City-Dwellers Under Stress

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Cities are places where people can go to find themselves, to experience a wealth of culture and human experience. Cities are also places where people can unravel, where density, claustrophobia, and economic anxiety can get inside someone’s head and lead them to unsettling places. That’s the paradox at the heart of urban life. As societies around the world become increasingly urbanized–as people leave rural and suburban areas for more densely-populated regions–these tensions intensify. They’re also the same tensions that drive a host of great fiction forward–and, not surprisingly, the result has been an increase of novels and short stories addressing the modern sense of urban disquiet.

When dealing with a character’s sense of anxiety, or flat-out fear, in a city, writers have plenty of options. There’s a long literary history of fiction tackling urban angst. Books like Patrick Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer convey a sense of place and the foibles and fears of city-dwellers through realism and stylish prose and dialogue. On the surreal side of things, you have J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, which uses a futuristic apartment building as its setting, even as it dismantles notions of civilization and the illusions its residents have about their world. China Miéville’s The City & The City is set in a thoroughly designed micronation that’s also metaphorically resonant of contested territories around the world. It could be a conflict zone, or it could be a neighborhood a few miles away.

Five recent books from across the globe demonstrate the ways in which questions of urban anxiety and restlessness can be turned into compelling fiction. Mr. Cui, the protagonist of Ge Fei’s The Invisibility Cloak (translated into English by Canaan Morse), lives in Beijing and makes a living working with high-end audio equipment–a world in which there are a dwindling number of potential clients. The tone of the book is quickly established in the first paragraph, as the narrator arrives at a building called “The Brownstones”:

“‘The Brownstones’ has been a household name in Beijing for years, ever since they executed the district mayor, Zhou Lianglou, for accepting millions in bribes on local real estate deals, including the one that made these apartments.”

Here, cynicism blends with a knowing sense of place. Soon, we learn more about Mr. Cui: he’s an audiophile’s audiophile, and is (among other things) horrified to hear the music of actor and pop singer Andy Lau emerge from a high-end set of speakers. “Something is definitely wrong with the world,” he observes.

The title of The Invisibility Cloak refers to a rumored item possibly owned by a fabulously wealthy figure who’s gone long before the events of this novel begin. It’s a useful image for a number of reasons: it hints at the social strata that exist high above the embittered narrator, and it emphasizes the way that several characters in the novel never quite connect. Bonds–whether between members of the same family or between professionals and clients–fail to click, as though one party can’t quite see the others for who they are.

But there are also moments of jarring violence: a client of Mr. Cui’s produces a gun to settle a dispute in a restaurant; Mr. Cui remembers the end of his marriage, where news of the divorce prompted him to a horrifying act of self-harm; a supporting character takes his own life in a particularly unsettling way; and a women whom Mr. Cui meets late in the book bears scars from a mysterious and terrifying incident which is never entirely explained. For all that its characters seem familiar with a certain level of power, it’s also implied that there are even more sinister and ominous forces circling them, with agendas beyond their understanding.

In the character of Mr. Cui, Ge Fei has centered a memorable combination of traits. Cui is a worldly cynic and an urban insider who also retains the capacity to be shocked. Like the “cloak” that gives the book its title, there are certain intangible or unattainable forces in the world in which he lives, each capable of great benefit or monstrous harm.

While they’re in very different lines of work, Mr. Cui has more than a little in common with Katya Grubbs, the protagonist of Henrietta Rose-Innes’s novel Nineveh. Katya lives and works in Cape Town, where she owns and operates a no-kill pest control service. Slowly, Rose-Innes reveals additional facets of Katya: her troubled relationship with her father, who also works in pest control; her sometimes-frayed bond with her nephew, who works for her; her inexplicable attraction to a loutish client, which ranks relatively high on the list of terrible yet plausible ideas by fictional characters.

It’s that client who introduces Katya to the building that gives the novel its title. Nineveh is an apartment complex that’s been overrun by an infestation of mysterious beetles which seem nearly impossible to locate or deal with. It’s one of several aspects of the novel that lend it an eerie quality. Rose-Innes does a fantastic job of creating a sense of the tactile, the grotesque (one early scene finds Katya dealing with an abundance of caterpillars), and the constancy of change. Nineveh includes a handful of moments in which the destruction of green spaces is lamented–but, like Katya’s ostensibly humane techniques, paradoxes abound.

And, as befits a novel whose central character understands structures and strata better than most, the language here is both insightful and evocative. This description of a room in Nineveh aptly captures a sense of place, as well as the sense of instability that comes with it.

“No wall is ever silent; always there is a subdued orchestra of knocks and sighs and oceanic rushing. The hum of pipes, the creaks of bricks and mortar settling. Or unsettling: such sounds are the minute harbingers of future destruction, the first tiny tremors of a very, very slow-motion collapse that will end, years from now, in a pile of rubble.”

Shacks with Dubai Marina in background (2006). Photo by Ryan Lackey, via Flickr.

Some of the most menacing cities are the ones we carry with us beyond their borders. Kelly Luce’s novel Pull Me Under opens in the Japanese city of Tokushima in 1988, as a twelve-year-old girl named Chizuru fatally stabs the bully who tormented her. Chizuru is the daughter of a nationally beloved violinist, who effectively abandons her after the incident. After years in a detention facility, she moves to her mother’s homeland, the United States, where she renames herself Rio and does everything she can to put the past behind her.

9 Stories About the Magic of Cities

Rio learns of her father’s death and returns to Japan many years later, after she’s married and become a mother. But throughout the book, Luce imparts a sense of place–whether it’s the small city that Rio now calls home, the terrain through which she runs to clear her head, or the pilgrimage trail on which she embarks with a former teacher after attending her father’s funeral. In Luce’s telling, time takes on an almost physical component–which meshes neatly with the way in which Pull Me Under explores both paradoxes and duality. Her descriptions of physical places help to accentuate that.

“Futons loll over railings like tongues. Concrete apartment cubes rise between wooden houses; in some cases it seems the new building is the only thing keeping the old one from falling apart.”

It’s a subtle storytelling choice, using a straightforward story to explore the ineffable, the conflicted, and irreconcilable.

There’s an even greater sense of duality in Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West, which plays out like a master class on dramatic timing — when to supply details and when to withhold them. It tells the story of a couple, Nadia and Saeed, who meet as their country slowly collapses in a civil war and ultimately decide to seek a better and safer life elsewhere. It’s a storyline that come come from the grimmest of news articles, save for the one decidedly magical realist element: doors in Nadia and Saeed’s city can sometimes transport people across the globe.

The burgeoning affection between Nadia and Saeed seems entirely realistic and naturalistic, while the horrors of their city’s descent into a warzone comes off as eminently plausible and utterly gut-wrenching. But Hamid makes interesting use of names in this book: outside of the couple at its center, no other character is given a name. (This shouldn’t be taken to mean that they’re not well-rounded characters: Saeed’s parents, for instance, are quickly and deftly established as multidimensional.) Similarly, the places to which people travel through the magical doors are named, but the city in which the novel opens is not. Nevertheless , Hamid manages an evocative sense of what life is like there–and what dangers it might hold.

