Mary Kuryla’s Characters Process Their Feelings Through Animals, Just Like You

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The stories in Mary Kuryla’s Freak Weather are by turns disturbing and astonishing, blending the desire for a better life with the quicksand of situational reality. In each tender rendering, a female protagonist navigates her surroundings by protecting herself from the peril she’s trying to escape, often with an animal standing in as an ersatz totem for the issue. These tales twist until they become something undeniable, and Kuryla’s commitment to letting her characters make mistakes without pausing to consider their actions is something rarely seen in fiction. Despite the rush of end-of-semester grading, we were able to speak by phone about her characters’ attempts to understand their sexuality, themselves, and the people around them—and how they use pets as an emotional buffer.

Eric Farwell: In reading the stories, it becomes immediately clear that there’s something propelling them, and that being able to take whatever wonky motivations a character might have at face value is a big part of what makes the work unique. Where did this absurdist humor come from? Were you reading that served as a touchstone?

Mary Kuryla: I wasn’t necessarily reaching for humor, but I’d say that I find human nature funny, and the way we conceptualize our world does tend to contain a certain amount of humor. I think that all of the characters in Freak Weather Stories, to some degree, are underdogs. I gravitate to the underdog, but I’m not interested in portraying them as victims. I struggle with that as a woman and a feminist, because there was so much literature that was coming up for so long that felt concerned with women as disempowered. I’m not interested in telling those stories, because the approach doesn’t seem particularly literary, or even particularly empathetic. I’m more interested in how people get themselves tangled up, how their flaws create huge problems for them, and whether there’s a potential exit for them, a way to escape their own trappings. I guess that when I speak of the underdog, I’m interested in how these types of characters might succumb to that more easily compared to someone who has a lot of means to shore themselves up and protect themselves from such things.

In regard to the question of what I was reading, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, Tom Jones’s The Pugilist at Rest, and Barry Hannah’s Airships come to mind. So many of the stories in these collections endlessly portray men behaving badly. It’s interesting that in all this post-Vietnam writing, you have these men that are steeped in this bad behavior, but somehow our culture is really supportive or at least indulgent of this behavior. There’s something like a bad boy thing, and we sort of tuck into them. We might feel like their behavior is really shocking, but there’s something that really stays with us about the burden these men are under. I was really interested in telling a female version of that, because I just didn’t see any. I was interested in what it would be like to have a female character behaving really badly. Joanna Scott’s Various Antidotes stood out to me as having a really intense integrity about exploring women’s identity in a way that wasn’t always pleasing. Angela Carter’s stories of noncompliant and wayward women were also a source of inspiration, as were the films of women directors such as Agnes Varda and Chantal Ackerman.

EF: The biggest theme in the collection is the lack of understanding these characters have of themselves. Often, there’s a shift where a protagonist thinks they understand, but then loses their grip on that certainty. Perhaps more interesting is when you don’t try and posit a reason, but just put the job in the reader’s hands. For you, what holds fascination in regard to what we think we know about ourselves and how we come to different realizations?

MK: These characters always think they can outrun their feelings. We all do that to some extent. You might even observe this behavior in another person—when, say, you’re taking a walk with someone, and you bring up something unpleasant, that person will start walking faster. It’s just a simple thing we all do. Take a story in the collection like “The Worst of You,” where there’s a mom packing to go to jail for child neglect. I was trying to work with the thread of the psyche unspooling. You could almost say it’s a stream-of-consciousness piece, but it also leads to all this action, sets her on this path of what she’s going to go do, even if by the end she undoes it all. In some of the stories, I was working with how language itself can create momentum, how language can chase both towards and away from itself. Since my background is in filmmaking, and as someone steeped in the history of cinema, my work is at times influenced by experimental traditions in film; therefore, I’m always trying to find a balance between story and form. I feel like I have to offer the reader a story, some semblance of story, so that the form can be tolerated. If you’re willing to understand the language and the rules I’m setting out formally, it’s because you believe there’s a story there that’s going to deliver. Maybe it won’t deliver in ways that are terribly familiar, but there is a story. You can say we create stories to try and figure out who we are, but I also think we put ourselves through things to find that out. For example, Penny, the main character in the title story “Freak Weather,” knows she’s in a bad relationship, but she doesn’t have the tools to get out of it. She’s just going to act out as a means of finding a way out.

You can say we create stories to try and figure out who we are, but I also think we put ourselves through things to find that out.

EF: It’s funny that you mention that, because the title story starts you off down this journey of using animals as emotional buffers. In “Freak Weather,” “Deaf Dog,” and “In Our House,” you take the time to set up a kind of vague or serious concern, and then bring in a dog or puppy to kind of separate the protagonist from that issue. In other words, the animals are used to divide the subject from peril.

MK: You know, when I worked with Gordon Lish, he encouraged us to find our limit or wound that we keep going back to. For me, it was rabbits. I raised rabbits as a girl, and I took a lot of solace in pets. Often when I would bring home pets, I’d have to take them back. There must have been something in animals for me where I believed I could protect them, but where they also, you know, helped mitigate my feelings. So, I think you’re correct, but I also wanted to point out that there’s real danger in taking the idea too lightly. I mean, the story “To Skin a Rabbit” is genuinely disturbing for some. In the story, the protagonist is trying to cope with forces in her world she can’t master. So she takes control of what she can.

A Culture of Violence is a Culture of Shame

EF: Animals are also used as emotional stand-ins in stories like “Animal Control” and “Introduction to Feathers.” What’s interesting is that these stories are much more interior than those that use pets or creatures as buffers. I’m not sure if you make that distinction yourself, but I’m hoping you could maybe speak to how you made those calls in a general sense.

MK: I can say that I didn’t necessarily have any conscious awareness of that, that the stories would become more opaque and interiorized or externalized as they unfolded. However, some stories were a lot harder to solve than others. For example, “Animal Control” eluded me for seven years. I worked on it a lot, and got feedback in workshops that could help tame the hell out of it, but nothing that helped if I wanted to stay with a story that was just not easy to contain. It wasn’t until Tony Perez at Tin House suggested I check out this essay by Lucy Corin called “Material” that I started to figure out the story. In the essay, Lucy Corin says that your material is your material. If you want to get answers for what your work is, a sense of what the language is asking for, you have to go back to your material and let it tell you. I took “Animal Control” and put the story up on the wall. I studied it and tried to figure out what it was telling me. It’s a weird way of detaching from your work and analyzing it. I suddenly realized that I needed to get the animal control officer downstairs into the basement, which I had not been able to do before. I had resisted taking her down the stairs because going into the basement in search of an abducted child is what happens in a thriller or horror story. But that was what the story required and, thanks to Lucy Corin’s essay, I figured out how to do it on the story’s own terms. So, I guess what I would say in response to the role of animals in these stories, is that an animal is often a projection of a young protagonist, while for the adult female characters, if an animal figures, it is often as a substitute for a child.

EF: Miscommunication also weaves its way into these stories. Again though, there’s this desire to subvert the expectations of the protagonist. In “Mis-sayings,” the dancer assumes her inability to correctly pronounce or sound things out is the reason she’s having a hard time connecting with her partner, not the situation they’re in. When you’re drafting, do you view this as another layer of subterfuge, or does this aspect of your craft have a different purpose?

MK: I am always looking at how we don’t understand each other. How language eludes us. I’m married to a Russian immigrant. I find that in being married to somebody who has a second language, I’m consistently thrilled by our miscommunications and how antic language can be. But even after my husband’s command of English was pretty flawless, he still had a habit of blending English words. He would take two words that were not necessarily similar in meaning but that nevertheless sounded similar and make them into one word, an unintended neologism. It was always fun to figure out the two words he had amalgamated; even more fascinating was to figure out how he had intended the word to be used. So, to me, I don’t see language as a fixed thing. I see it as elusive, full of tricks, and I like that best about it.

I don’t see language as a fixed thing. I see it as elusive, full of tricks, and I like that best about it.

EF: That’s funny, because I was going to ask you about your use of language. In the stories, there are a lot of bent phrases like “his smile is all sly boots,” that read like sayings or a kind of slang, but dial up the language more than render a character as regionally authentic. So your answer here perfectly accounts for the play there.

MK: The only other thing I could tell you was that I was a terrible speller as a kid. One of the reasons I was such a bad speller is because any spelling of a word seemed just as interesting as the correct one. I think that’s how I feel about phrasing. That’s how I feel about errors. That’s how I feel about language. In fact, that stuff is more interesting to me — the mistakes, the misalignments, the confusion — because it liberates us from our comfortable space in relation to language; and they make language come alive. There has been a great deal out there recently about William Gass, since he just passed away; his whole commitment was to make language flesh. To make language a thing. I think mistakes open up a space for language to shift from representation to delivering the actual thing itself.

EF: I wanted to end by asking about how you approached understandings of power in these stories. Men in “Freak Weather,” “Mis-Sayings,” and “To Skin a Rabbit” all have an inherently ill-informed sense of their own power in relation to women. You pull this neat trick where you showcase that women placed in these unfortunate circumstances are in control, but for the most part, you use that showcase of power as a social lubricant. In this way, it kind of goes back to the idea of the buffer, where they’re using their sexuality in order to gain ground and avoid an awkward or dangerous situation.

MK: I suspect that this collection can disturb some people because the female characters in it cannot be boxed in. They are not behaving in ways that people feel comfortable with. In “Mis-sayings” the American guy that the Russian émigré has come to live with only wants to see her as a ballerina, but she was a stripper in Russia. This American won’t let her be seen in that way. So, there is a certain relief in being able to show herself for who she is to the kid who comes to buy drugs. I have a tendency in my stories to deploy a stand-in; for example, in “Freak Weather” Penny needs to have it out with her husband, but she instead has a strange and precarious confrontation with her husband’s boss.

13 Literary Takes on the Lives of Animals

With regards to this idea that the characters are using their sexuality in order to gain ground and avoid an awkward and dangerous situation, I think some of those tactics spring from my love of cinema. Recently, I taught a class on cinematic and televisual bodies. We were looking at the body in cinema, and how different bodies gain power through visualization, through representation, through taking up screen space or by surrendering it. Actresses like Mae West and Marlene Dietrich, and these sort of earlier figures in the motion picture industry, enjoyed an incredible amount of power with their sexuality, and actually also owned it. Mae West had her own production company. She took credit for discovering Cary Grant. She padded her hips and breasts to spotlight her sexuality, and was in control of it, and especially in control of the script and her sharp and clever tongue. I do feel that women can have a great deal of power in their sexuality, but as a feminist I also recognize that it is a slippery slope where women are easily made vulnerable by the very same thing. A number of the stories in the collection deliberately take up these tensions.

