“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver, as Rewritten by Sylvia Plath
I would not go snake-blind in the burning bore of sand,
would not parch and prostrate to call you prophet.
You, who have bagged and tagged and tracked my feathered heart
with your mad dumb science back to your clutch?
I took my wings and turned to stone. Not a good one, but I’m free.
My symmetries revert and spin. X-ray cameras beam their rays through me
and I scatter. Anything can be a wing. My transmutation, my right angles, my beating heart.
I will not subjugate myself to beauty.
Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody” as Rewritten By T.S. Eliot
Because, once again, we lose our names Once again we watch some turn to a series of numbers, some to ash. The mystic paraphrases the language of math. We live in the failure of letters, and may yet.
We drink at the café, Aegina brings us coffee and stronger drinks. Coffee and liquor metronome that guns will turn to bombs. May the atoms that make us up bring us together again.
Prometheus shall never flee. Let us hide in spark and shadow lest our horror sell the war. Prometheus shall never flee, but we will not be the ones to tell the world. That is the domain for leaders among men; great men must swallow their wounded voices. The words they speak in war may be wasted, syllables inside the night and fog. Great men must speak that their voices transmit through the air. Lord, we live between facelessness and fire. Lord, show us your face now and take the fire from our shaking hands. Lord, take our shaking hands.
Shopping for others can be tough: you want a gift that conveys meaning, but also something people will actually use. As readers ourselves, we’ve been on the receiving end of those well-meaning, but ultimately uninspired gifts like bookmarks (which, let’s face it, are a bit boring) or clip-on reading lights (pretty impractical).
That’s why we’ve taken it upon ourselves to curate a gift guide designed specifically for readers and writers. This list is packed with thoughtful, creative, and useful items that will truly resonate with the bookish—whether they’re diving into a new novel, writing their next great work, or looking to cozy up their reading experience. You won’t find any Barnes & Nobles bookmarks here—just hand-picked items that we love and whole-heartedly recommend.
What better way to help the reader in your life curl up with a good book than via a subscription service that regularly mails them a new read? There are tons of book subscription programs on the market: CrateJoy gives used books a new life, Banned Books Box focuses on censored titles, and indie bookstore Books Are Magic’s Book Club offers the buzziest new literature.
For readers of print magazines, Journal of the Month delivers a curated selection of literary mags, offering a different publication to explore each time. It’s a great way to keep up with contemporary literature and for writers to scope out where they may want to submit.
Is there anything more hygge than lighting a candle and settling in for a quiet evening reading by its soft glow? For those looking to evoke the mood of a warm, musty library, Smells Like Books’s Library candle has rich notes of saffron, teakwood, mahogany, leather, and oak. Prefer the comforting scent of old book pages? Paperback by Demeter Fragrance delivers with hints of violets and potpourri. Or try Homesick’s Book Club, which blends nutmeg, vanilla, amber, and sandalwood, for a sweet escape. If you’re looking to splurge, Byredo’s Bibliothèque captures “the velvety quality of the paper embodied in a touch of peach, plum and vanilla” with notes of patchouli. For minimalists, Literie’s Late Fees at the Library keeps it simple with clean notes of paper and linen, inspired by New York Public Libraries.
Minor Cannon’s Dead Authors collection is an assortment of embroidered dad caps pays homage to legendary writers like Lucia Berlin, Italo Calvino, Doris Lessing among others: “The writers in this collection were never part of the literary mainstream—rather, they were members of that marginal counter-tradition (or its descendants) who either critiqued modernity from within or pushed outward from its fissures.”
A reading tray that can be used in the bath is the perfect gift for self-care. This Umbra bamboo tray has a book stand and two different cup holders—one for a stemmed glass and one for a mug—so readers can drink max while they relax. This bath tray is adjustable, so you don’t need to measure your friend’s tub before buying.
There comes a time when writing needs to go from the page to the laptop. Desks, while ergonomically friendly, aren’t the coziest of spaces. (Though personally, I live for the seasonal photos of poet Gabrielle Bates posts of her incredibly cozy workspace). Lap desks can help writers work from their favorite comfy chairs, couches, and even in bed. I personally keep mine under my nightstand so there’s no excuse not to do a little writing when I first wake up.
