Though it may seem like an impossible task, the blog over at Global English Editing has taken a stab at compiling the 20 most popular literary works throughout time. Below is a fascinating infographic that goes as far back as 10th Century BC with I Ching and fast forwards to modern written works like Fifty Shades of Grey (sorry, history). So do you think these are the most popular books in history? Read the whole list and its fun facts and see for yourself!
She could see Creed’s place now, up ahead, not more than another three quarters of a mile.
On the big flat stone at the top of the path she stopped to rest, pushed back her sticky hair and wondered again what he would do when he saw her — what he would say and how he would be and what he would look like too, close-up, after all this time.
For years now, for most of her life, she’d seen him only from afar, mending his walls or checking on his sheep or coming down off the high fell with a bucket to the spring above the waterfall, a bulky hatted figure.
A few times over the years she’d thought about going up there and knocking on his door and saying to him, Michael it’s me. Ruth. From the valley. Come. Sit with me at least.
Once not long after her thirtieth birthday she’d come up this far along the path with a box of her brother’s old dominoes in her pocket. All the way along the river and up over the slick black rocks on the west side of the beck to the top, with the game’s smooth pieces chinking against each other and her thumb fidgeting with the sliding wooden lid, she’d rehearsed what she’d say to Creed when she reached him: that it was crazy, idiotic, them living like this — the two of them in this vast forgotten garden of bracken and stone and pasture and bog, like the very last people on earth, but never speaking, never coming close to one another.
She’d pictured them both at his table, her brother’s dominoes spread out between them in various arrangements, not speaking perhaps (neither of them had much practice at that) but at least sitting together in a not-uncomfortable silence. Then up here at the big flat stone at the top of the path she’d lost her nerve. In the distance, his thick-walled bothy with its arrow-slit windows had looked so closed-in and stubborn and hunched against the weather and the world, so like a fortress for his feelings, that she’d lacked the courage to go on and had turned around and gone back down.
Today she was wearing her brown work boots and her black coat and her blue dress and she hoped she looked respectable. She didn’t want Michael Creed to open his door and look at her and think she was a fright.
She’d been a child when his wife died, ten or eleven years old.
She remembered the two of them coming to her father’s church. The wife’s dark hair. Creed a young man, broad-shouldered and strong, with a neat beard.
Her father had gone up there a dozen times afterwards and tried to comfort him but Creed wouldn’t let him in the house. She remembered how tired and discouraged her father had looked the last time he came home.
‘What happened, William? What did he say to you?’ her mother had asked, rather fearfully, and they’d all watched him hang up his coat and press his lips together and set down his Bible on their kitchen table and tap it lightly with his fingers. He’d looked as if he was debating with himself whether to repeat in front of his family what Creed had said.
‘He said, Janice, that God had greatly disappointed him. He said that he had begged Him for His pity and His mercy and had been refused. He said there was nothing now I had to tell him that he wanted to listen to and if I ever came trespassing on his land again and tried to talk to him about God’s love, he would come out into his yard and stick his shotgun in my crap-filled mouth and shoot me.’
Creed stayed away from the church after that, and if he ever came face to face with her father down in the valley he turned around and walked the other way. He began to avoid anyone who attended the Sunday service, which in those days had been nearly everyone. At some point he moved out of the farmhouse he’d shared with his wife and into the bothy further up the fell. Eventually he stopped coming down into the valley for anything. It was as if, not being able to look God in the eye and spit in His face, or inform Him personally that he was sending Him to Coventry forever, Creed had settled on the next best thing. Or perhaps he’d decided that there was no face to spit in and he was living in a world of fools; that from now on, he was on his own.
He mended his walls and birthed his ewes and when autumn came he drove the new season’s lambs up along the high straight track that had once been the Romans’ way north to the border, sold them to be slaughtered, picked up his supplies and walked back the way he’d come. Anywhere he had to go, he took the old Roman way, never the path down into the valley, the track along the river that took him past their house and the church.
What would he look like?
Like the other men she remembered in their fifties and sixties who used to live here? Bull-necked men with brick-red faces and bow legs and giant hands?
When he was young his hair had been brown, chestnut-colored, she remembered that.
Not as dark as his wife’s but still brown. His beard had been brown also.
And hadn’t he had one brown eye and one grey? She thought so. She thought she remembered her sister Pam remarking on it once when they were girls.
Her sister Pam and her brother Frank always asked after him when they came. ‘And what about Michael Creed?’ they said. ‘Do you ever see him, Ruth? Is he still up there?’
‘Yes,’ she told them. ‘He’s still up there.’ But what if he wasn’t? What if since the last time she’d glimpsed his bulky shape in the distance, he’d died or given up at last and gone away, like everyone else?
What if she got there and knocked on his door and there was no answer and when she pushed it open the place was empty and cleared out and there was nothing up there but his sheep and a couple of starving dogs?
In winter, months went by sometimes without a sign of him. Then there’d be a storm, a heavy fall of snow, and he’d be up there with his dogs, digging out his buried sheep. The dogs trickling over the white hillside, showing him where to put his shovel so he could bring them out alive. In spring, around lambing time, she woke sometimes in the dark and saw the pinprick beam of his flashlight moving over the sloping fields as he went about checking on things.
Over the years her father’s scattered parish had dwindled away.
One by one the farms had emptied out. The old had died, the young and the middle-aged had moved away. Where there’d been two shops and a pub, a school and a recreation room there were only the carcasses of buildings. When her father died, no one was sent to replace him. Where there’d been people and families and children there was only her left now, and Michael Creed.
Who would have thought a place could fall in on itself so quickly? That so monumental a ruin could be achieved like that? Almost, it seemed to her sometimes, it had happened in the blink of an eye, or in the course of one brief night while she slept.
Hikers who came up this far poked their faces in at her window. They seemed amazed to see curtains, chimney smoke, her boots at the door. Once, coming back from the church, she’d found a young couple in woolen hats and waterproof jackets on the step at the back of her house, picnicking on crisps and sandwiches and hot tea from a thermos. They’d hardly seemed to believe her when she said she lived here, and when they’d gone she thought of them telling their friends about the woman they’d found living way up at the far end of the valley by herself, using the words she’d overheard her sister Pam and her brother Frank whispering to each other when they came and thought she was outside, words like squalid, primitive, unhygienic.
For a time, she’d let her brother and sister drive her back with them for a few days. But in town she discovered, as the years went by, that her clothing attracted attention, that her appearance shocked people. One cold Christmas when Pam came to collect her she’d got in the car wearing both her dresses, her blue one and her knitted fawn one, one on top of the other. Pam had been ashamed. All that week Ruth saw her making silent signals with her eyes to her friends. She discovered also that she’d aged more quickly than these people. Carting water off the fell to her house in a bucket, hauling fodder from the pasture on a sledge for her cow Charlotte, chopping wood and breaking sticks and stuffing them into the stove and picking up scraps of slate off the hills to mend her roof — it had all made her age more rapidly than Pam and these other women who came to Pam’s house and tried not to gawp when Pam said, ‘This is my younger sister, Ruth.’ Like Pam, all the women still had dark hair and neat unbroken fingernails and attractive teeth. She couldn’t imagine how they managed it. She cared a little about it, this difference between the way they looked and the way she did, but not much. She told Pam she’d not be going back with her again. She was happy where she was, she’d no urge now to leave.
She’d stayed on to look after the church. When no one came to replace her father, it had been impossible for her to think of leaving it untended and unused. In winter she put holly in the alcoves. In spring, hawthorn and valerian. On Sundays she stood in the cold in front of the empty pews and read aloud the lesson. She patched the roof and polished the colored window in the nave and the blackened script engraved on the brass plaque her father had screwed into the lintel over the door when he first arrived here from the coast. It was still her favorite Psalm: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord.
In the back behind her house she grew swede and onions and potatoes and spinach. She had apples and blackcurrants and gooseberries from the trees and bushes her mother had planted. In winter an arsenal of things preserved in jars. A taxi came nine miles up the valley track once every three months and drove her to Penrith for her shopping. Her sister and her brother visited twice a year from Carlisle. She had no phone and no television but she had chickens and her cow and a sewing machine and her father’s books. She knew that there was another kind of world and she could see that it had its attractions but she did not want to live in it. She wanted to be here.
She liked it here. She was forty-two and she had not been lonely, not really. She had never lived her life expecting it to change.
Around her neck she wore the small wooden cross that had belonged to her father and as she walked she touched it every now and again to make sure it was still hidden beneath her dress.
She’d tried to leave it behind but in the end she’d not been able to.
She’d unhooked the clasp and dropped the chain into the palm of her hand and tipped it onto a plate and stepped out of the door but when she got to the path she’d felt so naked and afraid without it that she’d gone back and put it back on and slipped it inside her dress, telling herself that Creed wouldn’t necessarily see it. However things went, she would do everything she could to hide it from him.
As she walked her legs shook.
Her damp face boiled with heat, her blue dress clung to her like another skin, her heart thumped like a big beating wheel. She took off her black coat, folded it over her arm, and carried it. She wished she could turn back here and go back down to the beck and splash her face and cool her throat with the icy water.
