There’s a point in Searching for John Hughes when Jason Diamond decides to stop searching. He sits in a diner inside an old barn, in a tiny town in northeastern Pennsylvania, with a runny omelet and a breaking resolve. He’s looking for Michael Schoeffling, the actor who played Jake Ryan in Sixteen Candles. Shades of Jake Ryan come up a lot in the book: Diamond thinks he’s “suburban perfection” and generally represents the kind of tall, tanned, perfect-haired guy that Diamond never was in high school. But the actor, Michael Schoeffling, receded from Hollywood after Sixteen Candles, moving to a sleepy town to build furniture and, presumably, not talk to anyone about John Hughes.
The book opens in the inverse: Diamond has fled Chicago for New York, where he wants to call himself a writer. He works as a line monitor (or cupcake bouncer) at Magnolia Bakery in the West Village, and takes solace in the fact that no matter the state of his career, at least he’s made it to New York. He’s safe here from what tormented him in the suburbs of Chicago — until a Jake Ryan figure from high school comes into Magnolia that night and finds him. In this scene, it’s viewed as invasive — the reader wants to think, ridiculously, shouldn’t New York be a city for artists fleeing suburbia, not those who thrived in it? — and leaves Diamond feeling exposed. At the diner in Pennsylvania, he seems to have just realized that he has switched roles: now he is the one invading upon Jake Ryan’s life.
Diamond became obsessed with the films of John Hughes early on, subscribing to the gospel that his films conveyed the truth of adolescence:
“I expected some heartbreak and bad moments here and there, but I truly believed adolescence was going to be this magical time where everybody looked good. I thought turning thirteen was when my life would start to look like a John Hughes film.”
Even though it’s untrue in his case, Diamond still holds them up as a vision of what high school should be like. After a rough childhood with stints of being homeless, he makes his way to New York, holding down a series of menial jobs and trying to figure out how to become a writer. One night he’s out to dinner with another Jake Ryan figure from his childhood, a very genuine but annoyingly perfect guy named Reid, and impulsively tells him, “I’m writing the unauthorized biography of John Hughes.” After he says it out loud he thinks, that could work. In zippy, relatable prose, full of fervently realized memories and antics straight out of a rom-com, Diamond details the next five years as he attempts to write, perfects his latte art, and tries obsessively to find John Hughes.
The book gives equal attention to Diamond’s twenty-something plight of scattered biography-writing, and his troubled past in Chicago, where most John Hughes movies are set. We can see why he’d want to withdraw into the world of John Hughes, a universe of happy last scenes and golden homes: after his parents divorced, he was shuttled between his mom and his dad, his dad physically abusing him until his mother won sole custody, his mother eventually abandoning him, leaving him to shuffle between friend’s houses and all-night diners, off his medication and very alone. When he is taken in by a family as close to perfection as he can see, he’s eventually kicked out after he falsely takes responsibility for impregnating their daughter.
His family life leaves much to be desired, and the actual events are fairly horrifying: so it’s a wonder that Searching for John Hughes doesn’t read as horrifying. Even as he details suppressing the pain from the bruised kidney his father gave him, the way he would drink endless cups of coffee so he could stay in a diner all night without nodding off, the day that his mother tells him that she’s moving to South Carolina without him, it doesn’t feel maudlin or melodramatic — perhaps because in those moments, he’s actively receding into his fantasy world, and he allows the reader to, also. After being kicked out of his father’s car and made to walk home, Jason doesn’t wallow in his pain or the fact that his father is both abusive and absent, but instead looks up at the streets and trees surrounding him in the Chicago suburbs, connecting them to the suburban idyll of John Hughes movies. After his mother leaves for South Carolina, he spends one last morning in his house, looking up at his bedroom walls, thinking almost optimistically of how things will turn out now that he’s on his own:
“It would be an adventure,” he thinks, “like…Macauley Culkin in Home Alone.”
It’s as if he knew to protect himself from their disappointments by reframing the situations immediately.
One of the most devastating moments, one that comes without warning, is when he sits around a solid oak dinner table with family that took him in, after taking responsibility for the daughter’s pregnancy. “Their house was what I’d imagined Jake Ryan’s home looked like when his classmates weren’t trashing it during a party,” he says earlier. As he’s being lectured by the father about the pregnancy, he twists the ends of his frayed corduroy shorts around his finger, looking down and nodding. It’s telling that one of his most potent sorrows comes at the hands of another family. It’s not that this slight is at all worse than the ones at the hands of his mother and father, but it’s almost more of a betrayal because it comes from a picture-perfect family — one that could’ve been painted by his idol. After being given a chance to enter one of his fantasy families, that too became tarnished. It’s another hole poked into the John Hughes formula he so revered, one held up a lot of the time by stereotypes.
Tropes are important in Searching for John Hughes, as they are in his films. The Breakfast Club is about finding and dissembling stereotypes: the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess and the criminal. The famous last lines are, “What we found out is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, and a princess, and a criminal.” Sixteen Candles ends with the outcast getting the athlete, and the prom queen smiling at the nerd. John Hughes worked hard to mash together tropes, showing that they weren’t what they seemed. But this is a lesson it takes Diamond a long time to learn, as he casts himself as the weirdo, or the basket case, and continues to resent the Jake Ryans long after high school.
Titling himself as a weirdo, or basket case, or skater provides him with a set identity: carrying his skateboard everywhere gives him a certain kind of shield, even if it’s mostly under his arm. His other armor is the world of John Hughes movies, his nascent writing career, his goal to write the biography (said out loud more than acted upon). Rather than taking solace in a home life, he found comfort in those movies that he knows so well; rather than seeing his family at Thanksgiving, he’d watch Planes, Trains, and Automobiles every year. He buried himself in the myth of the director who has created much of what he loved and when he finally lets go of his obsessions, it’s because he no longer needs their protection.
Trying to find the secrets of the man who got him through his adolescence gives him a meaning and a mission, and even if his end goal changed, it gave him something to drive him through those years and find out that there is life after high school, the fictional version and the real one.
We were five minutes into the first episode of Jessica Jones when my husband asked me if I was going to be okay. It was right about when Jessica watches Luke Cage from a fire escape. While that scene isn’t especially triggering, it was still a valid question. As early as it was in the show, it was already pretty clear that Jessica Jones has PTSD, which, coincidentally, I had just been diagnosed with. More to the point, Jessica Jones is mad.
“You look angry. Are you okay?”
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that from lovers, partners, friends, my parents, strangers on the street…. And yet, no matter how many times I heard it, the question always surprised me.
“I’m not mad. I’m fine.”
Denial. Reassurance. Always aimed at the questioner, though the real target was me. I had to be fine. I couldn’t not be fine, and I certainly couldn’t be mad for no apparent reason. If I were to contemplate how angry I actually was, I would have to acknowledge why, and that was something I spent the better part of my life trying to avoid.
If I were to contemplate how angry I actually was, I would have to acknowledge why, and that was something I spent the better part of my life trying to avoid.
I was molested when I was four. Molested. I hate that word. It’s ugly. It’s confrontational. It’s blunt. It’s uncomfortable. It’s also true, which is why I’ve left it in. It would be much easier for me say that I was abused. Abused is comfortingly vague. It implies terrible things without going into details. Molested, by comparison, is specific and precise. It gets up in your face, which makes it far more germane, in this case, than abused.