“One’s relationship to windows now changed in the city. A window was the border through which death was possibly most likely to come. Windows could not stop even the most flagging round of ammunition: any spot indoors with a view of the outside was a spot potentially in the crossfire.”

The novel takes Nadia and Saeed to a number of other locations, each of which Hamid imbues with a memorable level of detail and a haunting evocation of its own dangers. While the use of its one magical realist element creates a stylized feel to the narrative, Hamid is grappling throughout with some of the biggest issues of our time, and tying them inextricably to a larger sense of place.

Perhaps there are some instances in which a sense of urban disquiet can best be conveyed by means outside realism. The stories in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People focus on the lives of foreign workers brought in to work in the United Arab Emirates. And throughout the book, bodies are constantly in flux, dehumanization is rampant, and dislocation is a constant. In one of the most memorable stories, a scientist creates a process by which workers with a finite lifespan can be grown in labs before being dispatched to several years of labor.

In Unnikrishnan’s narrative, the elasticity and malleability of bodies, languages, and identities takes on a haunting quality. Sometimes the language of metaphor suddenly turns literal, as in “Birds,” a story about a women whose job involves repairing “construction workers who fell from incomplete buildings.” Here, she muses on one of the streets where she works.

“Anna knew Hamdan as intimately as her body. In the seventies, when she first arrived, the buildings were smaller. Nevertheless, she would, could, and did glue plus tape scores of men a day, correcting and reattaching limbs, putting back organs or eyeballs. And sometimes, if the case was hopeless, praying until the man breathed his last.”

At its best, Temporary People ties together a feeling of place with a fundamental sense of alienation. Or, perhaps, alienations–Unnikrishnan charts a multitude of ways in which people can be distanced from one another, and uses a host of surreal devices in order to make this even more tangible.

Despite the population density inherent to nearly all cities, the potential for solitude and despair while living there is very real. These five books showcase different ways in which people experience a profound sense of disquiet and disconnection while living in a city. Whether alienated from human connection, labor, or questions of belonging, the range of unrest one feels in an urban space is vast. These stories impart a greater sense of that unrest in others, and leave the reader with a greater connection to the people living around them, whether friends or strangers.

Ted Wilson Reviews the World: My Overdue Library Book

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★☆☆☆☆ (1 out of 5)

Late at night when I wake up in a cold sweat, the cause is one of two things; the memory of the time I beheaded a deer with my car and the head came crashing through the windshield and the antlers almost killed me, or my overdue library book.

I know I need to return it, and I’m going to, but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. And the longer it sits there, the more the late fee increases, and the less I want to think about it all. To be honest, it fills me with so much dread I almost want to just move and leave the book behind and let the new owners of the house deal with it.

What had once been a magical portal to imaginary lands is now a brick of angst.

My hope is that if I wait long enough, this will become one of those endearing stories you read in the news where a man returns a library book decades after it was checked out and everyone forgives him.

Until that time comes, my story is one of wearing big hats and sunglasses to the library, speaking in a fake Scandinavian accent, and going by the name Tad Winslow.

Worst of all is thinking of all the people I’ve hurt. Strangers have come to the library, looking for the book that I have, and been denied an opportunity to read it. Who knows how that book may have changed those people’s lives? Instead, they had to read something else, like a book about home improvement, and it’s all my fault.

If you have any connections at the Boston Public Library and can help me in some way — I would love to set things right if I can be offered clemency. I can’t take this anymore.

BEST FEATURE: It was free.
WORST FEATURE: It will end up costing me more than I can ever imagine.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a pudding stain.

TED WILSON REVIEWS THE WORLD: EINSTEIN’S HEART

The Upside of Losing Everything

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The first time I took note of Ariel Levy was when I read her essay “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” which ran in a November, 2013 issue of the New Yorker and would go on to win a National Magazine Award. The essay tells of Levy’s experience losing her unborn baby at 19 weeks, while on assignment in Mongolia. Levy didn’t shy away from describing the terrible details of her rare second-trimester miscarriage; alone in her hotel room on a blood-soaked rug, the lost baby in her arms. I felt sucker-punched by the trauma of it, and also thankful that she’d had the courage to share an experience which women are generally expected to suffer though in silence.

Of course this piece was hardly Levy’s first — she’s been writing for almost two decades, first for New York Magazine and then for the New Yorker, where she has been on staff since 2008. Among other topics, she’s investigated the controversy surrounding the South African runner Caster Semenya and profiled Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the case that brought down the Defense of Marriage Act.

Levy’s recently released memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply (Random House, March), begins by acknowledging what readers of “Thankgiving in Mongolia” learned part of: at 38-years-old, Levy lost everything — her baby, her wife, and her house. But during her young adult life in New York and San Francisco, she was happy, feeling like she’d sucessfully avoided the rules traditionally placed on women in regards to family and career. Throughout the book, Levy reevaluates this assumption, and many others, as she grapples with the haunting power of hindsight.

I had the chance to talk with Levy over email about creating honesty in memoirs, the illusion of control, and why she’ll never stop traveling.

Carrie Mullins: I read, and like so many others was struck by, “Thanksgiving in Mongolia” when it was first published in the New Yorker. As a reader, the way you read a story when you happen upon it in a magazine and have only the information contained within its pages is different than how you approach it when it’s part of a bigger story, and you have more context. For you, as the writer, what were the differences in telling these stories individually versus weaving them together as a memoir? Did the way that you tell them change in any way?

Ariel Levy: “Thanksgiving in Mongolia” was a pretty unique experience for me as a writer — it just came out of my fingers, I really don’t know how else to say it. The Rules Do Not Apply was much more like my usual process: I try things, sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t and I have to cut them, sometimes they work but not in the way or the place I initially intended.

CM: I was reading an interview with a female author recently who said, “Fate is the fundamental engine of narrative, and women are particularly vulnerable to the fake security it promises.” At first I was like, yes, fate, that’s so true! But then I realized that the world I see around me is actually peddling the opposite idea, specifically that women can take control over every aspect of our lives — we have the burden of control. You can go to the gym to become skinny or act and dress a certain way to attract a partner. Or to use an example from your book, “Because I want to believe that if only my loved ones and I refrain from smoking, we’d be ineligible for lung cancer.” I feel like this question of fate versus control permeates your memoir. What are your thoughts?

AL: Well put. I think that on the one hand, it’s very important to make use of the agency and power that generations of women before us have fought for. It is a relatively new phenomenon for women to have the option to decide what kind of career to have, whether we want to marry, whether we want have children, what we want to accomplish in this life. I’m thrilled that we have that freedom, and it was hard-won.

But nobody, really, has control. That applies to men as much as women. I think putting down the “burden of control,” as you so elegantly put it, is the process by which one becomes an adult. I remember my father once told me he never felt as old as he did when he was thirty-five. I had no idea what he meant at the time, but now I get it. As life disabuses you of your illusion of control, you can come to feel free in a certain way that almost reminds me of childhood.