Above her, a pair of peregrines rose in circles and vanished high up over the crags, into the blue. From beneath she could see the yellow flashes of their legs, the black streaks of their tails and wingtips and as she watched them she imagined looking down out of the sky at the dark speck of herself moving slowly over the pale brown hills towards Creed’s bothy. The ground was boggy here, up on the higher ground after the path gave out. As she plodded through it the stiff grass brushed her bare knees.
She wished she didn’t resemble her father. She wished she wasn’t tall as he’d been. She wished she didn’t have his springy hair and large beaky nose and pointy chin. She didn’t want Creed to open his door and think of her father and think that after all these years she’d come to him on some kind of religious mission. She didn’t want him to be surly and unwelcoming. She didn’t want him to slam the door in her face or bellow at her through one of his narrow windows and tell her to be gone. She didn’t want him to pull his gun on her. She wished she’d come up here that other day, with the dominoes. She wished this wasn’t her first time. She wished that the ice had been broken between them before now — that she could at least have become an ordinary neighbor to him. Come on, Michael, it’s just us now. Sit with me. Everyone else has gone. The old have died, the young are all in the towns. My brother Frank, remember? My sister Pam? They’re in Carlisle. Pam’s a nurse. Frank’s at one of the big hotels. The Glaisters have all gone. Partingtons too, and Capsticks and Pickthalls and Hawksmiths, all upped and gone.
She wondered what Creed made of it all, this emptying out. She wondered what he felt when he turned up at the slaughterhouse with his new season’s lambs, or went into the places he visited for his supplies. She wondered if the people there exchanged secret glances and if he was made to feel uncomfortable. She wondered if he felt like she did and if in spite of everything that had happened in his life, he was always glad to come home.
There was more wind up here. It cooled her face and made a rushing sound through the stiff grass and the bracken, a sound her father always used to say was the same sound he’d grown up with, the sound of the sea. When he said that, her sister Pam used to beg him to take them all on holiday somewhere to the coast, to Morecambe or Blackpool, somewhere sandy and warm where they could stretch out on towels and go bathing and eat ice cream and see the lights and a show, and every year that they didn’t go she told Ruth that the first bloody chance she got, she was off out of here, away from this boring fucking dump of a valley, these prehistoric hills and struggling miserable little farms.
Up ahead now, only another hundred yards, Creed’s bothy sat like a dark stone resting in the bottom of a deep smooth-sided bowl. All around it the tawny ramparts of the hills rose to the sky. There’d been no question this morning of setting off towards anything else; there’d been no question of the nine mile walk along the river to a road where she might sit for an hour and wait without a single vehicle passing. With each step now she felt her own slow, dragging gravity. Across the marshy ground she proceeded with difficulty and sometimes she stumbled.
His yard was bordered by a woodshed and a privy and the L-shaped dwelling part of the bothy itself. Turf and ferns and a spongy blanket of moss grew on the thick shaley roof slates. The bothy door was painted brown. Bronze lichen grew on his walls like rust. A trio of his black-faced sheep burst out from behind them when they saw her coming, bunching together and jostling each other in their hurry to get away, as if she was something dangerous.
Oh Jesus, what would he say to her? Would he be appalled by the sight of her? Would he know who she was? Would he hold that against her? Would he look past her through the open brown door and out beyond the opening in his yard across the soggy uplands and the pale brown hills and down into the long tapering valley with its scattered emptied farms and ask her how in glory’s name it had happened? Would he turn sarcastic and ask her if she’d had a visit from the Holy Spirit?
At the corner of his yard a rowan tree grew out of the stones. She leaned against it, breathed. The hour’s walk, the climb, had taken her half the day. Her hair felt prickly and dry as gorse. There was bog cotton in it, grass and cuckoo spit. Blood leaked out of her, filling her boots and coating the ground. She’d known since this morning that something was wrong.
She could no longer recall the Scotsman’s face, only his sandy hair and his pale body.
When he was gone she realized she didn’t know his name or the name of his town or what job he did in the rest of his life or if he had a wife and children. She wasn’t used to conversation and they’d hardly talked.
He told her he’d come over Rampsgill Head and round Blea Tarn and after that the fog had come down and he’d had no compass and had to continue on his hands and knees, worried that he’d turned himself round and wasn’t where he thought he was and that on one side or the other there might be nothing but crag and scree and a sheer plunging drop to the bottom. When he saw her light he’d thought at first it must be the sun or the moon, a small whitish glow in the murk.
In the morning he’d thanked her for the hot breakfast and her warm bed. He was glad the ugly weather had brought him to her door, he said. He’d had a nice time.
She could see nothing now, even in the daylight everything was dark and all she could feel was the raised lump of the cross at her throat. She wished she hadn’t worn it. She was afraid again it might make Creed angry, that anything like that might disgust him still, that he’d send her away. She began to tug at the chain and fumble with the clasp at the back of her neck. Her last mad thought was that she wished there was some way she could tidy herself up. At least put a comb through her hair.
Creed’s dogs found her in his yard.
He didn’t recognize her but he knew she must be one of the Reverend’s daughters from the valley, whichever one had stayed behind. He could see the beveled edges of a crucifix beneath the blue fabric of her dress. He couldn’t remember her name but over the years he’d seen her many times, a dark point down there, moving between her house and the church. He’d seen the cars that once in a while fetched her away then brought her back along the track beside the river. Her lips moved a little and he wondered if she was praying. There was blood on the stony earth of his yard. A large clot, dark and ragged like liver on the hem of her dropped black coat.
Creed was brawny and white-haired and tall. He lifted her up and carried her inside and put her on his bed. In his whole life he had never seen so much blood.
At the sink he rolled up his sleeves and scrubbed himself and slipped his right arm up inside her. He moved his hand up past the torn and pulsing placenta and found the breeched legs, the curving beads of the small spine. Ruth’s eyelids fluttered and Creed didn’t tell her that she’d come too late. He knelt by the bed and stroked her hair and told her in a soft voice that she was a good girl, a brave girl. He repeated the same whispered words over and over the way he did with his sheep when they couldn’t birth and they were suffering and miserable; and when he was sure there was no more time and no other way he boiled up a pan and went in under the breastbone with his razor and brought out the child, a tiny curled-up girl with a pointy chin and a small beaky nose and a glistening cap of sand-colored hair, and when the long night ended and morning came and Creed had done everything he could with his boiled cloths and his needle and his fine cotton thread, when he’d tried every desperate thing short of a prayer to stop the blood and there was nothing at all, now, that could be done and it was over, he went and stood for a long time looking out through one of his arrow-slit windows at the sloping fell aflame in the dawn with the child in his arms.
She was light as a leaf and just as beautiful.
He’d call her Rowan, after the tree in his wall.
He wished his wife could see her.
Actor George Takei is taking up the pen to write a graphic novel about his childhood, according to a statement released by publisher IDW. Best known for his portrayal of Sulu on Star Trek and his rather amusing Twitter, Takei will be telling the story of his family’s detention in a US internment camp during World War II. At the time, Takei was five. The novel will take on issues of racism and human rights and will explore how Takei’s confinement impacted his art, fame, and activism. The New York Times reported on the publisher’s announcement; Takei, of course, had his own take on Twitter:
Warning: Graphic material. https://t.co/QvvgqG7MNl
Takei previously delved into similar material in 2015, when he starred in the musical Allegiance, which was also based on his youth. He sees the graphic novel as an opportunity to reach an even wider audience, according to his statement: “When the opportunity to tell my story in the form of a graphic novel presented itself, I recognized the value in making it easily accessible for our youth to discover and digest the material, bringing attention to an important and relevant issue, while preserving it for generations to come.”
He also noted that he hopes the book will advance his “ongoing mission of spreading awareness of this disgraceful chapter of American history.”
The as yet untitled work is due out in 2018.
The Power of Culture: an interview with Marie Mutsuki Mockett, author of Where the Dead Pause, and…
Science fiction’s most famous award just announced it’s finalists! The Hugo Awards — which have gone to writers like Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and William Gibson over the years — have recently been embroiled in scandal as reactionary voters decried the diversity of nominees and tried to manipulate the ballot. However, this year the ballot stuffing seems to have been curbed and science fiction fans can hopefully return to celebrating these great works.