The revulsion I feel for that word is a microcosmic slice of the anger people have always asked me about. The anatomy of that anger is both complicated and specific. It’s an anger that was never just anger, but a humiliating mixture of anger and shame (another word I hate). This very specific anger hardwired my brain when I was so young that it became a permanent part of my emotional landscape, which made burying it so easy that I didn’t know I’d done it. It’s like the difference between climate and weather. Anger was my climate while sadness, happiness, worry and the rest passed through like sunshine and storms. Compared to the consistency of climate, weather is conveniently distracting, so I ignored my anger for decades, until a series of realizations forced my perspective to shift.
Anger was my climate while sadness, happiness, worry and the rest passed through like sunshine and storms.
These realizations were subtle and seemingly unconnected to the molestation. Social injustice, dystopias and stories of wrongful imprisonment made me physically ill. But while they don’t have anything obvious in common, they all explore aspects of the same thing — powerlessness in the face of emotional, social or institutional violence. While not the most obvious trigger, powerlessness underpins the trauma I experienced as a child, as well as the anger that grew out of it. Now, in hindsight, it makes intuitive sense, but no matter how many times I was triggered, it would be years before I could face it. I became an expert at denial, helped, in large part, by the fact that I looked nothing like trauma victims in pop culture and TV.
When I was growing up in the eighties and nineties, characters with PTSD weren’t what you’d call well developed. They were more like paper dolls than people — two-dimensional figures that furthered a plot, usually through addiction and flashbacks. I’m not a veteran, I’ve never had flashbacks and I’m lucky enough not to struggle with addiction. In short, I don’t fit the stereotype, so it was easy to dismiss trauma as the cause of my issues — hyper-vigilance, panic, depression, disassociation, and, yes, a big, black ball of anger.
I don’t fit the stereotype, so it was easy to dismiss trauma as the cause of my issues — hyper-vigilance, panic, depression, disassociation, and, yes, a big, black ball of anger.
The denial I kept myself in was a critical, if self-defeating, survival skill. Deep down, I knew something was wrong, but every time I failed to look like a rape survivor on Law & Order, I breathed a sigh of relief. According to that reassuringly broad diagnostic I had nothing to worry about. I couldn’t be traumatized. I was just being dramatic. I had nothing to compare myself to, which is why Jessica Jones resonated when nothing else had.
Specificity is critical when you’re dealing with real life trauma, and equally important in fiction. Two people could experience the same abuse at the same hand, and suffer vastly different effects. Flight vs. fight. Avoidance vs. confrontation. Anger vs. despair. Temperament and background determine posttraumatic stress as much as the trauma itself. That’s why stereotypes don’t work. It’s personal and deeply specific. Marvel’s Jessica Jones is a revolution of specificity. Not only does it feature complicated characters dealing (or failing to deal) with posttraumatic stress in multiple forms, it does so, somewhat ironically, by mining one of trauma’s few universal components — powerlessness in the face of a threat.
That’s why stereotypes don’t work. It’s personal and deeply specific. Marvel’s Jessica Jones is a revolution of specificity.
Whether it’s an abusive relationship or a landmine, the emotional hook in most traumas is the fact that something bad happens and you’re powerless to stop it. It’s a visceral, sickening, inescapable shot of cosmic vulnerability, which, for most people, is profoundly upsetting. While everyone responds differently in the aftermath, survival isn’t something the victim can control, and that loss of control is disturbing. It turns violence into trauma. It’s why Kilgrave, the villain in the first season of Jessica Jones, is so brilliant.
Kilgrave is a sociopath with the superhuman ability to control the wills of others, which basically makes him the personification of psychological trauma. If Kilgrave tells you to put your hand in a blender you do it — he overrides your ability not to. He could make you kill someone, or put a bullet in your head. He could turn you into a druggie, or his personal slave. He could tell you to smile, or eat this, or wear that. He could tell you to love him, and you would.
Kilgrave commandeers his victims by bending them to his will, which makes the damage he causes while pursuing Jessica Jones amazingly varied and widespread. He’s the uniting factor in every single bad thing that happens on the show, but rather than gloss over his psychological effect, (as many shows have done), the loss of control his victims endure highlights the individuality of each character’s response. Some seek revenge, while others try to heal. Still others buckle under the weight of Kilgrave’s manipulation. Everyone comes away from the same baseline experience, but the portrayal of each character’s reaction in the aftermath is painful and realistically personal.
Kilgrave is a sociopath with the superhuman ability to control the wills of others, which basically makes him the personification of psychological trauma.
Into this lands Jessica Jones, a sardonic underachiever who survived the death of her family as a teen. When Kilgrave develops a fascination with her superhuman strength, he overrides her will, gas-lights her and systematically rapes her. When she finally escapes, she is the Jessica Jones of the show — cold, traumatized and profoundly angry. Twenty years ago, her backstory would have been used to explain her drinking and her spectacular issues with intimacy. It would not have driven the plot of the entire first season. It’s a lot to ask of a traumatic event, but the show pulls it off, not because Jessica Jones is angry, but because she’s angry in complicated ways.
There is nothing generic about the feelings this character struggles with. She’s callous and hostile, but she also has a moral imperative; she isolates herself while working a job that forces social contact; she barely sleeps and she drinks a lot, but she also recites street names during panic attacks. She feels tremendous responsibility for the things she did while under Kilgrave’s control but rather than paralyze her, guilt fuels her to positive action. Like all of Kilgrave’s victims, she’s a fully rounded person who experienced the fundamental violation of her will. The difference with Jessica is that, as the show’s protagonist, her trauma contextualizes everyone else’s experience, underscoring the specificity of posttraumatic response.
Jessica Jones is paranoid, angry and disassociated, but she’s also violently engaged in life. She never denies her trauma, nor does she use it as an excuse.
Jessica Jones is paranoid, angry and disassociated, but she’s also violently engaged in life. She never denies her trauma, nor does she use it as an excuse. She goes on the offensive and attacks its source until it no longer exists. It’s the ultimate survivor’s fantasy — take back the power you lost by destroying the thing that took it away. It’s a powerful message delivered without compromise or apology over the course of an entire season. Given my background, Kilgrave’s brand of evil should have triggered me in a million different ways, but Jones’s grim defiance neutralized the effect of what should have been a minefield. That’s why, when my husband asked me if I was going to be okay, I honestly said yes.
Anger is not an attractive emotion. As social creatures we’re conditioned to deny unattractive emotions, but Jessica Jones does not. She allows her anger to fuel her — not always a sympathetic choice. That’s a rare thing in a protagonist, especially a woman. Just as I hate the word “molested” and avoided it for years, I avoided my anger for similar reasons — it’s uncomfortable and ugly. It’s less than sympathetic. It’s also a natural response to trauma and, as negative as it seems, it can have positive effects. Watching Jessica Jones harness her anger (to both good and ill effect) felt like witnessing a sea change, not just in how women are portrayed on screen, but in how popular media engages posttraumatic stress.
Jessica Jones allows her anger to fuel her — not always a sympathetic choice. That’s a rare thing in a protagonist, especially a woman.
I will never hunt down my Kilgrave. That person is long gone, and even if I could, the damage has been done. I know what it is to be powerless. I know how it feels to be angry when your life is basically good. I know the grind of trying to live with those feelings, and the self-imposed strain of protecting people from them. Watching Jessica Jones didn’t validate those feelings (I had to do for myself), but it did do something important. It mirrored the anger — the very specific anger — people had always seen on my face. Once I’d seen it, I had to acknowledge it. Once I had acknowledged it, I was free to move on from there.