The Feminist Mantra I Learned from ‘The House on Mango Street’

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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 book was your feminist awakening?

When I finished college, it was a cicada year, temperatures were in the high eighties, and a radio evangelist had predicted the world would end on the very day of my graduation. I was an English major graduating from a Methodist college, and the symbolism of the locusts, the heat, and the prophecy was too much for me to resist and almost too much for me to bear. Disappointed in my college experience and prone to existential crises, I found myself thinking, What a waste. What a waste of the last four years of my life.

Of course the world didn’t end that day. But my life as a student did, and my life as a student was the only life I knew. I’d never enjoyed school, but I’d understood it. School was something I could count on, something I knew I could do well. I had trouble choosing good friends and coping with my emotions and styling my hair, but I could take a test. I could write a research paper. I could read a book. And this faith in my abilities as a student got me through the roughest patch of my post-grad funk. In that first year after college, I became a better student than I’d ever been. I started journaling, trained to be a GED teacher, and read over 60 books, one of which was Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. For the next several years, I’d sleep with Mango Street on my bedside table.

Cisneros began writing this collection of vignettes as a graduate student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and published it in 1984. It’s the story of Esperanza, a young Latina growing up in Chicago and dreaming of a life of creativity, independence, and self-defined femininity. If I concentrate, I can recite entire passages from Mango Street, but the phrase always at the tip of my tongue when I talk about this novel isn’t from the narrative at all. In the author biography at the end of the book, Cisneros describes herself as “nobody’s mother and nobody’s wife.” When I read those words, I was soaking in the bathtub at my mother’s house. I read and reread until the water got cold. Nobody’s mother, nobody’s wife. Goddamn.

Throughout the novel, Esperanza dreams about the woman she will be once she leaves Mango Street. She will wear red lipstick and be beautiful and cruel. She will live in a clean, simple house, all by herself. She will write poems and stories. She will have peace.

Peaceful solitude has been my dream for as long as I can remember. As a girl I, too, fantasized about clean, simple homes I lived in by myself. I dreamed of sparkling hardwood floors, billowing curtains, natural light, and beautiful aloneness the way other children dreamed of snow days in Georgia. When I was in first grade, we wrote stories about how we envisioned our lives. I wrote that I didn’t want to have any children, and my teacher showed my mother and they both laughed. I can’t blame them; it’s an odd thing for a 7-year-old to say. But some fifteen years later, Sandra Cisneros gave me permission to say it. All of a sudden, I’d found a kindred spirit.

Nobody’s mother, nobody’s wife. It’s an epilogue of sorts. The author biography is always at the end of a book. It’s usually light, objective, and for the most part, immaterial to the understanding of the novel. But in my reading of Mango Street, the author biography is something of a happily ever after. It was easy to identify with Esperanza. We were both artsy and melancholy and determined in our own way. We even shared a name — Esperanza means hope, and Hope is my middle name. What was more difficult to grasp, though, was the reality of the future. It’s always been easy for me to dream, but real-life examples of dreams come true were hard to come by. Along came Sandra Cisneros. A young brown woman from a working class family writing books and traveling the world and coming home only to herself. Not a fictional character, but a real person. Could it be? Yes. Yes.

Nobody’s mother, nobody’s wife. It’s an epilogue of sorts.

For years, I could be found at the grocery store, on the street corner, in my bedroom, muttering, “nobody’s mother, nobody’s wife.” It was my mantra. It would deliver me, or so I thought. It would prevent me from being burdened by relationships when I could be reading and writing and eating and dancing and living. Since those post-grad years, I’m happy to say my feminism has evolved. I now think it could be quite nice to belong to someone, that it could enhance my life instead of taking away from it. That thought could change at any moment. It changes throughout the day. At 28, I’m still trying to figure out if I can be a mother and a wife and still be the person I feel called to be. I’m not sure I can. Being a daughter and a sister and a friend is overwhelming enough. I’m not sure I can do more.

But my feminism is a feminism of possibility. And Hope is my middle name.

How an Alien Invasion Became a Xenophobic Massacre

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When They Came to Us

by Debbie Urbanski

They Arrive On A Warm Summer Night With No Breeze
We went to sleep, and in the morning they were here. We saw them on our screens as they emerged from a grove of trees a hundred miles west of us. Their ship had crashed. It was made of a rose-gold metal and looked like a claw with a broken tip. Within hours the government had moved these beings — the “blues,” we eventually came to call them — to a holding station outside the nearest city. There we could watch them whenever we wanted, because of the cameras in each room.

We assumed they would have special powers, like mind reading or levitation, but apparently they couldn’t do such things. What they could do was spray a fine white mist from their pores. Although this wasn’t what we’d expected, it still seemed amazing to us: White mist! Coming out of an alien’s skin! Mostly they just sat there in their rooms. There was a big to-do about how nice their accommodations were: the pricey organic grains they were fed, the high thread count of their sheets, the multiple down pillows, and the room dividers for privacy. The blues spent hours hiding behind those partitions. This became frustrating because we couldn’t see what they were doing; we could only hear them, and the sounds were unrecognizable to us.

They Weren’t Supposed To Look Like Us
Science teaches us that creatures adapt to their unique environments. Surely the aliens’ home planet must have differed from our own, yet the blues did look almost like us — or like imitations of us. They looked as if they had done their best to look like us. They even began to mimic our speech, though their voices were pitched ridiculously high, higher than a human child’s. Their skin, of course, was blue, as were their nails and hair. Mrs. Durand, who has lived here in town for many years, was disappointed. She wanted the blues to look like her dead husband, like in that old sci-fi movie about aliens who took the form of people’s deceased loved ones. That was useful, what the aliens in that movie had done.

Grace Madden, Who Also Lives In Our Town, Tells Us About Her Dream
In the dream she went inside the blues’ ship. They took her up into the air and welcomed her with circular motions of their arms. They touched her neck and her back and her stomach. The ship’s interior was soft and warm and painted with light. The walls seemed to pulse, Mrs. Madden told us, like a heart.

That’s the picture we had in our minds: an enormous heart going whoosh, whoosh, whoosh through space.

Our Town Is Named A Relocation Site, And We React In The Following Ways
Ms. Mueller began the rumors that our water had gone bad. Little Rita Oh refused to sleep, and her mom had to take away her screen at night and lock Rita in her room. Mr. Lucas’s hands began trembling. (From fear? Anticipation?) Roger Gibson put on a sandwich board declaring, “The Emperor Has No Clothes!” and he stomped around the train station in a menacing way. Dana Fisher moved up her wedding to Jeff Campbell, even though nobody thought they should get married at a time like this. At their backyard reception Mrs. Fisher laid out somber plates of mashed beans and skewered tomatoes, and a lot of people left early. Young Tom Durand tied a red bandanna over his mouth and stormed into the Pizza Palace waving a water pistol. The Lucases decided to try for another baby, like Mrs. Lucas wanted. Suzie Breton raised her hand in homeroom and let everybody know that she thought the blues were beautiful; they made us less alone in the universe, she said. Somebody kicked in the head of the homeless guy who begged at the interstate on-ramp. Jessica O’Brien complained of cramps. Certain people stopped drinking our town’s tap water. Jeff hit his new wife, Dana, in a place where he thought nobody could see it, but we saw it and took note. At our annual summer parade the children dressed up as aliens, or how they imagined aliens should look, wearing grotesque masks and walking around with lurching steps. We were unsure whether this was appropriate. Mr. Lucas forgot his bedroom windows were open, and we heard him tell Mrs. Lucas, “If you just lie there with your legs open, I might as well go fuck a cow. Should I? Should I go fuck a cow?” Many of us felt on edge. Ordinary things appeared unfamiliar or even vulgar.

The Blues Arrive In Buses, And We Stand On The Sidewalks To Greet Them
The whole town came out. All morning we waited, keeping the mood festive and light. Johnny Reynolds strummed his guitar, and Mr. Sullivan gave blue balloon swords to the children, because it was the only shape he could make out of balloons. We drank lemonade and ate popcorn and played word games to pass the time. We wore our best clothing. Our children were well-behaved and patient.

At noon the three school buses appeared in a cloud of diesel exhaust. Dana Campbell threw white confetti left over from her wedding, and the children sang a song about sunshine. We tried to catch a glimpse of the blues, but we couldn’t see through the white mist inside the buses. The drivers didn’t stop; they continued on to the refugee apartments that had been built east of town, where the blues would live eight to a room. This arrangement was OK because, from what we could tell, the blues enjoyed living close to each other. They were like animals that way. The relocation agency made sure the blues had what they needed: their closets were stocked with used clothes, their pantries filled with donated food. In each apartment hung a video camera.

After their arrival, if we spotted a blue in town — which was rare, as they were skittish in the beginning — we were supposed to treat them kindly. We weren’t to call them “aliens,” because of the word’s connotations.

When We Ask How Far Away Their Home Is, They’re Oddly Vague
They said their planet was beautiful, but it didn’t sound beautiful. It sounded cold and dark and wet. (The blues themselves smelled like damp wool and spoiled citrus.) They were only one of many tribes on their planet, and none of the tribes were particularly kind to each other. Apparently there were seasons, because at certain times of year heavy fruits hung from the trees, and herds of grunting animals wandered around, offering themselves up for meat. But other times the blues were hungry. Before leaving, they had sold off everything they’d owned, which is why they’d brought nothing with them. “What did you have? What did you sell?” we asked, wanting specifics. They mentioned animals, mainly livestock, and some kind of cloth in which they had wrapped themselves.

Many of the words the blues used to describe where they’d come from we couldn’t understand. We shook our heads, and they sketched the object in the dirt: a square box, perhaps, with lines radiating from it. We still had no idea. This is how conversations went with them. We asked if they had been to planets other than ours. The blues said yes; there had been other planets. Honestly they didn’t like to talk about it much. If we asked for a story about their home, the blues waved their hands in the air, as if the gesture itself were a story.

Our Children Are Understandably Puzzled
Such a change in what was possible: Aliens! Spaceships! New worlds! It didn’t seem healthy for a child’s development.

“What color are their penises?” little Jess Mueller asked her mother.

“I’m not sure they have penises,” her mother said, blushing. How was she supposed to know? Children should not be thinking about such things. They asked what the blues’ poop looked like, how they made their babies, whether they went to hell or heaven when they died, why blue boys were so skinny, and what were those marks on the blue women’s faces? We steered the conversation to more-suitable topics.

We Don’t Tell Our Children That Those Marks Are Bruises, And It Looks Like The Blues Are Starving Their Boys
Once, a blue female wandered from their group, shrieking and tearing at her eyes with her nails. Eventually she collapsed, and a blue male strode toward her. We assumed he intended to help her up, but instead he hit her with the back of his hand, then with his fist. We heard the male’s fist hitting the female, and her whimpering. The sounds made us sick. “Those fucking barbarians,” Ms. Mueller said. We expected the beating to stop, but it went on for a long time. We’d been told not to intervene, out of respect for their culture. If a blue male brought out a leather strap that left welts, we were told not to stare, but also not to avoid looking. We were to act like what they were doing was normal and accept them as they were.