Here are the nominees:
BEST NOVEL
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor Books / Titan Books)
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton / Harper Voyager US)
Death’s End by Cixin Liu (Tor Books / Head of Zeus)
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris Books)
The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit Books)
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (Tor Books)
BEST NOVELLA
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle (Tor.com Publishing)
The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson (Tor.com Publishing)
Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)
Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold (Spectrum Literary Agency)
A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com Publishing)
This Census-Taker by China Miéville (Del Rey / Picador)
Victor LaValle Talks About Horror Fiction, Imaginative Illiteracy, and Lovecraft’s Complicated…
BEST NOVELETTE
Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By The T-Rex by Stix Hiscock (self-published)
“The Art of Space Travel” by Nina Allan (Tor.com, July 2016)
“The Jewel and Her Lapidary” by Fran Wilde (Tor.com Publishing, May 2016)
“The Tomato Thief” by Ursula Vernon (Apex Magazine, January 2016)
“Touring with the Alien” by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Clarkesworld Magazine, April 2016)
“You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay” by Alyssa Wong (Uncanny Magazine, May 2016)
BEST SHORT STORY
“The City Born Great” by N. K. Jemisin (Tor.com, September 2016)
“A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers” by Alyssa Wong (Tor.com, March 2016)
“Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies” by Brooke Bolander (Uncanny Magazine, November 2016)
“Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar (The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, Saga Press)
“That Game We Played During the War” by Carrie Vaughn (Tor.com, March 2016)
“An Unimaginable Light” by John C. Wright (God, Robot, Castalia House)
BEST RELATED WORK
The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley (Tor Books)
The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher (Blue Rider Press)
Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg by Robert Silverberg and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (Fairwood)
The View From the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman (William Morrow / Harper Collins)
“The Women of Harry Potter” posts by Sarah Gailey (Tor.com)
Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016 by Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer)
BEST GRAPHIC STORY
Black Panther, Volume 1: A Nation Under Our Feet, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, illustrated by Brian Stelfreeze (Marvel)
Monstress, Volume 1: Awakening, written by Marjorie Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda (Image)
Ms. Marvel, Volume 5: Super Famous, written by G. Willow Wilson, illustrated by Takeshi Miyazawa (Marvel)
Paper Girls, Volume 1, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Cliff Chiang, colored by Matthew Wilson, lettered by Jared Fletcher (Image)
Saga, Volume 6, illustrated by Fiona Staples, written by Brian K. Vaughan, lettered by Fonografiks (Image)
The Vision, Volume 1: Little Worse Than A Man, written by Tom King, illustrated by Gabriel Hernandez Walta (Marvel)
BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION — LONG FORM
Arrival, screenplay by Eric Heisserer based on a short story by Ted Chiang, directed by Denis Villeneuve (21 Laps Entertainment/FilmNation Entertainment/Lava Bear Films)
Deadpool, screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick, directed by Tim Miller (Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation/Marvel Entertainment/Kinberg Genre/The Donners’ Company/TSG Entertainment)
Ghostbusters, screenplay by Katie Dippold & Paul Feig, directed by Paul Feig (Columbia Pictures/LStar Capital/Village Roadshow Pictures/Pascal Pictures/Feigco Entertainment/Ghostcorps/The Montecito Picture Company)
Hidden Figures, screenplay by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi, directed by Theodore Melfi (Fox 2000 Pictures/Chernin Entertainment/Levantine Films/TSG Entertainment)
Rogue One, screenplay by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy, directed by Gareth Edwards (Lucasfilm/Allison Shearmur Productions/Black Hangar Studios/Stereo D/Walt Disney Pictures)
Stranger Things, Season One, created by the Duffer Brothers (21 Laps Entertainment/Monkey Massacre)
BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION — SHORT FORM
Black Mirror: “San Junipero”, written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Owen Harris (House of Tomorrow)
Doctor Who: “The Return of Doctor Mysterio”, written by Steven Moffat, directed by Ed Bazalgette (BBC Cymru Wales)
The Expanse: “Leviathan Wakes”, written by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, directed by Terry McDonough (SyFy)
Game of Thrones: “Battle of the Bastards”, written by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, directed by Miguel Sapochnik (HBO)
Game of Thrones: “The Door”, written by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, directed by Jack Bender (HBO)
Splendor & Misery [album], by Clipping (Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, Jonathan Snipes)
BEST EDITOR — SHORT FORM
John Joseph Adams
Neil Clarke
Ellen Datlow
Jonathan Strahan
Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas
Sheila Williams
BEST EDITOR — LONG FORM
Vox Day
Sheila E. Gilbert
Liz Gorinsky
Devi Pillai
Miriam Weinberg
Navah Wolfe
BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST
Galen Dara
Julie Dillon
Chris McGrath
Victo Ngai
John Picacio
Sana Takeda
BEST SEMIPROZINE
Beneath Ceaseless Skies, editor-in-chief and publisher Scott H. Andrews
Cirsova Heroic Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, edited by P. Alexander
GigaNotoSaurus, edited by Rashida J. Smith
Strange Horizons, edited by Niall Harrison, Catherine Krahe, Vajra Chandrasekera, Vanessa Rose Phin, Li Chua, Aishwarya Subramanian, Tim Moore, Anaea Lay, and the Strange Horizons staff
Uncanny Magazine, edited by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas, Michi Trota, Julia Rios, and podcast produced by Erika Ensign & Steven Schapansky
The Book Smugglers, edited by Ana Grilo and Thea James
BEST FANZINE
“Castalia House Blog”, edited by Jeffro Johnson
“Journey Planet”, edited by James Bacon, Chris Garcia, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Helena Nash, Errick Nunnally, Pádraig Ó Méalóid, Chuck Serface, and Erin Underwood
“Lady Business”, edited by Clare, Ira, Jodie, KJ, Renay, and Susan
“nerds of a feather, flock together”, edited by The G, Vance Kotrla, and Joe Sherry
“Rocket Stack Rank”, edited by Greg Hullender and Eric Wong
“SF Bluestocking”, edited by Bridget McKinney
BEST FANCAST
The Coode Street Podcast, presented by Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan
Ditch Diggers, presented by Mur Lafferty and Matt Wallace
Fangirl Happy Hour, presented by Ana Grilo and Renay Williams
Galactic Suburbia, presented by Alisa Krasnostein, Alexandra Pierce and Tansy Rayner Roberts, produced by Andrew Finch
The Rageaholic, presented by RazörFist
Tea and Jeopardy, presented by Emma Newman with Peter Newman
BEST FAN WRITER
Mike Glyer
Jeffro Johnson
Natalie Luhrs
Foz Meadows
Abigail Nussbaum
Chuck Tingle
BEST FAN ARTSIT
Ninni Aalto
Alex Garner
Vesa Lehtimäki
Likhain (M. Sereno)
Spring Schoenhuth
Mansik Yang
BEST SERIES
The Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone (Tor Books)
The Expanse by James S.A. Corey (Orbit US / Orbit UK)
The October Daye Books by Seanan McGuire (DAW / Corsair)
The Peter Grant / Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch (Gollancz / Del Rey / DAW / Subterranean)
The Temeraire series by Naomi Novik (Del Rey / Harper Voyager UK)
The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER
Sarah Gailey (1st year of eligibility)
J. Mulrooney (1st year of eligibility)
Malka Older (2nd year of eligibility)
Ada Palmer (1st year of eligibility)
Laurie Penny (2nd year of eligibility)
Kelly Robson (2nd year of eligibility)
Julie Buntin’s debut novel, Marlena, is about loss, addiction, and teenage friendship. After Cat’s parents divorce, she has to leave her fancy private school behind and move with her mom and brother to a small town in rural northern Michigan. Enter Marlena, the beautiful, musically gifted girl-next-door with a creepy dad and an affinity for pills. Cat and Marlena’s relationship grows more intimate and dangerous as Marlena introduces Cat to a series of firsts, until inevitably — as the reader knows from the very first page — Marlena drowns in six inches of icy river water. Decades later, the sudden appearance of Marlena’s brother, Sal, forces Cat to revisit the ghost of her old friend, whose influence and mysterious death continue to plague Cat’s life.
While living in New York City last summer, I took advantage of its vast literary scene by attending as many readings as possible. One night, I stumbled into Bo’s Kitchen & Bar Room for a #YeahYouWrite event, where I met Buntin. I knew who she was. We have friends in common, and I had heard that her debut novel was outstanding. I had also heard that Buntin was incredibly kind and outgoing, so I felt comfortable approaching her to introduce myself, and I’m so glad I did — all the rumors were true.
When I arrived back in LA, a copy of Marlena was on my doorstep. I read it without pause, entranced by Buntin’s glorious prose and this toxic teenage friendship that felt real and relatable enough to be my own memory. When my editor asked me six months later to interview Buntin, I practically leapt out of my seat to phone her at home in Brooklyn to talk to her about girls, drugs, and Marlena.
Andrea Arnold: In my mind, Cat and Marlena’s friendship was so probable and genuine that I couldn’t help wondering if they stemmed from a real life relationship. How did you come to the story?
Julie Buntin: This is always a tricky question to answer. Cat isn’t me, Marlena isn’t based off of someone I know — they’re fictional characters. At the same time, it would be silly not to acknowledge the fact that I have had many formative female friendships just as intense as Cat and Marlena’s relationship, and in that sense I was writing from experience. I did also lose a friend in my early twenties. She was a very different person than Marlena, from a very different background, but she had been on a dangerous path with substances for a long time. Her death changed how I thought about our time together as teenagers, the stuff we got up to. She died when we were in our twenties, long after we had already grown apart. Writing about some of these subjects — intense friendship, substance abuse, teenage recklessness — felt more urgent after losing her.
“The Thing Between Us” by Julie Buntin
Arnold: The world of the novel encapsulates a series of firsts for Cat — first kiss, first sex, first cigarette. What makes this time in our lives fascinating to read about or why do you like to write about teenagers?