Saori put off the visit for nearly a year. It was just a rash, she thought. Plus, she was spending all her waking hours and not a little dream time dealing with Andrew’s minor indiscretion, his temporary lapse of judgment, whatever other clichés he used.
What did start out as a rash on her right shoulder soon became itchy bumps that she scratched open. These crept across the base of her neck and down the shoulder blade and, without scabbing, swelled until even the old shirt Andrew left behind set the skin alight. Saori wasn’t too vain to dig into the broken flesh for relief, but she didn’t look forward to flashing the results at the doctor.
Saori was surprised to hear that Dr. Norman was only forty. He reminded her of the bundle of green onions growing dry and limp in her fridge, though there was an incongruously fresh scent about him that the onions lacked. She was relieved he took her on, though he made it clear the troupe of medical students would be ever-present. They were watching as his pale face and dust-coloured hair stretched over her bent, bare back.
Eczema, he said.
“Isn’t that a childhood thing? Something people grow out of?” Saori asked.
“It’s not uncommon among adults,” said Dr. Norman. “You will have to speak up a little, so we can hear you better.” He nodded in the direction of the students.
Andrew was always asking Saori to speak up. She couldn’t recall if she noticed when the novelty wore off for him, when he stopped leaning in close to hear her better and teasing her for covering her face when she laughed.
“I have something here,” Dr. Norman said, “A new compound, very effective. Expensive, too, but I can let you try it for free.” Grey foam gathered at the corners of his mouth as he spoke. The med students continued to stare, whether to mimic the doctor’s expression or because they didn’t find eczema all that exciting, Saori wasn’t sure.
She left with a small jar and orders to return in three weeks. On the bus, she unscrewed the lid. The ointment looked like yellowing plastic and smelt of citrus. Perhaps Dr. Norman had eczema as well. He didn’t seem like the type to make small talk in front of his students. The bus slowed at the next stop, where a row of faces blurred as they passed Saori’s window. Saori thought of the faces in the examination room and grew dizzy. She closed her eyes.
That night, she slept without clawing herself awake for the first time in months. Her dream was scented by limes.
The itching disappeared. The bumps continued to grow, but they became smooth and only stung when touched. Dr. Norman said little about them. Once, in the silent exam room, she saw the whole group reflected in a poster frame. The doctor wore a slight smile, which was exaggerated in the faces of the med students. She took that as a good sign, though when she saw the real thing again, there was no expression. Saori pulled her shirt back on and took the refill.
After a long shower, Saori turned away from the fogged mirror and held up a compact. She swung her wet hair aside, bent down, looked up — there: the protrusions were lighter than her skin tone and, from this angle, suggested a familiar profile. She traced ointment with firm fingers over the brow ridges, deep into the eyes, between the sharp cheekbones and narrow bridge of the nose, finally along the thin lips. It was the face of a man who worked hard for himself instead of feeding off others, one who healed rather than hurt, she decided. She noted grey wisps sprouting from the growth, glistening against her damp skin. Saori pulled on a loose sweater.
As she stepped off the bus at the subway, she heard her name.
“Saori. How have you been?” Andrew drew her into an embrace. Saori felt his soft, full face resting against the top of her head. His arm pressed into the cheekbone on her shoulder blade. In her mind, she could see Dr. Norman looking annoyed. No, he never looked annoyed — his mouth twitched.
“Look, I’m in a hurry right now,” Andrew said, pushing back his dark, shiny hair, “But I feel really bad about how things ended between us. What do you say we get together for a drink? Say, Thursday?”
Saori’s eyes shone. She shook her head.
“Why not?” Andrew’s grin shaped itself into a sneer. “Are you seeing someone else already?”
The face was swelling against Saori’s sweater now. Her skin split apart to allow the mouth to open, releasing a spray of moisture at the corners. She felt a new cluster of growths throbbing under the skin, one for each med student in the exam room. A whiff of limes.
“I do have someone else, yes,” she said. She couldn’t tell if she was shouting or whispering, and she didn’t care.
Tonight the face will speak and it will listen to her, too. And soon, maybe in a few weeks or months, she’ll have all the company she’d ever need. Saori couldn’t wait.
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing an office holiday party.
One of the benefits of being a senior citizen is that people are reluctant to judge you when you do something socially unacceptable. For instance, when you show up at a party to which you were not invited, it’s rare that someone will ask you to leave. Instead they assume you are lost or lonely and take pity on you. When I came across an office holiday party last night I was both lost and lonely, but that was unrelated to why I stayed. I stayed to review it.
I missed the name of the business I had wandered into, but from the looks of it it was a real estate agency. I say this because there was a picture of a house on the wall and it wasn’t my house which isn’t for sale, so all the pieces seemed to fit.
Having never been to a modern office holiday party, this one was not as crazy as I expected. No one seemed very drunk, no one quit in a fit of rage, and no one photocopied their butt. I kept walking past the supply closet and opening the door, expecting (not hoping — I’m not a pervert) to find people having sex but it was empty every time. I tried leaving the door partially open with a condom on the floor, but no one took the bait.
It was clear who the boss was, because she handed the cleaning lady a $10 bill when she walked in and then the boss asked everyone to give a round of applause to Grace. It was awkward because then Grace still had to clean and everyone avoided speaking to her. I tried striking up a conversation with her but I abruptly halted when she asked, “Who are you and what are you doing here?” I could see why no one spoke to her. She asked too many questions.
Everyone’s favorite person at the party was Alejandro. He kept patting me on the shoulder and calling me buddy. He smiled a lot and seemed very interested in everything I had to say. I like when people seem to care, even if it’s fake. As long as I can’t tell the difference that’s all that matters. He said we should get together sometime but he offered no concrete details.
The most exciting moment was the Secret Santa gift exchange. Unsurprisingly no one had gotten me anything, so I gave myself a stapler I found in a desk drawer. It’s not stealing if it’s Christmas. Everyone seemed to love the gifts they received, and Grace seemed happy to have the gift of a job and to clean up all the wrapping paper.
The night ended without incident and everyone got in their cars and drove home, except for me because I was still lost and just gave up and stayed in a hotel.
Over the 45 minutes I had been at this office party I had grown to feel like these people were family, and it made me sad to say goodbye, knowing I wouldn’t see them at work today and that they weren’t hiring.
BEST FEATURE: The bowl of punch was delicious. I drank over a gallon of it. WORST FEATURE: The small, fake Christmas tree was the only decoration.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Mt. Everest.
This year is an Annie year at Tandy Caide’s small-town high school. Not an Oklahoma year or a Hello Dolly year or a Guys and Dolls year. Tandy Caide, CPA, and patron of high school theater arts, is, as always, sitting in the front row of the local production when she discovers the new Vo-Ag teacher, tearing up in response to a scene from Annie. Tandy is married to obese, alcoholic Gerald, who spends his time eating sandwiches in their backyard hot tub, but she throws herself into an affair with the ponytailed, beaded belt and man clog-wearing, quixotic Vo-Ag teacher, threatening both her livelihood and the town’s sense of stability.
Stephanie Wilbur Ash’s debut novel, The Annie Year is many things: a comedic novel of droll diction, a tongue-in-cheek send-up of accountants, high school FFA and theater culture, and a realistic study of the ways small-town life remains enslaved by tradition, while elements like meth use threaten communities that lack programs to meaningfully deal with poverty. The tone of Ash’s novel is light, but her observations of life in rural Iowa are more discerning than you’d expect. The Annie Year is an ambitious debut that offers sharp characterizations of both its protagonist and small towns.