Perfect for snuggling on a cold winter’s day,this blanket from Etsy has a faux-fur backing and pale grey, fleece front that features the signatures of famous writers, Victor Hugo, Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke, Toni Morrison and others. It’s a gift that will have the writer in your life dreaming of their own book signing.
It’s been a trying year and I’m sure plenty of us have spent hours hunched over the phone (hello, neck pain!) doom scrolling. A timed lockbox offers a practical solution for readers and writers looking to disconnect from the news and social media and refocus on the page.Mindsight’s timed lock box has three modes. The first locks your devices up for a set period of time and features a countdown, so you can see when you’ll get them back. The second locks the devices, but without the clock. Both of these modes allow the writer to set an override mode—so they can break in and get back to scrolling. With the third mode, the override code is gone. Writers can set it, forget it, and hopefully spend some quality time upping their word count.
When I think about settling in for a writing session, materials matter—especially if I’m writing by hand. Leather notebooks, with their pebbled covers and earthy scent, feel nice to write in. This Papier notebook is customizable, so you can add the initials of the writer you’re gifting it to. And it comes with page markers, so writers know where they are in the notebook.
We might be a bit biased since we created it, but we truly believe Papercuts is the most fun and raucous party game for the well-read crowd. Picture a mash-up of Apples to Apples and Cards Against Humanity, but with a literary twist. As we like to say, Papercuts is the game Kurt Vonnegut, James Baldwin, and Virginia Woolf would play if they were locked in a room together with nothing to do but throw down cards. It’s all about witty literary zingers, and it’s guaranteed to get the laughs rolling.
I know, I know, everyone has a shelf full of mugs. But I actually received this Greatest First Lines of Literature mug from Abracadabra as a gift (high school graduation, 2015) and it’s still a reliable favorite. The 14 ounce capacity makes it a perfect vessel for coffee and tea on days when I don’t want to leave my couch for a refill. And I do take it out and stare at it sometimes when I need inspiration for a strong opener.
For an on-the-go option, we love this provocative travel tumbler from our friends at The Rumpus, which encourages writers to “Write Like a Motherfucker.” It also comes in the form of a mug. Or, if you’re looking for something cheeky, there’s the White Male Writer’s Tears Mug—a statement piece for any desk.
A mug needs something to fill it. These loose leaf blends from Uncommon Goods come with literary names like Don Quixotea and Pride and Peppermint. The line is called Novel Tea. Who doesn’t love a clever name?
Insults might not seem like a thoughtful present. But they are good for a laugh. And when you’ve been sitting at your desk, fighting writer’s block and staring out at the vast, grey winter sky, sometimes you just need to glance at some wall art and chuckle. This Uncommon Goods poster features pithy lines like Shakespeare’s “the tartness of his face sours ripe grapes” or Oscar Wilde’s zinger, “he would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone.” I know that last one sounds menacing, but I promise your writer friends won’t stab you if you gift them this.
Designed to invoke an old school library card—cue the nostalgia—this tote bag from Out of Print is the perfect accessory for traveling with a book. The reader/writer in your life is sure to appreciate it, especially since so many people will give them books that need toting.
Speaking of traveling, readers know how much it sucks when a book cover gets bent or damaged. It’s convenient to toss a book into a tote or backpack, but it’s not always great for the book’s spine. Book sleeves, popular with readers on BookTok, are a trendy solution to that problem. Similar to a laptop sleeve, they protect books when readers need to put them in a bag. They’re a good way to protect any leather notebooks or reading diaries, too. These ones from Book Beau come in five different sizes and a number of cute prints.
For writers aiming to publish their book and seeking editorial guidance, Electric Literature offers personalized manuscript consults. Our team of editors provide detailed manuscript reviews, including comprehensive notes and a one-on-one video call. Open to writers at all stages of their journey.
When I was a ‘90s teen consuming literary novels and stories at a breakneck pace, I couldn’t have imagined that three decades later, there would be a glorious abundance of interesting fiction written by and about the Indian diaspora.
It’s perhaps because of today’s range of culturally grounded books that in my second short story collection, How We Know Our Time Travelers, I felt free not to make culture an element of narrative interest. As in my first collection, which often delved into dramas around identity—race, caste, and gender—the protagonists of the new book are Tamil Americans with both Christian and Hindu backgrounds. The far greater cultural force exerted in the book, is that of the West Coast, with its social and environmental particularities.