Buntin: Teenagers are very smart people who often make very bad decisions. A fifteen-year old girl, a seventeen-year old girl — they can be so perceptive. They can sniff out an insecurity in a heartbeat, or offer up a very sharp judgement that has some basis in truth, but so often those judgments and observations are lacking in the nuance and empathy that comes with adulthood. They’re smart but they don’t have wisdom, or an awareness of consequence. I find the hubris of thinking you know everything really fascinating. Cat and Marlena think they understand their parents, right, that they can see them for who they really are, that they have this terrific insight. What they observe might have some basis in truth, a certain accuracy, but they’re not really fully able to interpret those observations, to understand the how and why. The space between the observation and the interpretation, the kid and the adult, an experience as it’s lived and an experience from the perspective of adulthood — that’s writerly catnip for me.
Also, those teenage years are such a potent time. In the book, Cat talks about how some people grow up and don’t think about their teenage years at all while others think about them all the time. But we all had those experiences with firsts — it’s fun to write about them (and read about them, I hope) because they’re so charged, so big, so vivid. I also wanted to track the lineage between the teenager who decides to kiss the boy or make a terrible choice or experiment with alcohol and the adult that teenager becomes — how close are those two versions? How far? What do they have to do with each other?
Arnold: I saw Cat as a good girl who is lonely and sad and gets lured into Marlena’s web. Is that true, or other than geography, what intertwines their souls?
Buntin: I don’t think of Cat as a good girl. I think of her as a scared girl. Cat wants to be liked so much. She doesn’t know who she is — it takes the force of Marlena’s personality to get Cat to begin to develop her own sense of self. Compared to Marlena she is more stereotypically well-behaved, but then, I don’t see Marlena as a bad girl either. In some ways, I think Cat’s moral radar is more confused than Marlena’s — Marlena has a problem, and her problem directs the choices that she makes, especially the dangerous and self-destructive ones. But, especially at first, Cat doesn’t have much inner direction; she’s very susceptible to peer pressure, and Marlena is the person who helps Cat begin to be able to define her own boundaries, even as Marlena pushes them.
It’s interesting that teenage friendships are so often based on circumstance. You’re usually friends with the people you grow up with and who live nearby. In terms of what connects them, beyond that, I think that with each other, Cat and Marlena experience that exhilarating sense of looking out at the world from the same vantage point. And Marlena’s music made Cat see her as somebody with a big destiny. When she sees that in Marlena, it’s intoxicating. Marlena, I think, is drawn to the fact that with Cat she can be a blank slate.
Arnold: That idea of childhood friendships being circumstantial made this book so relatable. I’m still close with lots of girls from home. I was just talking about that with one friend from like first grade. We met because of circumstance and still hang now because we both moved to LA. I’m lucky — it could’ve turned out badly!
Buntin: Right! The accumulation of time becomes a kind of glue in friendships. I have friends like that too. That was something Cat and Marlena didn’t have. They aren’t constricted by the other knowing their past. When they meet, they get to decide who they are for each other — what kind of friendship they’ll have, who will play what role — in that way, best friendship is always a collaboration in the act of telling a shared story. I wanted to write about how girls make and mythologize those stories, and I needed Cat and Marlena to be strangers, for there to be an element of the random in their meeting, in order to really explore that.
“Best friendship is always a collaboration in the act of telling a shared story. I wanted to write about how girls make and mythologize those stories…”
Arnold: Socioeconomic distinctions are important in the novel. Cat’s life is comfortable until her parents divorce. Afterwards, Cat’s mom cleans houses, and one night the girls break into her client’s mansion and throw a party. How would these girls have been different people had they lived in that house instead?
Buntin: I think some elements of being a teenager are universal — the intensity of those firsts, the passionate friendships, the insecurity and yearning — but this would be a different story if both girls had more money. Cat was comfortable when her parents were married in the sense that they were getting by, but it was still a paycheck to paycheck existence. That’s why the divorce wreaks such financial havoc. If this were about wealthy people, maybe they would have had more supervision in the form of hired help or a stay-at-home parent, I don’t really know. Certainly, neither girl would be living with the immense anxiety that permeates life when you’re not sure where the money is going to come from, whether it’s going to come at all. There might not be as much chaos and instability in the background. A more concrete sense of opportunity. I think it’s hard as a teenager in a small town, when you don’t have any money and you’re not sure what’s going to come next and no one is telling you to go to college, to think about the future, to say, I’m going to live for this next thing, instead of just in the moment, because as a teenager everything in your body is screaming now now now. If you’re the kid in the mansion, maybe you have more faith in later. Cat and Marlena think about the future in a fantasy way, but I don’t know if Marlena especially believes in her gut that she actually has a shot at a better life, which corresponds to the kinds of choices she makes in the novel.
Arnold: The reason I ask maybe is because I also grew up in the Midwest but on the opposite side of the tracks as Marlena, yet I felt like I knew that girl, like she went to my high school. I wasn’t friends with her, but she was there. The main question I had while reading your novel was: how could this girl or any struggling with fucked up families surrounded by hardcore drugs and abusive men and circumstances out of her control survive it?
Buntin: It’s hard to think in those terms, but, yeah, I think so — I hope so. I think in a hypothetical or in a different story there is. One thing Cat’s struggling with, trying to discover in the process of telling this story, is if she can track the moment where things toggled from bad to really bad — which step was the one that went too far? What if a couple of things that didn’t even seem that consequential at the time had gone down differently? What if she told someone something? Asked for help? Stood up to Marlena? There are a ton of ways to try and intervene in real life, with real people — but that’s not what this book is about. Especially because Cat’s revisiting this year in memory, the consciousness of the novel is ever aware of the fact that Marlena won’t survive it. It’s the train barreling down the tracks and knowing that you can’t stop it from the very first page. That’s Cat’s story.
“What if a couple of things that didn’t even seem that consequential at the time had gone down differently? What if she told someone something? Asked for help?”
More personally, I’ve seen people struggling with addiction and watched it turn around. I’m also familiar with the point where you know that it might not. You hope and hope that it will but, I don’t know, I think that’s one of the difficult things about writing about addiction — how do you capture that horrible dawning feeling when you recognize, shit, this person is in way over their head? Or juggle the dual awareness, as a writer, of knowing just how much trouble a character is in, but writing a narrator who misses all the cues and is suddenly blindsided by the extent of an addiction, because she was naïve or self-absorbed or because the addict has become such a good liar? That happens so often in real life, that you both see and do not see what is going on — I know it from my own experiences with an addict in my family.
Arnold: Why was it important to show Cat as an adult living in New York looking back on her life? Why fluctuate from present to past and not just tell the story about the girls as teenagers?
Buntin: My answer to this goes back to when you asked why it’s fun to write about teenage girls. The fact that they are so sharp and perceptive but don’t have much wisdom is exactly why I wouldn’t want to write a novel about teenage girls from the perspective of a teenage girl. I wanted to be able to move between the past and present, to hold up each moment and let it refract off all the years that had passed, Cat’s sense of herself as an adult versus who she thought she’d be, etc. I needed that narrative distance in order to explore how memory changes the stories that we tell, how frustrating and impossible and beautiful it is to try and find the truth in our own pasts. Cat had to be telling this from the perspective of adulthood in order to do that — I needed that emotional range. Plus, aside from Sal’s reappearance in Cat’s life, the reason Cat is telling the story of that year is because she’s on a precipice with her drinking. To write the book I wanted to write about addiction, I had to go back to the problem that had been shadowing Cat since she was fifteen — her reliance on alcohol, which started the same year she met Marlena. It’s a life-defining year for that reason, too.
Arnold: So Cat is meant to be an unreliable narrator.
Buntin: Definitely. Cat, in telling this story, is trying to get to the truth of her own experience, but whether or not she can rely on her own impulses as a story teller, as a witness, to be objectively true — that’s something she’s wrestling with. A first person narrator is always unreliable, but I really wanted Cat to lean into that and say, I told you this, but I didn’t tell you this, to make the reader question what Cat’s motivations are in sharing certain things, what she might be hiding from herself, what she might not be ready to admit. For me, Marlena is about female friendship, definitely, and coming-of-age, but it’s just as much about memory — how we build our identities out of these stories from our pasts — and the act of telling. What changes during that process, what we can discover or reveal? What does it mean to take ownership over your own story?
Arnold: I saw the girls’ brothers, Jimmy and Sal, as the only male figures here that weren’t terrible people. This question is meant to be a little cheeky. Were you concerned about or did you think about what it would mean to portray most of the male characters in a book about female friendship as unlikable?
Buntin: [Laughs] No, I did not, but I love that question. I did not want to vilify men, I did not set out to do that, but I was interested in how you portray an absence of a male figure. You have to draw an outline so the reader is aware that that character is haunting the events that are happening in the book without him ever appearing on the page. Cat’s dad gets his scene with Cat, but I wanted to make the fact of his having left something that was always in her psyche, even when she wasn’t directly talking/thinking about it. That was a fun challenge. And I think of Jimmy and Liam as good guys essentially. They’re just not the story’s heart. The central relationships are between Cat and Marlena and Cat and her mom. Those other relationships had to be in a faded zone outside of the frame in order to amplify the female relationships. I am sure men can handle it.