Ash’s tone throughout The Annie Year is conversational, underplaying even her protagonist’s darkest moments of turmoil. Tandy comes from a difficult upbringing, losing her mother early, and taking her alcoholic father’s place in the family business after his death. But until meeting the Vo-Ag teacher, she has largely made things work for herself. What becomes clear early on is that she does this by not being very self-reflective. When things begin to unravel for Tandy, the juxtaposition of Ash’s light tone reminds the reader of the importance of oral histories in small communities, and the way that tragedies are downplayed, reframed, and retold in order to be processed. Tandy is close to several of her father’s friends, who remind her that “everything has gone downhill since 1976” — basically since the moment Tandy was born. Ash does a nice job of capturing the ever-present sense of nostalgia that characterizes small-town life. She interjects direct appeals to the reader, assuring us that her life is not the same as what people in our town would have or want. In this way, she also taps into the kind of small-town pride that’s built on a sense of exceptionalism.
While The Annie Year is many things, it is foremost a novel of its heroine’s late coming of age. Tandy did not have a chance to find herself as a child because she was caring for a drunk father, and then in college, her father controlled her life and forced her into the family business. Through her affair with the Vo-Ag teacher and a mentor-type friendship with Mueller, one of the town’s patriarchs, the disasters that her affair bring lead to a kind of late development. The best bits of Ash’s writing are her observations about self-realization and growing up. “I have learned in my many years as both a businesswoman and a human being,” Tandy says,
that the scariest things that happen to you — the defining things, the snapping-branch things — actually happen very quickly. They take up only seconds of your real life. It is in your brain later that they happen slowly, over and over again.
Through the misfortunes that force Tandy to see herself as others see her, she begins to understand where she comes from as well as the fact that she has options. Though Tandy has been working as a CPA in the town for many years, at the start of the novel she lives a small, protected life. Once she entangles herself with the Vo-Ag teacher and a group of his students, she has the opportunity to examine her life for the first time.
The Annie Year presents a complex heroine that “accept[s] the losing nature in everyone…” The message of the book seems to be that small-town life is better for its complicated, flawed characters. The Vo-Ag teacher is not who he first appears to be, and several elements of the plot are a bit predictable. But Ash’s subtlety in allowing her character to come to know herself as a flawed, worthwhile member of a flawed, worthwhile community, is heartening. Ash has a flair for comedic writing, but her witty syntax allows her to slip in some deft observations about small-town life. The Annie Year is weird and fun. But it says something important about the intersection of small business life and burgeoning meth farms in pastoral America.
Do not go gentle into that good night without checking out these gifts
What do you get for the starving artist in your life who has… well, not everything. They’re a starving artist after all! My Poetic Side made this nifty infographic with some possible suggestions for the writers in your life:
Each year, Electric Literature polls our staff and regular contributors to pick our favorite books of the year. Whichever books get the most votes make the final list. Here are the 25 amazing, diverse, innovative, and moving story collections from 2016 that we are proud to recommend. Check them out at an independent bookstore near you.
Chasing greatness spurs doubt, self-hatred, and pain — especially when the conditions for greatness are determined by the sort of egotistical men that reappear throughout George’s collection. Despite its criticisms of greatness — or perhaps because of them — The Babysitter at Rest is an undeniably great debut collection of stories. George’s writing is funny, courageous, smart, surreal, seductive, and terrifyingly vulnerable.
Helen Oyeyemi is one of those writers who, no matter when you discover them, makes you wish it had been long ago so you’d have extra hours left in your life to read the rest of their work. She published five novels by the time she turned thirty, and now, at the ripe old age of thirty-one, she’s coming out with a beautiful, brilliant, evocative collection of (somewhat) linked short stories. She is also, incidentally, one of those artists whom you cannot hate for such early success, not even a little tiny envious bit, because she’s clearly so, so talented.
Amber Sparks’ work in her collection, The Unfinished World, is an imaginative exploration of what-ifs. What if Lancelot was lost in a jungle? What if we could time travel, but we did more harm than good? What if a couple’s romance was linked in some way to a cabinet of curiosities? … Sparks understands timing, juxtaposition, and how to create original characters within the confines of a short work.
A Collapse of Horses is a master class in unnerving storytelling; seventeen short narratives that range from horror to science fiction and from surrealism to noir. The variety is outstanding, the writing is superb, but what makes this collection deserving of attention is how Evenson manages to achieve a perfect balance between what is on the page and what is left out.
Readers and reviewers of Pond have questioned whether it is a collection of stories, or a novel, or some hybrid of the two. This woman’s voice is the one you will hear throughout the book. Individual pieces from it were initially presented and published as stories though, and here now is “Morning, 1908,” standing alone again. The classification does not seem to me to be very important — my only concern being that imposing one classification over another might deter readers or limit the book’s success in any way.
We are very proud to have published Claire-Louise Bennett in the magazine and with the press. Discovering a writer of this caliber among the submissions and then getting to share her work with readers really is what it’s all about.
Every Joy Williams publication is a cause for celebration, and Ninety-Nine Stories of God shows Williams in her usual biting, insightful, and darkly humorous form. As the title implies, this is a collection of 99 flash fiction pieces. Some read like short stories, others like fables, aphorisms, or newspaper columns. But all of them are exquisitely written and thought-provoking.
— Lincoln Michel, Editor-in-Chief of Electric Literature
A talented, at times even daring, stylist Bell is a literary experimentalist who never lets his experiments overtake his fiction’s need for dramatic effect, that necessary quality of making the reader want to read. This is something many literary writers forget or even disdain: the fact that it’s their responsibility to attract readers and keep them interested, not the other way around. And it’s a lesson Bell seems to have learned from an early age. Fearless in terms of the subject matter he’s willing to write about and perhaps ever more so in the unexpected, sometimes extremely dark angles he takes in fleshing out his stories, Bell has the goods, no question.
The narrator who frames each of these fourteen stories is vulnerable — she’s caught up in the tumult of an ended marriage, and the poverty of an artist without a back-up plan — and her vulnerability resonates across the desolate landscapes she stops in. […] The stories in Cities I’ve Never Lived In are high-cost, and also necessarily gentle. In addition to the narrator reporting on her own life, she also tells the stories of the people she meets.
Within these pages, love is cut with many poisons — paranoia, indifference, circumstance, violence — and the New England settings seethe with suffering and shame. Loosely connected, the stories create a web the reader walks into without realizing it: A woman carries memories of a girlhood love into her brutal marriage; a college student’s relationship with her boyfriend and his mother changes dramatically during a summer vacation; a woman meets someone who might be her mother on a bus to Boston; a teenager’s love affair with an older man comes between her and her young sister. Below the tranquil surface, these beautiful women — and the beautiful girls they used to be — are screaming at the top of their lungs.
Maryse Meijer shreds readers’ hearts and souls in her debut collection Heartbreaker. Her characters are lonely, obsessive, and sometimes otherworldly. In the title story a high school student named Natalie molests a mentally handicapped boy. In “The Daddy” a woman hires a younger man on Craigslist to play her doting father. In “Love, Lucy,” the antichrist emerges on Earth in the form of a little girl. “The Cheat” involves an actual fox that seduces a teenage girl with junk food at a Christian weight loss camp. The rest of the stories also unmask humanity’s worst creatures so that every instance feels dangerous and leaves you with images that are impossible to forget.
