There’s no season better well-suited to curl up with a book than winter. Whether you’re seeking a Tuscan adventure or a book with a hot monster, these new titles—recommended by indie booksellers from across the country—span genres and styles, offering something for everyone. So grab a blanket, a hot drink, and escape the cold with the buzziest new books of the season:
“A wonderful story full of humor, warmth, a small Tuscan village that has seen better days, and a cast of hilarious, quirky characters. If you have a passion for Italy and beautiful, descriptive writing, grab this book and find out what happens when local truffle hunter, Giovanni, finds the world’s biggest ever truffle. The word mayhem springs to mind, but in the best possible way. This book is a gem!”—Polly Stott, The Hickory Stick Bookshop in Washington Depot, Connecticut
“If you enjoy reading historical fiction, pick up this book! The setting is 16th-century France, and Goodman does a masterful job of creating characters of different classes as well as a sense of life at a chateau and its village. Marguerite becomes the heir to this wealthy estate when she is orphaned at five and her guardian uses her inheritance to his advantage and as the years pass to eventually finance his expedition to New France. He takes her with him and during the voyage discovers she has befriended his secretary (remember this is the 16th century!). She and the secretary are then abandoned on a remote island. Is survival possible?”—Pat Moody, The Hickory Stick Bookshop in Washington Depot, Connecticut
“Have you ever watched a Studio Ghibli movie and gone ‘I wish there was a little more monster fucking in this?’ Alternatively, have you ever watched a horror movie with a hot monster and gone, ‘This needs more loving descriptions of food and decor?’
Great news for BOTH CAMPS: this book has it all. Despite being a confirmed arachnophobe, I really enjoyed the monstrous romance, the gothic fantasy vibes, and the gentle grotesqueries in this novella.”—Nino Cipri, Astoria Bookshop in Queens, New York
“Florida clown meets Shakespearean fool in Arnett’s new novel for me, for you—for all of us failures and hopefuls. Cherry the clown tries to make sense of her craft—something no one else seems to understand—in the birthday parties, carnivals, and children’s hospitals of Florida. Arnett’s meta tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy is for anyone who has ever felt like a mess. This book won’t fix you, but it may mirror you back to yourself. You’ll end the book saying, ‘how did she do that?’ and ‘ow,’ and ‘please do it again.'”—Julia Paganelli Marin, Pearl’s Books in Fayetteville, Arkansas
“Lion has quickly become one of my favorite autobiographical novels. Sonya Walger beautifully portrays the many feelings of frustration, yearning, and grief when reckoning with a parent’s inability to parent, to love, to listen, throughout both childhood and adulthood. This novel completely immersed me in Walger and her father’s broken world, and kept me tethered to every word. Lion will linger with me for a long, long time!”—Amali Gordon-Buxbaum, Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, New York
“This Young Adult cozy fantasy follows a ‘geeky overachiever’ and a ‘troublemaking chosen one’ who meet in a magical coffeeshop where their two different worlds collide. What excites me about this novel is that it is queer, cozy, and the cover is STUNNING! I have a personal appreciation for CB Lee’s work after interviewing them for the Pride Book Fest and it was just such a pleasure. I think fun, quirky, queer novels are so important and should be celebrated!”—Kaliisha, Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts
“If you’re in any doubt of Peters’ abilities as a writer, just note how she’s able to queer old lumberjack lingo into poetry in this book’s excellent titular story, ‘Stag Dance.’ In all the stories, some futuristic, some timeless, she explores the allure (and dangers) of transitioning, as well as the meaning of sisterhood and community.”—Rachael Innerarity, Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts
“‘The Anthropocene,’ Steven Duong writes, ‘demands a new syntax;’ what might it be? His answer: poems like ghost story manifestos tweeted out into the void; verse in which the spectral presence of Vietnamese fathers and refugee mothers hangs heavy overhead, ever-present and ever-calling; a collection in which their young American offspring, self-dubbed the ‘king of not killing myself,’ reigns over his domain of Oxycodone and Molotov cocktails at the collapse of empire. His answer is this book, a trickster’s debut about loving and surviving (against all odds, against yourself, against your worst impulses made manifest) through the end of the world.
‘when the markets fall & the workers pop their bubbly I will die old poet laureate of wherever they find me’
And so I ask you, dear reader: let the guillotine spare our newfound poet laureate, syntax-monarch-turned-aquarium-revolutionary, so he may follow this first book with a second and third and fourth, and so we may read them all while the champagne flows and the workers of the world, having united and at long last arrived at the better world ahead, can sit back and relax, beloveds by their side and At the End of the World There Is a Pond in hand.”—Mira Braneck, A Room of One’s Own in Madison, Wisconsin
“Set during the Yugoslav wars, Underground Barbie by Maša Kolanović is translated from Croatian by Ena Selimović. Two friends play with their Barbies while air raid sirens sound and bombs fall. Despite everything, this book is playfully illustrated and charming. Highly recommended!”—Caitlin L. Baker, Island Books in Mercer Island, Washington
“If the world could be saved by a journalist’s razor-sharp precision & a novelist’s sense of style & narrative alone, El Akkad would not have had to write this book. But he did. And we need to read it.”—Josh Cook, Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts
“After the death of their father, two brothers find themselves adrift and lost in the modern American West. Falling deeper and deeper into debt, they accept a job from a shadowy neighbor that, if successful, could allow them to climb out of the hole. However, failure means prison or worse. Let’s just say that things don’t go as planned, and the two brothers are forced to depend on each other as they never have before to find their way to safety. Callan Wink’s Beartooth is a gripping crime novel and a western story like you’ve never read before.”—Brad Lennon, Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes
“Somehow, a certain type of person (the young, progressive digital creative/freelancer/what have you) has the same houseplants and the same midcentury-style couch, despite living in different cities across different continents. They drink the same lattes in near-identical cafes; their dinner parties are all impeccably plated, locally-sourced, softly lit, and essentially indistinguishable. How could this be?
“Enter Perfection, a rare sharp social novel about millennials who find that the ever-elusive picture-perfect life omnipresent across their culture-flattening feeds seems to constantly be just out of reach IRL. The novel follows expat couple Anna and Tom as they socialize with their stylish artist friends across Berlin, attempt (and fail) to get involved in politics in a meaningful way, and go digital-nomad-mode in search of Meaning when Berlin ceases offering the newness they so desperately crave. And while I thought the premise of this novel seemed to land somewhere between vaguely grating and downright insufferable, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, sharply translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes, instead offered a vivid, piercing novel that so accurately depicts the young and disillusioned who go in search of some sort of contemporary specificity and authenticity, only to find themselves defeated and disappointed. Deceptively scathing and lowkey bleak, this novel made my ears ring.”—Mira Braneck, A Room of One’s Own in Madison, Wisconsin
“The Turn of the Screw meets American Psycho in this dark, comic tale about a governess as charming as she is murderous, and the long-buried secret that will rip her new family of employers apart (in more ways than one). Much like Miss Notty does to her victims, Feito turns the gothic novel inside out, bringing the disgusting, gory details of the Victorian age — everything from chamberpots to imperial exploitation — to the forefront, all presented through the eyes of a protagonist no less sociopathic than the society she holds in contempt. The only difference: she’s more than happy to admit it to herself.”—Nik Long, P&T Knitwear in New York, New York
“Much like its protagonist—a governess with a penchant for bloodshed—something evil writhes through the pages of Victorian Psycho. It’s my favorite horror novel of the year so far, and for good reason. Feito’s ability to breathe life into a soulless character is nothing short of masterful. With sharp, curt dialogue that doesn’t always match the characters’ seemingly sunny dispositions, this novel blends humor with horror in a way that keeps you on your toes. The ending? Utterly shocking. If you love Suspiria and American Psycho, you’ll devour this.”—Alexis Powell, The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City, Utah
“Han Kang’s newest novel is very literally stunning, and several of its passages left me reeling. The narrator is a writer who ventures into a secluded stretch of woods in South Korea to help save her friend’s parrot, because her friend has been hospitalized following a brutal injury. The narrator’s journey forces her to face the history of two real massacres that bookended the Korean War, as well as her friend’s relationship to that history. Reality and fiction intertwine in the novel for both the reader and the narrator, making for an eerie book that left me hung up on the history it centers.”—Maritza Montanez, Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, New York
“I’m still reading Death Takes Me, but I love Cristina Rivera Garza’s work for the way she and her characters analyze language, as well as for the careful attention she pays to gendered violence. Here, a professor goes for a run and finds a castrated corpse accompanied by a line of poetry at the crime scene. When she reports it to the police as part of a larger wave of serial murders, she gets roped into the investigation by a detective who’s intrigued by the professor’s knowledge of each poem, and newly obsessed with poetry herself. The writing is brilliant–disorienting, and more delightful than you may expect based on the story’s violence.”—Maritza Montanez, Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, New York
Alexandria Onuoha is on a bright spare stage dressed in white, bare feet, her black hair slicked tightly back. She is kneeling, but when the music begins, she quickly rises, arms eager and legs unbound. Her joints share a smooth vocabulary. She is soft wrists and loose limbs, blooming bones and fluid hips. She dances from the inside.
I ask her, What does it feel like to dance?
“Like everything makes sense,” she says.
She lingers there, speaks of history, family, Blackness, womanhood. I count one, two, three, four times she tells me:
“I feel free.”
Alex is a dancer, but there were times when people did not think she moved like one. She was a Black woman studying dance at a small, predominantly white liberal arts college in the Northeast. She moved her body according to the instruction she was given, but she often felt stiff and mechanical. “Robotic,” she said. The dance genres she grew up in, the languages her body spoke easily, were hip-hop, liturgical, West African, dancehall. She used movement to fuse culture and art, sexuality and spirituality, past and present.
Alex struggled in her dance program, and she recounted to me the aftermath of going public with her experience. She had been unsettled by a white male guest dancer’s comments on her body throughout rehearsals: the way it was failing, the way it did not fit.
She doesn’t remember precise words, but she remembers his tone registering as sarcasm.
Alex spoke to a professor about the guest dancer’s comments, but she did not feel she was taken seriously. When she got her grade, it was less than she believed she deserved, and she brought it up again to her professor, who she says dismissed her, telling her, in substance, “Sorry, this is just dance.” Alex didn’t think it was just dance.
Other professors made comments that suggested her body didn’t belong, and seemed baffled by the way it moved. She didn’t know what to call these critiques. Professors and guest dancers said they didn’t understand what her body was doing or what her art meant. She produced a choreographic piece combining dance from her Jamaican and Nigerian roots. When it was time to perform it, a guest artist said, “I don’t really understand what your piece is about, like, I am kind of confused, like, what’s the point of having Bob Marley speak?” She again told a professor she felt the comment was not right. The professor said the comment was fine. She told Alex to grow thicker skin.
Alex tried, but near the end of her program, she was exhausted. She was exhausted by the side-eye, the erasure of Black art, and what she saw as favoritism of white bodies. She decided she needed to speak. She wrote an opinion piece for her school newspaper on what she experienced in her program. She called it “Dancing Around White Supremacy.”
When the article ran online, friends saw it and texted to say they were proud. But at night, when she got back from an event and logged on to Instagram, she saw the other messages. She read them alone in her room.
She did not cry. She was still. She thought: “I can’t believe I go to school with people who think like this.”
She didn’t recognize names, and not everyone used avatars, but she assumed the DMs were from other students. Who else, she thought, would read her school newspaper? In a school with a student body of less than two thousand, she imagined the messages were sent by people she ate with in the dining hall, sat with in class, passed on the way to her dorm. Online, they called her a “black bitch.” They called her a “n*****.”
The day after the op-ed was published, Alex had dance class. She walked into class with dread in her step. She felt sweat coat her back. She didn’t want anyone to know what was happening inside her body, so she made it unreadable. She disciplined her face.
When class began, Alex said, the professor didn’t talk about Black art. She didn’t talk about Alex, how she felt, what she and the other students of color needed. Instead, she suggested that students should be careful, especially with what they say about guest artists. Someone could get sued, Alex remembers the professor saying.
After class and the professor’s not-so-subtle chiding, some of the white women dancers from her class came up to her in the cafeteria and said, “Oh Alex, we appreciate you being so courageous.” But Alex said none of them spoke in front of the professor.
Members of the school administration met with her after the op-ed was published. They said her choice could follow her, and they wanted to make sure she understood all the potential ramifications for her future academic career. They did not say the words perhaps silence will keep you safe. But that was what she believed they meant.
Violence online is linked to a struggle over the structural power of white supremacy
The problem of women’s online abuse is almost always framed as a problem of misogyny, but Alex’s story, and the stories of countless other women, show that violence online is also linked to a struggle over the structural power of white supremacy, to the other systems with which it intertwines. Alex could not ignore what people were saying to her online, because language can be used to maintain power or to resist it. It can be used to keep certain people in their place or to fight a system that ranks human life. Language influences how we see ourselves, how other people see us, how they treat us. Language shapes public life. So do silences.
When Alex was abused online, she was punished through multiple attack vectors: her gender, her race, and the norms of behavior for Black people in predominantly white spaces.