The blues did not hit their children, as far as we knew, but they behaved as if their boys were worthless. At meals, for instance, a blue mother gave each girl an enormous bowl of gruel — seconds if the girl asked for it — along with a chunk of dark bread, while the boys received no bread and were given only a few spoonfuls of the gruel. “They do not get hungry!” a blue female insisted when we asked, though the blue boys looked at us with starving eyes.

To be fair, the blues weren’t brutal all the time. They had a playful side to them. Even the adults appeared to enjoy a childish prank. They were known to hide in alleyways and jump out as we walked by. If we feigned surprise — “Oh, my!” or “Look at that!” — they made clicking sounds in their throats, which meant they were satisfied. When they laughed, they sounded like donkeys.

Better To View The Blues From A Distance, We Begin To Think
Through the cameras in their apartments, we could watch the blues on our screens whenever we wanted. We watched how they ate (with their hands), whether they used the toilets, how they prepared their meals and nuzzled and mated and fought. It was fun studying them like this. It made us feel like amateur naturalists. There was none of the usual awkwardness we felt in their presence; we didn’t need to worry about what to say or how to act. Their violence toward each other continued to strike us as bestial — the males biting the females’ arms; the females’ apparent pleasure — but we eventually came to expect it. In private, by ourselves in our unmonitored homes, some of us discovered that such peculiar and brutal scenes held an erotic charge.

Most of all we liked to watch them sleep. They looked the most like us when they slept, and we felt compassion for them as their chests rose and fell under the thin blankets.

Despite many such hours of observation, we still had unanswered questions. We wished we could understand what kindness looked like to them, and how they described cruelty, and what they thought love meant.

Our Lives Don’t Stop Just Because The Blues Are Here
Winter came, a very mild winter. By February’s end the trees were budding, and there were yellow daffodils in Mrs. Durand’s yard. We were glad for the pretty flowers, no matter when they decided to come. All around us the trees bloomed spectacularly, fragrant and white.

In March we put on our spring festival to celebrate the longer days and shorter nights. As happened every year, we got sick on Ms. Mueller’s fried dough, and we dressed Jeff Campbell up as the spring maiden and made him dance. Not one blue came. They could have come — no one was stopping them — but they didn’t, and in a sense it was better that way. Things were as they should be.

Part of the festival is an art contest, and the theme that year (Mrs. Gorski picked it) was the blues’ home planet. A dozen fine entries came in: paintings of an arctic landscape, an underwater city, even a terrifying vision of spindly legged machines that set trees on fire with their eyes. Only one painting sold, a watercolor of a monochromic desert purchased by Mrs. Lucas. She hung it in her family room, then sat on the sofa and stared at that painting for a long time, entranced by the blowing blue sands and the multiple suns. Perhaps she was trying to imagine herself on the blues’ planet.

“What the hell is this?” Mr. Lucas asked when he saw the painting hanging there.

The Blues Decide They Don’t Want To Be Watched Anymore, As If It Were OK For Them To Decide Such A Thing
First they misted up a few of the cameras. The other cameras they covered with their dirty sheets. So Johnny Reynolds marched right into their apartments — he was caretaker of the building, the master keys jangling at his belt — and he wiped the cameras clean and took down the bedsheets. “Don’t you touch these again,” he scolded.

Within a week the blues had broken every camera. Now that we could no longer watch them, they grew stranger and more savage to us.

They began leaving their apartments more often — swarming out of their apartments, is how it felt. We saw them at the bus stops in the morning, and in the afternoons they crowded us out of our parks. We ended their food donations — we had to, because of the shortages — so they dug through restaurant dumpsters and went begging beside the on-ramps. It was unpleasant for us to see all this and also unpleasant for our children, who began asking uncomfortable questions, like why the blues were stuffing rancid food scraps into their mouths. “Run them over,” Jeff Campbell said whenever he was in the car and saw a blue beside the road scrounging through a garbage bin. It’s not as if Jeff actually ran a blue over; it was just something he said. The point is they weren’t trying to act like us, or even to be likable. Though this shouldn’t have mattered, privately it did matter: their unpleasant smell, how close they stood to us, those guttural noises they sometimes made in their throats instead of using English. Best to leave them be, we instructed our children. We believed the blues must be going through an adolescent phase from which they’d soon emerge more fully formed and useful to us. Until then, we told our kids, stay away.

To Be Honest, The Blues Have Not Come At The Best Time
The mansions along our once-grand boulevards were falling apart, our children were roaming the streets with their pit bulls, and few of us had jobs — or, at least, not jobs we wanted. There were deserted retail spaces left over from the boom and also some ruined factories. It wasn’t just us. The whole world seemed to be in crisis, with riots and strange weather and war. You know how wars are, even if they’re far away: The fiery levels of alert. The panicked glow. The paranoia over everything.

We Advise Each Other Just To Ignore The Blues, But Do All Of Us Listen?
Mrs. Madden got it into her head that she could predict the blues’ future. She met them in the dimly lit back room of her house, where she sat across from them at a card table. They believed whatever Mrs. Madden said. When she told a blue female, “You hide your pain behind a curtain, but somebody will lift up the curtain,” the blue said, “Yes, yes.” When Mrs. Madden said to a blue male, “Everything will be OK for you,” he nodded, even though things obviously were not OK. She traced the patterns on an older blue’s hand and said, “I see darkness up ahead for you, but in your darkness there is a light.” Who knew what that meant? We were impressed when Mrs. Madden touched their hands like that. Sometimes, in return, they gave her a bucket of forest greens or a bowl of ripe tomatoes.

Generally she met with a single blue at a time, but one day she brought a group of them into her back room and said, “I have good news. You thought you were alone here, but you aren’t.” She said that she saw their deceased loved ones roosting near the ceiling like happy birds, and the blues believed her, as always.

If Mrs. Madden said these things in order to be beloved by someone or something, it worked. She was beloved by the blues. They held her hands. They held each other. They fell onto her soft brown carpet, weeping and squawking. Why not? If believing something makes your life that much better, then, by all means, go ahead and believe.

We Tell Our Children To Leave The Blues Alone Until They Start Behaving Better, But Do Our Children Listen Either?
Suzie Breton and Rita Oh began bicycling past the blues’ apartments before school. The girls stuck out their tongues at the buildings and spit on the blues’ lawn — all innocent enough, until one day Suzie and Rita climbed off their bikes and peeked into a first-floor window. (This is what we were reduced to, window peeping, because of what the blues had done to the cameras.) The girls were gazing into a bedroom, which was more nest than room — food scraps on the floor mixed with newspapers and old sheets. On the wall was a photograph of a grove of oak trees. Who knew why it was there?

“I dare you to knock,” Rita said.

“No,” said Suzie.

Rita made whimpering noises at her. “Are you afraid, you big baby?” She grabbed Suzie’s hand and slapped it against the window. Then a blue boy entered the room.

He didn’t see them at first. He removed his shirt and faced a mirror on the back of the door. The girls were awed by the deformities of his body: the too-long back, the emaciated legs, the severe angles of his bones. The boy licked the mirror with his tongue. This made Rita giggle.

Suzie jabbed her in the ribs. “He’ll hear you.”

Rita mimicked the blue boy, sticking her tongue to the window glass.

“Come on. Quit it.”

“Dare you to take off your shirt,” Rita said.

Suzie blushed and refused.

“God, I knew you wouldn’t.” Rita pushed Suzie into the window, and the blue boy heard and turned around. Suzie had no idea how to read the expression on his face. Was he sad? Angry? Curious? Pleased?

Rita unbuttoned her shirt to reveal the petite cotton bra her mom had bought her the week before.

“We’re late for school,” Suzie said.

“As if I care,” Rita said, and she flaunted her chest at the blue. The bra had stupid pink flowers along the seams, but Rita showed it off anyway. As the blue boy approached the window, Suzie studied his fingers and the narrow muscles of his shoulders. He raised his hand as if to press it gently to the glass, where she could see her reflection, but instead he slapped his palm against the pane. Both girls stumbled backward. He hit the glass again with his hand. Then he used his head. An animal sound — a goat? a horse? — came out of him as he stared at the girls. He pressed his open mouth against the window, exposing his terrible teeth.

The girls arrived at school that day shaken. They had thought — wrongly, as we all sometimes did — that because the blues had two arms, two legs, and a head, they would act like us. But they were not human. They were something else. So this assumption — we had to keep reminding ourselves — was untrue.

The Blues Force Us To Ponder Some Ethical Questions
Such as: If something is not human, can we expect it to be bound by human laws? Do civil rights apply to these creatures? Do we need search warrants to enter their apartments? Can they be handcuffed and arrested for scaring our children?

What does justice mean for a being who often appears more animal than human?

In the winter, when some of the blues began starving due to the continued shortage of food, there was the question of whether we were under any ethical obligation to feed them, especially the children. If something happened to the blue adults — and, by this time, things were happening to the adults — what were our obligations, exactly, to the children, and how long did these obligations go on? At what point were we allowed to wash our hands of them and focus on the needs of our own families?

We Finally Find A Use For The Blues
They turned out to be trainable. They could wash dishes or drive a truck or clean our houses.

“You can’t just make them work; you need their permission,” Mrs. Gorski told us. “And they’ll need wages. They aren’t indentured servants. They didn’t come here to be our slaves.” For that matter, nobody could think of any good reason why they had come.

They Are Even Entering Our Fantasies
Mrs. Lucas told Ms. Mueller over coffee and danishes that, when she closed her eyes in front of that painting she’d bought, “it’s like I’m there.”

“Like you’re where?” Ms. Mueller asked. “On their planet. And they’re all around me.”

In Mrs. Lucas’s mind, the blues’ planet was a desert, like the one in that painting — never mind what the blues had said about their moldy dwellings and their flood plains. And in this desert Mrs. Lucas stood barefoot on the sand, which was similar to the sand here on Earth, only light blue and softer. The sand went on all the way to the horizon, but the landscape didn’t feel barren or dead. There were huts to Mrs. Lucas’s right: charming and rustic, eight of them in a circle around a dwindling fire. Above hung lovely, fat clouds.

“Also there are two suns,” Mrs. Lucas continued. “You’d think it was this lonely place. I mean, I’m in the middle of a desert, all by myself, on a different planet. You’d think I would miss home, but I never miss anything when I’m there.”

Next she saw beings approaching in the distance. It was the blues. They were coming toward her carrying baskets of fruits and colorful cloths and flowers, kicking up sand with their feet and singing brightly.