Some stories — usually the best ones — come to life and carry you along with their own special, inexplicable gravity and when they’re over you’re not even sure what it was that pulled you in and wouldn’t let go. No literary mechanics or plot devices came into play; the writer, now magician, simply won you over and off you went.
This is how I feel about Rion Amilcar Scott’s writing in general, and particularly his story “202 Checkmates.”
Books and stories are a form of escapism for many of us. We read to go away from our current lives, or to learn about people who are vastly different from us, or to be swept up by language, or — well, a list of reasons we read would be endless. But escapism is definitely there, whether it’s something we seek or only a byproduct. The stories in Alexandra Kleeman’s new collection, Intimations, both distressingly and beautifully convey a different message: there is no escape.
Matthew Neill Null’s collection Allegheny Front is as notable for the strength of its prose as it is for the ways in which it eludes expectations. One story focuses entirely on the shifting relationship between a group of bears and the humans living nearby; another story leaps ahead several decades at its conclusion to show how the aftereffects of its violent resolution are perceived in the decades to come by people with no knowledge of the events described. It’s a way of finding compelling drama in the spaces normally left blank in histories and stories, and it’s to Null’s credit that these stories never feel academic or dry. Instead, they’re as visceral and tense and the landscapes and relationships that they describe.
For lovers of the TV series “Black Mirror,” and anyone who racks up hours on Twitter, this is your short story collection of the year. The 13 stories are set in a future an arm’s length from now, and consider how technologies we can already see on the horizon affect the most intimate aspects of life: sex, breakups, illness, and, as the title suggests, family and parenthood. Think those Facebook “Memories” posts are a little much? In Weinstein’s world, try recreational memory implantation.
— Lucie Shelly, Associate Editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading
Furnace is Livia Llewellyn’s second short story collection. NPR’s Jason Heller, describes her latest horror stories as “beautiful and hideous in the same breath,” and commends “its 13 tales of erotic, surreal, existential horror [which] pack a logic-shattering punch.” Llewellyn is a household name in dark fiction and has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award several times. These might not be the best stories to read right before bed, but they’re the cream of the crop for horror fanatics and disturbed readers (so every reader) alike.
Puberty rites, a child bride, a burning city, comically horrific families? Yes please! Man and Wife hits the story collection trifecta of story, sentences, and book-ness. Each story is excellent; there are no duds or space-fillers. Chase’s writing is addictive and clean, a perfect vessel for her fantastically creepy imagination (“They say every girl remembers that special day when everything starts to change,” begins the title story, a mundane enough sentiment that nevertheless gives me goosebumps every time I read it). And the stories work together without feeling repetitive.
—Kelly Luce, contributing editor at Electric Literature
Each story, in its own way, is asking deft questions about the possibility of improvement, both on the micro and macro level, and where other writers could have fallen into didactic or moralistic traps, Hyde’s stories move effortlessly and gracefully, never once causing the reader to feel as though she has her authorial thumb pressed on the scale.
In “Building Girls,” Jarrar captures the complicated dynamic between Aisha and Perihan, childhood friends now separated by geography, race, and class (and their daughters separated by all that, plus language). Wealthy Perihan only visits Egypt during the summer, whereas Aisha lives there full-time and even then rarely ventures beyond the paths of her daily routine. On a trip to the beach, she compares Perihan to a soaring kite and herself to a novelty pet crab on a leash, an image that manages to be all at once weird, hilarious, melodramatic, gorgeous, and sincerely resonant. Like the rest of the book it comes from, I can’t get it out of my head.
Patrick Ryan’s latest, The Dream Life of Astronauts(The Dial Press, 2016), is an exquisitely crafted collection of short stories set in Merritt Island, Florida — better known as the home of Cape Canaveral. The space program forms the backdrop to each of the book’s nine tales, which span the period between the 1969 Apollo 11 launch to present day. But the author’s intimate, character-driven narratives draw their power more from family dynamics than they do launch pads or rocket boosters (even if both of those make appearances).
Though taken from a story within, the title of this collection is a clever deflection; Sneed’s stories consider sex and men, but they’re as much about the nuances of life’s mundane moments, and the surprising ways that such moments change the desires and aspirations of women. From a mother vacationing with a reluctant teenage son, to woman who is anti-wedding but throws a Couplehood Jubilee, to an over-zealous applicant for an HR job at a t-shirt manufacturing company, the characters we meet in the 13 stories will upset your expectations every time.
— Lucie Shelly, Associate Editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading
Jones-Yelvington’s debut short story collection This Is a Dance Movie! has been met with plenty of acclaim. Alexander Chee praised his deft ability to juxtapose the playfulness of a dance party with serious modern social concerns, and described Jones-Yelvington’s stories as “a remix of pop culture, gay sex and celebrity, ranging from the confectionary to the visionary.”And you know that when Roxane Gay says, “Tim Jones-Yelvington doesn’t push the envelope. He kicks the shit out of it,” it must be worth the read.
I loved his collection, We Come To Our Senses, and “Colleen” is one of my favorite stories. It begins with twenty-two-year-old Colleen back at home in her childhood bed in her childhood bedroom in Mississippi, staring at the pink walls while a box fan blows, which is the same place I’ve found myself on too many occasions throughout my adult life. […] There is no love story here. This story will crush you, and I don’t mean that in a hyperbolic way. I mean pulse-racing-aw-hell-no-I-need-to-lie-down-for-a-while crushed.
There are a whopping 23 stories in Rebecca Schiff’s slim new collection The Bed Moved, and this is just one of Schiff’s many sleights of hand. Each story is a delight — drily funny, irreverent, original. But just as they’re refreshingly candid and witty — they are very witty — Schiff’s stories also offer tender, but stubbornly unsentimental emotional truths. The stories in this collection are interested only in being honest, and that means shedding light on grief, pride, promiscuity, and loneliness in ways that are surprising, funny, and frank.
In “If That’s All There Is,” a story taken from her gutsy and glorious debut Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, the narrator is the recipient of a dubious overture from her co-worker, Archibald. She contemplates his offer and decides — though it is a decision saddled with ambiguity — to take hold of the door he has shaken loose and pull it open a little wider. […] As the story hurtles toward its destination there is the sense that we are plunging deep into a moment of raw and exhilarating truth — and then, like lightening, we are there.
Mona Awad is one of the most exciting new voices I have read in a long time. Welcome to her world.
Sam has said that his stories are his attempt to cover songs he loves, and surely the stories in his debut collection, The Great American Songbook, are linked inextricably to music, to song, to chord changes, and voiced heartache. The nine stories in the collection take the Talking Heads literally. They follow Rodgers and Hart as they negotiate parallel realities and their relationship with each other. They employ humor and formal invention to build and crescendo, to speak melodically, jazzily, out of human experience.
In an early description of — of all things — a shirt wrapped around a broken finger, a character in T.C. Boyle’s new novel The Terranauts perfectly articulates the joy and wonder of a well-placed specificity inside a work of fiction: “I relate it to you” — you being the reader, it being the bloody shirt — “because it’s one of those maybe overlooked minor details that underpin the meaning of everything that happens in our lives, from the prosaic to the tragic. And this was tragic.”