Before the 2014 harassment campaign dubbed “Gamergate” became a cultural inflection point for the issue of women and online abuse, Black women were already navigating rampant misogynoir online. Gamergate was an explosion of masculine aggression toward women game developers, feminists critiquing video game culture, and anyone who dared defend them. Trolls organized on forums like 4chan and Reddit and the text-based chat system IRC to spread lies and disinformation about women they did not like, and they used those stories to justify attacks.
Most mainstream coverage of Gamergate focused on misogyny as an animating force, neglecting a deeper interrogation of the way racism also shapes the experiences of women online. Savvy Black digital feminists had already documented the harmful behavior of 4chan users who coordinated to impersonate and harass Black women. Just months earlier, Shafiqah Hudson, Ra’il I’Nasah Kiam, and Sydette Harry had created the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing, a nod to Hudson’s Southern roots, letting the trolls know “we see you.” Scholar Jessie Daniels, an expert on Internet manifestations of racism, told me the cultural conversation around Gamergate flattened the race element. White supremacy online, she said, does not get nearly enough attention as misogyny, despite the fact that misogyny and white supremacy are constitutive of each other. They are, she said, “of a piece.”
White supremacy is what Alex implicated in her op-ed—the same belief that animated the people who would call her slurs, the same belief she suspected influenced her professor’s reaction after the op-ed ran and which she believes also explains why some of the white women in her class did not defend her that day, a silence that tells its own story about white women’s complicity in Black women’s oppression.
In 2017, shortly after the first inauguration of President Donald Trump, I interviewed Kimberlé Crenshaw, a leading critical race scholar who coined the term intersectionality to describe the unique combination of racism and sexism Black women face. I asked if she would characterize the moment and explain what was at stake. I was so naïve that day.
She told me we have acclimated to the violence women face. She said a system of power is so normal that even those who are subject to it are internalizing and reproducing it. Remember that in 2016 nearly half of white women voted for Trump. Never forget that less than 1 percent of Black women did. In 2024, white women helped deliver Trump another win.
Black women’s experiences of abuse have been historically minimized and sometimes outright erased. Their prescience about the dangers of a nascent alt-right were largely ignored, and at least some of the online harms people experience today are a result of white people, including white women, refusing to heed Black women’s warnings. Black women’s pain is rarely deemed worthy of serious attention, which was precisely the point Alex made in her op-ed when she denounced the dance department’s lack of protection for Black women.
“They completely disregarded my feelings because in their minds, I was not capable of feeling,” she wrote.
After Alex’s op-ed was published, she tried to ignore the abusive messages people sent her online. She told herself: “These people are just crazy. These people are wild. They’re insane. I don’t care.” But she did care. There are so many ways that words matter.
There are so many ways that words matter.
In her book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett explains that our brain’s most important job is to manage our body’s metabolic budget so that we can stay alive. We are not conscious of every thought, feeling, kindness, or insult functioning as a deposit or a withdrawal against that budget, but she says that is precisely what is happening inside us. Words that are generous and connective function as deposits, while words that are degrading and exclusionary function as withdrawals.
“The power of words is not a metaphor,” she writes. Words are “tools for regulating human bodies. Other people’s words have a direct effect on your brain activity and your bodily systems, and your words have that same effect on other people. Whether you intend that effect is irrelevant. It’s how we’re wired.”
Knowing the history of a word makes it that much harder to set aside. CNN race reporter Nicquel Terry Ellis and I were former colleagues at USA Today, and I interviewed her because I witnessed her abuse, which was differently textured than my own. She was called not just a “cunt” but a “house slave.” When we spoke, she told me about the time she was home on the couch, exhausted after a long day, and saw the message that had been posted on her Facebook fan page: “N*****.”
She thought about her former manager, another Black journalist, a person she respects and admires, who told her she should try to ignore this language, who stressed that Black people faced worse during the civil rights movement—bombings, lynchings, beatings. Ignore it and do the work, he encouraged.
She couldn’t. Terry Ellis told me: “To have someone send you a message, someone taking the time out of their day to send you a message and call you the N-word . . . a name that was given to your ancestors who were slaves, who were called that by slave masters when they were told to get out in the field and pick cotton. I mean, you think about all the historical implications of that.”
Jennifer M. Gómez, a Black feminist sexual violence researcher and assistant professor at Boston University’s School of Social Work, told me the slur was directed at her when she was Zoom bombed—a disruption from harassers during a video conference—during a virtual awards ceremony hosted by the American Psychological Association. The interlopers put up swastikas. They shouted “fuck the n*****” over and over. The audience left. The audience tried to return, but it happened again. Gómez left and did not go back. She sat at home, whispered to herself that it was fine, that she was safe in Detroit, that the interlopers were not in Detroit. But she did not feel fine. She wanted to take a walk. Is it safe? she wondered. She cried. She felt anxious. She scolded herself. She was a violence researcher who should know better. How dare she be shocked?
When she marinated on why the words felt so violating, she realized it wasn’t that the transgression occurred during a private event; it was, she said, that it “happened within my home.”
The words people use to speak to us and about us tell us a great deal about how other people see us, which impacts how they treat us. Misgendering or deadnaming a trans person doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is connected to laws being passed in legislatures across the country that deny trans people human rights. Calling a woman a “cunt,” reducing her from a human to an anatomical part, is connected to a rape culture that makes sexual violence against her permissible. Calling a Black woman a racial slur reinforces her position in a white supremacist society that values white life above all other life, that demonizes Black bodies and brutalizes Black bodies, often without consequence. How other people see us, how they speak to us, shapes our lives—the privileges we are afforded, the dignity we are denied.
One night I was swiping through TikTok at an unreasonable hour when the algorithm delivered Jools Rosa (who would later create the viral “demure” trend). Rosa is a trans plus-size Afro-Latina beauty influencer with more than two million followers on the app. In the video, Rosa painted the word fatty on her chin in color corrector and blended the insult into her face. Impressed with this symbolic approach, I scrolled through her feed. I saw a woman challenging stereotypical depictions, fiercely funny, serially self-deprecating, and at times painfully vulnerable. On a trip to Las Vegas, Rosa posted videos of herself in full glam to watch Beyoncé perform, posted another at the pool lauding herself for not sweating off her makeup, posted another divulging that she had met a man the night before. She felt good with that man, connected, but she is a trans woman in America, her safety is routinely threatened, and she started to question her reality, to grow paranoid. She convinced herself the man was going to round up people to assault her, so when he went to the bathroom, she slipped away.
I reached out to Rosa, and when we spoke, she told me she is subject to a daily torrent of racist, sexist, transphobic, fatphobic messages online. Men call Rosa disgusting. Children call her a gorilla. Thin, white, passing transgender women deride her for not being trans enough. One of the strangest parts of the abuse, she said, is how it morphs into a preoccupation with the way not only people on the Internet but everyone sees her. Someone once commented on one of her videos that if they ended up sitting next to her on a plane, it would ruin their entire flight. She carries that now, that specific wondering about what fellow passengers think of her.
“I start picking up on how I perceive people are perceiving me. I’m like, great. Everyone thinks I’m a nasty bitch. Everyone’s looking at how big I am. Everyone’s disgusted by me.”
Working out how other people perceive us is an important part of understanding communication. It’s why a lot of the online abuse you would not think would demand our attention does, especially some of the less obvious kinds. It’s easy to assume what a person sending a rape threat or death threat thinks of you. It takes more work to sit with the subtler messages. Linguist Emily Bender told me that understanding language includes imagining what the other person is trying to say.
“Even if we are able to set it aside afterward, we still have to have made sense of it, and it’s very, very difficult to do that sense-making without modeling the mind of the person who said the thing,” she said. “It’s intimate.”
I don’t want to suggest violence should be a woman’s problem to solve. I don’t want to suggest that there is a single solution, neatly wrapped, that she can take into her life, into her work, into her body to feel immediately better or stronger or more resolute. I won’t suggest that there is a way we can feel better about sexism or racism. I do not want us to feel better about sexism or racism.
I began my book, To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person, wondering how women were surviving violence online. I wanted to know how women coped. I thought there would be a clear number of beneficial strategies and I would be able to sensibly arrange them. I have learned a great deal about how women cope, but I cannot be honest about those findings and package them as I’d hoped. Coping involves a number of strategies influenced by alternating priorities. Everywhere there are binds, and everywhere women are getting tied up.
Everywhere there are binds, and everywhere women are getting tied up.
What Alex knows with certainty, what she told me again and again, was that she tried to ignore the abusive messages but could not. She told herself she was unbothered. Her instinct to ignore her feelings is part of the unseen labor that Black women and other people who experience oppression perform daily.
Like Alex, many women online try to regulate their emotions, to control what they feel and express. Emotion regulation is defined by psychologist James Gross, a pioneer in emotion research, as “the processes by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions.” Emotion regulation can be done unconsciously, and it can be taught. The strategies people use to regulate their mood and behavior can be based on what they believe about emotion, and their tactics are also influenced by what is culturally accepted about emotion.
When I researched emotion regulation, I noticed two common strategies in the literature: expressive suppression, when a person tries to hide an emotion, and cognitive reappraisal, when a person tries to think differently about a situation to change an emotional response.
If you are engaged in expressive suppression, you try not to let anyone around you see how you really feel. I think of Alex in her dance class, the way she controlled the muscles in her face so no one could read her distress.
Cognitive reappraisal is generally considered a healthier emotion regulation strategy. Sometimes it is used to dull a negative feeling or to feel something else altogether. It may involve going over a situation in your mind several times to come up with an alternate take. You might see the situation one way, then try a broader perspective.
When I began this research, I thought emotion regulation sounded like a reasonable strategy for coping with negative feelings. Things feel awful, things are awful, so you do what you can to manage your emotions, to feel better. We cannot snap our fingers and rid the world of violence, so we might as well learn to regulate our emotions around the violence we face, minimizing their disruptions. We can’t ignore the abuse, but we can reframe a situation to dismiss individual instances of hate and maintain a sense of self-worth, to continue to participate in public life.
But when I dug deeper, I began to find the trouble.
In 2018 Alfred Archer, a philosopher at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, read a paper by philosopher Amia Srinivasan in which she writes that victims of oppression are often asked to turn away from valid emotional responses to give themselves the best chance of ending that oppression, a choice, argued Srinivasan, that constitutes an affective injustice. Archer was contemplating the paper’s arguments when he heard renowned emotion researcher James Gross give a speech, prompting Archer and fellow Tilburg philosopher Georgina Mills to think about the relationship between affective injustice and emotion regulation, concluding that “the demand faced by victims of oppression . . . is a demand that they regulate their emotions.”
Archer and Mills argue that while cognitive reappraisal may make a woman feel emotionally better, it can also involve “turning away from the injustice.” They offered the example of a woman who is angry at being sexually harassed, cognitively reappraises the situation to decide it wasn’t harassment, and then essentially ignores the problem and “gives up on attempts to challenge the injustice.” (The goal of reappraisal is to change your emotion, so the story you settle on may be one that makes you feel better but not necessarily one that is true.)
To illustrate the problem with suppression, they give the example of a woman who does not express her anger. That choice may keep her safe from further discrimination and avoid making other people around her uncomfortable, but it can decrease her positive emotions, cause problems with cognition, and lead to poor health outcomes.
When Archer and I Zoomed to lean into these complexities, he admitted that while some form of emotion regulation is necessary to survive life, in the context of oppression, the act of trying to control your emotional state is fundamentally unjust.
“The fact that you have to try and work out how to respond, how to keep yourself healthy in the face of this, shows how big a difficulty it is. Because not only are you faced with all of these options, each of which brings costs, but thinking through how you are going to respond to a situation is enormously cognitively taxing in itself.”
José Soto, a professor of psychology at Penn State who has conducted research on how culture can influence emotion regulation, said that when a person is trying to manage emotions around aggressions that are group based and identity based, the effectiveness of emotion regulation strategies is also likely going to be influenced by that person’s goals. The goal of self-preservation and the goal of fighting oppression may require different strategies.
Alex’s goal was to survive her senior year. And she did. She is a doctoral student now, studying how the messages of fascist groups impact the psychological development of Black girls. She organizes in Boston, writes for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, and conducts research on far-right misogynoir.
“It doesn’t stop,” she told me of the abuse. “Anytime I write something, it doesn’t really stop.”
Alex told me the difference now is that she doesn’t “pretend it’s not there.”
Learning how to regulate emotions is important for psychological well-being, but the strategies we use can force us into near-impossible choices about what is good for the moment and what is good for the future, what is good for the individual and what is good for the collective. I struggled with how to conclude this essay, because I wanted to end with an idea that felt unequivocal and concrete. That urge was impossible to satisfy, so I landed on a conversation with psychotherapist Seth Gillihan, who teaches people how to regulate emotions by changing unhealthy patterns of thinking. Gillihan, who had been a source during my reporting on the trauma of the January 6 insurrection, told me that if someone is upset about their abuse and is beating themself up for being upset, wishing they had thicker skin, thinking they can’t do this work or that they shouldn’t be sharing ideas publicly if they can’t handle them emotionally, he would encourage them to notice those thoughts, to loosen those attachments, and to question those assumptions.