“As life disabuses you of your illusion of control, you can come to feel free in a certain way that almost reminds me of childhood.”

CM: We often say a memoir feels “honest” when an author freely criticizes herself or talks about events that might not cast her in a positive light. Still, I have to say, your memoir feels honest! Did you think about this question of honesty as you were writing? Is easier or harder to be honest about mistakes or accomplishments? It seems like the latter has its own traps.

AL: Ha, thanks. I mean, the whole impetus for writing the book was, to a large extent, grappling with my own culpability in the turn my life had taken — writing my way towards an understanding of what I could and couldn’t control.

Feminism and the Pursuit of Relentless Happiness

CM: Throughout the book, you discuss the idea of interpretation. You see things and decide what they mean — it’s literally your job. At the same time, people are constantly interpreting you and your life, as I’m sure they will continue to do once they read your memoir. Do you try to prepare for this as a writer? How do you deal with the unavoidable double-edged sword of interpretation?

AL: I think it’s kind of none of my business how people interpret my book, my writing in general. I try as hard as I can to say as precisely as possible what it is I mean. That’s really all I can do. The act of reading, of interpreting, is active: we always bring to any text our own experiences and biases and taste — no two people can ever “read” the same book the same way. I guess what I’m saying is that I think reading and writing are reciprocal processes.

CM: Despite being a child who saw the world as unstable, you’ve kept pushing your boundaries, especially with travel. And many of those experiences seem to uphold the idea that the “rules” don’t always apply — whether its successfully chasing the Caster Semenya story with no initial contacts or the value of being in Israel and sitting down with Mike Huckabee of all people. Can you talk a little about that impulse to keep traveling?

AL: I think the way I dealt with fear for a long time was to thrust myself towards it. I didn’t want to be scared. I didn’t want to be the girl who was up all night, afraid of monsters, afraid of the dark. I wanted to be brave and self-reliant and so I tried to put myself in situations that I thought would cultivate — or necessitate — those qualities.

I’d say that the upside of losing so much that mattered to me is that I have considerably less fear now. I’m not trying to hold it all together, everything has already been blown apart. In addition to all the agony that brought, it also gave me a certain feeling of freedom.

“The upside of losing so much that mattered to me is that I have considerably less fear now.”

I still travel a lot, yeah. For one thing I’m in South Africa for several months of the year, because that’s where John, my fiancé is from, so we go to spend time with his sons and our friends there, and we ride horses which I’ve come to really love doing — maybe because when you’re on a horse, you have to admit you’re not in control, you’re along for the ride.

Predicting the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

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Considering how unpredictable the past few months have been, it seems almost unreasonable to even attempt to predict the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. But, at a time when books — and all of our arts, really — are facing such scrutiny, shouldn’t we take every chance we get to talk about and celebrate those things that inspire us and, in so many ways, enrich our lives? I certainly think so.

At a time when books — and all of our arts, really — are facing such scrutiny, shouldn’t we take every chance we get to talk about and celebrate those things that inspire us and enrich our lives?

The Pulitzer Prize, which honors the year’s best fiction by an American writer that deals with some aspect of American life, is the Oscar of the literary world. It’s the rare literary occurrence that garners news attention; it’s the book award that results in real sells. Some Pulitzer winners are household names. William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Junot Diaz are all past winners. But, just like with the Oscars, there are occasional surprises that cause shock and delight. For example, few people (seriously, “few” is extremely generous) predicted in 2010 that Paul Harding would win the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Tinkers. It’s commonly known that Tinkers, published by the small Bellevue Literary Press, sold only around 40 copies the week before it won the Pulitzer. In the week following the announcement, Harding’s novel sold over one thousand copies. For every Tinkers-level surprise, there are also some decisions that aren’t so great. In 2012, the Pulitzer jury nominated David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, but the Pulitzer board couldn’t agree on a winner. So, we were left with nothing. Talk about a bummer.

I don’t think this year will be like 2012. There’s too much at stake. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction seems especially crucial in 2017. Every novel and short story collection that I read felt important, and even more that that, these works of fiction felt urgent. Reading fiction teaches us empathy in ways that nothing else can, and, my friends, we NEED empathy now more than ever.

Reading fiction teaches us empathy in ways that nothing else can, and, my friends, we NEED empathy now more than ever.

In looking over some of the hundreds of worthy works that could be nominated, I’m amazed at the quality of work writers gave us over the past year. There were meticulously-constructed debuts, and there were epic tomes by some of today’s most established and respected authors. Comedies and speculative works received notice alongside family dramas and redemption tales. Most importantly, diversity came to the forefront of the conversation. It’s certainly true that we have a long way to go, but writers in 2016 told stories that couldn’t have been told before. These voices were simultaneously brave and bold. We can only hope that future Pulitzer contenders will enlighten us and inspire us just the same.

Writing, Risk, and Moonshine

I want to take a moment to highlight some of the titles that might be close but will likely wind up just missing the cut for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. These books received a lot of buzz throughout the year, and they arrived with some really glowing reviews. They were the ones that touched on important and timely (and, in many cases, timeless) themes. These titles graced the shelves of bookstores all over the country, and booksellers were selling them with passion. These memorable works include: Ethan Canin’s A Doubter’s Almanac (Random House), Kaitlyn Greenidge’s We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin), Nathan Hill’s The Nix (Knopf), Eowyn Ivey’s To the Bright Edge of the World (Little, Brown and Company), Lee Martin’s Late One Night (Dzanc), C. E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (Scribner), Patrick Ryan’s The Dream Life of Astronauts (The Dial Press), Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow (Viking), and Alexander Weinstein’s Children of the New World (Picador).

Any one of these books would be a perfectly fine finalist — and winner, for that matter, but there are ten additional books with a little more momentum at the moment. And, as with most things, momentum is tough to overcome.

Let’s get to it. In order, here are the ten most likely contenders for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction:

10. Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn (Amistad)

Sure, many readers think of Woodson as a children’s book author. And such a classification isn’t wrong. Her YA memoir in verse, Brown Girl Dreaming, won the National Book Award and was a Newberry Honor winner, too. Jacqueline Woodson isn’t only a children’s book writer; instead, she’s a great writer in general. Another Brooklyn is proof of her talent. It was recently selected as a finalist National Book Award, and reviews have been incredibly generous. If this year’s jury wants to put forth a taut novel about friendship and the struggles of growing up, Jacqueline Woodson could find herself with another award to add to her mantle.

9. Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

I’d love to see a speculative novel or short story collection (I’m thinking of Amber Sparks’ The Unfinished World) win a major literary award. Kelly Link was close last year, and Karen Russell, as I’ve already mentioned, was equally close in 2012. Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot could be the book to do it. It’s true that Mr. Splitfoot hasn’t been on a ton of “best of” lists, but let’s not forget the stellar reviews at publication. This is a book that critics loved. It’s also the kind of book that you can’t easily forget. There are some absolutely terrifying scenes in Hunt’s novel, but there are just as many humorous moments. Mr. Splitfoot shows us what it means to be human and it asks us to consider the boundaries we place upon our families — and our fellow humans. Timely? I say so.