“So you ran away from them, right?” Ms. Mueller said. “Tell me you ran away from them.”

“I didn’t run. Nobody was afraid.”

One of the blue females broke away from the group and brought a cloth to Mrs. Lucas, who touched the fabric — “It was softer than anything I’ve ever felt” — and the whole time the blue female chattered in her rough, throaty language. She must have been saying something about getting undressed, because she began to unbutton Mrs. Lucas’s shirt. The blue female helped Mrs. Lucas out of her clothing with no sense of shame. They laughed together at the scratchy fabrics of her old clothes. Then the blue woman wrapped Mrs. Lucas in the clean new cloth and tied the ends in a knot at her waist.

“This is getting rather wild, Maria,” Ms. Mueller said.

It turned out the blues were headed to a lake — a very important lake to them, one of the only lakes on their planet. Mrs. Lucas followed them there. On the way they began to sing again, and though she had no idea what the words meant, she found herself singing them, too. When they reached the lake, the blues removed their cloths and leapt naked into the clear water, but Mrs. Lucas remained on the wet sand, waiting to see what would happen next. A blue male began to watch her. He climbed out of the water, dripping, and took the edge of her cloth in his hands and tugged.

“Oh, my God,” Ms. Mueller said.

Mrs. Lucas held her cloth tight with both hands, suddenly shy. The blue male slapped her face and neck.

“He did what?” Ms. Mueller said.

The blue male let Mrs. Lucas look into his face as long as she needed to until she let go of the cloth. Then he unwrapped her slowly.

Ms. Mueller attempted to change the subject to the ongoing drought. On their screens they’d seen dusty refugees and ranchers standing beside their dead cattle. But Mrs. Lucas returned to the dream, because she wasn’t even halfway through it yet. She needed Ms. Mueller to understand the way the blue unwrapped her by forcing her to turn. Soon she was as naked as he was. Then he pushed her into the lake.

“That’s enough, Maria, please,” Ms. Mueller said, standing suddenly and taking Mrs. Lucas’s half-eaten danish to the kitchen.

Things May Get Better, Mrs. Gorski Says, If We Welcome Their Children Into Our Schools, So We Try
At the school there was little interaction between the blues and our kids. The blues sat in a far corner of the lunchroom. No one made them sit over there; they just did. And they ate nothing. In classes our children sat as far away as possible from them. The teachers tried their best, even working the blues into their lesson plans: the art of “savage” cultures, for instance, or the physics of space travel, or the portrayal of aliens in fiction. There was a lot of material there. Dana Fisher (she used her maiden name when she taught) asked students in her world-history class to give five-minute presentations on the blues’ home planet, drawing on both primary interviews and their imaginations. Suzie Breton went first, standing at the front of the room and describing something like the Amish farms of the past: the horse and buggy, the obedient children and enormous families. Who knew where she’d gotten this idea? Halfway through, a blue boy stood up from his desk and said, “Wrong.”

“You sit down,” Ms. Fisher ordered.

The blue boy did not sit down.

Suzie Breton began crying, her face red and ugly. “I did my best,” she said.

Ms. Fisher told the boy, “Look at what you did. Do I need to write you up?”

The blue boy closed his eyes, and soon his expression, his entire unattractive face, was lost in that infernal mist of theirs.

“You stop that right now,” Ms. Fisher demanded.

The mist spread throughout the room. It touched the students. It wrapped itself around Suzie Breton’s hair and neck. (It felt, she said, like someone was breathing on her.)

“Get it away from me!” Jessica O’Brien shrieked, grasping at the air, as if that would do any good.

The mist crept up the walls and covered the flags and the model of Monticello on the top shelf. Finally it drifted out the open window and dispersed.

If Mrs. Madden Means The Following As A Warning, The Blues Don’t Get It
“I’m not doing this anymore,” Mrs. Madden told the blues lounging on her front porch in the sun, waiting their turn to hear her predictions. “Not today, not next week, not next month. Go away. Get out of here! Get! Don’t come back!”

Was she having a vision of what we would do before we did it?

The blues shrieked, pounded on her house, tore her flower beds apart, and uprooted small shrubs with their teeth — their teeth! — but she would not open her door to them again.

We Pull The Blue Children From Our Schools
After months of the blue children sulking in the corners of classrooms and being bullied — our teachers were not body-guards; they could not form protective shields around each blue and still be educators — we moved the blues to another building. An old warehouse, actually. To be honest, all the blues had done was distract our kids, and we had our children’s futures to consider. Better to teach those creatures separately, in a special environment where we could focus on topics more vital to them, like how to bathe, or speak clearly, or patch a roof.

You have to understand, none of us hated the blues. We just didn’t want to be around them after a certain point. The fact was, we could already imagine them gone. We imagined the sorts of things we might say once they were gone: Oh, do you remember how they danced? Do you remember those songs we heard drifting out of their apartments at night? As if we hadn’t hated their music and their dancing.

Mr. Lucas Hears About His Wife’s Crazy Fantasies
“No human being can fuck you like you need,” he said — or, rather, shouted — to Mrs. Lucas. We think he then tied Mrs. Lucas to the bed. Even with the windows shut we heard them, but we pretended not to hear. It became clear to us that the blues were ruining certain people’s lives.

Life Cannot Continue On As It Is, Can It?
Look, we studied the same textbooks as you. We knew all the dark secrets of history, just as you do. When we discussed dark times in the past and the things people had done to each other then, we talked as if such acts had been committed by a different species. But these were dark times, too. And dark things happen in the dark. You don’t always have the luxury of sitting there and figuring out who did what to whom. Nobody should walk around acting like they have a golden light inside them, because they don’t. The blues were a disappointment to us, and disappointment can breed anger. We wished to be rid of them.

So we got rid of them.

The Morning After, We Wake Up, And It’s Over
The whole nasty business seemed like something we had watched, not something we had done. Already the air felt different: lighter or, rather, clearer. Something about the sky — though it was still the same sky it had been the previous day — wasn’t the same. We opened our windows for the first time in a long while. The charred smell of the fires still burning east of town drifted in, but we soon got used to it. Littered about our lawns and the streets were the rocks and bricks and ropes, looking obscene now in the daylight, like something it was best not to talk about. We got out trash bags and cleaned up. It was not by any means a joyful day. None of us were throwing confetti or kicking our heels together. In fact, we did not look each other in the eye. For the most part we kept to ourselves, raking our yards or organizing canned goods in the kitchen — the sort of tasks you think you’ll never have time for, so there is a great satisfaction in doing them. There were a few scenes, a few hysterics, such as Mrs. Lucas running down the street in her bloody dress, which she should have changed out of by that point. Anyone visibly upset was ushered inside and soothed with chamomile tea or something stronger. Though we knew the blues’ apartments were empty, Johnny Reynolds went over there just to be sure. He didn’t tell us exactly what he’d seen. All he said was that he’d checked every apartment, even looking in the closets and under the mattresses, and there was nothing worth saving.

Toward sunset a few cardinals in the trees of Mrs. Durand’s yard began to trill in the most extraordinary way, as if to say that certain things did not have to go on forever, and it was OK that they ended.

Can We Blame Everything Bad That Happens Afterward On The Blues?
Such as Suzie Breton’s eventual suicide, or the things Mr. Lucas later did to his wife, or Mr. Sullivan’s vodka binges, or the way our children seemed to lack a moral compass?

Take what happened to Donny Mueller. When he disappeared, we didn’t worry at first. He was only a sixth-grader with chubby legs; how far could he have gone? We searched the schools, the library, the woods. Then we searched the homes and basements of his friends. Finally we found Donny locked up in the Durands’ garden shed, a dog collar fastened around his neck. The collar was attached to a chain, which was locked to the floor beside a bowl of water and a pile of rancid meat. The shed smelled of something burnt. There were scars. Tom Durand and Donny were in the same grade. Apparently Little Tom had wanted Donny as his pet.

There are other examples, but it’s better not to go into them. We found ourselves wondering: If the blues had never come, would we have been better people?

The Blues Long Gone, We Build Ourselves A River Walk
The river walk has lights that turn on at night to keep us safe. The lights get rid of the shadows, and they’re also solar powered, which people seem to like these days. It shows we care about the planet’s resources. Already tourists are strolling along the river, holding hands and buying beverages from the carts, just like we predicted they would. The river walk ends at our town’s park, where there are benches under the oak trees and a rose garden and a pond. Autumn is by far the most popular time to visit. The leaves turn orange-red as if they were on fire, though they’re obviously not on fire, and after they fall we build enormous leaf piles for children to jump in. At Halloween there are pumpkin-carving contests and a costume parade. The tourists find such traditions charmingly old-fashioned.

Only the rare visitor bothers to ask about the blues. You can spot these people easily. They’re the ones walking around with their frowns and notebooks, looking for plaques or some sort of memorial fountain — anywhere they can get down on their knees and make a scene. They’re the ones who expect us to look haunted. One woman, clutching an open notebook in which she has thus far written nothing, asks, “You were a relocation site, were you not? Yet it appears you’re trying to forget this very fact!” As if forgetting were something to be ashamed of. It’s too bad that certain people can look at a town like ours, where nothing is missing anymore, and still see something missing.

When a visitor asks, we don’t deny that the blues were among us for a brief time, but there isn’t a lot more to say. That was many years ago, and most of us have moved on, because that’s what you do. There are only a few people left who’ll talk about the blues’ time here as if it were important: Mrs. Gorski, Mrs. Madden, Johnny Reynolds, Mrs. Lucas. We feel bad for them, because it means that what followed — i.e., the rest of their lives — must have been a disappointment. Mrs. Gorski will ramble on, if you let her, about what she was wearing the night they came (her fluffy red robe), and the style of her hair (in braids), and what she heard (a whistling in the air), and what she saw in the sky (a burning orb like a small, sad sun). Sure, at first it sounds like a big deal — ooh, beings from another planet, a spaceship landing — until you think about how we hadn’t asked them to come. They weren’t what we needed.

About the Author

Debbie Urbanski is a writer living in Syracuse, New York. Her work focuses on aliens, relationships, cults, belief, and family, or some combination of those themes. Her stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Terraform, the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Nature, and elsewhere. “When They Came To Us” is being adapted for the stage by playwright MT Cozzola. The play is being workshopped at Piven theater in Chicago, with public performances on January 29 and January 30, 2018.

About the Recommender

The Sun is an independent, ad-free magazine that for more than forty years has used words and photographs to evoke the splendor and heartache of being human. Writing from The Sun has won the Pushcart Prize and been selected for numerous anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays.