For the last few years, I’ve been secretly gathering my list of diasporic authors I’d like to invite to a massive dosa fusion dinner party with bird’s eye chili drinks. I don’t know, really, if they’d all get along, but hey, a little friction could be a fun thing (and makes it more likely we’d all want to write about it)! The following books strike me for their imagination, observations, and inventive spirit—and often, their moving risks. Whoever says it’s all been done clearly hasn’t encountered these works.
James is one of the best contemporary literary fiction authors in the Indian diaspora—every book she publishes is an event for me. In her latest, a fun historical novel and love story set across 65 years in eighteenth century India and Europe, she tells the story of a teenage woodcarver who is asked to build a tiger automaton for a sultan’s sons who’d been captured and returned by the British. It is to be “a gift of such grandeur and ferocity that it will silence all memory of the boys’ exile.” When the British attack and plunder Mysore, they seize the automaton and place it with other plundered art in a collection, the woodworker must go get it back.
One of the things that intrigues me most about Vauhini Vara’s stunning fiction is how intimately embodied it is, how unafraid it is of revealing all that is flawed or potentially unappealing about human bodies. This collection of ten visceral, intelligent stories are tied together by questions of connection, family relationships, alienation, and grief in all its different permutations. Where Vara’s The Immortal King Raocontended primarily with algorithm-driven technology, which sometimes uses quantification and rules to predict, This is Salvaged pays more attention to characters’ potential for unpredictable and emotionally demanding action.
Sheena Patel’s voice-driven debut—what a thrill. In what feels like a diary, a self-destructive young woman (who has a boyfriend) breathlessly reveals her sexual relationship with a toxic married white man and her obsession with one of his several other girlfriends. That girlfriend is an Instagram lifestyle influencer, and her careful social media curation involves expensive, tasteful things. The book involves not only an engaging, up-to-the-minute story but also an acidic critique of overconsumption, class, structural racism and patriarchy as filtered through online spaces.
In this lyrical coming of age novel, which follows Laskar’s acclaimed The Atlas of Reds and Blues, a young Indian American teenager feels caught between the traditional Bengali culture inside her house and the culture of the American South outside its doors. She and her friends, a brother and sister, rebel in all kinds of ways, much to her parents’ disapproval. When a tragedy occurs on the cusp of adulthood, grief soaks into everything, altering the choices they make and the people they might otherwise have become. Told in second person, the narrative follows the evolution of the friends’ relationship.
Jai Chakrabarti is a master of the realistic short story—I’ve been keeping an eye on his work ever since he was the 2015 A Public Space Emerging Writer Fellow. In these stories, he unfurls the vagaries of the human heart. A gay man confronts his lover’s wife with his longing to have a child. A woman wonders if her husband sees her as anything more than a caregiver. A married music teacher is attracted to a student in India. Brothers take an overnight bus to go become monks—one of them has abandoned his wife and child. And the beauty of Chakrabarti’s introspective sentences! Here’s one: “She was grateful for it now, that sublime feeling of one’s own silence.”
Sen is a versatile fiction writer who excels at conveying small but devastating moments in her characters’ lives. In this, her first collection of stories, which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction as judged by Danielle Evans, she writes of a baffled author who is lauded for a story he didn’t write, a couple whose different responses to a parent-teacher conference for their twins leads them to realize their deeper differences, a couple anxious that their neighbors are Trump supporters, and a young woman who discovers her mother was responsible for breaking up her father’s earlier marriage.
The narrator of Patel’s debut, which explores the clash of conservative tradition and modernity, is a young, upper middle class Parsi woman with a difficult relationship with her mother, who has mental health problems, and struggles around addiction and rape. The novel looks at trauma as an inheritance. Drawing an angry, self-destructive female narrator is a particularly fearless, taboo-breaking move for a diasporic author. The dark vigilance of an affluent, patriarchal Indian community—its exertion of control over young women by fomenting fear around their reputations, valuing that above all else—is finely drawn.