8. Michael Chabon’s Moonglow (Harper)

If Chabon had not already won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for what I consider to be The Great American Novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, he’d be higher on my list. But, hey, it could be his year again. Moonglow has received all kinds of accolades. One of the best predictors of the Pulitzer Prize is the National Book Critics Circle Award. Chabon was a finalist. Moonglow was also a finalist for the ALA Carnegie Medal, which is a big deal. Another thing working in Chabon’s favor is the emotional heft of his book. Moonglow is the kind of book that breaks your heart and then, somehow, makes you smile. It’s also classic Chabon, with sprawling sentences and crackling dialogue. If the jury connected with Moonglow as much as I did, it could definitely be a finalist.

7. Louise Erdrich’s LaRose (Harper)

Erdrich is one of our country’s best writers. In my opinion, she should’ve won the Pulitzer for The Plague of Doves. Now could very well be her time. She just won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, and LaRose was a finalist for the 2017 PEN Faulkner Award. These two citations are good indicators that Erdrich might get that Pulitzer sooner rather than later. It also doesn’t hurt that LaRose is such a moving experience. If the board members are voting with their hearts, LaRose stands a strong chance.

6. Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You (Picador)

There’s no denying that What Belongs to You is one of the best books of the year. Greenwell captures sexual desire so authentically, and his characters are beautifully rendered. This is the kind of book where each sentence clicks. Every aspect feels both lyrical and consuming. Take a look at some of the novel’s honors: PEN Faulkner Award (finalist), National Book Award (longlist), Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction (finalist), and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize (shortlist). It’s among the most acclaimed books of the year for sure. The reason I don’t have it higher on the list is because of the setting, which revolves around Bulgaria. The past two Pulitzer Prize winners — Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See and Viet Thang Nguyen’s The Sympathizer — have taken place abroad. Greenwell’s novel is such a strong contender that the setting might not be an issue, and if it’s not, What Belongs to You is one to keep an eye on.

5. Brad Watson’s Miss Jane (W. W. Norton & Company)

Sometimes you read a book and get a classic-feeling vibe from it. That’s how I felt about Miss Jane. This Mississippi-set story is relatively simple to follow: Miss Jane Chisolm, born with a genital birth defect, struggles to fit into a world that often doesn’t understand differences, especially sexual ones. Watson captures the southern voices that populate his novel so astonishingly well. It’s also such a timely book that asks its readers to consider the boundaries we place on gender. Miss Jane was longlisted for the National Book Award, and most everyone who reads it loves it. I see it as the most likely underdog.

4. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (Knopf)

In a year that gave us a plethora of good debut novels, Homegoing is the best of the bunch. It won the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard First Book Prize, and it’s been on so many “best of” lists that it’d be impossible for me to list them all. Debut novels don’t have the best odds of winning the Pulitzer Prize, but this is one that’s totally worthy. Gyasi’s novel is a slim epic, and, yes, “epic” is fair. Homegoing begins in eighteenth-century Ghana, and it ends in the present day. There are discussions of slavery, family, home, and identity. The book feels important and, yeah, even essential. 2016 was wrong in so many ways. A Pulitzer win for Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing would give us hope — and hope’s what we need right now.

3. Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth (Harper)

Ann Patchett, co-owner of Nashville’s beloved Parnassus Books, released her best novel in 2016. And that’s saying something. Patchett’s established an incredibly impressive resume over the years. Bel Canto, her most celebrated novel, won the Pen Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Commonwealth has racked up its own slew of awards, including being selected as a finalist for this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award. I don’t know if likeability really impacts literary awards, but if it does, Patchett has an advantage. She comes across at her readings as being kind and inviting. She’s the kind of writer people root for. It feels like Patchett should already be a Pulitzer winner. Commonwealth, a lovely novel about family and love, is a worthy and likely contender.

2. Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown and Company)

Adam Haslett’s short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger, which focuses largely on mental illness, was a massive critical success upon its publication. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Haslett’s latest novel, Imagine Me Gone, which also focuses largely on mental illness, is another critical success — maybe more so than You Are Not a Strange. This time, Haslett’s book was longlisted for the National Book Award, and it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Kirkus Prize. Imagine Me Gone might very well be his masterpiece. In most years, I’d say Haslett would be the winner, but there’s this little book that might be tough to beat…

  1. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (Doubleday)

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is the frontrunner. I hate to say it’s unbeatable because it doesn’t deserve a Titanic-like ending, but The Underground Railroad at least seems like it’s unbeatable. Seriously. Oprah gave Whitehead’s novel her seal of approval by selecting it as her latest book club pick several months back, and the book seems just as popular now as it was then. The New York Times, NPR, and the Washington Post gave the book absolute RAVES. It won the National Book Award (I don’t think it even matters that only six books that have won the NBA have gone on to win the Pulitzer — Faulkner’s A Fable, Porter’s The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Malamud’s The Fixer, Updike’s Rabbit is Rich, Walker’s The Color Purple, and Proulx’s The Shipping News). Just last week, it won this year’s Tournament of Books. It’s appeared on what seems like every yearly “best of” list. Whitehead’s a dude who’s received a lot of past awards for his other novels, so he’s overdue for a Pulitzer. The Underground Railroad is so timely — so important and so urgent. Yes, The Underground Railroad is the story of a woman trying to escape slavery and all of its evil, but it’s also about rebuilding. It’s about strength. It’s about how evil exists, but it’s also about how we can overcome it. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad deserves the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

And there you have them. Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone and Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth should be close, but Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is the frontrunner for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Who knows, though? The announcement could come with some surprises. One thing is for sure: 2016 was a wonderful year for the written word.

‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Has a New Ending & Stephen King Has a New TV Show

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Your essential literary news from around the web

VP Joe and Dr. Jill Biden Score Book Deal With Macmillan

Everyone’s favorite man to meme, Vice President Joe Biden, and his wife Dr. Jill Biden, have signed a three-book, non-fiction publishing contract with Macmillan. VP Biden will be writing two of the three books, and it’s been announced that the first one will be centered on his personal and political challenges in 2015, with a particular focus on the devastating loss of his son Beau Biden to brain cancer. There’s no word on what Dr. Biden’s book will cover, but it will surely add more insight into the years of the Obama Administration, along with the forthcoming projects from Barack, Michelle, and Hillary. Hard to tell if these books will add or subtract to the public’s disillusionment, but I imagine it will dredge up a lot of complicated emotions for readers. Like trying to be happy for your ex for moving on, but still harboring intense romantic feelings of longing. Come back, guys. Please? [Politico/ Aidan Quigley]

Stephen and Owen King’s ‘Sleeping Beauties,’ Is Being Adapted for TV Before It’s Even Published

