novel follows the travails of a couple transplanted from Cameroon to New York City during the Great Recession.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Nigerian writer Adichie has made waves both as a novelist and an essayist writing about feminism. Her bestselling Americanah grapples with the way that immigration can shake identity; her Nigerian characters, transplanted into the U.S. and the U.K., find that their new context changes how they’re seen and how they think about themselves.

Carrying Knowledge Up a Palm Tree by Taban lo Liyong

South Sudan is a brand-new country, but South Sudan-born poet and writer Liyong has been challenging literary barriers for decades. The first African writer to graduate from the Iowa Writers Workshop, Liyong has long been a gadfly of African academia, criticizing the ongoing colonialism of the English department. His poetry collection Carrying Knowledge Up a Palm Tree engages with some of his ideas about African intellectual history.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Gyasi’s explosive 2016 debut quickly became a New York Times bestseller and landed on numerous best-of-the-year lists. The novel tells the story of the descents of Effia and Esi, half-sisters who are born into very different lives in 18th Century Ghana. Esi is sold into slavery while Effia is married to a British slaver. By tracing their families over generations, Gyasi makes the global history of slavery resonate on a deeply personal level.

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

Bulawayo’s acclaimed debut is a coming-of-age story that follows 10-year-old Darling from Zimbabwe to adult life in the midwestern United States. The novel was nominated for both the Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. In 2012, Bulawayo was named one of the 5 under 35 by the National Book Foundation.

Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire

Poems don’t usually go viral, but Somali poet Warsan Shire managed it with “Home,” her ferocious and heartbreaking explanation of the refugee experience. If you didn’t encounter “Home,” though, perhaps you know her from the snippets of poetry in Beyonce’s “Lemonade” album—those are adapted from Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. Shire’s poetry is accessible and blade-sharp, easy to read and hard to forget.

Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta

Okparanta’s debut novel seems to have won or been shortlisted for every possible award for which it was eligible. We meet Ijeoma when she is 11 and before Nigerian independence. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced girl, and they fall in love. Discovered, Ijeoma is forced to hide this part of herself. Inspired by Nigerian folk tales, Under the Udala Trees is at once the story of a divided and emerging nation, and a coming-of-age narrative of a woman trying to become her full, true self as she seeks and accepts love.

Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya

Honduran-Salvadoran writer Castellanos Moya’s first book translated into English is a horrifying, emotional, darkly funny novel about…editing. It centers on a writer who, like Castellanos Moya, is living in political exile (Castellanos Moya from El Salvador, the unnamed writer from an unnamed Latin American country). The writer is tasked with editing a document from the Catholic Church detailing the human rights abuses of the military regime, and descends into a fever dream.

Concerto al-Quds by Adonis

Regarded as the greatest living poet in the Arab world, Adonis (whose full name is Alī Aḥmad Saʿīd ‘Isbar) is also an essayist, and one of the most influential and controversial voices in discussion surrounding the Syrian regime. “Concerto” was published in 2012, and written in response to the 2011 protests that broke out in Syria. A perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Adonis has won the first ever International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, the Norwegian Academy for Literature and Freedom of Expression’s Bjørnson Prize, the Highest Award of the International Poem Biennial in Brussels, and the Syria-Lebanon Best Poet Award.

Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Heralded as the “Great Ugandan Novel,” Kintu rewrites the history of the country by excluding colonization. The novel follows one dynasty through eras, from what would be the pre-colonial period to modern times. You can get a taste of Makumbi’s violent, funny, and heartbreaking book from this excerpt in Recommended Reading.

What’s a Book That Made You Fall in Love?

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Granted, it’s a little early for Valentine’s Day, but hey, the displays went up in drugstores on like December 31 this year. If you can buy a red foil box of chocolate in a Walgreen’s, it’s officially Valentine’s Day season, and it’s time to talk about what makes our hearts beat faster. For the new Novel Gazing, Electric Lit’s personal essay series about the way stories shape our lives, we’re asking: What’s a book that made you fall in love?

Of course, “love” doesn’t have to mean heteronormative flowers-and-candy stuff. It doesn’t have to mean romantic love at all. Take a look at The New York Times’ Modern Love column if you need inspiration: you’ll find essays about marriage, dating, and divorce, but also about intense platonic friendships, familial bonds, and no-strings hookups. What do we talk about when we talk about love? That’s up to you.