Arnold: To me, Jimmy was the most tragic character because he had a chance to get out and didn’t take it.
Buntin: I think of him as somebody who has a lot of potential and just chokes, at least during the year the book is set. He decided he was going to take some time off and then just never got back on the right track after that. For some people, taking a gap year is a great idea, but for others it is a terrible sinkhole. He lost his inertia. He wound up in this new town and didn’t know what he was doing, but I love his character — he’s a sweet, intense guy, but he’s always a little bit of a mystery to Cat. He grows up to be just fine though — better than Cat in some ways.
Arnold: When exactly does this story take place? Would things have turned out differently for Marlena had she grown up today?
Buntin: Marlena and Cat are in high school circa 2006, during the rise of the opioid epidemic and at the moment when social media was still sort of a novelty, before it fully swallowed every teenager whole. Also just before the housing bubble bursts. All these things impact the story, their specific circumstances, but I didn’t put in any dates in the book — as a reader, I tend to find such markers distracting, and I wanted to create an impressionistic sense of time, for it to feel a little like everyone’s high school experience. The only deliberate timestamps in the book are references to technology that came out in 2005, 2006. Because it was also important to me that Cat be an adult as she’s looking back, that means the narrative present takes place a few years from now.
Maybe it would have turned out differently for Marlena if she had been in high school today — there’s certainly more of an awareness of the danger of pharmaceutical drugs. And I don’t think small towns are as isolated now — the Internet provides constant access, constant connection. Teenagers today know that there is a bigger world out there.
Arnold: You earned your MFA from NYU. Did you start the novel while you were there? What was it like workshopping it?
Buntin: I did start it while I was there, sort of, in the sense that I first wrote something with these two girls in it. I was in a novella writing class and I wrote like sixty pages, and not one of those sixty pages are in the book you read. But those pages were about Cat, Marlena, Ryder and Greg. I honestly don’t remember what it was like workshopping it. I think there was some debate over whether it was YA. I sat on those pages for a while, poking at them here and there, but I was working on another novel very seriously at the same time. The other novel was experimental and written in fragments and super autobiographical. It was not very good, and I hated writing it. Writing Marlena felt entirely different — it was immersive and compelling. I wanted to find out what happened to the girls. It was a relief to realize that the story that you want to write is probably the one you should be writing. After I committed to Marlena, it went quickly. I finished a full draft about a year after grad school, though I did a full-blown rewrite after it sold. I feel like I wrote two books — the book that I sold, and the book that is coming out.
Arnold: In addition to being a writer, you also work for Catapult.
Buntin: Yes, I direct the creative writing program — we host a robust series of workshops and master classes in our NYC offices, and also online. I’ve also edited a few books.
Arnold: How is the editing process different for you than for other editors since you are in the unique position of also being a novelist?
Buntin: I think editing has taught me to kick my own ass! [Laughs] And in a way that I really didn’t know how to do before. If you’re editing someone else’s work, and you are coming at it from a place of love, of wanting the book to be the best possible version of itself, the writer to reach their highest potential in every single sentence, and you don’t apply that same intensity to your own editing process, then you’re a hypocrite.
Arnold: What are you writing next?
Buntin: Right now, I’m trying to keep my head above water between all the book stuff and the regular pressures of my day job. It’s a little early to talk about the novel that I’m working on now, but I can say that it is set at a boarding school, with a bigger cast of characters, both teenagers and adults. The adult perspectives are more central to the narrative than the teen perspectives. It’s also not in first person, which feels really liberating after writing in Cat’s voice for years and years.
Signs that you are watching a feel-good movie: a long sequence in which the protagonist opens up the shop where they work; they insert the key in the lock, roll up the blinds, flip the hanging open/closed sign. A tinkling bell announces the arrival of a customer who, by contrast, alerts us to the protagonist’s ennui––whether a klepto who places a books down his pants (Notting Hill), rude customers (My Big Fat Greek Wedding), or an old woman who one-ups the protagonist with talk of her internet sex life (You’ve Got Mail). Further signs: the protagonist attends a lightly comedic Lamaze class; running jokes which involve the mailman, or old men using “modern” technology.
Julian Barnes’ 2011 Booker Prize-winning novel The Sense of An Ending featured none of the scenes listed above. Its 2017 adaptation to film, written by playwright Nick Payne and directed by Ritesh Batra (The Lunchbox), contains every one of them.
Barnes’ novel is the story of middle-aged, middle class British man Tony Webster. Tony narrates his story in two parts. One focuses on Tony’s school years, beginning with his friendship with the enigmatic Adrian Finn, the new student at his all-boys boarding school. Adrian is cool, angsty, and smart; he reads Ted Hughes and comes from a broken home. He offers his teachers pseudo-intellectual justifications for not answering their questions (“I can’t know what it is that I don’t know. That’s philosophically self-evident”). Once at university, the second key character in Tony’s life appears: Veronica Ford, who, like Adrian, is alluringly inscrutable and elusive. Tony endures an awkward weekend at the Ford family’s home, including a steamy breakfast with Veronica’s sexually-charged mother. Before long Veronica dumps Tony and begins to date Adrian, a heart-stomping betrayal that threatens to confirm Tony’s misgivings about his own, prosaic nature.
The second part of Tony’s narration opens with a riddle. Veronica’s mother has now died, and has bequeathed the middle-aged Tony with Adrian’s diary. In both the film and novel the diary serves as the story’s hook: why did Mrs. Ford leave it to him? Why did she have it in the first place? And, what information does it contain about Adrian? These questions lead to greater thematic questions about memory and the consequences of seeing life through our own myopic worldview.
The film features some amazing British actors — Jim Broadbent as the older Tony, Harriet Walter as his ex-wife Margaret, Charlotte Rampling as present-day Veronica, Michelle Dockery as Tony’s daughter, and Emily Mortimer as Mrs. Ford. It seems like a missed opportunity not to use the engaging (and Oscar-winning) Broadbent to explore an unlikeable and narcissistic character. He instead plays Tony as one of your eccentric, luddite uncles. Rampling, at 71, remains electric, and manages to embody the person we imagine Veronica would become. But it is Harriet Walter as Margaret whose performance helps rescue the film––which makes it all the more ridiculous that hers is the only major character not featured on the promotional poster.
This is how the movie deals with explaining Tony’s past: Tony sits down with his ex-wife over pasta and wine and regales her with old stories. This scenario happens not once, but twice. Giving us a “plausible” reason for why Tony would be telling someone his backstory ends up feeling more artificial than if we were suddenly sucked into the vortex of the past. Walter, as his ex-wife, helps to mediate this stiff play-like format, in her subtle depiction of Margaret. Thanks to her we ultimately believe that these are two people with a complex past, divorced but still intimate. She can expose Tony’s bias without sounding like the plot device which, in these moments, she is.
A screenplay never contains every scene out of a book, nor does it follow its plot to the letter, and so it makes a certain kind of sense that the movie The Sense of an Ending combines the book’s two-part structure into one cohesive arc––this way the audience is intrigued by the mystery of the diary from the outset, and Tony’s “present” remains our fixed point in time. Still, I was stunned to find the essential character of Adrian practically cut from the film. This presents a problem from a technical point of view: without knowing much about Adrian, the story’s big twist––and it’s meant to be a doozy––doesn’t really make much sense. And yet, what bothered me more (likely because I had read the book, and unlike my co-moviegoer wasn’t left wondering what had just happened) was Batra’s choice to recast the novel as a conventional romance story about a boy and his first girlfriend. In the book it is his relationship with Adrian, not Veronica, that Tony mourns when he learns about the diary. Focusing on Tony’s romantic relationship with Veronica dismisses how important our platonic teenage relationships are, how much we invest in them, and how much they shape our identities.
The decision to minimize Adrian’s role in the film is all the more incomprehensible given the glut of other scenes he added (see: list above). In fact, the movie contains so much original material that it’s basically an entirely new story, that of the redemption of Tony Webster, a bumbling old man who receives a strange bequeathment which ultimately causes him to realize how selfish he’s been, especially with regards to his treatment of his ex-wife and his daughter. Here is one particularly telling sample of that extra material: in the novel Tony briefly mentions that his somewhat-estranged daughter is married with two children. In the film, the entire narrative arc is structured around his daughter’s fraught pregnancy; she is an unmarried 36-year-old who has chosen to have a baby sans father. Her baby’s delivery, with Tony standing at her shoulder as she pushes — literally and finally “there” for his daughter — is one of the film’s emotional highs. But why take a novel already stuffed with emotional stakes — two suicides, multiple broken hearts, forty-year secrets, unwanted babies, festering regrets––and add to it this new plot device?
I can only point to the text, to the sentences themselves. Julian Barnes is easy to read; his language is straightforward and unfussy. He doesn’t load up on adjectives or run sentences on for pages to mirror his character’s emotions. Perhaps the absence of dark, taut, or twisted language misled the movie team, and they read Tony as a conventional old British man (the way he invites the mailman in for coffee in the film certainly suggests this). Barnes excels at subtlety; his Tony’s regrets are slow burning, shrouded in fake candor. Or maybe Hollywood simply doesn’t accept unhappy endings.