It’s hard to believe that the heart-melting father/son duo in this picture were capable of co-writing the forthcoming horror novel, Sleeping Beauties. Their latest work due out in September is about what would happen if women disappeared from society. In the book, women in a small Appalachian town are overcome by “a cocoon-like gauze” when they fall asleep. While sleeping, their consciousness goes somewhere else, and if they’re disturbed they become wild and volatile (which sounds like most people getting woken up, to be honest). Anyways, there’s one woman, Evie, who is not affected by the epidemic. The story follows her struggle as the men wonder whether her immunity is a medical miracle or a sign of her possible demonic nature. People are already so hyped about this book that Anonymous Content acted early and secured the rights for adapting the novel into a TV series. Anonymous Content has a pretty good track record, too, with True Detective and Mr. Robot to their name. [Bustle/Kristian Wilson]

Woman Finds Rare First Edition of Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ and Cashes In Big Time

An anonymous woman recently bid £14 on a box of books and soon realized that one of those books would warrant an auction of its own. After returning home with her newly purchased haul, she claims she didn’t give much thought to the collection of fairly common titles, but decided to research their value online nonetheless. She was completely floored when she found that a book from the same 1886 first English edition of Crime and Punishment that she had just acquired was sold in the U.S. for $12,000. She contacted auctioneer Chris Albury, who claims, “I nearly fell off my chair when I received a blurry image and a brief description of this book in an email valuation one morning.” It turns out that it is one of less than 10 copies left in existence. The relic went for £13,500 at auction, and the woman plans to use the money for home renovations and maybe even a vacation. [The Guardian/Sian Cain]

PEN America to Present Women’s March with Award for Free Expression Courage

7th West and 34th Street

Amazon Will Open Two Bookstores in NYC

Earlier this year, the online retail behemoth Amazon announced a plan to open a brick-and-mortar bookstore in New York City, at the heart of Columbus Circle. Well, it seems the company has now shifted its offline phase into full gear. Today the company released word of a second planned store, this one on 34th street, right across from the Empire State Building. The store is scheduled to open this summer, during peak tourist season. So, will the store service out-of-towners or find a way into locals’ hearts? [LA Times/Michael Schaub]

The Handmaid’s Tale Audiobook Has Bonus Content

Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handsmaid’s Tale has been enjoying a second coming thanks to the dystopia-like political conditions we’ve been experiencing in Trump’s America. The award-winning audiobook, narrated by Claire Danes, has been available for years, and now it’s been revamped with an afterword from Atwood herself, explaining the inspiration for the book and its relationship to today’s troubling times. The audiobook also features an extended ending. Formerly, the book ended on the haunting lines: “Are there any questions?” Asked by Professor Pieixoto, after she concludes her lecture. Well, in this new version a cacophony of voices shout out questions that all readers have likely wanted to ask themselves. Finally, an essay from Valerie Martin read by Allyson Johnson puts a poignant finish on the project. [The Washington Post/ Katherine A. Powers]

Against Worldbuilding

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Forget plot or characters. Don’t worry about voice or structure. If you believe the internet, there’s nothing more important in fiction than worldbuilding. “Every story requires” worldbuilding, which is “is an essential part of any work of fiction” and “the very essence of any good fantasy or science fiction story.” What once was a term used for a certain strain of second world fantasy fiction has spread across cultural criticism, and is heard in university literature classes and video game reviews in equal measure.

Not long ago I was at a reading for the fantastic short story writer Kelly Link. The first audience question was “How much worldbuilding do you do for each story?” I’ve heard this question asked of many short story writers (myself included) of different genres and styles.

While worldbuilding is an important part of some types of fiction in a couple genres, it’s a largely counterproductive concept for most types of fiction

Worldbuilding vs. Worldconjuring

Worldbuilding is fun until the aliens attack

As a reader, I’m most drawn to writers that invent new realities or tweak our own world into bizarre new shapes. My problem is not with non-realist writing, but in applying the rules of certain types of science fiction and fantasy to all types, and beyond. But what is “worldbuilding”?

Some people will argue, tautologically, that all fiction takes place in a world and thus all fiction worldbuilds. But the way most people use the term is similar to what Chuck Wendig’s definition: “[worldbuilding] covers everything and anything inside that world. Money, clothing, territorial boundaries, tribal customs, building materials, imports and exports, transportation, sex, food, the various types of monkeys people possess, whether the world does or does not contain Satanic ‘twerking’ rites.” Worldbuilding is not merely creating a fictional setting and writing a narrative in it. It is an attempt to flesh out an invented world in way that allegedly feels “real.” In a perfectly executed work of worldbuilding, there would be no gaps in the world for the reader to fill in. Everything from the goblins’ favorite type of baby wipes to the export taxes on Martian ray guns would be worked out (at least in the author’s mind if not on the page). This is not possible, but worldbuilding expects the author to have “rules” that are “logically” followed to their conclusions.

Everything from the goblins’ favorite type of baby wipes to the export taxes on Martian ray guns would be worked out (at least in the author’s mind if not on the page)

In contrast to “worldbuilding,” I’ll offer the term “worldconjuring.” Worldconjuring does not attempt to construct a scale model in the reader’s bedroom. Worldconjuring uses hints and literary magic to create the illusion of a world, with the reader working to fill in the gaps. Worldbuilding imposes, worldconjuring collaborates.

A page from the mysterious Codex Seraphinianus

Let me make a necessarily incomplete analogy to another platform. In painting, worldbuilding is like Renaissance art that attempts to create realistic figures even when they are cherubs, demons, or god. Worldconjuring is a spectrum of other techniques: Matisse implying dancing figures with a few swoops of the brush, Picasso creating a chaos of objects to summon the horrors of Guernica, Magritte shattering our vision with impossible scenes. We should enjoy realistic paintings, but we shouldn’t impose their standards on every school of art.

Worldbuilding is The Silmarillion, worldconjuring is ancient myths and fairy tales. (In fairy tales, we don’t learn the construction techniques of the witch’s gingerbread house or the import/export routes of evil dwarves.) Worldbuilding is a thirty page explanation of the dining customs of beetle-shaped aliens, worldconjuring is Gregor Samsa turning into a beetle in the first sentence without any other fuss.

All stories may need to conjure a world, but only a few benefit from building one.

All stories may need to conjure a world, but only a few benefit from building one.

What Worlds Need Building?

At the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America page, Patricia C. Wrede offers a large list of worldbuilding questions for writers such as “How early do people get up in the morning in the city?” and “What shapes are tables/eating areas (round, oblong, square, rectangular, etc.)?” Wrede doesn’t expect authors to know all these questions, but they give a good idea of the level of detail at which many worldbuilding authors are asked to think.

George R. R. Martin’s Westeros

What kind of fiction needs such details? A prime example might be A Song of Ice and Fire, where the varying religions, political factions, and regional customs are indeed a huge appeal of the books. It’s also no coincidence the series is massive. As we’ve pointed out before, the current five books (of a planned seven) are 12 times as long as One Hundred Years of Solitude, 36 times as long as The Great Gatsby and more than and 80 times as long as The Metamorphosis. As a general rule, the longer we stay in a world, the more worldbuilding might be necessary.