It’s neither coincidence nor laziness that accounts for Boyle’s characters’ familiarity with the craft of narrative. The Terranauts is told in three first-person accounts, each delivered (and presumably written) by a character intimately tied to the novel’s central drama: the comings and goings of an experimental biodome community in nineteen-nineties Arizona, a high-tech experiment meant to mimic a future colony for human beings away from Mother Earth.
Readers who’ve seen the cover — with its space opera-inspired imagery and Creature from the Black Lagoon-like typeface — may find themselves surprised to discover Boyle’s novel is a realist, Earth-bound one, but those familiar with Boyle’s oeuvre won’t be shocked to discover that, like many of Boyle’s previous novels, The Terranauts is rooted in strange and recent history. Unlike The Inner Circle (“the Alfred Kinsey one”) or The Women (“the Frank Lloyd Wright one”), The Terranauts’s protagonists are not historical figures, per se, though Boyle’s prefatory Author’s Note reveals the glut of sources to which he turned when creating his on-planet astronauts; and the connection to history reminds the reader yet again of a theme present in much of Boyle’s works: that truth is at least equally as strange as the invented.
“A novelized discussion of the paranoia […] à la Stephen King’s The Stand or, more fittingly, Under the Dome, but The Terranauts […] throws this format for a loop.”
One might anticipate from the set-up — eight men and women locked inside a glass structure for two years — a novelized discussion of the paranoia that comes from limited quarters and a small cast of characters, à la Stephen King’s The Stand or, more fittingly, Under the Dome, but The Terranauts braided narrative throws this format for a loop. Boyle welcomes the reader into the ecological experiment with the help of three first-person voices, but only two such voices are Terranauts themselves; the third, belonging a woman named Linda, is of a jealous scientist who didn’t make the cut for the two-year inclusion, and her voice of rejection and boredom contrasts mightily with sexual and political dramas on the other side of the wall.
I won’t spoil any surprises, except to say that there’s as much turmoil in Linda’s world as there is in the artificial, anesthetized one (as one character says, “There’s no closure on gossip”); which makes Boyle’s novel less a closed-room gimmick of narrative limitation and more an absurdist drama that never forgets the reader’s lived experience, either. As the Terranauts inside the glass compound confront jealousy, disease, and rape culture, the novel makes a delightfully old-fashioned commentary about the soul of men and women: that their tragedies can’t be avoided by changing their environment alone.
Boyle achieves all of this through pitch-perfect detail work — the kind of work to which his character pays tribute in the quote from the beginning of this review. Each detail of life inside the shut-off compound, from the acidity of avocados to the migratory patterns of sparrows, pumps blood into the voices of Boyle’s scientists.
The novel is a page-turner, and a strong one; the Stephen King comparison holds. While Boyle’s language is scientific and sophisticated, it is also first-person language that falls prey to the limits of his characters: the voices are idiomatic, at times easy, and occasionally (pardon this condescending phrase) unliterary — so matter-of-fact that Boyle’s character will never be mistaken for poets. But in a novel of this length, with this ambition, the reader does not balk when authenticity-of-voice trumps poetry.
By creating three distinct narrators — one who loves nobly, one who betrays thoughtfully, and one who covets powerlessly — Boyle has made for himself quite the juggling act, and skeptical readers ought to remind themselves of what one Boyle character says of their created world: “Just keep in mind that this was an experiment, not a perfected and finished product, and that in any experiment there are limitations and that things can go wrong, things do go wrong — that’s the whole idea.”
From the outside, India evokes so much — the Taj Mahal, yoga, the caste system and so on — but save for a few deified figures such as the Buddha and Gandhi, India’s history, as Sunil Khilnani writes in the opening of Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives (FSG, 2016), is a “curiously unpeopled place.” The collection of essays does much to correct this impression by introducing and re-introducing readers to the leaders, poets, performers, and rebels who’ve shaped India.
Incarnations’ cast is extremely characterful. A random selection: Muhammad Ali Jinnah, lawyer and founder of Pakistan; actor and Bollywood patriarch Raj Kapoor; Indo-Hungarian painter Amrita Sher-Gill, and Ethiopian-born Malik Ambar, who went from being an enslaved mercenary to a power broker and the military bane of the Mughal Empire.
All fifty subjects are dead but Khilnani renders them in an intimate light. In doing so, he complicates any glory they’ve enjoyed as figureheads of contemporary causes in India. I spoke to Khilnani about how he populated the book and Indian history, beginning in the fifth century BCE up until the early 2000s.
J.R. Ramakrishnan: Incarnations narrates the long arc of Indian history from the Buddha onwards through the stories of fifty lives. What an impressive project of curation these profiles must have been! How did you decide who made the cut? And how long did the entire project take? I was also wondering which characters did not make the cut (or almost made the cut) if you’d care to share that.
Sunil Khilnani: It was a real sweat cutting down to the 50 individuals I’ve ended up with! I wanted figures drawn from a broad range of creative activities (so I have poets and painters, mathematicians and musicians, emperors and freedom fighters, photographers and philosophers, scholars and businessmen), drawn from all parts of India, and across 2,500 years of history. Most of the lives I’ve chosen also allow me to explore many of the persisting contradictions and conflicts in Indian history: they straddle the fissures of religion, caste, gender, region, and individuality and social norms. Very many of them have also had afterlives — recycled at different points in history, and deployed to fight current battles. Indeed, that’s one of the meanings of my title, Incarnations: lives that get revived. Finally, all of the 50 had to be real historical people (not figures from myths or epics), and all had to be dead.
I have been thinking about Indian history and how to tell it for many years. In the end though, it took me two years of concentrated work to write the book and to make the 50 podcasts and radio programs which I did with the BBC. Working with multiple deadlines, in different media, and with a great deal of travel involved, was at once exciting and a huge strain — not least on my wife, Katherine Boo!
The names that didn’t make it, well, you know, it’s like a limb you may have lost. Once it’s gone, you no longer dwell on it, you take satisfaction in what you have and not in regretting what you may be missing.
JRR: I imagine that your choices, your critical eye upon certain legacies, and your shedding of light on now-appropriated figures, must have elicited some strong responses. Indeed, you write in the introduction that this what you hope for but I am curious to know what you think of conversations that have resulted since the book’s publication, especially in India.
SK: The reception of my book, both in India and in Britain, has been incredibly generous and positive. I’m particularly heartened by the response in India — it seems to have caught the imaginations of younger readers, whom I really want to reach (a special edition for young readers will come out next year). Most young Indians have encountered the people I write about only in boring school lessons, or as hollow statues, glamorized images, or road names. So, to be able read about them as real human beings with all their foibles and quirks, can open up new ways of thinking about the past — and its relationship to the present. In my book, you encounter legendary or mythic figures — like, for instance: Ashoka, Kabir, Guru Nanak, Amrita Sher-Gil, Subhas Chandra Bose, Jinnah, Indira Gandhi or Dhirubhai Ambani — as complicated human characters, with weakness and failings as well as with extraordinary qualities. I wanted to de-mythologize these figures, in order to re-humanize them a little.
I wanted to de-mythologize these figures, in order to re-humanize them a little.
Many of the conversations I’ve had since the book came out center on all figures who people feel I should have included: why not a sports player, what about that musician, or this scientist, that leader, and hey, how about this actress and so on! Now, I welcome that sort of discussion. I want this book exactly to provoke such conversations: about who are the people who have made India’s history, why they are important, why they deserve our consideration. I never intended my book to install a pantheon, or to close down argument about which figures are important. Incarnations is an invitation to a conversation, a debate, about India’s past — and its future!