Whatever you decide it means, I want to hear about a book (or movie, show, game, or other story) that made you fall in love—with someone, or something, or even the book itself if you can make that an interesting essay. Maybe you became obsessed from afar with the author or the protagonist of a novel. Maybe someone else’s memoir made you realize that a partner you’d felt lukewarm about was actually right for you. Maybe a film made you suddenly smitten with your hometown for the first time. Maybe you looked across a subway car to see the cover of the same book you were engrossed in, and then the beautiful eyes above it, and the rest was history. If a story gave you a rush of oxytocin, made colors look brighter, raised your pulse rate, altered your self-concept and your relationships—you know, all the things love does—then it’s fair game. (A word of warning, though: There are a lot of cliché pitfalls for this one. You can do that one about the identical novels and the subway car, for instance, but you’d have to make it really bang. Might be better to look slightly to the side of the beaten path for your ideas.)

You may want to read some earlier Novel Gazing essays to get a feel for the series. Some recent favorites include essays about reading the Song of the Lioness series as a closeted young gay man, about losing faith in Mormonism while reading a Jon Krakauer book, and about turning to A Clockwork Orange in order to feel like the “right” kind of abnormal.

Essays should not be longer than 4,000 words or shorter than 800, and payment is $60 per piece. Submissions will remain open through January 26.

26 Books Coming to Film and Television in 2018

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The second best part about movie and TV adaptations is you can eat snacks throughout the entire story, which is hard when you need to turn pages. The best part is that you can complain that “they changed that from the book.” Here are some books to dig into before their adaptations come to the big and small screen in 2018.

Movies

The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter: February 9

Lovers of children’s classics, rejoice! The Tale of Peter Rabbit is slated for release on February 9th. It should be a great film for the kids, and maybe for you if you don’t mind seeing your childhood classic reimagined in CGI.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer: February 23

This science fiction flick, starring Natalie Portman, looks like it is ready to deliver some serious sci-fi with those timely political undertones that make the genre so sexy.

Every Day by David Levithan: Feb 23

A tear-jerker of a page-turner, Every Day will now be on the screen so you can get a good cry out in a crowd of people. Almost like crying on the subway, but more communal.

Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews: March 2

Jason Matthews, former CIA, probably knew his book would be picked up by Hollywood. It looks like it’ll be an attractive film filled with the unbelievable action that producers and consumers love.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle: March 9

A beloved young adult fantasy classic, a hotshot director (Ava duVernay), and OPRAH.

Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (Love, Simon) by Becky Albertelli: March 16

I’ve never seen a book be described as cute multiple times, but Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda nailed it.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline: March 30

When this science fiction novel/compendium of nerdy self-congratulation hit the shelves in 2011, it was an instant cult favorite, and an almost-as-instant hate-read. Will the Spielberg adaptation be beloved, loathed, or both?

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple: May 11

Just in time for Mother’s Day 2018, Where’d You Go, Bernadette tells a story about a daughter trying to track down her missing mom (played by Cate Blanchett).

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan: August 17

The insanely wealthy families of Singapore are now gaining a platform in the U.S. with the release of the Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan. The film adaptation will most likely be glamorous, shimmery, and all around visually pleasing.

Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family by Garrard Conley: September 28

After memoirist Conley’s family discovered his identity as a gay man, they forced him into conversion therapy that used faith in an attempt to erase his homosexuality. Expect the movie to be timely and harrowing.

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling (Mowgli): October 19

This film adaptation is definitely set to be more action-packed and less sing-along than the last adaptation.

Queen of Scots by John Guy: November 2

The film and the book are perfect for passing time on a chilly evening and being inspired by a kickass lady so you can grab life by the horns when the weather isn’t so frightful.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas! by Dr. Seuss: November 9

It’s been almost two decades since the last How the Grinch Stole Christmas so I guess it’s time.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald based on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them by J.K. Rowling: November 16

They will never stop doing this to J.K. Rowling.

Mary Poppins Returns based on Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers: December 25

Emily Blunt as Mary Poppins, Dick Van Dyke in a cameo role, and Lin-Manuel Miranda! Anybody else see this as a perfect Christmas gift?