Because the novel isn’t happy. Its ending does not uplift the reader, as the final lines suggest: “There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond that, there is unrest. There is great unrest.” Yes, there is a revelation––Tony realizes he has deluded himself about his life, that he’s been indulgent and simply told himself the version of history which made him feel better about himself. This kind of a realization is a personal triumph, but sometimes, maybe oftentimes, it’s a small one, fruitless except for the inherent goodness of realizing the truth. That’s why Tony never actually reads the diary he receives — it’s moot, he can no longer change how he behaved towards Adrian or Veronica; there can be no satisfactory end to their story. There can just be an end.
The Jittery Fearful Tone of Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time
The struggle to publish a manuscript is an arduous one for just about any writer, but it’s doubtful any literary underdog tale can compete with the implausible escape and publication of The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea, a new book whose perilous journey out of North Korea has emerged in the international press over the last week.
The book consists of seven stories spanning a six-year time frame, with the first story taking place in December 1989, and the last one in December 1995, following Kim Il-sung’s death. Each narrative explores the diverse ways in which North Korean citizens have been stripped of basic freedoms. The collection’s overarching theme is the fear individuals experience knowing tomorrow could be the day a fatal accusation is made against them.
So far, we only know a few things about the author, who writes under the pseudonym, Bandi, which in Korean means “firefly” — a fitting epithet considering the incendiary implications of the stories, which also serve the purpose of authentically illuminating the frightening conditions of the modern day slavery taking place within the DPRK. According to an afterword by Kim Seong-dong, included in the US release, The Accusation was written by a former (or possibly current) member of the Chosun Writers’ League Central Committee, North Korea’s state sanctioned writers’ group, which is tasked with generating propaganda for government-owned publications. CNN reports that Bandi originally planned to smuggle the document out of the country via a relative who had arranged to flee, but fortunately that plan didn’t go through. The relative was detained on the Chinese side of the border; if she had been caught carrying the manuscript she likely would have been sent back to North Korea to face imprisonment or execution. Instead, the Chinese soldiers reportedly demanded a bribe. During negotiations, she was able to contact Do Hee-yun, a representative of the Citizen’s Coalition for the Human Rights of North Korean Refugees, and was eventually bailed out. She later told Do about her relative’s manuscript, and Do organized a delicate handover when one of his most trusted Chinese friends was visiting family in the same town where Bandi happens to live. The friend was able to hide the manuscript inside The Selected Works of Kim Il-sung and bring the 750 pages back to South Korea.
Do said in an interview with VICE, “I see this as a book that can make the people who are hanging on in North Korea realize, just as we do in the international community, that they are living as slaves, and give them strength and courage to stand up for change.”
Bandi identifies with this fear on the most personal level, which is why he chose not to defect himself.
On March 30th, Do was joined by the book’s agent, Barbara Zitwer, and several other international publishers for a reading of The Accusation at the Korean Demilitarized Zone, which stands between North and South Korea.
You can now find the book in stores or online from its publisher, Grove Atlantic.
A journey into the woods in search of self-knowledge — or simply a reclamation of lost wonder — The Vine That Ate the South is one tall tale. Digging deep into the mythology of the South, J. D. Wilkes’s novel follows the unnamed narrator and his friend, Carver Canute, into the haunted western Kentucky forest known as The Deadenin’ where they seek out an urban rural legend: an elderly couple swallowed by a runaway strain of kudzu plant which has mounted them aloft in a ghastly ongoing display.
Along the way, they encounter any number of backwoods oddities, but can these match up with the bits of rumors and imagination with which they regale each other? In the South, Wilkes suggests, it doesn’t matter. Telling tales of doubtful truthfulness is a way of life in Marshall County, Kentucky even as there are also great real-life wonders to be found there. As such, Vine is one long tall tale built up of any number of smaller ones and where the fibbing leaves off and objective reality begins remains a moot point since as the narrator reminds us, “Collecting folktales and courting ghosts is just another way for the rural-lonely to stay sane.”
In this particular rural setting, there is no one lonelier than our narrator whose father, having died under mysterious circumstances when the narrator was a boy, has left him isolated and unsure of his manhood. Now in his 30s, he retains lingering daddy issues. “Between [my mom’s] smothering and [my dad’s] absence,” he tells us, “I was, and still am, lost when it comes to being a young man.” This lack of manly guidance has especially hurt him in his specific environment, a Southern rural town that has certain traditional standards of masculinity. As such, the narrator led a sheltered childhood in which he sought perpetual solitude and which has made him ill-fit in his world. This sense of inadequacy has continued into his adult life, fueled by the loss of his girlfriend to his arch-rival, the boorish Stoney Kingston.
Wilkes’s book is chock full of vivid, hallucinatory bits, odd moments of humor, and haunted environments, with the forest itself a classic moody setting, but the book gets its real charge from its complex consideration of the narrator’s views on manhood and the South — the two being intimately related. Throughout the novel, the narrator simultaneously bemoans his own truncated manhood (with the bear-like Carver as his foil) and delivers jeremiads about the diminished state of his home region. He dates this latter decline to 1927 when, he says, agrarianism began to give way to employment in “the System.”
The result is that “the old homestead ways of life have ceased” and, “along with it, many a manly conquest has followed suit, replaced with virtual adventure, overstuffed furniture, air-conditioning, and TV dinners” and on, into the internet age. The narrator, interestingly, never seems to question the assumption that the type of masculinity that he craves is a false goal, preferring to lament the circumstances that have made him, by this standard, inadequate and have done the same to Southern society in general.
His journey to the woods, then, is a double journey into manhood. One of his goals in going is to even the score with Stoney Kingston — who claims that he has already seen the kudzu couple — and to win back his girl. Another is to dig deep into the region he calls home and, by so doing, uncover the past since, as he is well aware, “In every nook and cranny, in any direction on God’s green earth, there is history to be learned”. In western Kentucky, in particular, this history is fraught and the narrator is quick to acknowledge the horrors of Native American genocide and slavery.
He also finds nobility in this past, particularly when set against the present day. For example, late in his journey, he notes the “barn-quilts adorn[ing] the old folks’ outbuildings. Perhaps they use these hex symbols to ward off the evil spirits of Gen-X sloth and Baby Boomer decadence. They were, after all, nailed there by ‘The Greatest Generation.” By pinpointing a generation that existed well after slavery and well before recent loathed age groups, the narrator finds a safe spot in the past to idealize. “What they had,” he continues, “was a life packed with hard-earned meaning, a life more in keeping with the Bronze Age than with this new so-called ‘information age.’”
This disconnect from his present time on both the personal and generational level provides the narrative with a certain tension that raises Wilkes’s book above the level of a simple entertaining trip into a folksy fantastical setting. The narrator’s confusion over how exactly he fits in with his immediate world (which extends to his complicated relationship with that other absent father, God), marks him as a flawed and compelling figure. If Wilkes himself sometimes seems caught up in that same confusion, confirming rather than questioning some of his narrator’s less constructive notions, then he at least understands the complexity of the question. In his novel, the South comes across as sufficiently haunted: by God, by slavery, and, not least, by the ghosts, literal and figurative, of a region with a very tangled history.
Seat number 2E was designated the Papal Seat, so I vacuumed it three times with the thin nozzle to get out all the pretzel dust. Sat down and tested the seatbelt, made sure there wasn’t any gum wedged in the buckle. I stowed the belt extender in the crew basket overhead — the Pope wears about seven smocks, and from what I’d seen on TV, he was going to need the extra slack.
Sheila dumped all the magazines from coach. It’s just press corps back there, and if they didn’t bring their own reading material, tough. Fuel economy comes first. Underneath, Hank loaded the hold with gifts and jewels and holy wooden thrones. Eva prepped the lavatory, stocked a box of wet wipes, and taped over the smoke detector real tight.
I stashed the Marlboro Reds behind the top lip of the lav mirror, loose, as instructed in the printout from headquarters, and a Bic lighter, yellow. Also, under the sink, a gown: full length and flame retardant. That white must be impossible to wear.
We worried the Pope’s one remaining lung would collapse on our flight — a sudden shock of turbulence while he dragged, a panicky jostle, a fall, and a counter-edge to the diaphragm. We hoped he’d be smart enough to sit on the closed lid of the john when he lit up, and we even rigged a seatbelt. Cooper changed out the blue water with clear formula because even if the lid’s shut, rough air can do horrible things. Last, we taped a sign to the door, POPE ONLY, his chapel, pulpit, confessional. We tested code words and settled on the Red Room.
The Pope arrived half an hour ahead of schedule, clasping hands on the tarmac, squeezing desperately. His wrists trembled as he fielded requests and apologies from politicians, then, with an aide on each elbow, he trudged up the stairs to the plane. He blessed the captain, co-pilot, and flight engineer with heavy grunted words, saying pray for me, pray for me. I led him to his seat.