46 Books By Women of Color to Read in 2018

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I first wrote a list like this in February of 2017. I’d been looking for upcoming books by women of color — to review, as well as to read — and I had such trouble finding them that it felt like hunting for unicorns. Once I’d collected a few 2017 titles, I thought I’d tell others about what I’d discovered. To my great delight, that list ended up being one of Electric Lit’s top five most widely shared pieces this year. So, I’m doing it again, with the wholehearted hope that a 2018 list might, here and there, help make the literary landscape less parochial, more inclusive. Toward this end, I sifted through publishers’ catalogs for forthcoming books, asked friends for thoughts, and solicited help on social media.

I’ve heard it argued that it’s been a banner year for books by women of color already: there’s Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 National Book Award, for one. It’s the first time the fiction prize has been conferred twice upon any black person or woman—thereby formally, prize-wise, placing Ward in the company of William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. This year’s National Book Award ten-book fiction longlist featured six titles written by women of color; three out of five 2017 New York Public Library Young Lions finalists were women of color; and so on.

But there’s such a long way to go. Look, for instance, at the New York Times’s weekly “By the Book” section, in which, to a shameless extent, prominent men continue to suggest we just read still more men’s books. Consider the fact that, as recently as this May, Leonard Chang wrote about a novel of his that was rejected by big-house publishers for not being “Asian enough.” As one editor told him, critiquing his manuscript, “You have to think about ways to make these characters more ‘ethnic,’ more different…in the scene when [a character] looks into the mirror, you don’t show how she sees her slanted eyes, or how she thinks of her Asianness.”

As it so happens, I’m Asian; I’m publishing my debut novel this summer, and my characters, much like me, don’t spend any time contemplating their slanted eyes. If that editor had read more widely in the first place, he might previously have recognized how limiting his stereotypes might be, and he could have broken free of the rigid confines of his own narrow mind. Perhaps it’s too late for him, but it’s not for us. Let’s read more broadly; let’s try inhabiting one another’s wildly varied, entirely human points of view. It’s late in 2017, and the situation’s desperate. If we can’t imagine one another, how will we get through these next few years?

It’s late in 2017, and the situation’s desperate. If we can’t imagine one another, how will we get through these next few years?

I tried, I really did, to avoid mentioning our current president, but as wicked tyrants tend to do, he poisons every day. Still, since this is a forward-looking list, a joyful celebration of what’s to come, I want to glance past him. This, too, will pass. In honor of our next president, the 46th—whoever she, he, or they might be—I picked 46 splendid novels, memoirs, anthologies, and collections I’m anticipating. These writers are here, their 2018 books are coming, and look how glorious.

JANUARY

When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele

I mean, honestly, what better way to start 2018 than by reading the memoir of Black Lives Matter founders Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele? It’s a vital, captivating story of who Khan-Cullors and bandele are, as well as of how the movement was founded.

This Will Be My Undoing by Morgan Jerkins

I’ve admired, for a while, the incandescent essays Morgan Jerkins has published in places like The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere. This collection brings together Jerkins’s writing about living as a black woman in the U.S., with reflections on topics ranging from Sailor Moon to Rachel Dolezal.

Halsey Street by Naima Coster

In Naima Coster’s first novel, a mother who’s abandoned her family gets back in touch with her daughter, asking for forgiveness. Ben Marcus says Halsey Street is “a poignant, moving book, written with deep empathy and sophistication.”

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

Ijeoma Oluo, editor-at-large of The Establishment, is a trenchant, reliably insightful writer and thinker about race in America, and this collection is necessary reading. Her writing’s been compared to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s, Roxane Gay’s, and Jessica Valenti’s.

Everything Here is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee

Celeste Ng calls this debut novel “a tender but unflinching portrayal of the bond between two sisters — one that’s frayed by mental illness and stretched across continents, yet still endures.” Everything Here is Beautiful examines the depths and limits of love.

The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory

The Wedding Date is a first book from Jasmine Guillory, who wrote frequently for the late, much-lamented The Toast. It’s about a woman who goes to a wedding with a man she meets in an elevator, and Roxane Gay says it’s a “charming, warm, sexy gem of a novel.”

FEBRUARY

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

It’s always an event when there’s new writing from Tayari Jones, but her forthcoming novel, about a just-married husband sentenced to prison for twelve years, is, according to Edwidge Danticat, “an exquisite, timely, and powerful novel that feels both urgent and indispensable.” Jones, says Michael Chabon, “has found a new level of artistry and power” in An American Marriage.

The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore by Kim Fu

Kim Fu’s extraordinary first book, For Today I Am a Boy, received the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. Her second novel depicts five girls at camp who take a kayaking trip and end up stranded, unchaperoned, on an island.

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

A woman loses her mentor and best friend, and takes on caring for his Great Dane. In this vivid portrait of the wilds of sorrow, The Friend shows two fictional creatures in their shared but separate grief becoming increasingly close, and isolated from everyone else.

Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

From a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree comes this picaresque about an Iranian American bibliophile, freshly orphaned, traveling across Spain. Bustle has acclaimed Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi as an author “on the verge of developing a whole new literature movement.”

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

This is Akwaeke Emezi’s debut, but, as Taiye Selasi says, “she is an old―an ancient―storyteller: thrillingly at home in the tradition of griots, poets, seers and seekers.” Freshwater follows a Nigerian woman with a fractured self whose multiple identities take turns narrating the novel.

Song of a Captive Bird by Jasmin Darznik

Song of a Captive Bird is a fictionalized portrayal of the influential Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, who, in her verse as in her life, rebelled against expectations that she keep quiet. Jasmin Darznik’s novel is inspired by the poetry, letters, and interviews that Farrokhzad left behind.

Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad by Krystal Sital

Nicole Dennis-Benn calls this memoir a “brilliant account of gender inequality and the burdens we bear as women in the Caribbean.” Secrets We Kept is about Krystal Sital’s grandmother’s life as a widow, and the complicated freedom she found after her husband’s death.

Feel Free by Zadie Smith

I really love opening up a magazine to find that there’s a new essay out from Zadie Smith. Now, for the first time, she’s gathered her nonfiction in one book, Feel Free.

Heart Berries by Terese Mailhot

While Terese Mailhot was in the hospital, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder, she started writing in a notebook. Heart Berries comes out of that notebook, and it’s a memoir in essays that, Lidia Yuknavitch says, is “shot through with funny angry beautiful brutal truths.”

The House of Erzulie by Kirsten Imani Kasai

Shade Mountain Press is a small, new, exciting feminist press founded by the writer Rosalie Morales Kearns. The House of Erzulie is its next release, a surreal novel that switchbacks between the present day and a 1850s Louisiana plantation.

MARCH

Bury What We Cannot Take by Kirstin Chen

Kirstin Chen’s second novel is the large-hearted, absorbing tale of a family forced to flee Communist China because a child reports his grandmother to the Party for having vandalized a picture of Chairman Mao. When the visa office says one child has to be left behind, heartbreak ensues.

The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat

I was utterly enthralled by this book, an unsettling, inventive debut novel about a girl and her father in an island commune. On the level of both prose and story, The Parking Lot Attendant feels startling and new.

Everyone Knows You Go Home by Natalia Sylvester

In this novel, Natalia Sylvester’s second, a woman’s father-in-law comes back from the dead to try to redeem himself with his unforgiving family. Cristina Henríquez says the book is infused with “extraordinary spirit and life.”

Go Home!, edited by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

For months, I’ve been anticipating this anthology, which brings together Asian diasporic writers as wide-ranging, and as wonderful, as Mia Alvar, Alexander Chee, Karissa Chen, Kimiko Hahn, Alice Sola Kim, Chang-Rae Lee, T. Kira Madden, Jennifer Tseng, Esmé Weijun Wang, and still others. Ocean Vuong says, “I read this book and see my people — see us — and feel, in our collective outsiderhood, at home,” to which I say amen.

My Old Faithful by Yang Huang

The winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction, My Old Faithful is a linked collection about a Chinese family that immigrates to the United States. This slim volume spans thirty years and a rich variety of stories.

The Beekeeper by Dunya Mikhail

In The Beekeeper, poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail gives the accounts of Iraqi women who escaped Daesh (ISIS), and of the beekeeper who helped them get away. Mikhail herself left Baghdad for the U.S. in the 1990s.

Happiness by Aminatta Forna

Rabih Alameddine says Happiness is one of the best novels he’s read in a while; John Freeman compares it to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. In this new book by the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize–winning Aminatta Forna, two strangers in London search for a missing boy.

Whiskey & Ribbons by Leesa Cross-Smith

A police officer with a pregnant wife is killed on duty, and then the widow’s brother moves in to help raise the fatherless child. Alexander Chee says Whiskey and Ribbons is “thrilling,” and “as immediate and compelling as music.”

APRIL

Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar by Kavita Das

Poignant Song is a biography of Grammy-nominated Lakshmi Shankar, a prominent Hindustani classical music singer who collaborated with Western artists like George Harrison of The Beatles. I’ve followed Kavita Das’s writing for some time, and am eager to see what she does with this book.

Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Nafissa Thompson-Spires brings to life a funeral singer, a suicidal girl, and middle-class mothers in this debut collection from Atria. Kelly Link says “the stories here are dazzling, wise, wicked, and tender,” and that the book’s a “knockout.”

Disoriental by Négar Djavadi, translated by Tina Kover

Already the winner of France’s Le Prix du Roman-News, Disoriental now comes to the U.S. with its fictional account of Kimiâ Sadr, who, at ten, fled Iran for France. Now 25, she sits in a Paris fertility clinic as she’s visited — besieged — by memories of her family.

MAY

The Ensemble by Aja Gabel

Aja Gabel’s debut novel focuses on a string quartet making its way through the highly competitive, fascinating demimonde of music. Maggie Shipstead, for one, calls The Ensemble “a wise and powerful novel about love, life, and music”: “I didn’t want it to end,” she says.

Not that Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, edited by Roxane Gay

Look, I’m not sure what could feel more urgently necessary than this collection of essays addressing rape and assault. It’s never “not that bad,” and may everyone read this anthology.

JUNE

Sick by Porochista Khakpour

Porochista Khakpour’s previous books, The Last Illusion and Sons and Other Flammable Objects, were memorably superb. I know I’m hardly the only reader who’s been awaiting Porochista’s third book and first memoir, a chronicle of her experience of late-stage Lyme disease.

Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li

With one of the more eye-catching titles around, Number One Chinese Restaurant is centered upon the workers in a Maryland Chinese restaurant. Peter Ho Davies praises the novel, saying that Lillian Li “conjures the ‘eco-system’ of this workplace with insider acuity and renders her bustling, hustling clan of waiters, hostesses, cooks, and managers with brilliant feeling.”