Ashes in the Snow based on Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys: No official release date

Between Shades of Gray is a work of historical fiction, drawn on true testaments from survivors of the Baltic genocide.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath: No official release date

Kirsten Dunst is directing this adaptation starring Dakota Fanning, who is somehow now old enough to play college-age Esther Greenwood, the thinly-veiled Plath analogue.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett: No official release date

Bel Canto, in Italian, means “beautiful singing,” but the story isn’t just about singing. (Though it is about a singer!) It’s about the ways that the unexpected interfere with the anticipated, the same way beautiful singing startles us with its piercing beauty. Should be good.

The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells: No official release date

Attempting to follow Claude Rains in this role may be Johnny Depp’s greatest act of hubris so far.

Television:

The Alienist by Caleb Carr: TNT, January 22

Think Law & Order: SVU, 1892 edition. Featuring Theodore Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan. (And Dakota Fanning again!)

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: PBS Masterpiece, May 13

On Mother’s Day, literature’s four favorite women will premiere thanks to PBS. Thank you, Louis May Alcott!

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn: HBO, June

The official date is yet to be announced, but expect to be glued to this crime-drama, from the author of Gone Girl, sometime in June.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury: HBO, no official release date

It’s hard to ignore why any book lover would be excited for Fahrenheit 451’s television series. There’s no official release — but it’s coming, for all of us.

Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler: Starz, no official release date

Working in the restaurant industry already has the drama and tension of a reality TV show, so this should be good.

Dietland by Sarai Walker: AMC, no official release date

Judging from the book as well as its reviews, Dietland will be one of those shows you watch with your friends over some wine and charcuterie, followed by revisiting the @Mencatperson twitter page.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: Amazon Prime, no official release date

This hilarious romp about Armageddon could not be more timely. Features Michael McKean, Jon Hamm, and David Tennant in a very bad wig.

8 of the Best New York City Meet-Cutes in Literature

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I moved to New York in 2010. When I left two or three years later, a friend asked me what my best moment here had been. I realized I had no snappy anecdote; instead, what I thought of were those times when I was on my own, well-caffeinated, and walking somewhere above Canal and below 14th. Being in Manhattan on a big-skied day can feel insanely exultant, outrageously full of potential.

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The prime intoxication of any city is the probability of chance encounter, but this feels exceptionally heightened in New York City, a place of intersections both literal (it’s really a giant grid) and figurative (there’s coincidence to be had in a population of 8.5 million and counting.) My debut novel, Neon in Daylight, is plotted around chance encounters on downtown streets, but it’s also driven by the romantic, reasonable idea that you might meet anyone here, that they might change your life. The literature of the city is filled with moments of connection, coincidence, and confrontation on its streets. Here are a few of the best.

“Wants” by Grace Paley

Brief and guileless as a shrug, Paley’s story packs the enormity of regret, affection, marriage, personhood into fewer than 800 words. Its first three sentences are incidental and monumental: “I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library. Hello, my life, I said.”

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote

There are few more fascinating strangers than Holly Golightly, and she’s particularly appealing when glimpsed by the novella’s unnamed narrator, from a Fifth Avenue bus stop: “I noticed a taxi stop across the street to let out a girl who ran up the steps of the Forty-second Street public library. She was through the doors before I recognized her, which was pardonable, for Holly and libraries were not an easy association to make.”

“Debbie Harry at the Supermarket” by Wayne Koestenbaum

In Manhattan, the stranger ahead of you in line might also be a generation’s icon. However many times I walk past the grand old Chelsea building where Debbie Harry still lives, I will always think the words “Debbie Harry at the Supermarket.” Koestenbaum, crushing wildly, spins a roaming ode of an essay precipitated by spying the Blondie singer ahead of him, waiting to buy groceries. The ensuing rhapsody includes this observation: “The terror of being unable to describe Debbie Harry’s sublimity is built into the experience of apprehending it…” Stars: they’re nothing like us.

“The Purchase” by Elizabeth Hardwick

An author sometimes needs to incite her characters into collision, and Hardwick knows that life’s putative chance encounters can also be semi-orchestrated, half-willed. The magic of chance in this story is more the contrivance of the character himself, Palmer, who heads downtown with the intention of running into an acquaintance’s wife — and succeeds, cranking the story’s gears into motion. (There is the added pleasure of imagining moneyed Hudson Street as a place where, “a dingy, unkempt, transient quality still clung to the neglected alleys.”)