“Maybe you could ask yourself something like ‘Do any of the people I know who have expressed who they truly are in spite of society’s criticism or hatred, who have really changed society, have they done it without some level of abuse? Is it worth what it’s going to cost?’ And the answer might be no. But someone might realize, ‘Oh, nothing says this should be easy.’ And there can be real relief in that. And realizing this is hard. Yeah, it’s hard. Exactly. That’s exactly how it is.”
Pain and reprieve are the nature of struggle. They formed the poles of Alex’s experiences. They made their way into her art. When I asked Alex for some examples of her choreography, she shared a piece she created during college that featured five Black alums. The piece began with the women moving into a circle, clasping and raising their hands before breaking into smaller groups. One performed a solo, then they came back together, eventually dancing in unison. You don’t have to understand every move to feel the weight of it. Alex told me the piece was about how Black women are rarely protected, so they depend on the love between them to invent safety, to sustain movement.
Alex told me she later watched a recording of the performance. When it ended, in that liminal silence before the audience claps, you can hear a single voice, low and proud:
Guatemala—the land of eternal Spring—the birthplace of my parents, their parents, their grandparents, and as far back as we can remember, the place I consider my second home. Guatemala, a country ravaged by civil war, the Spanish colonial regime, and the United Fruit Company; a place Anthony Bourdain was too scared to visit for fear of gang violence, drugs, and kidnappings. A place I visit every few years, where I have been stopped and frisked by military personnel and crooked police, threatened with machetes, and survived the shooting-up of my childhood home. It’s also the place I learned to ride a horse with no saddle, swim in lakes so clear that I could see my feet, and drink with locals who had to be up for work in a few hours. It’s a place blessed with beauty and plagued by history.
I was an infant—less than a year old—during my first visit to Guatemala. I don’t remember this. I was three, seven, ten, and twelve when we went again, and my memories all blend together into two distinct but cohesive montages of images. The first, in the mountainous highlands—sleeping on hammocks, trekking the jungle with my grandfather while holding a machete, carrying water up from the lake to boil and drink or heat for showers, and walking down the mountain to the mill to grind corn for tortillas. The capital holds different mental pictures and associations—men in uniform with automatic weapons, my cousin standing on the corner with his friends selling drugs, the open-air markets, the gang signs spray-painted on neighborhood walls.
My book, Guatemalan Rhapsody, explores the dichotomies of my upbringing—both the beauty and the danger—and shows what it means to have both of these things living inside of you. My characters present tough exteriors to conceal the pain and trauma dwelling within. These are a people who have been through much, both in their recent and ancestral histories, and tell the stories of country and its inhabitants. These are the fictionalized stories of my uncles, cousins, brothers, parents, friends, and strangers I knew or saw while I was growing up, all of which have been informed by the authors I have named here. From the humor I employ to the loss of our indigenous roots to the difficult circumstances my characters find themselves in, these topics converse with the other authors on this list. I think this is our way of presenting, center stage, a body that casts a shadow—a people too real to not stop the light that illuminates one half of our beings and obscures the other.
Trout, Belly Up by Rodrigo Fuentes, translated by Ellen Jones
This collection of interlinked short stories brings to light the life of Don Henrik—a rural farmer on a quest to better his circumstances in life—and the lives of others in the surrounding areas in similar situations. Fuentes’ characters are overflowing with vices and virtues and feel more real than some of the people—made of flesh and blood—that I encounter on the street in real life. From a missing dog to hitmen to trout breeders, the stories in this collection end with an open-endedness that left me frantically turning pages and stopping just short of attempting to slice open the thin paper on which the words were printed to see if there was more.
This is a novel told in verse, where “Las Chismosas”—the gossipers, a chorus of aunts and grandmothers—follow the narrator, Melissa, as she goes about her daily life dealing with breakups, periods, bad sex, and, of course, the bringing back of Mexican superstar Selena Quintanilla. Most people who grew up listening to Selena’s music, much like myself, know about her story and her untimely death. This book comes to us at the perfect moment, as the person currently serving time for Selena’s murder, Yolanda Saldívar, will be eligible for parole on March 30th of 2025 after serving 30 years in prison. The book ends with an alternate timeline in which Selena doesn’t die—she goes on to make more “bops” and fall in love with Johnny Depp after they star in a movie and having a daughter and….
This book, as the subheading suggests, is a meditation on race and the meanings and myths of “Latino.” The book focuses on defining what it means to be a Latine(x) person in the United States now and how that term itself—a Spanish-given term, much like the term “Hispanic”—erases our indigenous and African past for the more “favorable” European option. The book discusses themes ranging from Hollywood’s rebranding of colonialism in an attempt to redefine it as a heroic act, growing evermore violent in its onscreen portrayal as if trying to imitate the real life barbarism that occurred in Guatemala and other Central American countries in the final decades of the last century to the “passive” mass killings occurring at the US-Mexico border by US policy makers who understand the desert to be a natural death machine of which they can wash their hands clean when asked if they have had a hand in killing anyone attempting to seek asylum or emigrate to the US.
The Popol Vuh, which translates into “Book of the Council,” “Book of the Community” or “The Sacred Book,” tells the story of creation according to the Maya—the thunder gods and the water serpent making land, the making of animals, and the three attempts to make humans. Much like the Bible, it features other myths but the main focus is on two sets of twin brothers (Jun and Wuqub and Hun Hanaphu and Xbalanque) who take on the gods of the underworld. The first set of brothers, the fathers of Hun Hanaphu and Xbalanque, disturb Vucub Came—the master of the underworld—with their game of pitz—a Meso-American ballgame best described today as a cross between soccer and basketball, where players must shoot a ball through a hoop using only their hips. Vucub Came challenges them to a game, then lords of the underworld trap and kill them. But Hun Hanaphu and Xbalanque, formed from the spit of the decapitated head of Hun Hanaphu, challenged years later, pass all of the tests set before them by the gods of the underworld and come out victorious.
This poetry collection is divided into two sections—the first section takes place in New York City, the other in Miami. The poems in the collection are short, and yet the turn at the end of each one is a gut punch for which you can not brace. Each of the poems could be rapped over a beat you have to nod along to, which is exactly what the reader will find themselves doing while reading. The language is taut, no word out of place or used for filler, all guts and veins and bones, no fat.
Men of Maize by Miguel Ángel Asturias, translated by Gerald Martin
No list about Guatemalan writers would be complete without mentioning an Asturias book. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Asturias is well-known for his writing, specifically his novel, Mr. President, which,like Men of Maize, focuses on telling the novel through the point of view of multiple characters. I first came to Asturias by way of his story collection, Legends of Guatemala, which focuses on Maya mythology pre-Spanish conquest and the power struggle between the story telling of the Indigenous population and written word of the Spaniards. Men of Maize, much like the other books I have mentioned so far, is not an easy read. Divided into six sections, each from a different point of view covering the course of decades, the novel addresses the way of life of the Indigenous Maya population and its attempt to hold on to its culture; the maize at the center of the book is seen as sacred to the Maya, but the Ladinos see it as a means to an end—the achievement of modernity and monetary prosperity. The book relates the difference between the magical realm of the Maya and the “practical” world of the Ladinos and tells the stories of what it means when one culture attempts and succeeds to impose itself upon the other—the loss of identities, spiritualities, and histories.
The poems in this collection, to my mind and ear, are like prayers to the earth, the sky, the sea, the land, and the gods that came before us. Ak’abal was of the same location as all of my ancestors—the highlands of Guatemala, from tribes settled along the Motagua River Valley—and wrote with legs and feet like roots anchored to the land. The poems appear as a vision and slowly lead the reader to an ending—one that ends on the page but continues in the mind; here is his poem, “Dusk,”: “Like a wounded rose, / evening / bleeds / slowly / into nothing. / Then even nothing / is no more.”
This memoir incorporates traditional prose with interspersed poetic forms to tell its story. Starting when Claudia was a child, focusing on age 5, when her mom ran away from her abusive husband and father of her children, Raul, leaving behind Claudia and her two sisters, Consuelo (9) and Sindy (15) with their aunt Soila, the book traces Claudia’s upbringing in Guatemala and her journey to “El Norte” and back. Claudia’s mother returns when Claudia is 8 and tells them that she married a man named Amado in America and that she plans to take them back with her. What follows is the journey through Guatemala and Mexico to their new life in the US, ending when Claudia is 13 during a return trip back to her homeland; but as the title poem says, “The soil knows no border.”
Covering topics ranging from her college years (and in the same vein as My Time Among the Whites by Jennine Capó Crucet) to her first visit to Guatemala at the age of twenty-eight, De Leon approaches her topics with retrospective clarity and tenderness. Born in the US but still feeling out of place in mostly white spaces with friends and colleagues who travel during breaks and summer, De Leon decides to go to Guatemala to stay for six months. Broken into three parts, the second part of the collection focuses on events during her visit—from her first day with her dad helping her get settled to re-learning Spanish to performing The Vagina Monologues in Spanish—De Leon bring humor to her experiences. The final section focuses on her writing once back from her travels, the raising of her child, and on the many return trips she made to the land of her ancestors.
See tragic photos in the NYT—attacks in Israel by Hamas. I cover my mouth. It’s a weird reflex.
I walk to the playground by the beach. The sky is a mountainous gray. Waves are messy like a white and steel-colored fingerpainting. My one year old is toddling towards the swings which are pendulating fiercely with bigger kids and I have to run and grab him before he’s punted up and over the sea wall. Just as I reach for him – his soft belly, downy curls of hair still smelling of warmed milk – I see my friend with her son. Her daughters are in Hebrew school. She says, did you hear about it? I say yes, it’s so terrible. She says, I mean, people taken at a music festival. It’s really horrible. I say, yes, it’s horrible. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t say I don’t want to talk about it, but I already feel accused. She says, at least with social media we’ll finally see what really is happening. I pause. I had no idea she thought the news was biased in the other direction. Or that anyone thought that.
In a month, that friend will have a book reading. She’ll talk about working for the Kuwaiti government; about teaching diversity; about wanting everyone in the room – a hypothetical room – to feel comfortable.
A hand goes up. “So, what did it feel like working for, you know, the Dark Side?” Some laughter ripples through the room.
My friend treats the question with diplomacy. She tries, I think, to make everyone in the room feel comfortable.
But my face has already turned bright red then pale. I want to leave. I wish I could leave. There are people all around me, including my mom whom I’ve dragged to the event with me. My skin is prickling and the hairs on my arms are on edge and I wonder if this is a reaction to a threat.
October 8
Reach out to friends with family in Israel.
They say:
My family’s ok but it is really terrible.
Reach out to more friends with family in Israel.
They say:
Thank you. My family is ok. There has been so much loss on all sides. It’s terrible.
October 9
Call my friend who’s more like a sister from Tunisia via upstate New York. In a quiet side voice because I’m walking around my kids’ school before pickup I say, I am horrified. I feel ashamed to be Arab, or like I’m supposed to be ashamed of myself for being Arab, I mean much more than usual, I say openly, candidly. Without my usual wryness.
She (who is darker-skinned than I am, more like my dad, more beautiful, and maybe more Maghrebian, or more Berber, than Arab. We’ve never really talked about it. Her parents are Muslim, mine aren’t) says – I know. It’s terrible. But you didn’t do it.
I know, I say. But people, I’ve learned, aren’t that interested in nuance. You know, they recoil when I say I’m Lebanese. (Like either, terrorist, or, not at the right address, or at the very least, gaudy. Loud. Uncouth.)
I’m worried about how teachers will treat my kids, how other kids and families will treat our kids.
As I say that last bit, a friend who is half Jewish walks by with her dog and headphones and is sniffling. I wave and say, oh hold on one second to the phone, give her a hug – she looks startled, distracted, tearful. She doesn’t smile or crack a joke like usual. We part and I continue mumbling into the phone and pacing outside the school.
I say, I’m ashamed to be adjacent to the people who did this. And I’m ashamed of humanity.
Yes exactly, my friend on the phone says.
And I’m scared. Scared for what’s going to happen next. It’s not going to be good.
You mean like backlash?
Yes. It’s going to be bad, I think.
I better go.
Text friend who was walking her dog with the headphones. I say:
Hi mama, I’m sorry I was on the phone when I saw you. I wanted to see if you were doing OK? You seemed to be down, maybe from the horrific events that have happened in the last few days. Just wanted to check in and give you a hug through text. (or if I’m imagining it all, please disregard!) xo
She writes back and says she was tired but also, yes, feeling the weight of the world.
I feel relieved. I thought she might have been planning to ostracize me and my sons from our elementary school community.
I ‘heart’ her text.
Full page full screens of the New York Times are about the massacres.
“TAKEN AT A CONCERT.”
“THE TERROR.”
“NIGHTMARES WREAKED BY HAMAS.”
It’s a shift. It’s as though the NYT leadership saw readers were turning to social media for catharsis and wanted in on the action.
In the face of the all-caps headlines I shield my eyes. I feel as though I’m being yelled at by a dysregulated parent.
More messages about how horrible this all is from high school friends who are all white. Some are liberal. Some are conservative. None, it seems, have a single Jewish friend. Is that possible?