Even in epic fantasy stories, though, it’s questionable how much detailed worldbuilding improves a work. Tolkien is revered among worldbuilding obsessives for going to such lengths as inventing complete languages for his fictional races before even writing the story. Contrast that with George R. R. Martin, who famously describes himself as a “gardener” instead of an “architect,” and who simply makes up some fake words and lets the reader infer the rest. Readers may prefer one series to the other for a variety of reasons, but I doubt one reader in a million prefers The Lord of the Rings because dwarven has more realistic grammar than Dothraki.

And plenty of great fantasy books fall outside of this kind of faux-realistic worldbuilding. Marquez’s brilliant and epic One Hundred Years of Solitude is filled with magical happenings, but the magic exist for metaphorical and poetic effect. One character is constantly followed by yellow butterflies, but there is no explanation for this. There are no “rules” governing who gets butterflies and who doesn’t.

And for all the worldbuilding love that The Lord of the Rings gets, Tolkien’s work would fail the worldbuilding guides I’ve linked to here. He may have set the table for high fantasy, but he doesn’t even pass contemporary fantasy author Brandon Sanderson’s first “law’ of magic. The focus on worldbuilding has moved far beyond simply creating some interesting backstories and complex politics to increase the drama of the tale, to expecting a writer to have mapped out every detail of a world as if they were producing an encyclopedia instead of a story. Would the mythic The Lord of the Rings be improved by more discussion of elvish trade agreements and Mordor dining room etiquette?

Was Star Wars improved by midichlorians and trade negotiations?

A Crazy Fan Theory about Crazy Fan Theories

The problem I see with worldbuilding is that readers have come to expect books to meet a standard that the author can’t possibly (and probably isn’t trying to) meet. When I’ve taught fiction classes, I’ve often seen that when students encounter a book outside of the modes of actual realism or faux worldbuilding realism, they don’t know how to evaluate it. They believe that a different way of seeing reality aren’t invitations to see reality in a new way yourself, but simply failures of worldbuilding.

(As an aside, it isn’t a coincidence that the celebrated SFF “worldbuilders” are Western writers, typically white, while imaginative writers from so many other cultures get lazily lumped together as “magical realism.” Worldbuilding insists on a certain concept of supposedly logical “realism” that pretends it is the only way to see the world.)

lazy ass eagles

At the same time, fans of worldbuilding works focus not on the arc of the story, the struggles of the characters, or the aesthetic power of the fiction. They focus on the inevitable moments when worldbuilding breaks down. My least favorite example of this is the “crazy fan theory.” These normally begin on a site like Reddit, then spread like Kudzu across the internet. Why didn’t the giant eagles simply fly Frodo to Mount Doom? Well, it would be a really boring story if they did! That doesn’t satisfy fans, who instead create fan theories that “explain” and “fix” and “change the way we see” famous works like The Lord of the Rings. (These crazy fan theories exist for basically every popular book or movie that has ever been produced.)

The urge to “fix” or “explain” art is one we should always be suspect of.

“Bad Worldbuilding” Is Just Bad Writing

None of this is to say that there aren’t many stories that are poorly written. That are set in dull worlds with corny characters and unoriginal plots. But are these problems truly one of worldbuilding? Take Charlie Jane Anders’s often-referenced “7 Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding.” Anders is a great writer and a smart critic, and I agree with the substance of almost everything she says. One dimensional alien/fantasy cultures are lazy and lead to bad fiction. Stories need a sense of why the events are happening now and not some other day. Anders’s advice is solid.

But do we need “worldbuilding” as a concept to explain why moral simplicity, characterization without nuance, or a lack of a tactile sense-of-place can be a problem? A work of fiction set in 2017 will also be bad if the characters lack nuance, the political messages are heavy-handed, and the story is wrapped up in an overly-logical bow. Good writing is complex and ambiguous, not simplistic and heavy-handed.

But do we need “worldbuilding” as a concept to explain why moral simplicity, characterization without nuance, or a lack of a tactile sense-of-place can be a problem?

At the same time, the appeal to “realistic” portrayal of alien or magical beings doesn’t have anything to do with realism. Magical creatures don’t exist! If aliens exist, we don’t know what they are like yet! Human history doesn’t illuminate the history of fictional creatures. It’s quite possible that an alien race might have a monoculture, and the creatures of actual mythology and folklore were often portrayed simplistically. The call to make make such races more complex is not to make them more “true” to the reality of dragons, Martians, or giant eagles. It is a call to make them more human, and thus more interesting to human readers.

Fairy tales were very unfair to creepy dwarf culture

Storybuilding Vs. Worldbuilding

Ultimately, the logic of worldbuilding always succumbs to the more important logic of storytelling. George R. R. Martin liked the idea of a planet that goes through decades-long winters, but he also wanted it to seem like medieval Europe with similar wildlife and political structures that would, in “reality,” not survive decades of winter. What matters in a story is the story, and what serves the story is useful. The Machiavellian political struggles of Westeros are the story of ASOIAF, and so the complex politics of the region matter where the grammar of Dothraki or the breeding habits of Westeros mammals do not. The mythic sense of civilizations passing is part of The Lord of the Rings, so the history of the races and kingdoms matters even if their biological plausibility doesn’t. Harry Potter’s class might be a fraction of the size it should be, but the small cast of characters works better for the story that Rowling wants to tell.

It isn’t a world that a writer is creating, it is a story. The goal of the writer is not to clutter the path with every object they can think of, but to clear the way for the reader’s journey.

The World of Fiction Beyond Worldbuilding

The main reason I think worldbuilding has become a problem is that it leads people to believe that “realism” is the primary point of fiction, even fantasy fiction. But representing reality — whether “real” reality or a fictional one — is simply one way of telling a story, just one house in the city of fiction. Surrealists, magical realists, post-modernists, and countless other movements or styles create fantastic worlds that function on other levels — mythic, philosophical, Freudian, etc. — that are at odds with this idea of worldbuilding.

Representing reality — whether “real” reality or a fictional one — is simply one way of telling a story, just one house in the city of fiction.

One of my favorite novels is The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe. It’s about a man who misses his bus while looking at insects at the beach, then gets tricked into living in a village where each house lies in a big hole in the sand. The villagers spend their days on the Sisyphean task of shoveling sand to avoid being buried alive. The book is amazing, thought-provoking, and bizarre. And it could only be ruined by worldbuilding (how could such a village survive in modern Japan without being discovered? Wouldn’t sand actually just collapse on all of them?) You have to accept it on its own terms.

#ThatDuneLife

Julio Cortazar is not failing at worldbuilding by not describing the tax rate of vomitted rabbits, nor is Ray Bradbury violating the rules of SF by having the implausible buildings on Mars. They are simply doing something different.

The reader who expects worldbuilding is frequently the reader who expects fiction to have “answers.” The one who wants all mysteries to be solved, all stories to have “a point,” and all ambiguity to be swept under the rug. Worldbuilding may expand a world, but the concept is narrowing the paths available to writers and to readers.