Jazz by Toni Morrison

“Romantic love seemed to me one of the fingerprints of the twenties, and jazz its engine,” Morrison wrote of her sixth novel, in which the city, an extra engine to the jazz, is unnamed but unmistakably New York—specifically, 1920s Harlem. The central couple, Joe and Violet, arrive together, but it’s in the city streets, which Morrison riffs on in bursts like sax solos, that they encounter themselves and each other for the first time: “The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves, their stronger, riskier selves. And in the beginning when they first arrive, and twenty years later when they and the city have grown up, they love that part of themselves so much they forget what loving other people was like — if they ever knew, that is.”

Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran

The first line of this unashamedly lush and lyrical 1978 novel, an under-celebrated gay classic, announces itself as a novel of crowds, glances and aleatory romance: “He was just a face I saw in a discotheque one winter…” That face is Malone’s, a character who commits to love in the grand abstract after a random, but longed-for encounter with a messenger boy, a Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx, a kind of cupid in “maroon pants and sneakers.” “Little wonder,” that when Malone, “looked at strangers on the street now, his unquiet yearning for rescue went out to them.”

Just Kids by Patti Smith

Smith’s celebrated memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe includes the memory of meeting him on her first day in the city. A chance meeting in Brooklyn is also an instantaneous enchantment: “I watched him as he walked ahead, leading the way with a light-footed gait, slightly bowlegged. I noticed his hands as he tapped his fingers against his thigh. I had never seen anyone like him. He delivered me to another brownstone on Clinton Avenue, gave a little farewell salute, smiled, and was on his way.” Days later, he walks into the bookstore where she works. The rest is punk history.

Underworld by Don DeLillo

The greatest novel DeLillo ever wrote, which is also one of the greatest novels anyone ever wrote, is shot through with the electricity of street encounters. The most significant is one of plain eros. Klara Sax, unhappily married, artistically frustrated, sees Nick Shay standing by a lamppost from her window. He sees her, flicks a cigarette, walks across the street and the thing is begun: an affair, a plot.

9 Hopeful Books About Schizophrenia

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I n August, 2009, I got something in the mail from my uncle Bob. I didn’t know Bob very well; he was a self-described “hermit” who lived in the Californian desert. It was the story of his life, which he’d typed in all-capital letters on his typewriter, a stack of about sixty misspelled pages that stunk of cigarettes and were punctuated mostly with colons. On a cover page, he described it as a “true story” about being “labeled a psychotic paranoid schizophrenic.” On the phone, he explained he wanted my help with getting his story “out there.”

The more I learned about schizophrenia, the less I felt I could answer something as seemingly basic as “what is it?”

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Soon after I began to write a version of Bob’s story based on what he sent me. Eight years later and it’s grown into a book called A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about Schizophrenia that’s being published by Scribner on January 23. My version tells Bob’s story faithfully to the facts as he shared them. It also endeavors to better understand that phrase: “psychotic paranoid schizophrenic.”

Before my uncle sent me his manuscript, I knew virtually nothing about what the term schizophrenia meant or didn’t mean. So I started reading. A lot. I read psychiatric books and anti-psychiatric books and books by family and friends of people who’ve been diagnosed with mental illnesses. I read books by self-identified “mad” people and “psychiatric survivors.” I read books about science and history and disabilities studies. I read memoirs and novels and poems and plays. I interviewed lots of people, too, and spoke with people informally. I spoke with anybody who might have some perspective to lend on these topics. Because, it became clear, the answer to a question like “What is schizophrenia?” isn’t simple. For a long time, the more I learned about schizophrenia, the less I felt I could answer something as seemingly basic.

Often someone I’ve just met will ask what I do, and we’ll get to talking about my uncle Bob and what he mailed me. We’ll end up talking about schizophrenia. We’ll talk about mental illness more generally and mental healthcare in America today. Sometimes we’ll talk about what a better future could look like. Sometimes people I’m speaking with decide to tell me their connection to schizophrenia; they’ll often tell me about someone they love, or they’ll tell me about the work they do, or occasionally they’ll tell me about themselves.

The following are books I find myself recommending to people. My hope is that they’re works that are approachable for readers brand new to this topic but also stories that will be illuminating even to those already entrenched in these complex topics. Something I’ve noticed is that books about the topic “schizophrenia” skew sad; some are downright pessimistic. I have tried to present works that speak about schizophrenia honestly, and yet do so with a measure of hope.