How do we support Israel?
How do we support our Jewish coworkers?
They text.
October 10
The first families are on the move. The first perish. Reuters Journalists are killed in southern Lebanon.
I wait for friends who know that I have family in Beirut, who know that I’m Lebanese, who know that I’m Arab, to reach out.
I wait for at least my closest friends to reach out.
They don’t.
Maybe they don’t know?
October 14
An Asian-American Pulitzer Prize winner is canceled by the Pritzker Center for his criticism of Israel. A Pulitzer-prize winner.
This is frightening, I text to a writer friend.
Frightening, indeed, they say. And that’s all.
I post nothing. I say nothing to anyone. Not even to my husband. He listens to the news of what’s going on in Italian but he knows better than to discuss it when the kids are around.
The kids are always around.
October 16
There is a knock at the door of a Chicago family’s apartment. At home is just the mother and her 6 year old son. She opens the door and it is her landlord. Her landlord says Muslims and Palestinians must die. He strangles her. He stabs her. Then he stabs 6 year old Wadea 26 times. Wadea looks exactly like my plump-faced 7 year old, exactly like my father in his childhood photos. Wadea al Fayoume dies. His mother remains in critical condition at the hospital. My husband sees me sitting on our bed clutching my phone and says, what’s wrong? What happened?
2017-2023
At Cal State, as an adjunct, I teach Susan Albuhawa’s, Mornings in Jenin.
I teach Imre Kertesz’s Kaddish for a Child Not Born.
The class talks about how unlikely it is that Jewish settlers would steal a child from a Palestinian mother’s arms and take it to raise as their own.
We talk about how, on the other hand, we “know” – because of Steven Spielberg films, a student quips – that the Nazis were capable of any sort of atrocity.
In my international human rights class, I teach Corrie v. Caterpillar.
In my Migration Politics and Policy class, I teach Ex Parte Shahid, which asks, for purposes of citizenship eligibility, whether a Syrian is or is not “white”. (Shahid’s “walnut complexion” and primary language and the court’s ‘original intent’ interpretation of the 13th amendment led the court to conclude “NOT white”.)
I show the picture of my great grandfather’s simple gravestone: Born, Zahle, Syria (Zahle before, and Zahle after, was in Lebanon). Died, Brooklyn, New York.
I talk about my great great grandfather, too. He applied for asylum for his wife and four children. He did not want to be conscripted into the Ottoman army. He traveled from Zahle to Mexico when he was 30. Then he died.
According to a tourism website, Zahle is known for its warriors, wine and poetry.
I wonder aloud to my class if any one of these contributed to my great great grandfather’s death in Mexico.
Several months after a letter made its way back to Lebanon with the news of his death, the asylum papers came through. His widow, my great great grandmother, took her four kids and boarded a ship to America.
February 2022
I opened the email asking for the course descriptions for my Fall classes. I was getting to teach a full course load. I’d even get health insurance.
May 2022
Suddenly, I’m pregnant. It was unplanned. I’m married with two kids. We’re economically ok for the moment; it’s not disastrous. But it’s unexpected.
I’m due in the middle of the Fall semester.
I walked out of the doctor’s office in dread.
June 2022
When I tell her the news, the Director of the Department gives a hard laugh and tells me she can find someone to replace me for the year.
That would leave me without any source of income. That would foreclose my dream of teaching a full course load. Of having health benefits.
I tell her I’m already working on how to invite guest teachers to fill in for me for just the few weeks after I give birth.
She says, “You’ll have to pay anyone who takes over your classes. Our department doesn’t have the funds to cover that.”
I hang up. I want to cry but I don’t. I have other things I need to do right then. I’m working and raising two kids already. There’s no time for it.
The following week HR tells me, Of course there is maternity leave. Of course it is covered. This is California. You’ll get five and half weeks of paid time off. I ask about lining up other teachers, and how they’ll get paid. She says, the Department Chair will take care of that. When I ask if I would need to pass my salary to the substitute teachers she froze. Of course they’ll get paid. The Department will have funds for that. No, you don’t give them your wages. Who told you that?
The Director of the Program calls me three times in a row while I’m at the doctor’s office. I see three new texts from her:
“Pls send me the resumes of the writers you propose to take over your classes in the fall when you leave.”
“I am working during my summer, unpaid, to resolve this problem as soon as possible.”
“Thx.”
This problem.
Spring 2023
I am woken up every ninety minutes throughout the night. The baby is a poor sleeper.
I walk through lectures like a zombie. I still love to teach and I still love the students.
In the leadup to the CSU lecturers’ strike demanding better pay, more job stability, parental leave and health benefits, the Director comes into my office late at night. I never usually see her on Mondays.
They don’t need me next academic year. They have professors coming from Israel to teach.
It’s evening and almost everyone on the floor has left for the day but I still have a night class to prepare for.
She walks into my small, quiet office, closes the door behind her.
They don’t need me next academic year. They have professors coming from Israel to teach. Their salaries are paid for by their universities in Israel so it’s a huge savings to the creative writing department.
You understand, I’m sure. But we might have a class or two opening up the following year.
I say, face turning red, my mind flailing about to keep my response dignified, “thank you for this opportunity to teach a full course load this year. Having health insurance has been a huge benefit to me and my family.”
“And maternity leave,” she says. “Don’t forget, you also got to take maternity leave.”
October 2023
Our family’s health insurance runs out.
November 2023
A college roommate forwards to a small group of us an IG post.
“Jewish groups sue UC Berkeley over unchecked antisemitism.”
She says she is fearful for our future generations. She asks about another friend’s family in Israel.
The friend says, Her friends and family are all ok.
I don’t chime in. Even when things have turned lighter. When they forward silly memes. When they talk about a reunion. I still don’t chime in. I’m the only one of 5 on the text chain that stays silent. No one calls me out. One of them might not even recognize my number. It’s been so long since we talked.
Same friend sends the IG post directly to me alone.
If I was my normal self, if I was the compassionate vessel I’ve trained myself to be, a heart listener, I would have asked – did you feel that way when we were at Berkeley? I’m so sorry if you felt that way. I understand. How terrible. I’m so sorry you had to feel that.
If I was the person I want to be I would say something eloquent and eviscerating. About the students, about the US, about AIPAC, about 1948, 1896, about imperialism and xenophobia and ignorance.
Instead, with body trembling, sitting in a parking lot, I write:
Such a sensitive issue and such a terrible heavy time for all sides, in the Middle East and for the diasporas in the rest of the world. I feel a lot of emotions as a Lebanese American, with family in Lebanon. A Jewish friend of mine just published a memoir about her time working for the Kuwaiti government. She said she hopes it will help people remember to always get to know others on a human level, never generalize or make assumptions. How are you feeling these days, friend? Sending hugs to you and your family
I am trying to be diplomatic and kind and magnanimous. I am not writing what I want to write. What I want to write is full of anger and sadness. I am still shaking when I receive her response.
I get out, walk up one flight of stairs to the Persian threader who will rip out my lip, chin and brow hairs. She’ll call me dear, I’ll call her honey, I’ll speak more freely than I do with my own mother even though I don’t speak Farsi. The thread will break and I’ll joke that it’s my strong Lebanese hair-itage that broke it. The threader will laugh and put her palm on my shoulder.
I’ll leave and as I walk back to my car and climb in my mouth floods with acid again.
I make sure the mini mall security guard is far enough away before I scream in my car until my voice goes hoarse.
November
The kids’ school pictures arrive. Matte finish. 8x10s and 5x7s. A red, textured background that looks like bloody plumage.
My ten-year-old sees that I’ve sent a copy to our family Whatsapp chat and he gets angry. Mom, I told you not to share pictures without my permission!
Is he embarrassed about his braces? About the forced smile, i.e., his acquiescence to the photographer? Does he just want some control?
Ok. Ok. I say. You’re right. I’ll ask first next time.
November
Three men walk down the evening street in Burlington, Vermont. A Brown student, a Trinity student and a Haverford College student. Ivy Leaguers? I don’t know what qualifies as an Ivy League. Only one is not a US Citizen. All three are of Palestinian heritage; they are wearing keffiyehs and speaking Arabic, on their way to celebrate Thanksgiving at a friend’s house. America can be that.
A man spots them from his apartment window. He hears them. He sees the keffiyehs, maybe.
A man spots them from his apartment window. He hears them. He sees the keffiyehs, maybe. He sees the dark, wavy hair. The dark sparkling eyes and beards. Hears the Arabic, maybe. They are not what he looks like. The man watches them. The man descends his apartment stairs half-blind with rage. Half-blind with self-righteousness. The man’s hand is heavy and light. The man shoots them, one, two, three. The man shoots them, one two three four. Four rounds. One was hit in the spine.
“We hope he will still be able to walk.”
December
You should post something, my husband says in a low voice. Our eight year old is kicking the soccer ball against the wall in the other room. Bang. Bang. Our toddler is lying on the floor eating a graham cracker and smacking his hand on the hardwood. Bang. Bang. About your family in Lebanon. Or about Arab Americans. Just some solidarity, my husband says. He is from Sicily. They’re marginalized and proud.
I shake my head. I tell our eight year old to go kick the ball outside but he doesn’t listen. I show my husband the story about Wadea. At first he says, what is it? thinking I’ve changed the subject. Then he is jubilant – oh! Is that the boy giving out the roses in that bar in Beirut? Remember that? He mimics putting the child on his shoulders and raising him up and down. The flower seller with the little black fedora that had been lifted to crowd surf over the dance floor, his dimples flashing shyly as he and his bucket of red roses traveled in a circle around the room, a little prince, a little god, suspended by kind, joyous hands lifting and bouncing him to the beat of the club music, him floating above all of us adults, shy, unsure, until finally he started smiling broadly under the hat, his dimples deep and his eyes all radiant light.
I shake my head. It’s not him. Keep reading.
My husband gets quiet. He pales. He shakes his head. That’s terrible. He says in his Sicilian accent, What kind of people are in this world, he says. He walks back into the kitchen.
December
More chatter on texts. More chatter on social.
I stop reading the news. I stop looking at social. I stop responding to texts.
I sit on the seawall and stare out at a gray glassy ocean. A lone swimmer in a wetsuit breaks through with hand and elbow. A bird dives into the water.
For five minutes, I don’t even look behind me to see if anyone is brandishing a knife. I revel in the safety. I immediately feel guilty for being able to enjoy it.
I am the Room Parent and I sign off on the December email with “Peace on Earth”.
How fucking weak, I say to myself. I think of saying more, even to friends, and then I think of backlash on my kids. My ten year old wants control of his image.
What if he’s called a terrorist, jokingly, by his teacher? By other fifth graders? What if the teacher says, Whoa, watch out! Followed by some deep-toned angry mimicry of Arabic.
What if the teacher or the parents are mentally or emotionally unstable?
What if they are just misinformed?
What if they have guns?
January
My friend who works at the Jewish Museum in Northern California says she is furious at Netanyahu. He’s as bad as Hamas. She has trouble with the use of the word genocide, though. We walk on the beach. She admires the rose-colored cliffs circling the cove. We pick up shells, ogle surfers, take selfies. Our tone dips into despair and then rises into silly laughter. We’ve known each other for twenty years.
I say – not having watched the news in weeks – it might not be genocide.
She says, I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear you say that.
Later that day, alone, I look at the 1989 Convention on Genocide.
I text her the link and say:
Looks like we’re already there.
But to make her feel better, to try and bridge, I say,
But maybe you were asking
about how this compares
to other atrocities, to other
genocides?
She writes and says:
No, I just wanted some
certainty.
Tearful emoji.
February
My 79 year old aunt sends messages to Biden.
Your policies are killing innocent children. You are funding genocide. You are dehumanizing all Arabs everywhere.
My aunt is furious.
I am still not watching. I am still not reading.
Somehow something trickles through about the protests at Columbia University. There’s even an encampment. Tents.
I am shocked. I am touched. What is that feeling you get when you walk into a surprise party that has been assembled for you? That’s the feeling I have. Why?
I call my other aunt in Beirut. She is 90 years old and she was a history professor at the American University of Beirut and she speaks four languages fluently and she never married and last I saw her, she had traveled alone to my wedding, her gray hair blown into a beautiful style. She had loved the food. She says, I am fine. But it really is horrible. They will try to take the whole region, mark my words. But I am fine. My apartment building has a generator.
I say, Do you think you can come here? You know you can always stay with us. For as long as you want.
She says, Go there? No way! Not the way you treat your university students.
March
I fly to San Francisco. A friend tells me about this famous person being pro-Israel. That famous person being pro-Israel. She tells me there is a groundswell of Palestinian support, though.
We walk through the Mission and see Free Palestine graffiti. A huge Palestine flag painted on the door of a beloved, abandoned Italian deli. I take photos and send them to my aunts and cousin and sister.
We drink beer in the park, my friend and I. We eat sushi. I start to think that the only Arabic thing about me is my fatalism. I start to think Arabic fatalism is not inevitable. I wonder how different I might be if being Arab in this country were an asset not a blemish.