JRR: You write about the recycling (and often deification) of historical figures for use in various contemporary projects (e.g. first century military strategist Kautilya being used in Pakistani military schools or the poet Kabir at the Jaipur Literary Festival). Would you say that this is an especially Indian characteristic?
SK: I don’t think it’s an especially Indian characteristic, if by that you mean something like a cultural trait. After all, many societies turn to their past heroes for present purposes: in the US, George Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Roosevelt are constantly invoked. In the UK, it’s Churchill, and so on. But it happens even more in India, because of the current political situation there, which is a very divided one, with different caste and religious groups, different regions, each seeking to assert their own interests. And they all use history to try to do that. So you get a much greater investment in historical figures, and many more of them are invoked in current political argument. Something which might be more of an Indian trait, though, is the deification and mythification of these figures: the reluctance to see them as human beings in the round, with their flaws as well as their qualities.
JRR: In your profile of Periyar, the anti-Brahmin activist, you write that based on his look (“a bulky man in a black shirt with a bald head, untamed white beard, and beside him a little pet dog to scare away Brahmins”) you felt that you were in the company of a beat poet. You certainly offer close insight into the personalities of these characters, which is impressive since quite a few have been dead for centuries. Could you tell us about your research and reporting process? I imagine you must have travelled a great deal. What were the most memorable stories of the book’s journey for you?
SK: Thanks. So many of these figures are remote from us in time, culture and beliefs, and so I really did work hard to try to bring them alive, and to give readers an intimate sense of what it was like to inhabit their worlds, and even their minds. To do that, I worked with primary materials wherever they existed, with the direct words or writings of the people I was studying — as well looking at how those around them saw them. In addition to archives and texts, I also travelled to the places where they lived or worked — soaking up the land and streetscapes, the sounds, the light — and used all of those details to imagine their worlds, their anxieties, and hopes.
Let me give you an example. When I was researching the life of Kabir, the 15th century radical poet who lived in Benares or Varanasi, I spent time in one of that city’s poorest neighborhoods, where a community of Muslim weavers live, barely scraping an existence. This was the same community from which Kabir came, and seeing the conditions in which the present-day community live, I could really grasp the sheer rage which motivated Kabir, and which shaped into his unforgettable poetry.
I should also say that I was privileged to be able to talk to some of the finest scholars of and intellectuals from India, and through them learn more about these individuals and their times.
JRR: My personal favorite was the profile of the mercurial V.K. Krishnan Menon, Jawaharlal Nehru’s political operative. My father’s family has roots in Kerala and the temperament you described seemed more than a little familiar to me. I wasn’t aware that he’d a hand in the founding of Penguin Books so that was an exciting discovery for me. The story about you sitting down with what you hoped was an important box of his archives only to find instead his old hairbrush had me in stitches. Could you talk about the humor of many of your characters, and the role it played in constructing the profiles of this book?
SK: I’m so glad you highlighted this. I’ve tried always to bring out the humor of my characters, as well as the ironies and absurdities of how they are nowadays memorialized. Too often these ‘greats’ are presented as po-faced, venerable elders. Yet the fact, is that when they made their reputations they were almost all young, brash rabble rousers, with sharp tongues and scathing wit. Periyar would be a good example; or even Guru Nanak, in the provocative way in which he chose to dress — a sartorial farrago, as I describe it. Or take another example, Lakshmi Bai, the Rani or Queen of Jhansi who led an uprising against the British in 1857. She’s treated as a demi-goddess in India. She appears everywhere frozen in a ubiquitous icon: astride a horse, sword held high, her son cling to her back, as she leaps over the ramparts of her besieged hilltop fort. But, drawing on the contemporary memoirs of a Brahmin who spent time at her court, I was able to show how, while she engaged in strenuous physical routines and exercise (unlike her cross-dressing husband), and was physically impressive, in fact she probably slipped out of the fort by a special back door. Or another example: the way I show Mahatma Gandhi to be a brilliant, painstaking manager of the media, even while he claimed always to be guided by his spontaneous ‘inner voice.’ There is something laugh-worthy in this gap between burnished reputation and actual human choices though noticing such a gap does not diminish the people I write about. If anything, by seeing them as human like us, their very real achievements become all the more remarkable.
JRR: You link the lives in Incarnations to the contemporary moment in not just in India, but also the rest of the world. You liken Kautilya’s torture methods in his Arthashastra treatise to the 2014 U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA’s interrogation techniques and later on, you open the profile of Ambedkar, the Dalit statesman who drafted the Indian constitution, with a quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates and compare the Dalit cause with the struggle for civil rights in Black America. What do you hope will be the greatest take away from the book for those less familiar with Indian history, say perhaps your non-Indian, non-Indian diaspora and non-Indophile readers?
SK: There are two big takeaways. First, that India’s history and the people who made it — even if you go back 2,500 years to figures like the Buddha or Ashoka — are living presences in contemporary India. Present-day Indians turn to these historical lives in their struggles to make their own lives better. Second, that Indian history is not a niche interest, for a couple of reasons: because India, which is home to almost 20% of the world’s population, and to an economy growing faster than any other major economy, matters more and more to the world. And because the dramatic sweep of the Indian past, the reach of Indian ideas, the stakes of India’s struggles both with itself and with alien colonizers, are central to the story of human history as a whole: to our ideas of power, of justice, of economic growth, and of freedom, as they apply to the entire human race.
The stakes of India’s struggles both with itself and with alien colonizers, are central to the story of human history as a whole…
JRR: And finally, who is your most beloved character of the fifty?
SK: I was most moved by the story of Birsa Munda — born into an Adivasi or tribal community in central India towards the end of the 19th century, he grew up wandering the forests around his village and mastering special healing skills. But he saw his people being dispossessed by the the British colonialists, by Christian missionaries, and exploitative Indian middlemen. And so he decided to fight for the rights of his people over the forest and the land. He became something of a religious teacher, and led an uprising. It was suppressed, he was captured, and died in jail, barely 23 years old. His story resonates very powerfully with the present-day struggles of India’s Adivasis and all the country’s dispossessed citizens.
In an era of superhero mashups, Angry Birds, Hemsworths and boardgames-on-the-silver-screen, that delicate old relic — literature — might not seem like the hottest IP in Hollywood. But then each year, somehow, somewhere a producer or a hot young director with green-light cachet goes home to a hillside neo-Mediterranean villa, pours a glass of something stiff, and cracks open the latest Max Allan Collins novel or a collection of Ted Chiang stories, and through some dark alchemy of inspiration, screenwriting, double-entry bookkeeping, star power, union rates, overseas funding, and merchandise synergy, literature makes its way off the page and onto our beloved screens.
Now, with pedigreed clunkers like American Pastoral and The Girl on the Train, it might not be fair to call 2016 a banner year for literary adaptations, but there were some memorable successes. (Dammit, every year can’t bring us The Imitation Game!Yes, that won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. In 2014. Really. Go ahead and check. It beat out Inherent Vice.) This year saw more than its share of quality productions — stories of first contacts, last rites and whatever it is that’s going on in Park Chan-wook’s latest rom-com.
It looks like 2016 might be remembered as the year Ted Chiang broke through from cult-favorite to Hollywood darling, with Arrival pulling in big numbers at the box office and looking poised to grab up end-of-year honors. Denis Villeneuve has to be near the top of any list of the most ambitious directors working today, and Chiang’s first contact story gives him all the room he needs to ponder and probe and brood on man’s fundamental nature. Amy Adams stars and there’s a hell of a good twist that your friends and colleagues want desperately to spoil. But best of all, Arrival, whatever its flaws, is that increasingly rare thing — motivation to go out to the theater.