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

This is a deeply considered and gorgeously rendered work, part memoir and part clear-eyed assessment of the past, present and future of genetic study. Mukherjee, both a physician and gifted writer, begins by describing the several members of his family whose lives have been devastated by schizophrenia. In order to better understand schizophrenia, he explains all of genetics generally, unraveling the fascinating story of how researchers have come to know what they do about genes. Arriving in the present day about halfway through the book, he then shifts into exploring the ramifications of genetic knowledge today. He discusses such matters as race and gender and identity and intergenerational trauma and psychiatric diagnoses like schizophrenia. I think the world would be a better place if everybody read The Gene.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg

This 1964 novel fictionalizes the author’s self-described descent into and recovery from schizophrenia right before the dawn of psychopharmaceuticals in the late forties and early fifties. The book rivetingly animates the protagonist’s elaborate inner world, and the devoted efforts of her psychiatrist — who is based on a real-life doctor, Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Rose Garden was initially published under a penname at the behest of Greenberg’s mother. It resonated with a surprising number of readers, becoming an unexpected bestseller and inspiring many adaptations. Today Rose Garden remains something all too rare: a widely read story about schizophrenia written by someone who had herself been diagnosed. It’s a very powerful and formally daring work, one that remains as necessary as ever.

Agnes’s Jacket by Dr. Gail Hornstein

In this memoir, an academic psychologist traces her own journey toward a more scientific and historically grounded understanding of madness. I recommend this book particularly for mental health care professionals seeking to better understand schizophrenia and other severe mental illnesses, and to those partaking in the debates about how to best treat people diagnosed. For those interested in psychiatry, I also recommend Dr. Hornstein’s thorough biography of Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (of Rose Garden fame), To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World.

Mad in America by Robert Whitaker

In this exemplary work of narrative investigative journalism, Whitaker begins with a confusing proposition: a WHO study that found that in richer nations like America, there are worse outcomes than in poorer ones for people diagnosed with severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia. Puzzled, Whitaker began to look at why or how that could be. In this groundbreaking work, first published in 2001, Whitaker comprehensively tells the story of American mental health care, unfolding how the public came to know what we do about psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and psychiatric treatments like antipsychotics. I also highly recommend another of his books, Anatomy of an Epidemic, which looks at the skyrocketing cost of the growing population of Americans today disabled by mental illness.

The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Diseaseby Jonathan Metzl

In the 1950s, half a million Americans lived in public mental hospitals, a number that has since fallen dramatically. In this academic book, Metzl analyzes historical psychiatric records from one public hospital, observing a clear story of how the label “schizophrenia” was disproportionately applied to different groups at different historical periods. The end result deftly demonstrates how psychiatric diagnoses may be wielded as tools of racist and misogynist oppression.

The Voices Within by Charles Fernyhough

An engaging popular science book that examines how little we understand the internal experiences of people generally — not only those diagnosed with schizophrenia. What is thought? How do scientists study thought? This book also provides an introduction to the Hearing Voices movement, a civil rights movement for self-identified voice-hearers that has emerged over the last three decades. Fernyhough contemplates the voices “heard” by creative writers such as myself, and closely examines several historical and literary examples of this other sort of voice hearing.

The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes

This (in)famous psychology tome, published in the 1970s, offers a particular thesis about the evolution of human beings, specifically to do with consciousness. Jaynes argues that humans in Homer’s Iliad were not conscious in the modern sense; instead, he posits, they hallucinated directions from Gods, i.e., voices. In support of his argument he mentions the existence of people diagnosed with schizophrenia, who claim to hear voices. In the late eighties, a Dutch woman named Patsy Hague who’d long been diagnosed with schizophrenia — she heard many voices — read Jaynes’ book. She afterward worked to convince her psychiatrist, Dr. Marius Romme, of the realness of her voices. The two appeared on a Dutch daytime show asking voice hearers to call in — and to their surprise many did. They then held a meet-up for voice hearers, which many mark as the beginning of the Hearing Voices movement. These gatherings allowed voice-hearers to realize that they were uniquely equipped to help one another strategize about how to live not just despite but with their voices. The first Hearing Voices Network support groups were held soon after in the UK; today there are HVN meetings in about 30 nations worldwide. To those interested in learning more about the Hearing Voices movement, I’d recommend Living with Voices: 50 Stories of Recovery by Dr. Marius Romme himself and his wife and longtime collaborator, the journalist Sandra Escher, as well as three other prominent figures in the movement. The book presents 50 narratives of people who’ve heard voices or seen visions or had other unusual or extreme experiences.