I start poking around IG again. I’m on antidepressants, after all. My feed is almost exclusively Al-Jazeera, Democracy Now and writers for Palestine, peppered by ads for bras, for the perfect yoga pant, for dining chairs, wrinkle cream, comedy shows, pet food. I have to put my phone down after starting to feel vertigo from the incongruence.
April
My dad of all people is the one who has the idea. The message arrives on a Friday.
I’m going to visit the local university’s
pro-Palestine encampment
tomorrow and see if
I can donate to them.
Want to join?
We parked too far away. My kids were complaining halfway through our walk up the campus. But my dad, on reaching the protestors’ table, had softened into a person I did not recognize.
At the table were a lady who looked white and in her thirties, and a girl who looked Asian-American and in her twenties. I said thank you to both of them.
I smiled a little too long at them. I never imagined anyone who had their own battle against the American mainstream would put themselves on the line for Arabs. For Palestine. Something that was so small in me, that seemed long dormant, stirred. I asked if we could bring the protesters anything.
I never imagined anyone who had their own battle against the American mainstream would put themselves on the line for Arabs.
They said, just snacks maybe. Individually wrapped. And maybe coffee, but not from Starbucks, please. I said no problem. I thought about how I could get back the next day with coffee. How to bring it in containers that would reassure everyone that it had not been tampered with. How to bring it hot but sealed. Maybe just bring some cans of local cold brew. Or those packets that you mix with hot water? But how would they get the hot water?
The next day the university arrested 61 students. All of the tents were trashed.
I had been on my way to get coffee when I heard the encampment had been “cleared”. I was too late. I berated myself. I hated myself for being too late.
I reminded myself coffee was not like food and water. Not a proxy for dignity and freedom of speech. I reminded myself the university did not have to arrest peaceful protestors. That wasn’t my fault.
It’s a public university, though, and I’m paying taxes.
I drove around the campus perimeter in circles. I was like a stray ant whose line had just been wiped up by a sponge.
May
Lunch with a friend who works in the theater. She is neither Jewish nor Arab nor Muslim. She is a widow with two young kids and has successfully prioritized the important thing in life, namely, to survive until her children reach adulthood.
When she ordered she asked for a hamburger with no bun. My doctor says I’ve got to lose twenty pounds, she says.
She tells me about theater gossip. People are talking about genocide and apartheid and putting Palestine flags on their cubicle walls. The Theater Director, who is Jewish, is uncomfortable. He wants to issue a statement to the theater – to everybody, playwrights, actors, managers, directors, to keep politics out of the theater. He feels attacked.
I look around and then say in a hushed voice, “Has he seen the DOD or DOS statements? The US is still arming Israel. We always have. Weapons and bulldozers and drones and tactical support and cyber support and assault rifles and bombs.”
I’m not polished, I’m not building a methodical argument, or an argument based in human rights law or international humanitarian law or in logic. I’m flailing wildly and my cheeks are getting hot.
“The Director might feel attacked but the world’s most bloated military budget is behind him. I mean, I mean, everyone on the other side of our bombs and rifles are actually being attacked.”
As I reach for the water glass, my hands are trembling. My fork is still clean and shiny on the cloth napkin. We are sitting outside, a sunny breeze sends a shiver through the leaves, there are a few tables close to us and I feel I’m going to get screamed at or have rocks thrown at me or worse at any second.
My friend said, “I guess I’m in such a bubble in the art world. Everyone is wearing keffiyehs. Palestine is the cause celebre.”
“Well, it’s the first time in my father’s lifetime that anyone in America has cared,” I say. And even if the Director is in the minority in the theater world, he’s in the majority everywhere else. The theater world is not in charge of arms deals.
In the end my friend said she talked the Director out of issuing a statement to keep politics out. You’re in a position of power, she told him. It will be like censorship.
I bet it wasn’t easy to say that, I say.
No. It was so hard, she said. She finished her meal. I took mine to go. I was still nauseous.
May
Warm day. Dallas-Fort Worth. A mother and her children at their apartment complex swimming pool. Her six-year-old son and three-year-old daughter are splashing and shouting with glee in the shallow end. They can’t swim yet but love how weightless they feel in the water. How powerful they feel slapping and pushing the water to and fro with their small hands.
“The suspect approached the mother [who was wearing a head covering] and asked where they were from. The suspect then jumped in the pool and dragged the three-year-old girl into the deep end and tried to grab the six-year-old boy, the police report said.
The mother was able to pull her daughter from the water, police said, and local medics responded to the scene and the children were medically cleared.
The woman is being charged with attempted murder.”
“My daughter is traumatized; whenever I open the apartment door, she runs away and hides, telling me she is afraid the lady will come and immerse her head in the water again.”
May and June
I see the toddler’s naked corpse with no head. It is not cleanly sliced off, the flesh is shredded at the neck. The arms flop lifelessly.
I hold my toddler and I clutch his head and I run my fingers through his soft curls. I think of how I’d like to die quickly if I was the mother of that other toddler.
What about my other kids, though?
I think, would it just make sense, cost-benefit analysis, devastation-life still left to live analysis, would it just make sense for all of us to die quickly?
Is that what the people bombing us think?
When did I start to think I was among those being bombed?
June
My sister calls my aunt sobbing. She can’t take any more images of dead children.
I call my aunt almost immediately after. It was a coincidence.
I tell her I have survivor’s guilt. She says she does too. We talk about traveling to Lebanon next October to see Aunt Shereen. To show the place means something – because Americans are visiting? Who cares? American citizens have already been wiped out on either side of the conflict.
To plead, don’t wipe this place off the map. A hubristic thought.
I don’t plan on bringing my kids.
August
I blow up at my husband. My mom. My kids. My sister. My aunt. I can see myself flailing wildly in life. A loose fire hose. Can’t get steady.
Reach out to aunt in Beirut again. She’s fine.
Reach out to a writer friend. Tell her my 90-year old aunt is fine. She’s going to the beach. She’s having her friends over for dinner. She’s living her life as a fuck you to Israel and the U.S. I text:
My aunt is proof there is courage in our blood, but I didn’t get that gene.
September
I dig out my grad school copy of Orientalism.
“We still have at our disposal the rational interpretative skills that are the legacy of humanistic education, not as a sentimental piety enjoining us to return to traditional values or the classics but as the active practice of worldly secular discourse…Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow…
“Humanism is the only, and I would go so far as to say, the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustice that disfigure human history…
“What is quite worrisome is the absence of analysis and reflection. Take the word “terrorism.” It has become synonymous now with anti-Americanism, which, in turn, has become synonymous with being critical of the United States, which, in turn, has become synonymous with being unpatriotic. That’s an unacceptable series of equations.”
“The human and humanistic desire for enlightenment and emancipation is not easily deferred.”
It’s the 2003 edition, with a preface by Said written three months before he died. He writes in that special window of lucidity and honesty afforded those who might intuit their impending deaths.
September
Pagers explode while people are buying cucumbers and tomatoes. Children nearby are killed.
What does that mean? They had pagers rigged before they were even sold? How many steps ahead did they have to plan this? Is “they” the entire supply chain?
Leon Panetta calls it an act of terror.
The UN calls it a war crime.
Sources say Israel was on the phone with the US minutes before the attack.
In the debate, Kamala says Israel has a right to defend itself. Kamala puts emphasis on the massacre of 1400 Israelis last October. Kamala glosses over the estimated 40,000 women, children and babies who have been massacred by Israel.
Is one Arab baby worth one fortieth an Israeli baby?
I would never ask this aloud. I would be afraid of the answer.
Bernie says he will introduce a resolution to block a $20 billion arms sale to Israel.
September
I yell at my eight year old to put his shoes on. I roll my eyes at my husband. I pick up our toddler and nurse him and it works – it silences him. I’m teeming with something I can’t yet name.
All the killing feels close and personal. I stand in a kitchen with four walls and multiple electric appliances. I stand in a house in a wealthy city in a wealthy state in a wealthy country protected by the most expensive military of all of human history. Protected by a military that is helping massacre my relatives on my ancestral homeland. I feel persecuted and utterly ensconced. It is all so dissonant. I don’t know what to do with myself. I stare for a full five minutes at the blades at the bottom of the empty blender.
September
My friend who works at the Jewish Museum texts:
Argh! Israel. (Enraged emoji.)
I hope everyone you know is okay.
It is horrible, infuriating, needless.
I text her:
Thank you for your kind text.
My family is still ok. I love you, friend.
September
I’m letting the carpool out at middle school. My older son, a sweet eleven year old now, can’t find his Fortnite hat. He digs around in the trunk and finds my hat with the Lebanese flag and puts it on. I’d bought it recently but had never had the courage to wear it. It’s still bright and stiff.
Israel has just bombed and killed hundreds in Lebanon. Dozens of women and children. I’d heard about it the day before. We are still waiting to hear from our aunt.
I stop him as he’s getting out.
“A___,” I say. “Wait.”
My heart is beating fast. Should I tell him not to wear the hat?
What will his teachers say? What will the kids say?
Will we all get called into the Principal’s office for advocating violence, or advocating Arab-ness which in America is the same?
Will my son – already the new kid in his middle school – become ostracized? Will he yell at me with tears in his eyes – why didn’t you tell me what this hat meant? Why did you let me wear this?
Or worse?
Or so much worse?
“Yeah?”
I stare at him. His smooth cheeks and long straight hair and deep dimples. His sparkling eyes under the brim of the hat. He’s been happier the last few weeks than I’d seen him in months. He had come out of some long shadow and his smile this morning is blindingly, painfully radiant.
“Mom, yeah? What is it? I’m going to be late.”
“Nothing. I love you. That’s all. Have a good day, dear.”
“Love you, too.”
I think maybe the gene for courage found itself to him, despite skipping me. I think, what a strong son I have. I think, he doesn’t have any idea what kind of risk he’s taking. That’s my job. I should have said something. I should have stopped him. I think all of these things at once and I do not cry.
November
Trump looms. In a few months, he’ll talk about taking over Gaza to build a resort. His face, with Netanyahu’s, will be on an Israeli Security Agency leaflet that litters the sky. “The map of the world will not change,” the leaflet says, in Arabic, “if all the people of Gaza disappear from existence. No one will ask about you.”
I still don’t post. I still don’t speak about it. I write a narrative that I hope no one will read.
My last year as a high school teacher, I taught a senior English elective called Fear, Haunting and the Supernatural. I’ve been out of the classroom for two years now, and the real world hasn’t gotten any easier to understand. As I created my curriculum for this course, I often dwelt on the same questions I asked my students when thinking about my novel. Why do we create what scares us? Is fear the best vehicle for social change? How can fantasy enhance reality, rather than distract?
My novelJunie is a supernatural coming-of-age story about the titular character, who faces a life-altering decision after awakening her sister’s ghost, but it’s more of a story with a ghost than a ghost story. Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, she commits a desperate act—one that rouses Minnie’s spirit from the grave, tethered to this world unless Junie can free her.
What I’ve found so compelling in my years as a speculative reader, writer, and teacher is how other authors use fantastical elements to offer their own commentaries in unique ways. While Mary Shelley could have written a book about the dangers of science, telling a story of a scientist bringing a man-made corpse to life is far more resonant. While Octavia Butler could have written a modern Black character reflecting on their ancestry, it is far more powerful to see that character time travel and face the man who is both their enslaver and ancestor. In my novel’s case, the ghost serves to confront Junie with her grief, rage, and conflict in a more visual and visceral way. Fantasy allows authors to craft settings, characters, and plot points that foster conflicts that are impossible in pure realism. At its best, speculative fiction uses the unreal to put reality into clearer focus, allowing authors to create more potent social commentaries.
The following seven works of speculative fiction are a few of my favorite examples of the genre’s limitless possibilities to examine power, race, and oppression:
Our Share of Night follows Gaspard, a child in dictatorship-era Argentina whose mother has just died under mysterious circumstances and, unbeknownst to him, was part of a satanic, capitalist cult. To save his son from the cult and the darkness it worships, Juan, Gaspard’s father—a former cult member forced into leading its rituals as a child—does everything in his power. The novel is a fantastic allegory for wealth, fascism, and capitalism, focusing on how the wealthy worship power and abuse the poor and indigenous to further their ends. One of the most messed-up books you’ll ever read.
From the outset, the book throws 1970s Black woman Dana into the world of antebellum Maryland, demanding she save a young boy. The boy’s identity as a plantation heir who will later assault his slave is revealed, explaining Dana’s heritage. This book showcases Butler’s mastery of speculative fiction, using fantastical or futuristic settings to explore human conflict in ways that would be impossible in reality. Unlike most time travel novels, Dana’s movement through centuries is a violent and traumatizing experience, one that forces her to confront the darkest realities of slavery and African American ancestry. It’s a modern classic for a reason.
Part road trip, part intergenerational family story, Sing Unburied Sing follows mother-and-son Leonie and Jojo as they travel to pick up Jojo’s father from Parchman Prison in Mississippi. Like most great ghost stories, the haunting has little to do with the undead spirits. Instead of focusing on supernatural ghosts, the novel explores how the lasting effects of systemic racial and class violence haunt people’s lives.