Tiny Crimes, edited by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto

Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto, both longtime champions of short fiction, have compiled 40 very brief stories about crime. The collection includes writers as fantastic as Amelia Gray, Yuri Herrera, Carmen Maria Machado, Charles Yu, and Laura van den Berg.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

I first read Sayaka Murata’s fiction in Granta and thought it hilarious, strange, and mesmerizing; this novel promises to be no less. It’s about a woman who started working at a convenience store while she was in college, and, at 36, is still in the same job.

Old in Art School by Nell Irvin Painter

Nell Irvin Painter is a visual artist and Princeton history professor whose teacher once told her she’d never be an “Artist.” In this intriguing memoir, she explores questions of what it is to be an “Artist,” capitalized, and of how the judgment of women would-be Artists can be affected by their looks, age, and race.

JULY

Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Fruit of the Drunken Tree takes place in 1990s Colombia, and depicts a privileged seven-year-old girl and her family’s maid. As drug-war violence escalates in Bogotá, the two girls draw close in what Patricia Engel calls a “heart-stopping portrait of the intimacy of violence.”

How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs

Plimpton Prize–winning Alexia Arthurs is publishing her first book, a collection about Jamaicans and Jamaican immigrants. These accomplished stories range from New York to the Caribbean to the Midwest.

Love War Stories by Ivelisse Rodriguez

Here’s what Brazos bookseller Mark Haber has to say about Ivelisse Rodriguez’s book: that “it’s an insightful look into girlhood, race, and the wounds of growing up,” a “dazzling collection by an important new voice.” Puerto Rican girls, and the women who raise them, fight and love in this new release from the Feminist Press.

What We Were Promised by Lucy Tan

What We Were Promised tracks a family that moves from rural China to America then back to China, this time to a luxury high-rise in Shanghai. One day, an ivory bracelet goes missing, a mystery that exacerbates existing interfamilial tensions.

AUGUST

A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua

Vanessa Hua’s previous book, a story collection, received the Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature and was applauded by O, The Oprah Magazine as a “searing debut.” A River of Stars is Hua’s first novel, and its gripping tale of Scarlett Chen, a Chinese boss’s mistress sent to America to birth a child, is as moving as it is entertaining.

If You Leave Me by Crystal Hana Kim

Gary Shteyngart says If You Leave Me is “an unforgettable story of family, love, and war set against the violent emergence of modern Korea.” This deeply affecting debut novel is about Korean War–dislodged refugees who fall in love.

Everyday People: The Color of Life, edited by Jennifer Baker

Everyday People is the first fiction anthology in a long while from a big-five publisher featuring people of color and Native writers. Edited by Electric Lit contributing editor Jennifer Baker, the book includes Mia Alvar, Alexander Chee, Junot Díaz, Yiyun Li, Hasanthika Sirisena, Brandon Taylor, and other luminaries.

This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s third novel details the difficult life of Tambudzai, a woman in Zimbabwe who hopes for a better life than she can attain. Crisis comes when she takes a last-resort job in ecotourism.

OCTOBER AND AFTERWARD

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

I’m in the habit of reading every one of Nicole Chung’s essays that I come across — compassionate and astute, her writing has much to tell us about race, America, belonging, and adoption. All You Can Ever Know is her first book, a memoir about having been adopted and the search for her Korean birth family.

And It Begins Like This by LaTanya McQueen

“I have felt unseen my entire life,” says LaTanya McQueen, and she notes that this might be why she became obsessed with finding out more — and writing — about a storied ancestor, once a slave, who had a relationship with a white man. They had three children together, and the ancestor took the man to court to give their children his name.

Useful Phrases for Immigrants by May-lee Chai

Tayari Jones selected Useful Phrases for Immigrants for the Bakwin Award, and calls it “essential reading,” with fiction that “interrogates heavy subjects with a light touch.” May-lee Chai used to report for the Associated Press, and this will be her ninth published book.

The Body Papers by Grace Talusan

Grace Talusan makes use of immigration papers, legal certificates, and medical test results in her memoir about immigration, trauma, and illness. The winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing for Nonfiction, The Body Papers is timely and compelling.

Eileen Myles’ Memoir Is Much More than Just a Dog Book

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Eileen Myles’s Afterglow, a dog memoir, dazzles in unexpected ways. Myles weaves together seemingly disparate topics and personal vulnerabilities to advance their story to a sense of possibility. Their signature brand of rawness, delivered with their Boston vernacular and punk tenacity, renders their grief in a manner different from conventional memoir, yet the book has the same searing depth as the likes of Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk. Myles is in their most primal poetic state as they express tender intimacy through memories of bereavement. They reject chronology and use experimental hybrid text to bring together fragments, finding an idiosyncratic order in the untidiness. In other words, we’re witness to their unadulterated mourning process, one involving the loss of Rosie, their beloved 16-year-old pit bull.

We’re witness to their unadulterated mourning process.

While the core subject of Afterglow is Rosie, Myles also revisits themselves at eleven years old, witnessing the death of their father Terrence, a former mailman and alcoholic. Like Rosie, Terrence died while Eileen was in the room. When translated to the page, the sensory experience is a dualistic homage to Rosie and Myles’ father; the two figures are connected through Myles’ belief that Rosie is their father’s reincarnation. The subject matter asks a lot of the reader, but we also get the kind of humor you might find in, well, a dog book. Myles’ prize-winning literary enigmatologist skills make this memoir an unapologetic, frisky tapestry, robust with canine energy. The narrative threads jump around, get rowdy and growl, hide behind the couch, pee on the rug, want to play ball, bark to go outside and sleep across your lap.

I talked to Myles about form and how to upend it — whether that’s by intent and practice, or by following their instincts, writerly or otherwise.

Yvonne Conza: The memoir opens with a kind of fabulist investigation: an awkward, hand-addressed letter from Rosie’s lawyer who is interested in “getting the ball rolling on dogs’ rights.” Why did you choose this opening, a witty piece written years earlier, over the more sentimental dog-mortality chapter “Protect Me You” that begins with You’ve just fallen down on the grass — a gutting, heartbreaking moment that every dog owner recognizes and dreads.

Eileen Myles: I needed to establish the fantastic aspect of the book immediately. I don’t think if I started with “Protect Me You” I would be able to stretch the dimensions of the book to include invention. And I needed to place the letter in the book as quickly as possible. The front was the only place I could imagine it. And then I wrote around it to naturalize it.

YC: The book has a structure that invokes a tapestry. How did you decide on the arrangement? Had you envisioned that from the start?

EM: I kept shuffling them till they felt right. No, the tapestry idea came towards the end of the writing. But I had the xxx sections (Myles had thought to entitle those as “transcripts” or “Rosie at 15” or so Rosie can have her say) for a while and they seemed to reinforce the tapestry structure once it existed.

YC: Afterglow goes rogue on the memoir genre, there’s much less narration than one would usually see. Rosie’s life and death, the bond between pet and pet-owner, intimacy, spirituality, celebrity, politics, alcoholism and recovery, fathers and family history, and the myths built around grief are all covered, seem to froth together with subjects diverse as Kurt Cobain, Abu Ghraib and George W. Bush. How did you know when you got this foam-like form right?

EM: I realized that if I felt secure within each section as a whole, then I could search for the larger order and in some cases end things a little shorter here or there to reinforce the new (and final) ordering of the sections. And that feels foam like. Transitory and drifting. Any final order is a provisional place where I felt I could relax now like this. I could have kept persisting for perfection but finally felt like pretty good was enough like life to be as ideal as it got.

I realized that if I felt secure within each section as a whole, then I could search for the larger order

YC: Did Rosie’s dying give you permission, or new access, to explore your relationship with your Dad and to put his story on the page? What has that meant to you? Did it distill the grief, or provide final closure that, when you were eleven, might have been muddied with confusion and other emotions?

EM: Sure I think I wrote it to give myself that closure. Again there’s no end to mourning. It’s only provisional, but I used everything I had and got to the end of a lot of those feelings. But my mom died before the book came out and it’s dedicated to her so I think I finished that book (and my mourning for my dad and Rosie) so I could get going on the loss of the female parent.

YC: What poets and prose writers influenced your writing process with the book?

EM: Octavia Butler, Kafka, Bruno Schultz, Ursula LeGuin, James Schuyler and a number of travel adventure memoirs. Travel and sci-fi generally felt good.

YC: Chapters titled “x,” “FOAM,” and “The Dog’s Journey” push the narrative forward in unexpected ways. How did the lyricism and the landscape develop for these sections? Did you trust the pieces would home themselves, be woven in, as they came into existence?

EM: “Foam” came in pretty late. It already existed, but I saw that it could fit in the book. The “x” chapters were a whole and I had to figure out how to break it and position them throughout the book. The dog’s journey was written where it was as it was. It was meant for the end and maybe following it with the walk was a late thought. There was another ending chapter that didn’t work and that got jettisoned pretty late.

I think they are the lyric landscape. I mean the landscape comes into existence as these pieces find their harmony with each other. The order is kind of tonal.

YC: Do you write in parceled bursts? Or in fragments you weave and link together?

EM: Big bursts that I tighten and throw out passages to make it swifter, leaner.

YC: What’s your editing process like while working on a book like Afterglow? Do you hand-edit or do it on a computer?

EM: Both. Whatever makes me want to work. I enjoy printing out drafts and editing with a pencil but at various points doing it on the computer feels swift and dangerous though I always save drafts.

YC: Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm’s literary host of KCRW’s author interview program, asked you if you realized the extraordinary risks you took for this book and you mentioned: This was an opportunity to really betray my tribe. Can you talk further about taking risks in your work?

EM: In a way I have subject matter for the first time. It’s about a dog, truly. I gave myself a different question. How to make a book and honor a relationship. In many ways it’s truly a memoir. And I have no inherent respect for that form. That might’ve been the greatest betrayal. To write in a form I don’t admire, but then to figure out how to do it my way.

YC: While writing Afterglow, what was something that unexpectedly came up that you decided to run with?

EM: The puppets. (An early chapter in the book entitled “The Puppets Talk Show,” an imagined interview between Rosie and Myles’s childhood toy puppet.) The walk at the end was the memory of a recording but not the recording. I thought, oh I could write that walk by pretending I recorded it. I did but I never listened.

It’s about a dog, truly. I gave myself a different question. How to make a book and honor a relationship.

YC: Was there anything you cut in Afterglow that we will see in another book or poem? How did you determine that a cut section should be kept for future work?

EM: No. It was more like things from other places — foam, the rape of Rosie came into Afterglow.

YC: What current books are you reading? Who are the emerging writers that you are taking note of?

EM: Joy Williams. Just finished Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of a Fox. It’s in galley form.

YC: What writing habit has been most influential for you and has helped to advance your work?

EM: Write lots. Don’t fix as you go. Keep producing.