The Loony-Bin Trip by Kate Millett

In this gorgeously wrought memoir, celebrated feminist author Kate Millett vividly portrays the astounding loss of power that can come with psychiatric diagnosis. Though not a story about just schizophrenia, per se, it is one about a dynamic that pervades so many narratives about mental illness: a disagreement about whether someone has to take psychiatric medications. At the story’s beginning, Millett is a celebrated author living a stable life. She decides to stop taking Lithium she’s been prescribed for six years, doubtful of her diagnosis and tired of shaking hands and diarrhea. She soon finds being opposed by nearly everyone in her life. I recommend this book especially to those Millett mentions in her dedication: “to those who’ve been there.”

Outside Mental Health by Will Hall

Hall is a therapist and self-identified schizophrenia survivor and host of the Madness Radio podcast. This collection anthologizes many of the interviews he’s done on the show with people involved with efforts to reform mental health. Together these conversations provide a wide range of points of view on so many matters related to psychiatric diagnosis and treatment and the status of persons given psychiatric diagnoses in our society, as well trauma, oppression, alternative conceptions of madness, and spirituality. I’d most recommend this book, as well as his podcast, to anybody interested in hearing the perspectives of those who’ve been psychiatrically diagnosed about what has and hasn’t helped them live full and dignified lives.

7 Books To Help You Understand the Dogs (and Dog People) in Your Life

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Dog person vs. cat person: it’s an old and contentious debate, and one that probably won’t be solved by literature—but that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to try. Writers have been struggling for decades (probably centuries) to argue the dog-person case, trying to express exactly what it is about canines that’s won our eternal affection. Here are just the offerings from the last few years.

From a graphic memoir about a neurotic but beloved dog to a thriller about a zoonotic plague that threatens a cull of the family pets, these seven books tell of the resilient bond forged between dog and humans, celebrate the human-canine devotion, and illuminate why dog people dedicate their existence to their furry companions.

Afterglow (a dog memoir) by Eileen Myles

On the surface, Myles’ poetic memoir seems like a meditation on what it means to be a dog,“an eternally silent child,” dependent on humans. Afterglow opens with the decline and death of Rosie, Myles’ beloved pitbull, confidant, and muse. Myles, who at various points envisions Rosie as the reincarnation of their father and of other famous people in history, channels Rosie’s ethereal voice from the afterlife, allowing the dog to “recount” her experiences on earth. Afterglow uses fabulist imaginations and a nonlinear mix of true, fictitious, and experimental scenes to reflect on Myles’ experiences with intimacy, spirituality, queerness, politics, alcoholism and recovery, writing, and of course, loss.

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

An unnamed writing professor inherits a Great Dane after the suicide of her best friend and mentor. Apollo is bewildered by the sudden loss of his master. The dog waits unbudgingly by the door, expecting his master’s return. Despite her protestations that she is a cat person and a rent-stabilized lease that prohibits dogs, the professor finds herself bonding with Apollo through their shared mourning. Nunez’s story of a dog and his inadvertent caregiver is a darkly humorous and unsentimental tale of friendship, mourning, and solace.

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

Georges’s beautifully drawn graphic memoir recounts her relationship with Beija, a shar-pei/corgi rescue dog. Prone to knocking over small children and barking obsessively, Beija was such a difficult pet that not even vets, dog whisperers, and a pet psychic could cure her neurotic behavior. But through the next fifteen years of a turbulent young adulthood, relationships gone wrong, depression, a sexual awakening, and the chaos of the Portland punk scene, Beija and her “Don’t Pet Me” bandana was the one constant in Georges’s life.

Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis

Does human intelligence makes us unhappy? The gods Apollo and Hermes make a bet to answer that question, granting a pack of dogs at a Toronto veterinary clinic mortal consciousness. The pack’s newfound cognition proves to be both a burden and a gift as they navigate unfamiliar thoughts and sensations. The dogs escape to establish their proto-society by the city’s lakeshore, free from the control of human masters, but divisions form between those who cleave to the familiar canine ways and those who welcome the change. The transference of sentience reveals the paradoxes of human behavior, but also unmasks a universal truth: a life fulfilled is being in love and being loved in return.