Reminiscent of Maxine Hong Kingston or Claudia Rankine’s hybrid work, Sejal Shah’s collection of 11 evocative linked stories is lovely and unusual—experimental without being showy. First-person stories about diasporic girlhood, young womanhood, and finding one’s way that frequently feel autobiographical are interspersed with images, ephemera, and letters. What is especially attention-getting here is the unusual poetic and impressionistic language. In one story that leaves a mark, “mary, staring at me” a girl massages cured sesame oil into the back of the narrator, whose “back twists into the treble clef.” This bold collection follows Shah’s more straightforward This Is One Way to Dance: Essays about Race, Place, and Belonging, and certain elements cross both.
This thoughtful memoir moves us through Sharma’s relationship with her husband Quincy, a Black man, and her parents’ anti-Blackness, which seems to soften as they get to know Quincy. Interleaved with relatable scenes of family life are relevant slices of Asian American history, summaries of caste’s import, and political discussion. Here, too, are glimpses into Sharma’s mental health struggles. Her courageous discussion around race, caste, and more quietly, mental illness, is astute and admirably frank—within many Indian American immigrant homes, these are taboo topics that everyone is expected to avoid.
In 2002, when Chowdhary was 16 years old, living with her Muslim family in Ahmedabad, a city with a long history of religious violence, a train fire resulted in 58 deaths. The chief minister of the state at that time was Narendra Modi—India’s present-day prime minister, who has taken the country to nationalist intolerance, autocracy, and violent attacks on minorities such as Muslims. He cast the train fire as an Islamic terrorist act, triggering widespread violence. For three months, Hindu mobs turned against Muslim citizens, once friends and neighbors—looting, raping, and burning them alive. Chowdhary’s family, who are memorably sketched this memoir-cum-history stayed inside their apartment to stay alive.
This is an absorbing and fascinatingly constructed debut. Wall Street consultant Naren comes home to Mumbai after Prime Minister Modi and his intolerant nationalist party take power and attempt to unmake what was a secular nation and we follow Naren, his brother Rohit, and Amanda, a white woman who has made it her mission to help Muslims in a slum. Most of the book occurs through fascinating, extended jostling blocks of opinionated, philosophical dialogue and debate about conditions in India including income inequality, caste, secularism, and the perceived need for unification of identity in an extremely heterogeneous country.
This is the swift nonfiction book anyone who is interested in what’s happened to the India of their memories or imagination needs to read. Deb makes a smart, lucid, and pointed case for how the country descended into authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism after Modi and the BJP took control. Deb talks to minority people, jailed dissenters, the impoverished, scholars, and other writers—readers would do well to remember he’s well-positioned to report on and write about this partly because he’s not broadly under threat from censors. Earlier this year, Modi and the BJP unexpectedly lost seats across the country, but this book remains crucial to understanding conditions there, which also have something to say to America.
A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart by Nishant Batsha (forthcoming, July 2025)
Next summer, Batsha, author of Mother Ocean, Father Nation, returns with his second novel, set at the start of World War I—it’s one of my most anticipated. A Bengali revolutionary seeking material support to overthrow British rule and an idealistic graduate student, the daughter of an engineer working around the mines of the West, meet at Stanford, and find themselves of like minds about ideas regarded as radical. They cultivate a passionate romance amidst the heady protests of anticolonials and gatherings of anti-British activists, and intellectuals in Palo Alto and Berkeley. As the United States is pulled into the war, the climate becomes hostile to dissent, and the couple quickly marry and flee to an uncertain future in New York City, where the marriage is tested by their differing ambitions. Look out for this one!
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Transplants by Daniel Tam-Claiborne, which will be published by Regalo Press on May 13, 2025.