9 Fictional Friendships that Explore Male Intimacy

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While constructed masculinity often represses conversations about the intensity, messiness, and vulnerability of male friendships, many novels and stories display men behaving together in ways the public discourse shuns. For this list, I chose pairs I found compelling in their contradictions. Many of the men rely on each other while struggling with addiction and mental illness, railing against their own toxicity to achieve a more honest form of vulnerability. Others compete for validation, dulling their sensitivities in the process. But whatever the dynamic, these are the kinds of friendships between men that reflect something much closer to real life than your average bromance caricature.

Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

At the fulcrum of Roberto Bolaño’s kaleidoscopic epic Savage Detectives, are the poets Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, the author’s alter ego. The mysterious leaders of the Visceral Realists, drift through Spain, Israel, North Africa, and Mexico sharing an unspoken and often inscrutable bond as they phase in and out of contact. Chronicled through dozens of perspectives — although never directly from Arturo or Ulises — the novel’s narrators often observe a silent vulnerability shared between the pair as their physical and mental health slowly degrades.

Robby and Todd, “Midnight in Dostoevsky” by Don Delillo

Robby narrates Don Delillo’s masterful short story “Midnight in Dostoevsky.” While walking with his friend Todd around their college town, the two encounter a loner wandering around. Over a series of chance encounters, the friends project a fictional life onto the mysterious figure, debating his heritage, role in the town, family, and even the style of his winter coat. Coursing beneath their witticism; however, is a latent violence, as both struggle for control of their crafted version of reality.

Gunnar Kaufman and Nicholas Scoby, The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty

The White Boy Shuffle was the first novel from the poet Paul Beatty, who went on to win the Man Booker prize for The Sellout. This coming-of-age tale follows Gunnar, an awkward, black surfer bum who is moved by his mother from Santa Monica to urban West Los Angeles — a decision Mrs. Kaufman makes after her son refuses to attend an all black summer camp because he feels the children are different from him. After befriending Nicholas, a prolific basketball player, Gunnar begins to undergo a startling transformation from neighborhood outcast to basketball superstar, and eventually to reluctant messiah of a “divided, downtrodden people.” This is a friendship about that explores conformity, and the conditions of black masculinity.

The narrator and Robert, “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver

On the surface, Carver’s “Cathedral” is a simple if, admittedly, strange story. A man’s wife invites a blind man her husband has never met to their home for drinks. They talk. They draw. That’s it. But, beneath its simplicity is a complex discourse about the ways many men do and do not communicate with each other. It digs into trust, vulnerability, and questions of inherent truth. By the end of the story something inside the narrator softens. He becomes more open, altered through his connection with another person.

Scott and Chris, The Sarah Book by Scott McClanahan

Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book was probably the best thing I read in 2017, and the saddest thing I read ever. After separating from the titular Sarah, Scott moves in with his also-recently-divorced friend Chris. In “the apartment of death,” they get drunk, feed steak to kittens, sing “November Rain,” and fuck around online, trying, together, to find something resembling functional happiness. This book is gorgeous. The friendship is communal and raw. Highly recommend.

Gnossos Pappadopoulis and Heff, Been Down so Long it Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Fariña

Richard Fariña’s freewheeling Been Down so Long… follows charismatic Ivy League senior Gnossos Paddadopoulis as he returns to a campus primed for a counter culture revolution. Brazen, nearly constantly high, and obsessed with “cool,” he relies his friend Heff for grounding and political direction. As the novel progresses, however, it becomes clear that both use their personas as a means of staving off the encroachments of a corrupt and sinister era.

Georgie and Fuckhead, “Emergency” by Denis Johnson

The standout story from the late Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son is about two hospital orderlies stealing drugs and driving through Iowa at night. It’s a story about fear, hallucination, needing another person to hear you, and saving lives. In a book about weirdos and addicts struggling, and often failing, to get better. Georgie provides Fuckhead with hope that rarely exists in his world. Oh, and before all that he pulls a hunting knife from a man’s eye without doing any damage.

Jude, Malcolm, Willem & JB, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Four friends graduate from college and move together to New York City to make their way. They’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; Jean-Baptiste, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, son of an affluent New York family and a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. The reader learns more — and more graphic — details of Jude’s traumatic past as his friends do. As the tale unfolds, Yanagihara shows us the manifold roles that men play in one another’s lives.

Gene and Phineas, A Separate Peace by John Knowles

John Knowles boarding school classic A Separate Peace, follows narrator Gene’s friendship with Phineas, the charismatic and athletic leader of their grade. Driven by an admiration that borders on obsession, Gene finds himself embroiled in an accident that leads to Phineas being severely injured. In a psychological rich narrative rife with homoerotic undertones, Knowles uses the boy’s friendship to explore trust, admiration, anger, and what it means to want another person’s life.

Gods of Sad Beauty

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When Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was five, monks took him from his mother. When he was twenty, he and the monks fled Tibet. He studied comparative religion in Oxford. A car accident left him half paralyzed and prone to depression. He stopped dressing like a monk. At thirty, he married; his wife was sixteen. He called a friend to report news of his wedding and forgot his wife’s name. When he first arrived in America, he stayed at the home of a Korean monk; after drinking with him late one night, the monk called him a fraud and kicked him out. In Boulder, he had his hippie students dress neatly and follow elaborate rituals. He drank heavily. He believed true spirituality began and ended with boredom. He slept with his students. He liked the grasshoppers he saw in Texas; he said, “The world is very interesting, wherever you go, wherever you look.” When his mentor Suzuki Roshi died, he wept blood. He said, “Ego is always trying to achieve spirituality. It is rather like wanting to witness your own funeral.” He rang a gong over Robert Bly’s poetry reading. He thought Western psychology secularized original sin. He had his students strip W. S. Merwin and his girlfriend against their will. He believed in a concept he called “basic goodness,” a term I choke on. He said, “The real function of a spiritual friend is to insult you.” Brooding at a car window, he predicted the date of his death. People said he acted the same all the time, whether he was at home or speaking before hundreds. He said, “The bad news is you are falling through air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there is no ground.” When he died at 47, his body stayed warm for five days. At his funeral, a rare form of rainbow appeared in the sky.

Some say he was a charlatan. He came to me in a dream and farted. He came to me in a vision and said, “Why do you keep asking me questions? I am not your mommy and daddy. Before you can be your own parent, you must learn to be your own child.” I haven’t been to the center he founded for a year. I wanted to go on Mother’s Day for a long meditation, but I’d slept badly, and it snowed. Lately, when I meditate, I think about writing and forget to notice that I’m thinking about writing. For a while, I read only Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I haven’t picked up his books in months.

In recent months, I’ve taken up and lost an intense interest in the Boulder Shambhala Center, Spanish, karaoke, Texas Hold ’em, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, salsa dancing, my new neighbor, Zumba, and the actor Anson Mount. I still, though, retain a small degree of interest in them, though least of all in the actor Anson Mount. He is preternaturally gorgeous and seems like a nice guy but is nothing like the character he plays on Hell on Wheels, Cullen Bohannon. Bohannon is part god of sad beauty, part wolf, and full of Hollywood rugged individualist tripe: “The only higher power I believe in,” he says, patting his gun. But look how, pure sorrow, he says of his wife, “She’s de-ad.” Look how he wakes at a bar table, drooling. Look how he breaks out of jail with a spoon. Look how he talks his way into the job of a man he’s blamed for killing. He can do anything but be happy. Then in season two, even Cullen Bohannon becomes nothing like Cullen Bohannon. How he simpered through that love scene, the one I’d waited for forever, as if all he was and loved meant nothing. What the hell happened? Where’s that wounded, seething, magic man? How I long for him, even now.

Love, Lies, and Grocery Shopping in a Blizzard

We Live in a Tree for One Month Every Year

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Welcome to Recommended Reading’s new Monday supplement, a biweekly home for short prose, poetry, and comics.

Bigfoot on the Beach

Issue №1 | We Live in a Tree for One Month Every Year

by Reina Hardy

We are fragile, but immortal, somewhere between mayflies and unicorns. Eleven months of the years we sleep wrapped in tissue paper in big red boxes, until we are lifted and carried down, and carefully uncovered. By that time the tree is ready, covered in lights and red glass balls and golden ribbons. The tree used to be a stranger every year, a strange-smelling, god-like thing, sticky with sap, who knew things we didn’t know, but now the tree is more like us. It stays in a red dark bag in the basement most of the time.

Light comes down through the box lid. It stays on till we hear the only songs we know, and then the girl lifts them off. She has been tall enough now for so many Christmases, and she knows all of us that are worth knowing. She makes sure that we stay by our loved ones, and our friends. She makes sure that we do our jobs.

The goose girl must await her geese.

The giraffe puppet and the top hat lion are married now, after a long courtship.

The beautiful glass king stag must hang a little hidden from view, with a green or blue light to illuminate him. Only then can his magic and beneficence filter through the house.

All of the other precious ornaments must be seen, even if they are new.

The old and unlovely are hidden below the window and behind the tree, but never do they stay in the box.

The new and unlovely go high, facing the window, but away from the family. They shout back to us about passerbys and dogs, which we have not seen for some time.

Angels and moons and suns and stars must go near the top.

Birds must nestle in lower branches, except for the doves, which must wait on Galatea.

Galatea is the angel that holds the reins of the world. She is lashed to the highest point of the tree and she watches over all of us (the reins of the world are the golden ribbons.)

The green satin rocking horse mourned and would not stop mourning the death of the blue satin rocking horse (chewed up by a dog) and while he hung sad and lonely low for ever so many years he is gone now, and no one knows how he went.

After we have heard our songs two or three times through, the box is carried away, and life begins. We talk and visit, and love each other. We watch the people of the house, and the people of the street, and we cast our various magics on them. We used to talk to the new tree. We love to hear about snow, and traveling fast above streets, and about other trees, and about the moment when the old man put his hand on the tree, and shook it, and chose it for our own, and would take it home and string the lights so that the girl could go to work. And oh the strangeness of being strung with lights! The feeling of being all lit up and beribboned and becoming a world ruled by an angel!

The conversation is different now. This tree has never seen the old man, and says it has been strung with lights for as long as it can remember, so it is like talking with another old friend, an old friend we met just last year. And truly, we think it is better. The trees who were strangers could never stay long. They changed as people do, and their marvelous smells would fade. Galatea would tug on her golden ribbons, her face growing sad, and when the old woman would take us off the tree and wrap us in fresh paper, we would cling to the branches for and whisper “goodbye—goodbye!” We do not know what changed. We do not know where the dogs went, or the blue satin rocking horse, or the old man, but this year as we go into the paper we will say just Au revoir! Auf Wiedersehen! We will think of the songs in our sleep, dear tree, until we meet again!