Lily and the Octopus by Steven Rowley

Ted is a single, gay writer struggling with sobriety, tumultuous relationships and a flailing career. His life revolves around one constant: Lily, a 12-year-old ice-cream loving dachshund. On Thursdays, they argue over cute boys (he’s a Ryan Gosling fan, she’s a Ryan Reynolds girl); on Fridays, they play board games; on Sundays, they indulge in pizza. But the cozy life the two of them built together is threatened by an octopus attached to Lily’s head. Ted can sense that the the interloping cephalopod is hungry to take his most devoted companion away from him and he vows to kill the octopus. Using magical realism, Rowley conveys precisely what it feels like to love and to lose a dog.

Jonathan Unleashed by Meg Rosoff

Jonathan has all the trappings of a successful grownup: a job at an advertising agency, a New York City apartment, and “a not-unimpressive girlfriend.” But the truth is writing mind-numbingly boring copy for stationery makes him miserable, the landlord might evicted from his illegal sublet any day now and he finds Julie and her “belief system consisted of medium heels, a decent haircut and solid retirement funds more or less from birth” boring. His brother’s dogs Sissy the Spaniel and Dante the Border Collie come to live with him and they are determined to sort out his life. Rosoff’s charming and hilarious novel is a love story of becoming an adult in the New York City.

Just Life by Neil Abramson

A deadly animal-transmitted virus spreads through the Upper East Side, bringing chaos and panic to New York City. Suspicion soon falls on the family pets and faced with a demand for immediate action, the Governor declares a quarantine. Veterinarian Samantha Lewis who runs a no-kill dog shelter in her neighborhood knows that a cull is imminent. With help from a homeless teen, an elderly priest, a sympathetic cop and a disgraced psychologist, Samantha embarks on a mission uncover the origins of the disease and save the dogs before it’s too late.

Zaphod Beeblebrox for President

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It probably started with Ronald Reagan, the actor-turned-president—or, if you take Douglas Adams’ word for it, the terrifyingly dangerous extraterrestrial-origin synthetic person.

Reagan didn’t jump right from Hollywood to the presidency; he spent a long time as governor of California, and even as an actor he was also a union leader. (Ironic, huh? He wasn’t a Republican back then.) But he was the harbinger of a genre of celebrity politicians, with ever-shorter gaps between their artistic and political careers. These entertainer-leaders leveraged studied charisma, name recognition, and fanbases built in a much more exciting arena than government to achieve political success. A Sonny Bono, an Arnold Schwarzenegger, and an Al Franken later, here we are: The president has never held any previous office but did host an embarrassing reality show, and as soon as Oprah Winfrey gave one rousing speech people started clamoring for her to run for the highest office in the land. (She might do it, too.)

As with almost everything else of note in the galaxy, Douglas Adams saw this coming 92 million miles away.

The Galactic President in Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is the two-headed, three-armed Zaphod Beeblebrox — erratic, irresponsible, wildly egomaniacal, voted Worst-Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe seven times. Zaphod has more charisma than Trump and less poise than Oprah, but as politicians they’re three of a kind: They’ve been rocketed to power not by their background in statecraft, but by their inescapable celebrity.

In the case of Oprah and Trump, this is due to a major flaw in American politics known as “the American people.” The thirst for celebrity politicians—the urge to transplant prominent entertainers into other influential roles regardless of background or skill—is a function of our short attention spans and lack of respect for experience or knowledge. When we see someone we recognize projecting authority, charm, or oratorial skill, we cry “make them president!” with a joking fervor that is indistinguishable from the real thing.

Zaphod has more charisma than Trump and less poise than Oprah, but as politicians they’re three of a kind.

In Zaphod’s case, though, it’s actually the goal. The purpose of his position, though he isn’t supposed to know it, is distraction. “Only six people in the galaxy knew that the job of galactic president was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it,” Adams writes. “Zaphod Beeblebrox” — who, as is revealed in the Hitchhiker’s Guide radio show, has made presidential addresses from the bath, from prison, and from a sex worker’s bedroom—“was amazingly good at his job.”

Like many of Adams’ great innovations, it’s a joke that’s also a sly critique that’s also a genuine perspective shift likely to disrupt your worldview forever. Once you’ve internalized the gag, it’s impossible not to think about it every time a president does something showy, even if it’s as gentle as playing basketball in mom jeans. What if his job right now is not to wield power but to attract attention away from it? you wonder. We’d never know. This is doubly true when the president is a grandiose blowhard obsessed with the size of his TV ratings and perpetually starting petty, awful feuds. It’s triply true when the president isn’t a president or even a candidate, but simply an eloquent celebrity who gave a stirring and morally upright speech and was immediately cast as the Savior of Our Embattled Government. Do we want Oprah to bring dignity back to the White House, or do we simply want her to distract us until we forget where real power lies?