When Noemi goes to visit her newlywed cousin Catalina, she’s already very apprehensive about Catalina’s reclusive English in-laws. What starts off as a wellness check turns into a horrifying fever dream in one of the strangest haunted houses in literature. Like Haunting of Hill House meets The Substance, Moreno-Garcia crafts a lingering and powerful social commentary on colonization. Prepare to have your understanding of fungi revolutionized; you’ll never see mushrooms the same way again.
Mona Awad is best known for weird-girl classic Bunny. In her most recent book, theater teacher Miranda lives with incurable, debilitating chronic pain that has ruined everything from her acting career to her marriage. She spends all her free time immobilized in agony or tortured by male doctors with little regard for female pain. Her only slight happiness lies in staging a college production of All’s Well that Ends Well, despite her students’ mutinous opposition. When she’s visited by three strange men who give her the ability to transfer her pain and thrive, Miranda enters a manic state of joy at her revenge and physical freedom. Based on Awad’s own experience living with chronic pain, this book is a searing and often-times funny critique of the social disregard for women’s pain.
This queer coming-of-age tale set in the heart of evangelical Alabama focuses on Max, a German immigrant with the ability to resurrect the dead. Hudson uses a Perks of Being a Wallflower-esque narrative to slice into the dark underbelly of Southern culture, from the cult-like football obsession to the charismatic politician/pastor known only as The Judge. The novel uses all the elements of Southern Gothic to great effect to explore identity, religion, queerness, and masculinity, all building to a compelling commentary on power and violence in religious communities.
This historical fantasy novel follows Robin, a Canton-born orphan adopted by a British professor and trained to work as a translator as the fictitious Babel, a school within Oxford in the 1830s. In Kuang’s alternate history, translation powers the Industrial Revolution and British colonialism through silver bars that channel the “lost-in-translation” elements of language into action. The novel, beginning as a coming-of-age story set in academia, evolves into a powerful commentary on white supremacy, colonization, and power, revealing how imperialism exploits immigrants and the colonized. Warning: you will cry.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the covers of Algarabíaby Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, which will be published by Graywolf Press on September 02, 2025. Pre-order your copy here.
Algarabía is an epic poem that follows the journey of Cenex, a trans being who retrospectively narrates his life while navigating the stories told on his behalf.
An inhabitant of Algarabía, a colony of Earth in a parallel universe, Cenex struggles to find a name, a body, and a stable home. The song of Cenex weaves and clashes texts by cis writers on trans figures with fragments from historical, legal, and other nonliterary texts. Cenex leads us through his childhood hospitalization, his years as an experimental subject, a brief stay in suburbia, twisted meanderings, and not-so-far-off lands accompanied by a merry band of chosen queers.
Referencing everything from pop culture to Taino cosmology and philosophy (at times in a single line), this book laughs at its own survival with sharp, unserious rage. The edition is composed of two original texts—one written in the Puerto Rican dialect of Spanish, the other in a reconsideration of English. Algarabía inscribes an origin narrative for trans people in the face of their erasure from both colonial and anti-colonial literary canons.
Here is the English-language cover, designed by Luis Vázquez O’Neill with art by Natalia Bosques Chico.
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera: “Every time I see the covers, I get chills. Historically, I have worked almost exclusively with Puerto Rican visual artists on my books. Natalia Bosques Chico and I began discussing the cover art and illustrations for this book before I had finished the manuscript. I have long admired Natalia’s work and her understanding of those images that form part of our collective imaginary and her work around trans icons such as Villano Antillano and Walter Mercado. I also knew that she’d be able to capture the feel of a trans epic. The final painting, a centaur set in a landscape near a bohío (the jíbaro centaur), is charged with remixed familiar images. The boys that ride horses or motorcycles with breathable ski masks are condensed into the lone figure of the epic anti-hero, shaped by wind, grass, and palm.
I had also previously worked with Luis Vázquez O’Neill, who had designed the book for the no existe un mundo poshuracán exhibit at the Whitney Museum. His vision for the covers was ingenious and the work was often collaborative. After much discussion, we felt having two covers—corresponding to each side and language of the flip book—made the most sense. The cover for the Spanish-language side focuses on the ski mask, which tapers off in unfinished strokes beneath the neckline. We wanted to convey that traditions rooted in radical change are works in progress and subject to revision, which is how I see this book in relation to my poetic and political lineages.
For the English-language cover, Luis integrated the use of red on Cenex’s path, linking both sides. The centaur’s tanktop fades into the page, an embodiment that is textual and speculative, as well as rooted in my experience. The style he used for the title, subtitle, and my name alludes to Algarabía‘s playful and intimate nature. The contrasting textures capture my use of variegated poetic styles such as décimas, sonnets, tankas, ekphrastic poems and, of course, the epic.”
Luis Vázquez O’Neill: “Designing the cover for Algarabía was an exciting opportunity to collaborate closely with Roque (whose work I deeply admire) and a creative challenge to use collage, illustration, and hand lettering as mediums. My first encounter with Roque’s writing was through La Impresora, an independent publisher in Puerto Rico, and later while working on a publication for the Whitney Museum’s exhibition no existe un mundo poshuracán, which referenced Roque’s poetry.
The book required bilingual covers—one for the Spanish version and one for the English version. Roque had commissioned a beautiful illustration of a centaur by Natalia Bosque Chico and asked me how could we incorporate the illustration for both covers in two different. The English cover uses Natalia’s illustration in the form of a layered collage showcasing the full centaur. The Spanish cover isolates the centaur’s mask, creating a more abstract representation of Bosque Chico’s centaur. The choice of handwritten lettering across both covers seemed like an appropriate and natural way to express the meaning we associate with the word ‘Algarabía’.”
Aquí está la portada en español, diseñada por Luis Vázquez O’Neill con arte de Natalia Bosques Chico.
Electric Literature se complace en revelar las portadas de Algarabía de Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, que será publicada por Graywolf Press el 2 de septiembre de 2025. Preordena tu copia aquí.
Algarabía es una epopeya que sigue el viaje de Cenex, un ser trans que narra su vida retrospectivamente mientras navega por las historias contadas en su nombre.
Habitante de Algarabía, una colonia de la Tierra en un universo paralelo, Cenex lucha por encontrar un nombre, un cuerpo y un hogar estables. El canto de Cenex entreteje y enfrenta textos de escritores cis sobre figuras trans con fragmentos de textos históricos, documentos legales y otras fuentes extraliterarias. Su protagonista nos conduce a través de su hospitalización temprana, sus años como sujeto experimental, una breve estancia suburbana, meandros retorcidos y unas tierras no tan lejanas en la compañía de un grupo jovial de cuirs predilectos.
Poblado de referencias a la cultura popular, la cosmología taína y la filosofía (a veces dentro de un mismo verso), este libro se ríe de su propia supervivencia con una rabia pícara y aguda. La epopeya se compone de dos textos originales: uno que fue escrito en español puertorriqueño y el otro que fue escrito en un inglés alterado. Algarabía inscribe un origen para las personas trans ante su exclusión de los cánones literarios coloniales y anticoloniales.
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera: “Cada vez que veo las portadas, me dan escalofríos. Históricamente, he trabajado casi exclusivamente con artistas plásticos puertorriqueños. Natalia Bosques Chico y yo comenzamos a discutir la portada y las ilustraciones antes de que yo completara el manuscrito. Hace tiempo que admiro el trabajo de Natalia, en particular, su comprensión de aquellas imágenes que forman parte de nuestro imaginario colectivo y su trabajo en torno a íconos trans como Villano Antillano y Walter Mercado. También sabía que sería capaz de capturar el sentir de una épica trans. La obra final, un centauro situado en un paisaje cerca de un bohío (el centauro jíbaro), está cargada de imágenes familiares remezcladas. Los chamacos que corren motora con máscaras de esquí transpirables se condensan en la figura solitaria del antihéroe épico, moldeado por el viento, la grama y las palmas.
También había trabajado anteriormente con Luis Vázquez O’Neill, quien había diseñado el libro para la exposición no existe un mundo poshuracán en el Museo Whitney. Su visión para las portadas era ingeniosa y el trabajo fue a menudo colaborativo. Después de mucho debate, nos pareció que tener dos portadas, correspondientes a cada lado e idioma del libro reversible, era lo más lógico. La portada del lado en español se centra en el pasamontañas, que se estrecha en trazos inacabados debajo del cuello. Queríamos transmitir que las tradiciones arraigadas en el cambio radical son obras siempre inacabadas y sujetas a revisión y así es como visualizo este libro en relación con mis linajes poéticos y políticos.
Para la portada en inglés, Luis integró el uso del rojo en la vereda de Cenex, uniendo ambos lados del libro. La camiseta sin mangas del centauro se desvanece en la página, una encarnación que es textual y especulativa, así como arraigada en mi experiencia. El estilo que utilizó para el título, el subtítulo y mi nombre, alude a la naturaleza íntima y lúdica de Algarabía. Las texturas contrastantes capturan mi uso de estilos poéticos variados como décimas, sonetos, tankas, poemas ecfrásticos y, por supuesto, la épica.”
Luis Vázquez O’Neill: “El diseño de la portada de Algarabía fue una oportunidad emocionante para colaborar de cerca con Roque (cuyo trabajo admiro profundamente) y un desafío creativo para utilizar el collage, la ilustración y el letrismo a mano como medios. Mi primer encuentro con la escritura de Roque fue a través de La Impresora, una editorial independiente en Puerto Rico, y más tarde, mientras trabajaba en una publicación para la exposición del Museo Whitney ‘no existe un mundo poshuracán’, que hacía referencia a la poesía de Roque.
El libro requería portadas bilingües: una para la versión en español y otra para la versión en inglés. Roque me encargó una hermosa ilustración de un centauro realizada por Natalia Bosque Chico y me preguntó cómo podríamos incorporar la ilustración en ambas portadas de dos maneras diferentes. La portada en inglés utiliza la ilustración de Natalia en forma de un collage en capas que muestra el centauro completo. La portada en español aísla la máscara del centauro, creando una representación más abstracta del centauro de Bosque Chico. La elección de realizar tipografía (letrismo) a mano en ambas portadas me pareció una manera apropiada y natural de expresar el significado que asociamos con la palabra ‘Algarabía.’”
The Book of Eve, by C. R. Chatem-Johnson, Blumen Press
Review-essay by A. Treadham
Chatem-Johnson’s latest marathon-in-disguise-as-a-novel has arrived and none a moment too soon. The Book of Eve is timely and gripping, if also disgusting in the best possible way. Let me explain.
As its title implies, the novel tells the story of Eve from the beginning: nude and innocent, frolicking with Adam in the woods—for this is Chatem-Johnson’s Garden, rendered lush and sunlit in her vivid prose. It’s intriguing to follow Chatem-Johnson’s investigations of an essentially pre-pubescent Adam and Eve. They are chaste and amiable cousins until the very cusp of puberty, when Adam genially teases Eve for the coils of hair spreading between her thighs, even as he boasts of his own.
In a state of distress, Eve runs into the trees, encountering the snake. Not the prelapsarian monster of temptation. Rather, a small green garter, mute and indifferent. Eve allows the snake’s presence to comfort her. The snake does not fear Eve, but neither does it menace her, and in contemplating the snake, Eve develops consciousness. So the encounter with the snake is developmental. Here I note the key difference between King James and Chatem-Johnson. Eve is not seduced. She is neither victim nor victor. She, sitting naked, tears streaming down her face, is a thinker. A philosopher.
As she considers the garden, Eve notices a small red scabby fruit hanging from a tree. She observes other animals eating these fruits—squirrels for instance, for this is a North American new world. She has lost sight of the snake but it has awakened in her the powers of contemplation. She tastes the fruit, its sweetness. And so she brings it to Adam and impresses upon him her changed vision of the world.
To be safe from poison—for Adam is superstitious, if scientific—he will only taste the apple from her mouth. She chews for him. She presses her lips to his. To Adam, the apple and Eve taste impossibly good.
And so they discover each other, blah blah blah. It’s all quite erotic and banal; you’ll have to read for yourself.
It’s after an encounter among the trees, the fruit rotting now, the beasts crawling, that the story really takes root, and this reader was not expecting such a contemporary impulse. I have argued elsewhere that it is impossible to write an historical novel. We are always writing of our own time, however we may disguise it.
Here’s what shocked me. Although this story of the Garden (or rather, the woods) is in the air, the water, the culture, I had never stopped to consider the experience of a pregnant Eve. Without an elder woman to guide her, without books, without precedent—of course, Eve feels she must have done something wrong. She must deserve this punishment. And while The Book of Eve makes clear she has not sinned—she has merely fed Adam nourishment from her lips and dallied with him among the damp leaves—despite that, Eve suffers.
She loses the ability to eat. Her guts churn. Her limbs droop with fatigue. Adam believes she may be dying, and tries to force fruit between her lips, chewing it himself. She vomits. She weeps. Her body swells. He fears she may bear a contagion, and though it pains him, Adam shuns her.
Eve is alone. The snake comes to bear witness. It seems to mean something. But in truth, the snake merely wishes to sniff the puddle of vomit quivering in the dirt, the vile trail dripping from Eve’s mouth.