A harrowing and poignant novel following two young women in pursuit of kinship and self-discovery who yearn to survive in a world that doesn’t know where either of them belong. On a university campus in rural Qixian, Lin and Liz make an improbable pair: Lin, a Chinese student closer to her menagerie of pets than to her peers, and Liz, a Chinese American teacher grieving her mother’s sudden death. They’re each met with hostility—Lin by her classmates, who mock her for dating a white foreigner; Liz by her fellow English teachers, who exploit their privilege—and forge an unlikely friendship. After a startling betrayal that results in Lin’s expulsion, they swap places. Lin becomes convinced to pursue her degree at a community college near Liz’s Ohio hometown, while Liz searches for answers as to what drove her parents to leave China before she was born. But when a global catastrophe deepens the fissures between modern-day China and an increasingly fractured United States, Lin and Liz—far from home and estranged from themselves—are forced to confront both the familiar and the strange in each other. Unspooling over the course of a single extraordinary year in our not-yet-distant past and in small towns from Dandong to Deadwood, Transplants is a piercing story of migration, belonging, and the parts of ourselves that get lost in translation. Alternating between Liz and Lin’s perspectives, it is a lyrical and moving exploration of race, love, power, and freedom that illuminates the limits and possibilities of what can happen when we open ourselves to the unknown and reveals how even our fiercest differences may bring us closer than we might ever imagine.
Here is the cover, designed by Elisha Zepeda.
Author Daniel Tam-Claiborne: “The cover was going to be simple. A bilingual vintage encyclopedia for new immigrants to America. An anatomical woodcut of the heart from traditional Chinese medicine. A pair of lungs-turned-butterfly wings: a metaphor for survival and rebirth. Only, my heavy-handed suggestions were not translating well to the page (I’ve learned to never ask a writer about aesthetic design choices). My editorial team, which had patiently executed each of my failed visions, informed me that there was no time left for new directions.
On a lark, I went to social media. Unbeknownst to me, a burgeoning ecosystem of book cover designers was in full swing, perhaps none more eye-catching than Elisha Zepeda, whose process videos had already netted a devoted following. Determined not to repeat my previous mistake, my cold query to Elisha contained vanishingly little about the project save for the book’s summary. With a boldness that can only come with naivety and a turn-around deadline that would make anyone’s head spin, I figured I’d never hear back.
I was wrong. Not only did Elisha agree to mock-up a draft, but on the very first pass (which he modestly described as ‘throwing spaghetti on the wall’), he knocked it out of the park. I was immediately blown away by Elisha’s attention to detail. The collage approach was a brilliant way of rendering the novel’s diffuse subject matter. In addition to capturing the subtle textures of rural China and America, the image itself looks like the outline of a state or a province, another fitting touch for a book that centers so much on movement and migration. The underlying reality is actually more whimsical: the shape is derived from a layering of ‘cat head blobs,’ a subtle reference to a feline motif that I hadn’t even initially thought to include.
The blue hue feels hopeful, something that despite my own blinkered view of the world, remains true of my protagonists. Liz and Lin are the beating heart of this novel: two women whose lives intersect and supplant each other in myriad ways. Despite my initial reservations about having a female figure on the cover, what I perhaps love most about Elisha’s design is that it isn’t immediately legible whether the woman depicted is Lin or Liz (or even Liz’s mom). The idea of mutability that comes with the Chinese diasporic experience (the seemingly impenetrable distance between Chinese and Chinese American) is a central fascination of this novel, and one that this cover—in all its abstract and artistic splendor—pays incredible homage.”
Designer Elisha Zepeda: “Daniel sent me a synopsis and the manuscript, and after reading through that we both discussed similar literature Transplants could sit next to (Crying in H Mart, Severance, Pachinko, Past Lives…).
We wanted something that felt upmarket but approachable (my favorite genre to make covers for). I threw out the idea of a collage, which is my go-to solution for books that have a long list of themes and settings and elements. Trying to show all of those important parts may make the cover feel cluttered—but blending them into a collage tends to make it feel more cohesive and artistic.
I luckily found this wonderful photo of a woman’s face obscured by a flower. I leaned into that and asked Daniel for a list of key visuals/items. He provided an extensive list, and we landed on: a tea ticket, rice paddy, black cat, cat head shape, grain, and a peach blossom. That’s a lot of elements to place on a cover! But I think it landed somewhere really great. My favorite part is the cat legs resting perfectly in the shape of our character’s hair.”
We watched them from our table in the coffee shop. My leg over yours, your chin on my shoulder, we drank precisely engineered cold brews and watched them, the two orthodox Jewish men—Haredim, you called them—in animated conversation on the other side of the avenue, the Jewish side. Two men dressed for an 18th-century Polish winter in the Brooklyn summer heat, all that trapped sunlight and no mature trees on our block.