About Recommended Reading

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

9 Books About Being Southern and Queer as Hell

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In the months leading up to Alabama’s special election — a race between KKK-defeating prosecutor Doug Jones and a horse-riding pedophile — all eyes were watching the South. Then again, eyes have been unusually tuned on the south since the 2016 election. And yet, phrases like “Trump Country” also reduce an entire region to a single, homogenous, ignorant concept.

In the literary world, many people seem to think that the South’s greatest export is our gothic canon. Authors like Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner elevated the region’s literature in the 20th century, but as a writer, when I think about what it means to be Southern, I think of the many LGBT writers who use themes of solitude, violence, and social isolation as a way to cope with their own identities and traumas. Fighting and survival are trauma’s close cousins, and they reunite frequently in the majority of the texts I’ve chosen for this list. But queer Southern literature isn’t just about the struggles LGBT people have to deal with while living in the South. While many of these books explore the hardships LGBT southerners face, I’ve made it a point to include texts that highlight the joys of being Southern and gay as hell, y’all.

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

There have been many attempts made to place Carson McCullers within the realm of LGBT Southern fiction, and with good reason: McCullers interweaves themes of loneliness and sexual confusion in nearly all of her work, and she cherished a lifelong close friendship with Swiss writer Anne-Marie Clarac-Schwarzenbach. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, her most well-known work, follows a deaf man named John Singer as he navigates his small Georgia town. The story focuses on Singer’s acquaintances, including Mick Kelly, a “tomboy” who’s clearly a coded lesbian, if you ask me.

The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater

This YA fantasy series is set in Virginia, and at times feels distinctly Southern. The best thing about these books is that they feel familiarly Southern. They’re not billed as a Southern series, like Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels, but the Southern setting and culture pervades throughout. Class and gender tension mingle with magical realism; family roots and forged friendships push back against a persistent underlying feeling of abject isolation — a Southern specialty. What earned this young adult series a place on this list, however, is its centering of a young LGBT couple, Ronan and Adam. Steifvater weaves their romance — between a boy as hard as nails (or at least wishes he could be) and boy who’s fought his whole life to fit in with his rich friends — into the larger plot.

Two or Three Things I Know For Sure by Dorothy Allison

Bastard Out of Carolina was an obvious pick for the list, but Allison’s memoir, released in 1996, doesn’t get enough love. She dives into the history of her own family line headfirst, and dissects what she finds. It’s dark and enduring, full of lyrical prose. Dorothy Allison is known for being provocative and confrontational, and her memoir is no exception.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Alice Walker has said that she doesn’t identify as a lesbian or bisexual, but she’s not straight. Her most famous work, The Color Purple, centers a relationship between two women, Celie and Shug, within a winding tale of abuse, violence, and resilience. Shug Avery, a blues singer, spends most of this epistolary novel nurturing and loving Celie, eventually helping her escape her abusive husband.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg

This novel by Fannie Flagg was adapted for film in 1991. The film is beautiful, but the novel, which follows the lives of Southern women in the fictional town of Whistle Stop, Alabama, is much more vibrant and diverse. While the lesbian themes in the film are only hinted at, Flagg’s novel paints Idgie and Ruth’s relationship as overtly romantic. If you love Southern food, crying, and lesbians, read this book.

Cooking in Heels: A Memoir Cookbook by Ceyenne Doroshow

I really wanted to include food writing on this list, because if there’s one thing Southerners love, it’s food. I love the idea of a “memoir cookbook,” and it’s everything I wanted and more. Ceyenne Doroshow is a transgender writer and activist raised in Brooklyn, but this cookbook is decidedly Southern. She shares stories from her life alongside classic Southern recipes like “Grandbaby’s Spare Ribs” and deviled eggs.

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

I couldn’t write a list of great Southern literature without including at least one Southern gothic choice, and I couldn’t write a list of gay Southern literature without including Truman Capote, so here I’ve managed both. Other Voices, Other Rooms was Capote’s first novel, written in the Southern gothic tradition. It’s deeply autobiographical, recounting the time Capote spent growing up in Alabama with his childhood friend and fellow Southern writer Harper Lee.

Crooked Letter i: Coming Out in the South, edited by Connie Griffin

This 2015 anthology, edited by Connie Griffin, features LGBT writers across the gender spectrum, all navigating the intersection between two sometimes disparate identities. Dorothy Allison provides the forward for this collection, and what follows are sixteen stories of survival, audacity and hope. In “Ben’s Eyes”, Ernest Clay tells the posthumous story of his longtime partner, Louie, growing up as a black gay man in the South and discovering his identity. Elizabeth Craven’s “Almost Heaven” explores the intersections of identity, family and Christianity.

Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones

I love to think of Saeed Jones as a Southern poet. I’m not sure if he thinks of himself that way, but it gives me a great amount of joy when I read his work. His debut collection, published in 2014, is brutal and unsparing, but at times tender in a way that feels harsh. The poems explore ideas of isolation, connectivity and beauty, and question what it’s like to leave a mark on another person’s body, another person’s history. It’s a stunning collection, worthy of every praise.

The 10 Sexiest Jesus Figures in Literature, Ranked

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One of the first things you learn in a high school English class is how to recognize a Jesus figure. Some possible tells: They’re too pure for this world, they sacrifice themselves for the good of all, they’re presented as the chosen one everybody has been waiting for, their initials are J.C. But it’s often not until after high school that you start to think “wait a second, aren’t a lot of these guys… kinda foxy?” Or maybe you never put two and two together before, and this is the first time you’ve thought about which Jesus figures in literature are snacks. In which case: merry Christmas.

Below, counting down to number one, are our picks for the dishiest Messiahs on your bookshelf.

Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter in one of the later movies so it’s not creepy for us to put him on this list

10. Harry Potter, the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

Harry starts out the series as a child, which is of course not sexy at all and means we’re uncomfortable ranking him any higher. But by the last book of the series he’s a flawed but strong-willed and noble young man. (He is also, not for nothing, played in the film version by Daniel Radcliffe, which will get you pretty far with some people.)

A realistically bloody crucifixion is the goal in “The Five Wounds” but for the sensitive we’ve provided an artist’s rendering of a hand nailed to a cross

9. Amadea Padilla, “The Five Wounds” from Night at the Fiestas by Kirstin Valdez Quade

The main character of this indelible short story is a Christ figure by choice, not just by authorial intent: He’s portraying Jesus in a brutally authentic passion play, in which he will really be whipped and nailed to a cross. A high pain tolerance and near-fanatical devotion are arguably sexy qualities, and he’s also trying hard to be a good dad to his pregnant teen daughter, which is an attractive attribute. But religious feeling makes Amadea prudish; during the course of the story he judges both his daughter and her mother for being sexually active.

Michael Clarke Duncan as John Coffey in the movie adaptation of The Green Mile

8. John Coffey, The Green Mile

Physically, John Coffey is pretty hunky if you like that sort of thing (“that sort of thing” being dudes who can pick you up with one hand). But Stephen King’s oversized miracle-worker convict maintains a sweet, self-sacrificing innocence that justifies his telltale initials, but doesn’t do a lot to fire up the loins.

Painting from the cover of an old edition of Light in August

7. Joe Christmas, Light in August by William Faulkner

Faulkner’s subtly-named Jesus figure is a societal outcast and an illegal bootlegger, who believes himself to have African American ancestry and thus hovers uncomfortably between worlds in the highly racist Yoknapatawpha County. Being a surly, outside-the-law bad boy is kinda sexy, and so is troubling arbitrary racial distinctions. But Christmas is also bitter, resentful, and violent—to the point, it’s implied, of murder. Hannibal fandom aside, homicide is a bit of a cold shower.

Alan Arkin as John Singer in the movie adaptation of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

6. John Singer, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

John Singer’s entire role in Carson McCullers’ novel is to be a blank slate onto which other characters can project their desires and expectations. Because he’s deaf and mute, he doesn’t contradict them, even as they get increasingly messianic. If you’re the codependent type, this kind of malleability might be extremely hot. If you prefer a partner with more grit, well… it’s a list of Jesus figures, so don’t get your hopes up too high.

Estonian actor Risto Kübar, by far the cutest person to play Myshkin, in an adaptation of The Idiot

5. Prince Myshkin, The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The eponymous idiot isn’t dumb at all — he’s just fragile and sensitive. Though the epileptic Myshkin isn’t the picture of robust masculine health, he is generous, wise, trusting to a fault, and really gets women. He’s also very rich, if you’re into that. Unfortunately he also has basically no libido whatsoever, but if you’re looking for a guy who’s going to do the emotional labor, Dostoevsky’s “holy fool” is the man of your dreams.

John Carradine playing Jim Casy and a shoe playing Jim Casy’s hand in the movie adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath

4. Jim Casy, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Preachers are not known for their sex appeal, but ex-preachers — now we’re talking. Jim Casy actually got up to a lot of shenanigans when he was a man of the cloth, but once he gives up on the idea of sin and starts espousing a philosophy of humanism and social justice, he gets even hotter. When he lays down his life for the rights of migrant workers, we can’t help but think he might be the holy sex symbol for our time.

Aslan in the 2005 adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

3. Aslan, The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

The highly religious C.S. Lewis surely did not intend for his transparent Christ analogue, who is also a lion, to be sexy. Unfortunately, Aslan is definitely extremely sexy for some reason. Maybe it’s the air of authority? We don’t forgive Pious Lion Daddy for barring Susan from Narnia just for getting into lipstick, but we gotta call it like we see it: hot cat. Sorry.

A young, hot, confused-looking Kyle MacLachlan in David Lynch’s Dune

2. Paul Atreides, Dune by Frank Herbert

The prophesied Chosen One of the desert world of Arrakis, Paul Atreides definitely has swagger. Honestly, he has way too much swagger. He is a cocky nightmare. But he’s a cocky nightmare who can ride sandworms and see the future! Buuuuuut he’s also kind of the product of a weird eugenics program so… okay, look. Fine. We’re being unduly influenced by the fact that in the otherwise unwatchable David Lynch film of Dune, Paul is played by a young Kyle MacLachlan, one of the few truly great-looking men. We’ll put up with a lot of attitude for that.

Charles Nolte being downright distracting in the Broadway production of Billy Budd (Photo: Charles Nolte Collection for the Performing and Cinematic Arts)

1. Billy Budd, Billy Budd by Herman Melville

Listen, we’re not just giving Billy top billing because of this picture of Charles Nolte in the… excuse me, scroll down please! The text is down here! Ahem, this picture of Charles Nolte in the 1951 Broadway production. Melville’s sailor is also—could you please scroll down—charming, handsome, popular, and endlessly forgiving, even when falsely accused and persecuted. Plus, his stutter means he won’t interrupt you. Bliss.