UPDATE: I’ve published a follow-up article that addresses some of the questions and critiques in the comments here. If you want to argue more about goblins and aliens, give it a click!

More Thoughts about Worldbuilding and Food

On Grieving and What Comes Next

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A telephone psychic told Elvis Babbitt, the 12-year-old narrator of Annie Hartnett’s debut novel Rabbit Cake, that she couldn’t be sure whether or not Elvis’s mom killed herself on purpose. She drowned while sleep-swimming, and that is all they can know. Intent would not materialize. It’s a tough lesson for a child to learn: Sometimes the most important questions are the ones least likely to be answered.

Over the course of Rabbit Cake, Elvis has a lot of questions that are not answered. When she is ten, her mother goes missing and is found, two months later, caught in a dam across state lines in Georgia, twelve miles from their hometown of Freedom, Alabama. Everyone in their family copes in different ways. Their dad begins wear their mom’s lipstick. Lizzie, her teenage older sister, lashes out at her friends and begins eating in her sleep. Elvis tries to take care of them.

The title itself comes cakes shaped like rabbits that Elvis’s mom would make on many special occasions. And they eventually turn into a coping mechanism, too, when Lizzie attempts to set the Guinness World Record for Most Rabbit Cakes Baked.

It is fitting that even the book’s title refers to a coping mechanism, as the novel’s focus is on the way these characters grieve and cope. Hartnett evokes this powerfully. She understands that one of the most difficult parts of the process is continuing to have the power to handle the daily obstacles required to keep oneself and those one cares about safe and healthy.

That is not, of course, how Elvis digests things. Hartnett tightrope walks over the gulf between what her character understands and what her audience will with remarkable dexterity. When Elvis is staying up late in order to supervise her sister in case she sleepwalks into the kitchen, it is clear both how necessary it seems to Elvis and how destructive it is in the long run. And she sometimes doesn’t have access to quite how troubling some of what she sees is.

She relays the information plainly and clearly.

“I found my sister drinking milk straight out of the carton. The milk had gone sour…I tried to take the milk carton from her but she wouldn’t loosen her grip. Some of the curdled milk splashed onto the floor, and not even [the dog] would lick it up.”

This is a tough image to handle. There is a youthful innocence woven into the fabric of language that cuts deeper. She is aware that her sister may get very sick from what she is doing, but the concerns are so factual, almost plain. She knows what food poisoning is but does not seem to know how bad it can be.

Outside of the Babbitt’s home, Freedom is a rich world. Some of the book’s most vibrant sections take place in the local zoo, where Elvis volunteers. There too the violent and scarring is often immediately juxtaposed with the endearing. In the beginning one chapter, she is describing the black bears at the zoo.

“Nacho and Yoyo had been raised as circus bears. We tried to treat them as wild animals now and never went into their enclosure when they weren’t locked in their sleeping cages. [A zoo employee] told me that sometimes you could catch Yoyo doing her dance routine, standing on her hind legs and rotating in a circle. Yoyo the Ballerina Bear had been her stage name. She’d been kept chained up when she wasn’t performing.”

Again, Elvis’s reportorial style of narration relays heartbreaking information to the reader without much fanfare, which only makes it hurt worse. Elvis is not given the luxury of staying naïve to the underbelly and neither is the reader.

The book’s limitations, sometimes, also spring from Elvis’s perspective. This comes through most obviously within the context of Lizzie’s and her father’s relationships. There is only so much a character can know about what another person won’t share with them, and her youth is a secondary limiting factor. It makes perfect sense, in that if Elvis did understand more about Lizzie’s relationship with her best friend it would be difficult to believe. But that does not make the lack of insight easier to swallow for the reader.

The book’s loose structure is provided by a grieving chart that a counselor at Elvis’s elementary school gives her. The counselor says it will take 18 months to complete the process and gives Elvis a two-month buffer to account for the space between when her mother went missing and when she was found. Elvis is a science-driven kid, and a structure like that makes sense to her. Eighteen months is a long time, but it is not the longest. It insists upon the existence of an unseen track, and it insists that at some point, the track will end.

In other words, it provides hope that there might be hope. In the face of all the bad that comes her way, the chart is always there to reassure her that, sometime in the future, she will feel better.

An end will come. For better or worse, an end will come.

Coming of Age at Harvard and in Hungary

Taking a Story Somewhere Dangerous

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In her collection Wait Till You See Me Dance, Deb Olin Unferth deals in turns of phrase and turns of luck. There are dips into wells and lifts over dunes, and the step-ball-change of shifting intentions. A shooter describes a family on a beach dodging bullets as “Keatonesque.” In the story, “Draft,” a description of the scraps of an incomplete story quickly sprints from “shifting dots of sunshine on the floor” to “botched, bloody murder.” It is a limber collection with the dexterity and precision to launch in most any direction. If Unferth’s book is a dance floor, it is a dance floor unmoored, the dancers in constant and immediate danger.

Perhaps the greatest peril here is that of love, both in its presence and absence, the way it can appear and disappear, conjured and then obliterated. “Who can explain the recession of love?” asks one of Unferth’s narrators. “Love’s sneaky decline?” In her story “The Magicians,” Unferth writes about Houdini’s “elephant room”: a room too small to fit an elephant, and yet, of course, it populates itself with an imagined elephant the minute the listener hears the story. She writes, “by calling it the elephant room he had made me imagine the elephant in that room…It became the elephant room by magic.” Unferth’s stories engage in this sort of sorcery, populating rooms with love even if love is crushing, is absurd, is too large to fit through the door.

Hilary Leichter: The story “Your Character” is such an amazing meditation on the randomness and brutality of creation, the way a character’s fate can spring from a simple turn of phrase. And maybe the way a real, human life can also spring from an arbitrary series of sentences smushed together. Why did you choose to put the story in the second person? I wondered at who might be speaking, and whom they might be addressing.

Deb Olin Unferth: I’ll tell you how that story came about. I was working on a novel, and getting insanely frustrated, so I typed into a google search “how to write a novel,” which seemed the best way to go about it in the moment. I read around on a bunch of different websites, mostly about how to write horror and fantasy, and then I stumbled on a novel-writing forum, which seemed to have thousands of people contributing (is this inspiring? I’m not sure). One thread, under the “plot” category went something like, “What to do with your character if you’re stuck.” And there were hundreds of responses, pages and pages of them, a string of sentences, each beginning with “Your character,” such as “Your character is hanging by a piece of yarn over a fire.” Very similar to the ones in the story. I loved it and began hearing the story in my head before I’d even left the thread. I wrote it all out very fast, modeling mine after the ones in the thread and even just taking some more or less word for word, and then I spent a long time arranging them so that I felt the story had its own little arc — such as you come upon a series of sentences about water, or a series about sleeping, or a series about the love interest, and so on.