Adam blames the apple, though he is not ill from eating it. He blames the snake, the sky, the very dust. Adam does not want his only companion to suffer. And Eve is very young, the novel reveals. Through skillful use of scratched branches and observations of the cosmos, Adam estimates that Eve is twelve. Adam hovers at a distance, while Eve suffers and swells and cries for wretchedness. The seasons change and change again. The climax when it comes is troubled with blood and agony. Eve dies, leaving Adam alone in paradise. There is no sound but the howl of a child whose mother was unprepared for its arrival.
The rest of the story is that of Adam and the child and the cosmology they create from Eve’s ashes. The way the story gets told becomes the story itself, what the French call mise-en-abyme. Adam now recounts the story of Adam and Eve, as does the child, who blames the mother for being unable to survive giving birth. The story is told so many times, in so many ways, it begins to feel true. That woman, that original woman, stained. That mother, unsupported, lost, and of course, so deeply evil that her very name is the shuttering of light, the darkening of the world.
And so the original sin is revealed over the course of the novel to be a lie. And not just any lie: this fundamental sin, in Chattem-Johnson’s intricate, measured prose, is specifically a denial of the hardships of pregnancy and birth. Hardships so terrible that sin itself—the very concept, the theological fundament—must be invented to explain them. As Chattem-Johnson apparently has been working on the novel over the past nine years, it is disturbingly prescient.
But of course, as I have written elsewhere, much as historical fiction is really contemporary, so too the present endlessly retells the story of the past. The handwriting was already on the wall, waiting to be transcribed. And now, Reader, alone in the Woods, without compass or guide, here we are.
Retellings have experienced a remarkable renaissance in recent years. But instead of simply retrodding familiar ground, authors are increasingly reclaiming these stories to explore narratives that have either long been overlooked or deliberately obscured. In a time when myths and stories are being co-opted to reinforce dangerous rhetoric, retellings that challenge traditional interpretations and create space for historically silenced voices become not only invaluable but imperative.
In the realm of Greco-Roman mythology specifically, we’ve seen a meteoric rise in novels giving voices to the women cast to the sidelines of epic tales (Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Shipsand Eilish Quin’s Medeaimmediately come to mind); and slowly but surely, we’re starting to see more books that finally give queer characters their rightful place at the center of the narrative, too.
I first learned about the sirens in high school when The Odysseywas assigned for an English class; like many authors before me, I found the side characters to be far more compelling than the poem’s main character Odysseus. How did his wife Penelope feel being left behind for two decades Why did Calypso fall in love with a man who supposedly spurned her advances over a period of seven years? And most importantly for my writing journey: who were the sirens?
Based on Ovid’s Metamorphosesinterpretation of the myth of Persephone, my debut novel Those Fatal Flowers picks up where Ovid left off–in the aftermath of Prosperpina’s abduction to the Underworld. My main character Thelia is heartbroken over the loss of her first love and the role she unwittingly played in Proserpina’s kidnapping, and the novel follows her and her sisters, the sirens, after they’re banished to the island of Scopuli for failing to find her. It weaves this lesser-known myth with the mystery of Roanoke Colony to explore themes of loss, love, and feminine rage, and the transformative power of each.
As readers continue to devour these novels,the appetite for queer retellings has only grown stronger. This reading list highlights books that breathe new life into old stories focusing on a queer lens. From reimagined epics to radical reimaginings of familiar fairy tales, these novels demonstrate how familiar tales can be transformed to explore gender, sexuality, and identity in powerful ways. Each book offers a unique perspective on love, power, and transformation–some more literally than others—while honoring the complex legacy of tales that have remained with us through the centuries.
Arguably the catalyst for the popularity of the retelling genre, this reimagining of The Iliadis beloved for a reason–it’s heartbreakingly beautiful. Although the romantic nature of Patroclus and Achilles’s relationship isn’t explicitly stated in the Homeric tradition, the question of whether the two were more than just friends confounded even Ancient Greek authors. Plato named it a model of romantic love, where Aeschines asserted there was no need to label their relationship as a romantic one.
In The Song of Achilles, Miller does away with the ambiguity. Told from Patroclus’s perspective, the novel follows him as he’s taken in by Peleus, the King of Phthia, where he grows close to his son Achilles. When Achilles requests that Peleus allow Patroculus to become his sworn companion, the two become inseparable–to the point where the gentle Patroclus eventually follows Achilles into war.
Gentlest of Wild Things is another story inspired by Greco-roman mythology, this one in the Young Adult space. This time, the myth of Eros and Psyche serves as the source of inspiration. The novel follows sixteen-year-old Eirene, whose town is controlled by one of Eros’s descendants, Leandros. When his wife dies suddenly, Leandros decides to marry Eirene’s sister, Phoebe. Determined to keep her sister safe, Eirene strikes a deal: if she can complete four elaborate tasks designed by Leandros, she’ll marry him instead. But as the tasks become more difficult, Eirene finds help from an unlikely source: Lamia, the daughter that Leandros keeps hidden away. Although not a strict retelling, this sapphic fantasytakes the familiar setting of Ancient Greece and uses it to explore themes of feminism and disability.
Shifting out of the realm of mythology and into folklore, Silver in the Wood is a loose retelling of the Green Man, an ancient figure from British folklore whose motif can be found in medieval church architecture. This lyrical novella follows Tobias, a man who has served as the Wild Man of Greenhollow for centuries. When Henry Silver, a folklore scholar and the new landlord of Greenhollow Hall, turns up at Tobias’s door, Tobias is forced to reckon with his past, and dark questions he’d rather leave unanswered.
In only a little over one hundred pages, Tesh creates an atmospheric world filled with magic that is both deeply emotional and startlingly beautiful.
Sutherland’s lush A Sweet Sting of Salt gives readers a sapphic retelling of selkie folklore. Selkies are creatures who can shapeshift between human and seal forms by either putting on or removing their seal skins. In the most common version of the story, a human man forces a selkie into marrying him by stealing and hiding her seal skin, thus preventing her from returning to the sea.
When a cry awakens Jean, the only midwife in her isolated seaside town, during the middle of a storm, she’s shocked to discover a mysterious woman in labor. After Jean’s neighbor Tobias comes to collect the woman, Muirin, and reveals her as his new wife, Jean finds herself drawn to a woman as mystifying as the sea itself. Set in 19th century Nova Scotia, Sutherland breathes both a new setting and new life into traditional selkie tales. More importantly, she gives Muirin and Jean the ending they deserve.
In the realm of fairy tales, Malice poses the question: what if Maleficent wasn’t actually the witch who cursed the princess, but Aurora’s love interest? Technically a sapphic retelling of Sleeping Beauty, Walter also pulls elements from both Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast to create a dark twist on classic fairy tales.
In Walter’s retelling, Princess Aurora is cursed to die on her twenty-first birthday unless she receives true love’s kiss, thanks to a spell placed upon her by Alyce’s ancestors. As Alyce learns more about herself and her dark magic, she discovers it might be possible to change the trajectory of her life while saving Aurora’s as well.
In the world of Bayron’s incredible debut, Cinderella has been dead for 200 years, and her legacy has had devastating consequences for the kingdom of Mersailles. Girls born in the dystopian city of Lille are raised knowing that they need to secure a husband at the royal ball, and those who fail for three consecutive years are forfeit.
This novel follows Sophia, a queer black girl, on the cusp of her first ball. Sophia has no interest in finding a husband because she’s in love with someone else–her best friend, Erin. When Sophia’s night at the ball goes horribly wrong, she finds herself running for her life and ends up in Cinderella’s tomb. There, she meets someone who shows her she has the power to remake her world. Cinderella is Dead gives us a new “Cinderella” for the modern age–one with the agency she deserves.
This retelling ofThe Little Mermaid is unlike any you’ve ever read. In this version, the mermaid doesn’t come ashore to marry the prince of her own volition like her Disney counterpart does, nor does she change back into seafoam like Hans Christian Andersen’s. After her daughters devour and destroy the kingdom, the mermaid finds herself on the run with a mysterious plague doctor who has a darkness of their own.
This horror novella stuns with its gory images, but also manages to tell a beautiful love story in a small amount of pages. The writing is stunning, and the ending will make you weep.
A retelling of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, this novel follows Alex Easton, a non-binary war veteran from the fictional country of Gallicia. After receiving news that their childhood friend (and perhaps one-time love interest) Madeline Usher is dying, Alex rushes to her ancestral home. But the House of Usher is a living nightmare: the grounds contain possessed wildlife, it’s surrounded by an eerie lake, and all around, a mysterious fungal growth abounds. With the help of a British mycologist and American doctor, Alex must unravel the house’s secrets before it destroys them all. This dark and atmospheric retelling is just as spooky as the original, although you might not be able to look at hares the same way after reading it.
When I first heard a Joni Mitchell song, it didn’t sound like any other music. It wasn’t only that the songs moved differently from chord to chord, or that the chords called attention to unexpected notes, or that their words mattered, calling up pictures. It was a sense that the songs were reaching at every turn, pushing up against limit. They were acts of discovery—and living documents of that process.
My book Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchellchronicles how Joni’s music shapes my life and my art, from my beginnings as a songwriter to my work as a prose writer. She shows me that self-invention is never simple. She isn’t ever interested in defining and isolating her signature moves and getting better at them over time. Rather, she remakes herself as soon as things feel too fixed, as a way to keep curious, open, awake. The Joni of Blue might as well be a different person from the Joni of Court and Spark, even though the albums were released only two and a half years apart.
These ten novels and nonfiction books—I think of Song So Wild and Blue as a fellow traveler—explore the invention of self through music, each one making life out of bent notes, new chords, silences, broken strings. They might ask different questions from mine, but we’re all walking parallel roads.
Coming Through Slaughter re-assembles the life of Buddy Bolden, an early twentieth century New Orleans jazz musician, whose music went unrecorded. Over the course of the novel, Buddy’s fragmenting psyche is echoed by the form of the book, in abrupt tonal shifts, photographs, prose poems, and lists, unspooling any expectation of a straightforward narrative. In a late passage, the writer—a version of Michael Ondatjee—speaks directly about his connections to the wrenching emotional landscape of this world and the pressure points that compelled him to write the book. Coming Through Slaughter walks the thin line between self-creation and self-destruction, embodying jazz’s imperative towards improvisation and on-the-spotness.
Dawnie Walton’s The Final Revival of Opal and Nev accomplishes the nearly impossible: it evokes the adventures of a fictional 1970s Afropunk duo with such style, precision, and conviction that it’s tempting to look up their recordings and performances on Spotify and YouTube. It manages this feat through an invented oral history, a chorus of multiple voices: the manuscript’s editor, the musicians themselves, and their collaborators. Some speak at length. Some break in for a line or two. The story feels energized by the novel’s architecture, as though its liberation could have only come from trying out then rejecting established structures. The same might also be said of Opal herself, whose protest against a label mate’s racism makes it clear that the costs are higher for Black women musicians who dare to say no.
With magnetic directness, poet Lynn Melnick recalls waiting to be checked into rehab at fourteen, listening to Dolly Parton. “The multifaceted clarity of her voice,” she writes, “hooked me instantly. I needed to feel that euphoria in my body again.” In a book structured as a playlist, each chapter named after a Parton song, Melnick offers insight into the ongoing work of reclaiming herself after rape and abuse in childhood. She does more here than connect her personal story to Dolly Parton’s. Her book gives the reader the tools for making meaning of perilous times, as she lays out the impact of misogyny and violence on the culture at large, all the while honoring the singular voice that powers her resilience: “I felt desperate to lose myself in it, and to find myself there as well.”
Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro had plans to be a singer-songwriter in his youth, studying the work of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, even sending demo tapes to record companies, but left music behind when he turned to writing. Music still influences his work, however, through its first-person intimacies and his desire to “approach meaning subtly, sometimes by nudging it into the spaces between lines.” Part novel, part story cycle, Nocturnes explores the rift between music’s optimistic reach and the practical. That perspective illuminates “Cellists,” the fifth and final story, in which a cellist takes lessons from an older woman who claims to be a famous virtuoso. Before long he finds out that this is a fiction: she refuses to compromise her genius by playing her instrument—in fact, she hasn’t played in years. This is a book finally about the cost of delusion when it comes to giving oneself over to a life in art.
Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman’s Sounds Like Titanic, a finalist for the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, chronicles her college years when she accepts a position as a violinist while struggling to pay tuition. The work is lucrative, but there is a catch: the mics are off when the ensemble performs for audiences, recorded music piped in through speakers. What are the consequences of participating in deceit? Dedicated to those with “average talents and above-average desires,” Sounds Like Titanic explores what it is to live in a consumer culture that prizes outsize dreams over the often mundane, grueling work of developing raw talent. Performance is the doorway through which it thinks about ambition, talent, gender, and competition.
Denise attends to her brother Nik with a combination of skepticism, puzzlement, wit, and warmth as he painstakingly documents what might have been his rock stardom: the bands he belonged to, the albums recorded, an invented autobiography. How do you endure middle age after you’ve been nearly famous, your major-label record deal implodes, and you’ve missed your moment? Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, a Finalist for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, is a novel that dares to ask if art must be evaluated by the marketplace to have worth. What does it mean to create work that isn’t directed toward the cultural conversation of the moment—or even an audience, for that matter—but expects to be understood and appreciated in a more receptive time?