It’s a comforting thought, in all honesty—at least it is now, when our president is a sub-Beeblebrox buffoon. (Zaphod’s not in control of his faculties either, and he spends most of his presidency as a criminal fugitive, but at least he’s clever.) What if Obama’s statesmanship and Trump’s shenanigans had exactly the same amount of influence on actual policy: zero? Deflationary for Obama, to be sure; by Galactic President standards he’d be considered deeply mediocre, always reading and working and eating seven almonds instead of putting on a show. But in the Trump era, it’s actually nice to think that the president might be a flashy figurehead, his vaunted “button” just a pacifier. He can strut and howl and posture all he likes, but there’s somebody else in charge.

And maybe that’s why we’re so eager to cast votes for Oprah—or, for that matter, The Rock. “She has no governing experience,” I saw people scolding when the “Oprah for office” fervor took hold, and others responded: “Well, look at the guy we have now.” If the presidency is going to be reduced to pure spectacle, we seem to be saying, let’s at least fill it with someone we can watch without feeling sick.

But of course, the presidency isn’t pure spectacle, now or in the future. That’s the difference (well, one of the differences) between Adams’ universe and ours: The president may be a clown, but he’s not supposed to be one. He still has a job, a real one. And while there are plenty of shadowy influencers behind the scenes, they’re people like the Mercers and Vladimir Putin and lobbyists: corrupt opportunists out for personal gain. If the president can’t be trusted to wield real power, you can bet that the people his antics are covering for are even worse.

In Adams’ world, when the president attracts attention away from “real power,” that means a single source of responsible and lucid (if eccentric) leadership. “It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it,” Adams writes. Thus we have had “a succession of Galactic Presidents who so much enjoy the fun and palaver of being in power that they very rarely notice that they’re not. And somewhere in the shadows behind them — who? Who can possibly rule if no one who wants to do it can be allowed to?” It’s a conundrum, but a solvable one; this is, after all, a world in which Life, the Universe, and Everything has an answer, even if we don’t know what it means. (N.B. for anyone who hasn’t read the books: it’s 42. Suddenly a lot of things nerds have been saying make a lot more sense to you, don’t they?) The power the capering president distracts from is the single person who can be trusted to rule.

Eventually we meet him: a man living alone, save for a cat, in a shack on a planet on the outskirts of some distant galaxy. The Man in the Shack is so relentlessly skeptical that he ceases to believe in the outside world when the door is shut. Lesser leaders ask him questions, and he answers in his idiosyncratic way (“My Universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay”), and they act on his answers. But he isn’t interested in ruling people; he isn’t even sure people exist. (“Do you rule the Universe?” Zaphod asks him. “I try not to,” he says.) The universe, Zaphod decides, is in good hands.

Our universe is not.

The entertainment president requires a solid backing: known or unknown, someone in the shadows who can rule when no one who wants to can be allowed. At the very least, he or she requires a solid clockwork of advisors, officials, and legislators—all of them knowledgeable, all of them functioning, all of them practiced and proficient enough to keep the system running when the person who’s nominally in charge is really only there for show. What is a figurehead without a ship?

The entertainment president requires a solid backing: known or unknown, someone in the shadows who can rule when no one who wants to can be allowed.

I wish we could have a Zaphod Beeblebrox president, one whose antics can be safely enjoyed because they’re only there for show. I would be perfectly happy to live in a country that could anoint its favorite celebrity as its public face and let governing take care of itself. It works beautifully in Hitchhiker’s Guide; Zaphod gallivants around the galaxy, doing telecasts from the bathtub and stealing multiple ships and getting eaten by a carbon copy of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, and meanwhile the Man in the Shack keeps everything quietly ticking along. It’s fun and functional. It’s also science fiction. We know, precisely because of how well it works in that universe, that it can never work here.

We wish for a Zaphod Beeblebrox because we want to believe in a Man in the Shack: someone who can be trusted to give us direction, even if we’d never understand their methods, even if we’ll never be allowed to see. But in real life, there is no weird grownup in charge. Those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it, and somewhere in the shadows behind them — nobody.