The Night Manager
Adapted from The Night Manager, by John Le Carré
The six-part miniseries might just be the perfect form for John Le Carre flicks — enough time to think and to dwell on the banality of deception, but not so much time that Le Carré’s carefully crafted plots need be unspooled for the sake of a multi-season arc. Tom Hiddleston, well-known boyfriend of the Internet, was in his element as Jonathan Pine, poised and quick to smile and hell-bent on avenging a woman’s honor. Hugh Laurie got to show off his charm, too, of the slightly more evil variety, with the always superb Angela Burr hot on his trail. All that gun-running intrigue was served up with a healthy portion of travel porn — Cairo, Switzerland, and of course a stunning seaside villa in Mallorca. Of the recent Le Carré adaptations, only Gary Oldman’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Constant Gardener top The Night Manager. With any luck, AMC & BBC One will just option the entire oeuvre and put it into production. Who doesn’t enjoy a well-made spy thriller?
Game of Thrones
Adapted from…some obscure indie title, you probably haven’t heard of it…
The sixth season of Game of Thrones brought us to a pivotal moment in the annals of literary adaptation, when the biggest show in the world finally outpaced its source material. Sure, that guy at your office who’s read and re-read A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons still had a few insights and theories that left your head spinning, but at a certain point we were all just speculating as [minor spoiler alert…] Jon Snow and Sansa were reunited, the Faith Militant cracked down on King’s Landing, and Daenerys, her dragons and the Dothraki were finally reunited. Benioff & Weiss were in fine form this season. Episode 9, “The Battle of the Bastards,” stands up against any piece of filmmaking in recent memory. And in terms of literary penetration into pop culture, Game of Thrones remains the undisputed king.
Luke Cage
Adapted from the Marvel comic series, created by Goodwin/Romita/Tuska
Cheo Hodari Coker stepped into the Marvel universe this year with one of the more ambitious tasks in Hollywood — bringing together the sensibilities of superhero comics, Blaxploitation film, socially conscious noir, and hip-hop to tell a story about black lives in contemporary society. No easy feat, but Luke Cage turns out to be an irresistible watch, thanks to a top-notch cast — especially Mike Colter and Mahershala Ali — vibrant cinematography, and the kind of cultural references — from Gang Starr to Kristaps Porzingis to Walter Mosley — that ground the sometimes operatic storytelling and manage to build a world far more effectively than the clunky backstories Marvel stories so often succumb to. No word yet on when season 2 will air, but most likely production will take a backseat to a unified Defenders series.
Certain Women
Adapted from Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy
Writer/Director Kelly Reichardt gets extra credit for the level of difficulty on this adaptation, which was based on Maile Meloy’s 2009 collection of short stories. Certain Women has a few unifying strands, but largely it’s a matter of tone and insight that bonds the stories of three different women in Montana. Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, and Kristen Stewart star, and all turn in strong, subtle performances (not to mention the excellent Lily Gladstone, in a supporting role). But it’s Reichardt’s (and Meloy’s) lived-in, deeply felt connection to the landscape that leaves the strongest impression of all.
Quarry
Adapted from the Quarry series, by Max Allan Collins
Mac Conway leaves Vietnam and goes home to Memphis in 1972. He’s hardened by war, disconnected from his family, and known to enjoy the occasional drink. Naturally, he’s preyed upon by the Delta/Mississippi River criminal element and eventually pressured into taking on a new trade — as a hit man. Quarry was adapted from the novels of Max Allan Cullins and stays brutally true to the hard living, hardboiled world that earned the author a cult following. The show’s impeccable eye for era detail isn’t quite on Matt Weiner’s level, but it’s not too far off, and the dialogue is sharp enough to provide a bit of light amidst the bleak world-view, especially when delivered by quality actors like Damon Herriman. (Somehow it makes sense that between Justified and Quarry, it’s an Australian actor giving us these unforgettable characters from the underbelly of the US South.)
The Handmaiden
Adapted from Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith is a Dickensian tale of orphans, inheritances, and corruption in Victorian Era England. Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden is an erotic thriller set in an asylum in Korea during the Japanese occupation. Aren’t adaptations great? Both film and book will leave you unsettled, and maybe that’s more than enough of a connection, so long as two big storytelling talents are communicating in their own strange way. Like Oldboy, The Handmaiden will have you clawing at the armrests from time to time. It will also burn some truly astounding images into your memory bank.
The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story
Adapted from Ride of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson, by Jeffrey Toobin
In 2016, FX’s OJ mini-series dominated the pop culture conversation like no other series, except maybe that one about “tits and dragons.” Ryan Murphy and his insanely productive team managed a pretty remarkable trick — luring us in with what we knew (the trial was, after all, one of the most covered events in modern American history), then teasing out everything we didn’t. Historical legacies were entirely reshaped, most notably those of Johnnie Cochrane (played by Courtney B. Vance) and the rising feminist icon, Marcia Clarke (Sarah Paulson). For a couple months, we were all re-living the insanity that was the OJ Trial, only this time we had another twenty years of celebrity worship, racial tension, and police misconduct to reckon with.
Preacher
Adapted from DC Vertigo comic, created by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon
Preacher, the comic series created by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, was long thought to be immune to adaptation — too violent, too obscene, too all-around batshit crazy. But the unlikely team of Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen and Sam Catlin actually pulled it off, bringing to AMC a show that doesn’t skimp on the gore, but pulls it off with wit, visual style and — yes — real emotional connections between multi-faceted characters. A Texas preacher, an Irish vampire, a single mom organist, a gunslinging man-chewing ex — in its own way, Preacher has as rich a tapestry as any show on television, and at least with Leftovers on hiatus and Young Pope still to come, it offers up one of the more complex (and troubling) visions of religion’s place in our culture.
Nocturnal Animals
Adapted from Tony and Susan, by Austin Wright
Tom Ford’s newest film, based on Austin Wright’s 1993 novel, isn’t the quiet meditation fans of A Single Man might be expecting. Yes, the framing is poignant and beautiful, and okay, the movie allows for meaningful silence, but there’s enough story packed into Nocturnal Animals to fill up a multiplex. Three layers of fiction to be precise: Amy Adams’ present-day gallery owner, whose ex-husband sends a manuscript dedicated to her; her recollections of their relationship, played out in another strand; and the plot of the ex’s manuscript, a high-octane thriller. The perspective shifts are dizzying in the best possible sense, and the result is a surprisingly intimate and powerful portrait of a relationship gone bad.
Look, this would have been on the list. It would have topped the list, if we were doing things in order. But apparently the screenplay is being treated as an original, rather than an adaptation, possibly because Barry Jenkins wrote the script (with story by Tarell Alvin McCraney) based on an unpublished, unperformed play that McCraney was working on at the Borscht arts collective in Miami. It’s all too complicated to piece together here, but for the record, Moonlight is phenomenal. Everyone should see this movie.
The Man in the High Castle
It’s not the greatest show on TV, but it’s pretty good, and based on the Philip K. Dick novel about a fascist America that’s suddenly looking fairly prescient.
Love & Friendship
Do you like Whit Stillman? Do you also like Jane Austen. Then here you go.
Lion
A helluva story. Really, just a helluva story. The movie will shatter you.
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