We slammed to full power down the runway, but the plane felt like it had a plow on the front. Somehow we got the wheels up 30 feet before the end of the tarmac, and the captain blinked the no smoking sign six times — prepare to ditch. My training kicked in all wrong, and I remembered a story from the workbook, a flight from Bolivia to Switzerland where the finance minister loaded a bunch of gold bars and didn’t tell the crew. That’s going to be us.
I looked front and back to make sure everyone was buckled in, and caught a flop of white out of the corner of my eye. The Pope was dragging himself up the aisle and into the Red Room. Nobody dared to yell Back in your seat. The turbines were screaming, we were pulling hard to try to catch some help from the jet stream. Then a carpet of smoke rolled out from under the lav door, and the engines started to mellow. Finally, over Greenland, the pilots eased into the usual speed at the usual cruise. I ventured to the Red Room and knocked. He answered Pray for me.
He was still in there when we approached Rome. I had to get him back to his seat, but now he didn’t answer. I keyed open the lav and found him crumpled on the floor, white robes tar-stained and ashy, three cigarettes in his mouth. Then he jumped to life, brushed himself bleach-clean with a swipe of the hand, and floated back down the aisle. I buckled his belt, no extender needed. He pulled me close and coughed thank you, and I heard the weight returning and knew why he asks us to pray.
In 2013, law enforcement officers caught up with a mysterious burglar who had plagued the residents of North Pond, in central Maine, for over a quarter of a century. The man they arrested, Christopher Knight, was clean-shaven, neatly dressed and polite. At first he was reluctant to speak, but when pressed, he confirmed what many had believed to be a myth — a bogeyman or a folk hero, depending on your attitude toward modern-day society, not to mention whether you were one of the many hundreds of homeowners victimized by the so-called “North Pond Hermit.”
Christopher Knight told officers that he’d been camping in the woods of central Maine, without any human contact or active support, for over twenty-seven years.
It began as an impulse. One day, driving home after a long trip south, Knight pulled over to the side of the road, parked his car and went into the woods with no intention of ever returning to civilization. He found a clearing near North Pond and set up camp. He built no fires and left no tracks. Drinking water was easy to collect. The waste, he buried. On moonless nights before the arrival of snow, he left camp and broke into cabins, raided for supplies, then let himself back out again.
After the arrest, Knight’s story was national news, a curiosity at the end of the six-thirty broadcast. One of those watching was the journalist, Michael Finkel.
Like many others, Finkel wrote to Knight, who was in jail awaiting trial on buglary charges. In that first letter, Finkel wished Knight well and attached a few magazine articles. The odds that the Long Pond Hermit would write back were exceedingly slim, but Finkel remembers believing a response would come. He avoids using words like “fate,” but that, more or less, is how it felt. His interest was sincere and profound. And whether through fate or some other mechanism, remarkable stories seem to find their way into Finkel’s orbit.
In 2002, after having been drummed out of The New York Times following the revelation that he had conflated the stories of several figures in a cover article on the slave trade in modern-day Africa, Finkel learned about Christian Luongo, an Oregon man who had killed his wife and children and fled to Mexico, where it turned out he was living under an assumed identity — journalist Michael Finkel’s identity, to be exact. Finkel went to meet with Luongo and eventually wrote about their shared experience in True Story, a true crime ‘memoir’ that was later made into a movie.
For his latest work, Finkel found himself once again, notebook in hand, entering a prison during visiting hours, hoping to learn what he could from a man whose actions very nearly defy all comprehension.
After receiving a response from Knight, Finkel decided to go to Maine to meet him in the flesh. Very cautiously, Knight began to reveal his story. Meanwhile, Finkel spoke with relatives and locals, read widely in the literature of hermitage, and went into the woods of Maine himself.
Out of this came The Stranger in the Woods, an utterly captivating story that brings readers into close contact with the world’s “last true hermit” and wrestles with profound questions about society, why we seek it out, and what happens when one of us wishes to be removed from it.
Last week, Finkel passed through Brooklyn for the book’s release, and I had the opportunity to ask him a few questions about the enduring appeal of hermits, burglary as a lifestyle, and how Finkel’s own fall from grace sparked an interest in criminals.
Dwyer Murphy: There’s a passage in The Stranger in the Woods where you sum up Christopher Knight’s situation and come to a striking conclusion: “[H]e persisted a total of twenty-seven years while speaking a total of one word and never touching anyone else. Christopher Knight, you could argue, is the most solitary known person in all of human history.” So, was he the most solitary person? How did you sort out the contenders?
Michael Finkel: Well, I fell into the rabbit hole of hermit literature, which is tremendously broad, starting with Tao Te Ching, going past Walden into today. I kept trying to figure out who was more secluded than Chris Knight. I must have read a hundred books, a thousand articles, plus I hired a full time researcher. No stone was left unturned. And in the end, I couldn’t find a single example of another human being in all of history who spent twenty-seven years alone. Someone always snuck up on these people, or brought them food, or there was communication of some kind. For Chris Knight, there is an asterisk: he stole, and he once encountered a group of hikers who said hello. But in terms of pure and complete seclusion, he was the ultimate. Right here in the 21st century, in the age of Facebook, with seven billion people crowding the planet, we have the most secluded known person who ever lived. I’m staking my claim to that. I’m confident it’s true.
“Right here in the 21st century, in the age of Facebook, with seven billion people crowding the planet, we have the most secluded known person who ever lived.”
Murphy: It seems like Knight’s story had a special grip on you. I’ll admit it had a hold on me, too. Maybe there’s a whole subset of the population just clamoring for stories about hermits.
Finkel: I love hanging out with my friends, and I can go to Burning Man for a week, but I also really crave solitude. Years before this story, I went to India for a ten-day silent retreat. You might think it would be boring, but it wasn’t. It was terrible, crazily difficult, and it just scared the shit out of me.
Going into yourself is unnerving. We almost never do it. And I was so frightened by this ten-day retreat, I never did it again. But that experience was in my mind when I first heard about Christopher Knight. I thought: he went to the very depths of it. I wanted to pick his brain. So I reached out to him. People ask me now if I was shocked that he wrote back. After all, he’d been contacted by hundreds of other journalists. But really, I wasn’t. I was maybe a little surprised. But the truth is, I thought he would write me back, because my curiosity wasn’t prurient in any way. It was genuine.
Murphy: I wanted to talk a little about Chris Knight’s woodsmanship. You write about the way he moved in the woods, how easy and expert he was at navigating the harshest conditions. That ability seems central to his story. I was wondering if you could try to put this into context for me. How does he compare to say, an experienced camper or a skilled hunter?
Finkel: There are some aspects of this story where, if I tell you the truth, it’s just going to sound ridiculous. But I’m going to tell you the truth. Now, I’m a decent woodsman, like a minor league ballplayer. But let’s take as an example Sergeant Terry Hughes, the officer who arrested Chris Knight. Terry Hughes is an amazing woodsman. He can move through the forest better than anyone you or I will ever meet. On the night of the arrest, Hughes followed Chris Knight through the woods for forty-five minutes, on the way to see his camp. Chris walked out front and the officers followed behind. Now Hughes and those officers are the only human beings to witness Chris Knight moving through the woods. I interviewed Hughes about it — I have a two-minute video that I sometimes like to show — and you can see it on Hughes’ face. Describing Chris’ movements, he was beside himself. He was in a state of shock, just remembering it.
I try to think of comparisons for Chris. I could say he moved like a cat and left no footprints; or I could talk about Usain Bolt, if Bolt was winning the hundred-meter dash by five seconds. This guy, Chris Knight, in the woods he was like a God. He could move in a way nobody else can even imagine moving. It sounds so hyperbolic, but I’m just telling you the way it is. It’s a phenomenon.
That’s why I don’t really think the comparison to Chris McCandless [from Into the Wild] is fair. Chris McCandless died after six months in the wild. Chris Knight walked out healthy as a rock after twenty-seven years.
Knight had a ridiculous brain. Sometimes I felt taunted by his brainpower. He said he didn’t have a photographic memory, but he could quote from any of a thousand books. He had a Library of Congress in his head. He could also fix electrical and automotive and plumbing. He understood thermodynamics and theoretical physics and could talk basic gardening and hunting and fishing. He was too smart for this world. If you study hermits throughout history, you find out that’s not an unusual thing. Isaac Newton basically invented physics, but he never had any friends and died celibate. There’s such a thing as being too smart.
Murphy: One of the most memorable parts of the story is Chris Knight’s camp: this little clearing in the woods where he spent most of his time for twenty-seven years, where no one ever found him, even though they were looking pretty intensely. You describe it vividly:
“[T]wenty feet on each side, with ideally flat ground cleared of stones and situated on a slight rise that allowed just enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes away but not so much as to cause severe windchill in winter. It felt to me as if a cube of forest had disappeared.”
Even so, I had a hard time imagining this space, or rather, I spent a lot of time imagining it, but I have no idea whether my image of it is close to life. It feels almost apocryphal. Do you remember your first time entering the camp?