Hanif Abdurraqib’s essay collection They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us chronicles what it is to be Black in 21st-century America through multiple frames, primarily music. Nina Simone, My Chemical Romance, Whitney Houston, Prince, The Weeknd, and Chance the Rapper are central figures—as is the concert venue. In one wrenching moment, Abdurraqib recalls seeing Bruce Springsteen in New Jersey a day after visiting Michael Brown’s grave. The only other Black people at the concert are ushers and vendors, which leads Abdurraqib to insight: “[The River] is an album about coming to terms with the fact that you are going to eventually die, written by someone who seemed to have an understanding of the fact that he was going to live for a long time.” Abdurraqib wonders how it would be to live in a country where no one is killed, and all its citizens, regardless of race, were entitled to the “promise of living.”
Richard Powers’s eighth novel dramatizes the story of a couple brought together in response to racism. David, a white German-Jewish physicist and Delia, a Black woman from Philadelphia, meet at Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert on the Lincoln Memorial steps after the DAR had stopped her from performing at Constitution Hall. In time, the couple’s two sons become classical musical prodigies, one a gifted singer, the other his piano accompanist, while their daughter distances herself from the family and joins the Black Panthers. A single question—“Where do we come from?”—yokes the book’s contrapuntal threads, time-traveling between past and future, as the family unravels. At one point, the pianist brother thinks, “Every sure thing was lost in the nightmare of growth.” And yet this book’s fascination with the possibility of self-invention exhilarates its symphonic form.
Karen Tongson queers her namesake in Why Karen Carpenter Matters, which is another way to say it’s a book of questions. Why does that singular voice, originally directed to conservative white listeners in the 1970s, have such meaning for brown, Black, and LGBTQ+ communities today? Why Karen Carpenter Matters not only considers The Carpenters’ history alongside Tongson’s migration from the Philippines to the sprawl of southern California. It shines a spotlight on the perfectionism that ultimately shaped Karen Carpenter’s sound and eventually brought her to harm. In this loving book, Karen’s significance to the writer is never easy, never without complexity: “Karen Carpenter is, at once, both my blessing and my burden.”
Anna Brundage, the 44-year old narrator of Stacey D’Erasmo’s Wonderland is an indie singer-songwriter who releases a comeback album after believing her performing days were behind her. This is a novel about reinvention, second chances, and how an artist navigates a niche position over the long run, especially when it comes to money, romance, rootlessness, and a life on the road. Moving between multiple points in time, Wonderland’s sentences about the power of music are electric: “The record sounded like a dress falling off a bare shoulder and a girl falling down a well.” And: “I was reaching for a train as it disappeared…Now I’m trying to go back to a place I’ve never been.”
In Christine Murphy’s debut novel, Notes on Surviving the Fire, Ph.D. student Sarah Common is struggling to complete her thesis and survive the last year of her academic program with few resources. In fact, Sarah has little support across all areas of her life. Her academic advisor doesn’t care and is possibly plagiarizing her students. The Title IX office has simply filed away Sarah’s rape accusation and the police barely investigated the allegations. She’s struggling to complete her thesis and survive with very little money in a city that’s choked by smoke from the Southern California forest fires.
Amid all Sarah’s struggles, her only friend dies. To Sarah, Nathan’s death is suspicious but it is logged as another drug overdose in a university community where overdoses are increasingly common. While Sarah has her suspicions about who may have wanted Nathan dead and begins to look for evidence, the police aren’t interested in pursuing this angle. And Sarah has to ask herself whether her studies of Buddhist traditions support her desire for vengeance and revenge.
I spoke with Christine Murphy about sexual violence, vengeance, escaping to a nunnery to write, and Buddhism.
Donna Hemans: You have quite an interesting background, including spending a year in a Buddhist nunnery in the Himalayas and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies. How did you come to write fiction?
Christine Murphy: I am a curious person, and I pursue that curiosity. The Ph.D. in Buddhist studies largely came about after the year in the nunnery. After the year in the nunnery, I wanted to learn more. The nunnery actually came about because I wanted to take time to work on a novel. I had taught English for two years in Japan, and had saved quite a bit of money, and with that money, I backpacked across the African continent for a year, and then I did a Master’s degree, and I still had some money saved over from my Japan years. I was chatting with somebody, saying how I really wanted to take some time away outside of academia. She knew of this Buddhist nunnery in the Himalayas where you could essentially concoct your own private retreat. So I reached out to them, and I expressly said, “I really would be coming to work on a novel as opposed to being a Buddhist practitioner. Is that okay?” And they were very welcoming and receptive.
DH: Now that is a really good story about creating your own retreats. Most of us do a week here, a weekend there at a hotel. But this is quite a different story.
CM: Yeah. I straight up ran away to the Himalayas and the nunnery to work on a book. A lot of people think, Oh, wow, you must have been such a devout practitioner. No.
My plan A was always to be a novelist. But I was raised by farmers and am a very practical person. So I jumped straight to plan B, which was to build a career that would allow me to write novels because, you know, nobody gets paid for novel writing. So my plan B was to be a happy little professor somewhere with my summers off to work on books. Hilariously, my plan B absolutely did not work. There are no tenure track jobs, and so my life advice is, probably don’t pursue plan B. I mean, give plan A a chance, like a solid chance, and then go to plan B.
DH: So where did the idea for this particular book come from?
When it comes to sexual violence, you can have the most heinous allegations against you and really have very little effect on your career.
CM: I was raped by a colleague during my first year of my Ph.D. I had literally just come out of a year in a Buddhist nunnery, and I had been thinking quite a bit about the core tenets within Buddhist traditions. One of the core ones that’s so well known in the West is this idea of non-violence. But Westerners don’t really understand Buddhism very well. Actually within the Vajrayana tradition, violence is quite common. The question is the motivation behind the violence. Sometimes, if the motivation is, shall we say pure, which in the Buddhist context we would refer to as “advancing their path to enlightenment,” then the violence could be perceived as a positive thing. Buddhism does not advocate for violence certainly, but what I mean is Buddhism, particularly by Westerners, is interpreted as a non-violent religion, and that’s just actually inaccurate when you look at the tradition, when you read the text. And there are multiple examples, and I put one in the book, the very sort of famous story of Buddha on the boat where making a choice to harm one person to benefit many others, is, in fact, considered a spiritually evolved choice. Now granted it’s not a coincidence that in that narrative, it is the Buddha and enlightened being making that choice. It’s not a regular person, and the idea being only a Buddha could make a decision like that.
But I was looking at this in the context of sexual violence, which is so ubiquitous. It’s commonplace. It’s totally devastating, and very little is done about it. And I was thinking, wouldn’t it be interesting to have a character grapple with this question of when you have senseless violence, like rape, would the greater good be to just remove them from society.
DH: So I want to shift a little bit to what the book has to say about violence against women and the difficulty of getting help. So, where is the safety net?
CM: I don’t think there is one. For example, in this country, Donald Trump has over 20 credible allegations of sexual assault against him, and he was elected president, which means tens of millions of Americans either didn’t care about the sexual assault allegations, didn’t believe them, or thought they were great and want to see that in a leader. I don’t know the motivation of the people behind that particular political affiliation. Matt Gaetz was being run as another forerunner of our political system. He dropped out at the last minute, but he had allegations of sex trafficking and rape of a minor against him. It kind of boggles the mind that, when it comes to sexual violence, you can have the most heinous allegations against you and really have very little effect on your career.
DH:And so how does Sarah’s studies help her to survive all of this—the rape, the death of her friend, her academic situation? How does her study of Buddhism help her?
CM: I think it gave her something to focus on. One of the themes I wanted to play with was this idea of finding yourself, trying to build a life in a world that becomes your known. So Sarah is not born to an academic family. She’s not born to the Southern California culture. It’s very clear that she is an outsider throughout the book. At the same point, she has been in that world a long time and so there is a degree of comfort in doing what you have been doing for a long time. And it’s clear that it is not a good fit for her. And so I think for Sarah, as for many people, it is important when you have trauma, which psychiatrists define as overwhelm, to find a lifeline, find a guiding light, which often is nothing more than just familiarity. Habits that you know, that you’re comfortable with, are really critical as a way to keep you afloat as you work to build yourself back together.
DH: Throughout the book, smoke and ash from the wildfires in California is present. And the title refers to surviving a fire. Tell me about the title and the influence of the seemingly endless wildfires. Is this also a nod to climate change and just how we need to take care of the environment?
CM: The book really is about juxtaposition. So sometimes that is looking at hypocrisy and contradiction, but other times it’s just the uncomfortable juxtaposition of two seemingly disparate scenarios that we have to accept or live with at the same time. Southern California is very beautiful. It’s sort of this romanticized, idealized place. When a lot of people think about America, they think about Hollywood. They think of glamor and ritz. And I found it very interesting to play with that. At the same time, there are terrible wildfires that now ravage the state of California pretty much year round. When I was there, the wildfire season kind of stopped being a season. The reality is, it just happens year round.
I really enjoyed playing with the dichotomy of being in America’s Riviera with human-caused disasters that are inescapable. Air pollution is considered the great equalizer, because, unlike water pollution, noise pollution, overpopulation, you can’t actually buy your way out of it because it affects you. It’s such an inequitable society, which Southern California is, which higher education is, which gender and sexual violence absolutely is the product of and perpetuates. Air pollution, like wildfires, is one of the few equalizers.
DH: How did you come to the title?
CM: The title was such it was a lot of work. The working title of the book originally was Carpet Bomb. And I had never heard that phrase until back in 2016 during the Republican primaries. It was Ted Cruz who used the phrase “carpet bomb” in reference to a question about what his policy in the Middle East would be, and he essentially said on stage, in order to win votes, that he thought the best approach would be to carpet bomb the Middle East. I thought that was the most horrifying thing I had ever heard in my life. I was shocked and appalled that anyone would say that publicly on camera.
A few years later, a friend of mine made the comment that “carpet bomb” is actually a specific term that references one of the internationally forbidden behaviors of a government that is considered a war crime. He actually referenced a genocidal activity in his campaign for presidency. And so as I was tinkering with this book, I thought, Gosh, what’s a really disgusting title I could come up with? Because I’m really dealing with some gross things. We’re looking at climate change. We’re looking at sexual violence. We’re looking at the knowledge of evil. We’re looking at systems of oppression. And the word that popped to my mind was “carpet bomb.” Also, I knew I had a very angry protagonist, and I think Sarah has her moments where she wants to carpet bomb everyone around her. So I quite like that term. But it’s not the most marketable. And so my editors and I spent about a year coming up with other titles, and we settled on Notes on Surviving the Fire.
DH: So except for Nathan, Sarah really has no friends and no family to speak of, and she seems really lonely. Is there a kind of loneliness in surviving a violent act?
If we have this violent criminal and the system designed to stop his violence does not work, would the responsible thing to do is remove him from society?
CM: Oh, I think so. One of the greatest challenges of experiencing violence in particular, or great loss or grief, is this idea that your world is forever changed. It may even feel like it’s over and yet the world of everyone around you not only continues, but is largely completely unaffected. There is great loneliness in that. And I think one of the things that survivors learn is how to sort of navigate this duality where your world was completely different but the world around you isn’t.
DH: The epigraph reads, “After it happened, a woman told me it doesn’t have to fuck you over. Her name is Betty. We are all Betty. This is for us.” I’m interested in the things we carry, the things that can indeed be our undoing. Sarah carried her rape and violation and university’s apathy. It weighed her down. Even Nathan she discovers carried a weight he didn’t talk about. Does vengeance help?
CM: We all carry things, and we never know what others are carrying, and so much of our life is to unpack what in fact we ourselves are carrying—the assumptions, the biases, the expectations, the inherited grief, trauma, perceptions of the world that we come into through culture, through family, through lived experience. Violence, I don’t feel is helpful. Vengeance I feel is an emotionally charged impulse that lacks reason because in my mind, vengeance is the desire to undo the past. It is to break even. The goal there is not to hurt the other person. The goal is to erase your own hurt. But it doesn’t help in my experience. And when we look at the state of the world, we see that vengeance is not an effective way to get better. And so part of the question I was tinkering with, with Sarah’s desire to kill her rapist, was would it make her feel better? Would it help her psychologically? As I was working on the book, I really wasn’t sure.
My second question was the question of moral balance. If we have this violent criminal who gets away with violence, and the system designed to stop his violence does not work, if you take someone who is able to stop his violence—albeit doing it through violence herself—would the socially responsible thing to do is remove him from society? That was the second question, stripped of all emotion, almost more of a mathematical equation. And the third question, though, was kind of going back to the question of would it help? Rape prevention narratives are quite common. I think they’re meant to be very titillating, and they presume quite a few things. And the biggest presumption is that if somebody hurts you or harms you and you hurt or harm them, then you are yourself no longer hurt. And that’s not a rational statement. It’s an emotional one. And I think if you look at the state of the world, I would just say vengeance doesn’t work. I understand where the impulse comes from. I think it’s very human. I don’t think it’s effective to get better on a personal or social level.
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