A Story of a Murderous Adjunct by Deb Olin Unferth

HL: The stories in your collection range from a paragraph to many pages long, and yet even the tiniest of the bunch feels complete, a perfect morsel. How do you know when a story is done?

DOU: Yes, the shorts — like “Your Character” — I tend to see whole before my eyes before I write them, or as I’m drafting them. Many in the collection are like that: me hearing something in my mind and getting it down. The longer pieces are different and take immense plotting and developing. I often think a story is done long before it is, or a story is done and yet it sits in a corner for years, mostly forgotten. I don’t have a good system.

HL: When you set out to writing, do you have a sense whether a story is destined to be closer to flash fiction, or something longer?

DOU: Yes, I usually know. Sometimes I try to squeeze one into another — grow out a short piece or squash a long piece and it rarely works.

HL: In “Granted,” we see two historians struggling to spend the grant they received to travel to an unnamed country. They must spend it all, and can’t seem to spend enough on anything. I love the way this piece unravels around the title and the premise, until it ends up somewhere extreme and surreal. A similar thing happens with the story “Likable,” in which variations on the word in the title are almost weaponized so that we might end up at the final sentence, a gasp-worthy moment. What is the seed for these kinds of stories? Do they start with the title, with their exuberant conclusions, or somewhere else completely?

DOU: “Weaponized,” I like that. The repetition I like the most in prose is perhaps Steinian, or maybe that’s just how I think about it. My thinking is: each time I come upon a repetition of a word or a phrase my experience of it should be different. The meaning of it should shift so that each time I see it, the word surprises me with its newness. By the time I reach the end, I want the word to have come to have many meanings, many connotations, and to produce many emotions.

“Each time I come upon a repetition of a word or a phrase my experience of it should be different.”

I studied philosophy as an undergraduate and now I live with a philosopher. Definitions are the lifeblood of philosophy. What would philosophers do if they didn’t have anything to define or if they weren’t considering different shades of meaning? They’d have to take down their shingle.

HL: I first encountered your prose while working on NOON with Diane Williams. Can you talk a little bit about how NOON has influenced your writing?

DOU: I talked at length about how I met Diane Williams and how essential she was to my becoming a writer here, and every word of it is still true. I would add to it that I have watched her discover a new generation of writers in recent years. Her touch is perfect. No one knows the sentence better than she, no one can track sound across a page or hear the off-note in a line like she can. I simply and baldly love her without reservation.

HL: Many of your stories here feature teachers and students, and the complicated ways those relationships can unfold. There’s this great line in the title story of the collection: “I was what is called an adjunct: a thing attached to another thing in a dependent or subordinate position.” Can you speak a little bit about how your own experiences as a teacher have influenced your writing?

DOU: I once had a book called What Color Is Your Parachute that is supposed to help you figure out what you should do to support yourself without wanting to kill yourself. They help you determine your best money-making match by having you do a series of convoluted exercises and filling out huge numbers of charts and making bigger and bigger charts. So I did it all, I had charts taped together all over my floor (yes, on paper), and at the end of all of it — and it took weeks — the book declared very simply that I should be a teacher. And that was exactly right. I love being a teacher! In fact summer gets to be a little hard on me psychologically with no teaching.

But some of the worst days of my life have been spent teaching. By that I mean, the most depressing periods in my life, I was usually in the middle of a semester and had to turn up and turn it on and bring it on with a smile. I remember crying in the bathroom many times when I was an adjunct. I remember students coming in and seeing me blowing my nose and wiping my tears. Being an adjunct is the worst. I channel some of that into my stories.

HL: In your story ‘Voltaire Night,” the teacher and students in a writing class take one night of the semester to share the worst thing that has happened to them: in the past week, month, in their entire lives. I want to do reverse Voltaire Night with you. What’s the best thing that happened to you this week?

DOU: That’s easy. In addition to being a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, I run a prison creative writing certificate program at a prison in southern Texas. One of my students made my husband and me wooden boxes — a jewelry box for me and a “manbox” for him, where he can toss his keys and change when he comes in the door. I have never been more touched by a gift.

Yeah, you can’t get away with Voltaire Night anymore. No one wants to talk about the bad things that happened. I’ve noticed this. It’s always “most embarrassing moment” or “most looking forward to,” etc. I tried last semester to get my students to tell stories about the worst thing that had happened to them and they looked at me like I was deranged.

PEN America to Present Women’s March with Award for Free Expression Courage

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Bob Bland has been asked to accept the award for the March

Women’s March via Flickr

This year’s PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award will honor the Women’s March, according to a statement released today by PEN America. The award, which honors “exceptional acts of courage” in demonstrating freedom of expression, will be presented at PEN’s annual gala on April 25th. Bob Bland has been asked to accept the award on behalf of the Women’s March.

On January 21st, 2017, women of all ages and their allies, donning pink pussy hats and carrying homemade signs, turned out on an unprecedented scale. 673 marches were organized, bringing together an estimated five million people on all seven continents. The rallies were entirely peaceful, with not a single arrest made. Speakers at the Washington protest, including Gloria Steinem and Senator Kamala Harris, underscored the March’s mission statement, which reads:

“The Women’s March on Washington will send a bold message to our new government on their first day in office, and to the world that women’s rights are human rights.”

The PEN award recognizes that the March embodied more than a protest against President Trump, becoming a show of support for diversity, women’s healthcare reform, LGBTQ, religious, reproductive rights and other issues.

PEN America’s press release quotes its executive director, Suzanne Nossel:

“The Women’s March began as a quixotic idea shared with friends on Facebook. In the hands of 99.9% of people, it would have ended there, as a pipe dream. But Bob Bland and the group of women who joined her forged a powerful, diverse coalition that worked with immense drive to win over skeptics and build the support of an extraordinarily broad coalition of which PEN America became part.”

PEN America has told Electric Lit that Bland alone has been invited to accept the award on behalf of the March, but that it hopes other organizers will be able to attend the ceremony. Bland is the Brooklyn-based fashion designer who, the night after the election, went on Facebook to suggest a women’s protest. Her efforts were combined with Teresa Shook, a woman based in Hawaii who created a Facebook page for a rally that quickly garnered over ten thousand RSVPs. Shook’s event was originally called “The Million Woman March,” which prompted criticism of her and Bland’s efforts and the absence of women-of-color in the planning process. Three nonwhite women with substantial organizing experience — Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, and Carmen Perez — were asked to join the protest as co-national chairs, alongside Bland.

2017 marks the third year the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award will be handed out. The award incited controversy in its inaugural year by honoring the satirical French newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, after the deadly attack on the magazine’s Paris office. Some PEN authors, including Michael Ondaatje and Francine Prose, pulled out of the gala because of the paper’s history of offending various religious groups in France, particularly the Muslim community. The 2016 award went to Lee-Anne Walters and Dr. Hanna-Attisha, the pair who exposed the lead poisoning water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

34 Books by Women of Color to Read This Year

INFOGRAPHIC: The 20 Most Popular Books Throughout History

Posted on by 007595

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!

Neruda & Paterson: Notes on the Contemporary Poetic Film