Finkel: Everyone seemed to have a point of disbelief when it came to Chris Knight. For the people around North Pond, there were a few questions they would get hung up on: how do he go twenty-seven years without a fire, without a doctor? Or how did he survive the Ice Storm of 1998? How does a guy not talk for twenty-seven years and then speak so eloquently?
My point of disbelief was this: how do you live on a piece of private property with three hundred houses around and nobody finds you for a quarter of a century? I couldn’t get my head around it. Until I went to those woods. It took about fifteen minutes for me to figure out how it was possible. Those woods — man, I’ve lived twenty-something years in Montana. I spend a lot of time in the woods. But around that pond, I couldn’t walk. It wasn’t just that there was no trail. The trees were all wove together and there were massive boulders everywhere coated with slick moss. I’ve never seen nastier woods. Imagine a brillo pad the size of Manhattan. And then…You find this site.
His camp — honestly I thought I might never find it. I knew where it was, but only within a couple football fields. I was on the verge of giving up, and then I found these weird rocks with an opening between them. It looked like an optical illusion. You could only see the opening from certain angles. I’ll never forget walking through it for the first time. Right now, I’m sitting on this couch in Brooklyn, and I crave being there. I don’t like terms like magical, but it was magical. If you have any cravings for peace and solitude, this was everything you could ever want. It was cleared out. Overhead, branches formed natural trellises. You were in the middle of a dense forest, and yet you were in a room and it felt secure. I ended up spending five nights there, by myself. Each time, I didn’t want to leave. It’s an incredible little spot. I’d be sorry for the homeowner, but I feel like everyone in the world should spend an hour there.
14 Novels of Wildness & Wilderness
Murphy: There’s one thorny issue that complicates the romance around Chris Knight. He stole. He broke into homes and took what he needed, not just a few times, but thousands of times. It was part of his lifestyle. How do you think the public view of him might have been different if he’d survived by hunting and fishing?
Finkel: If Chris Knight had hunted and fished for his food on public land up in northern Alaska, I don’t know if I would have written the book. He’d be too clear a hero. I found the thieving and the moral murkiness riveting. I would read someone else’s book about Chris Knight the pure hero, but I wouldn’t write it myself. To me, if the book is successful, you’ll consider how you feel about Chris Knight and your own life and your own choices and the things you’re willing to do. You can’t call the man purely evil or purely angelic, and where you put him on that scale says a lot about you. Probably more than it says about Chris.
“You can’t call the man purely evil or purely angelic, and where you put him on that scale says a lot about you. Probably more than it says about Chris.”
Murphy: You mentioned before the points of disbelief people have in hearing Knight’s story. Are there points of belief, too? Was there something you heard from him that convinced you, no matter how implausible the story sounded, he was telling you the truth?
Finkel: He was telling me about the moment when he was parked in the woods and was about to take the most radical leap a human can make — he was going to walk away, leave civilization. And in the middle of this story, our time expired. Visiting hours were over. The next visit, I rewound things a bit, I said, okay, you were parked in your car in the woods and you tossed your keys in the center console. He asked, ‘did I say tossed my keys?’ I checked my notes: he had. He said, ‘I would like to change that. It’s an exaggeration. I placed them.’ He was about to leave the world for twenty-seven years, but he thought it was an exaggeration to say that he’d tossed the keys. I thought, man he must be telling me the truth.
Believe me, I tried hard to overturn his story. I never could. From the outset, he assured me he was either going to tell me the truth or not tell me anything at all.
Murphy: I want to ask you about building rapport in the incredibly strange context of jailhouse visiting hours. In the process of researching and writing your last book, True Story, you spent time with Christian Luongo, a man accused of killing his wife and children (and who posed as you when he was a fugitive in Mexico). In The Stranger in the Woods, you’re getting sporadic time with a hermit who’s just come out of twenty-seven years of solitude. I’m not trying to compare the two men, necessarily, but the situations presented some of the same difficulties for you, the journalist.
Finkel: Obviously you know about my crack up with The New York Times fifteen years ago. It changed me. It made me a better journalist, I think. I was someone who’d fucked up, like everyone else in the world. That humbles you. After being busted for a journalistic crime, I got attracted to real criminals. Now, when I reach out to someone who’s made craven errors, I’m not on my high horse. I’m not trying to hide my humanity, my mistakes from anyone. And bizarrely, the reaction to that has been respect — respect that I’m open about my flaws. I don’t mean to say that I’m using it as some kind of chess move. It’s more organic than that. I just talk to other people who’ve acted criminally, and I’m a mess-up, too.
“After being busted for a journalistic crime, I got attracted to real criminals.”
Murphy: Aside from responding to your letter, Knight never explicitly encouraged you to take on this project. But was there a change in your relationship as time went on, something that told you he was willing to open up?
Finkel: So the question is basically: how do you feel about disturbing a guy who didn’t want to be disturbed? I’ve thought about that a lot. I was never morally clear about it. I’m not just some pit-bull journalist. I’m a human being. I reached out in the gentlest way possible: a letter in the mail. Chris got hundreds of letters and ignored almost all of them. With me, he chose to respond. Now, I also went to the jail, which I was nervous about it. It seemed a little morally murky. But he could always decline my visits. He said no to other people, but he took every one of my visits. And in the very end, he said to me, ‘You’re my Boswell.’ I was extremely grateful to hear that. He was basically saying, you write my story. He asked for nothing in return, no money, nothing more than that I leave him alone. Hopefully everyone else will leave him alone, too. I took that extremely seriously. I didn’t write a single sentence for Chris Knight. He had no editorial control. I just wanted to honor the story and to do it as well as it could possibly be done.
Murphy: Do you think people will leave him alone? Or is there a risk this book ignites curiosity and drives people to make some sort of pilgrimage, the way some still visit the site where McCandless died?
Finkel: I hope he doesn’t get a single visitor. Chris and I didn’t discuss this thoroughly. But I think I understand his reasoning. In addition to the other things he’s quite adept at, he’s adept at game theory. He saw the press requests. He knew he was going to be hounded for the rest of his life. I believe he figured the best way to regain a modicum of privacy would be to tell his story to one person. It’s kind of odd. He told me exactly what he wanted to tell me. I asked for more, but there’s no way to talk an intelligent guy — who’s been silent for twenty-seven years — into speaking. He’d just say I don’t want to talk about that, and it was on to the next subject. I think he considered this book to be a fence, or a shield: I’ve told my story, I have nothing more to say, don’t bother me now. I really hope that’s the case. I’ll be dismayed if anybody reads this book and goes up there and looks for him. How could you come to that conclusion?
“I believe he figured the best way to regain a modicum of privacy would be to tell his story to one person.”
Murphy: Well, if he does inspire some sort of following, he’s in the right part of the country. I thought abut J.D. Salinger, how he lived all those years in that town in New Hampshire, and when people went looking for him, locals would offer up misdirection, send them on a wild goose chase. They were protective of his privacy.
Finkel: You know, that’s a lovely comparison. There might be the stray person who goes looking for him, but you’re right, Chris Knight is living in the ideal spot for someone who wants to be private. He’s been out of the woods going on four years, and really he hasn’t been bothered. People have stuck their business cards in his mailbox, and I’d say that’s too much, but in terms of being bothered, that’s not too bad. And also, when I was worrying about invading Chris’ privacy, Terry Hughes, the officer who arrested, him, mentioned something I found helpful. He said, ‘Mike that man committed a thousand felonies, breaking into all those houses. He sort of deserves to have someone bug him a bit.’
Murphy: At one point after Knight was released from jail, you went to visit him, and he said something that convinced you he was going to commit suicide. That really seemed to unnerve you, and you went to his relatives, a therapist. This question may sound a bit callous, or indelicate, but reading that section of the book, I found myself wondering, why were you determined to prevent that suicide? I had some trouble understanding that. Maybe it’s just me, though.
Finkel: Chris told me he was planning a specific suicide, and I believed him fully. It wasn’t that I was determined to prevent it. But I had to think, what do I do with this information? Holy shit. Am I supposed to stop him? Am I supposed to let him do it? I felt like I had been handed something explosive, a bomb, and I didn’t know whether to let it go off or to try and defuse it. This had never happened to me before, not in my career, not in my life. What would you do if your friend told you he was going to kill himself in the morning? Do you go to the police? Do you try to stop him? There’s no handbook for that situation.
Murphy: One final thing. I’m wondering, since writing this book, have you found yourself changed — your relationship to solitude? To the woods?
Finkel: It warped my sense of time. I spent three years writing a hundred and ninety pages. I still had reality and bills to pay, but I didn’t care. Time floated weirdly for Chris Knight, and it seemed to do the same for me. I was working on this as a magazine story before it was a book, and at some point, Chris said to me, ‘How about we take a break and you can come back in a couple years?’ He was dead serious. And I thought it was a great idea. But I also had a deadline in four weeks.
One more thing changed. This is going to sound like a cliché…I have three little kids. I’m always late to shit. There’s traffic and the kids are fighting and I have six text messages coming in and I’m listening to fucking news about Trump. Twice a day I think: it’s not Chris Knight who’s crazy, it’s the rest of us.
Thank You!