What could they be talking about?
You and I both lived along the boundary between worlds. The subway ran above the street here. A generation ago, it divided the Jewish neighborhood from the Puerto Rican neighborhood, but now I guess you could say it divided the ungentrified from the gentrified. Sitting in the cafe on our side of the street, the block was almost like an aquarium. We watched the men in their peyos and knee socks, young girls in long skirts pushing baby strollers, women with cellphones tucked into their hair coverings, plastic bags blowing everywhere. So much plastic. For me, Jews like this had always been part of the scenery, like fruit carts or window cages or payday loan places or storefront churches. But to you, the lives of these Haredim were intelligible. I guess I mean, they were real to you.
“They are obsessed with separation,” you had explained. Now you had a new name and a growing mustache, but as a child you had learned Hebrew and worn long dresses that covered your knees and collarbones. Such a past life was part of your magic—who you were before you remade yourself completely.
We were in the unsustainable, obsessive stage of love. All night and into the day, our bodies found each other. Weekends were a kind of prison, the exhaustion of our desire, always needing to begin again, to touch you again, to feel you inside me again, to come again. We would sleep and wake and come together again as the subways rumbled above and below us. In between, we lay in the dark whispering about how hard we had tried to be girls. You’d gone to seminary; I’d been in a sorority. Now we were boys.
We’d come to this cafe to stop having sex long enough to check our work emails. Tomorrow was Monday. Now, two Orthodox men stood on the corner outside a greengrocer. Or, I’d seen them as men. But the longer I watched, the younger they looked. The taller one had a wiry, patchy beard; the slighter one was fresh-faced with pink cheeks. They were hardly more than teenagers, I realized. What were they talking about so animatedly? The pink-cheeked one was laughing with a hand over his mouth; the bearded one looked away, maybe shyly.
Behind us, a chic girl in unblemished workwear was ordering a coffee.
“Do you think they’ve ever been on the internet?” I asked.
“No.” Your newly sprouted beard rubbed on my bare shoulder. You were changing from the inside out. God, I loved you. I loved watching when you took your T shot right to your belly. I loved that you were braver than I was, ready to change completely. When I visited my parents, I wore my old clothes and used my old name. They paid my rent.
“What was it like to live like that?” I asked. “So set apart?”
“My family isn’t that religious,” you said with a touch of annoyance. “We were modern Orthodox.”
You had told me that in your family, men and women do not touch anyone from the opposite sex who was not a spouse or an immediate blood relative. You told me on the sabbath they would not so much as flip a light switch. You told me everyone married young. It did not sound very modern to me, but I conceded. “No, I know you weren’t like that, but I’m just thinking about living in a world with so many rules, what that feels like.”
Could your girl-cousins touch you as you were now? As you had become? Or was that forbidden?
The two Jews in their black suits moved to the side to allow a pregnant woman to get by with her stroller. Her wig glimmered plastically. “Okay but does the shorter one have chaotic twink energy to you?” I asked. There really was something boyish and mischievous radiating off him. He held out his hand to the taller boy who hesitated. “Look! Look at that! Is that flirting?”
They shook hands.
“I heard about this one Chassidish rabbi who made a strange ruling,” you said. You were ignoring my comments but I still loved the way your voice curled into my ear. “He forbid the men in his yeshiva from shaking hands with each other.”
“And that’s unusual?”
“For sure. I mean, men and women who aren’t related never touch, but men to men? It’s totally bizarre to forbid this.”
Outside, the men had not broken their grip. A long handshake, no? The pink-cheeked boy looked up at the taller one. I wished I could hear what he was saying.
You continued. “It’s like by creating the boundary, suddenly this totally normal act, just shaking hands with a friend, becomes like, illicit. Erotic even.”
“Are those two allowed to shake?” I asked.
I watched as they broke apart, the two Jewish men, turning to walk opposite directions. Why did that make me sad?
“Yeah for sure,” you said. “That ruling was totally fringe.”
I turned to you, twisting around in my seat. “Are we allowed?” I put out my hand. “Or will we get in trouble?”
You took my hand.
“Imagine this being forbidden.”
You rubbed a thumb over my knuckles.
I remembered that place between below your ear that nearly sent you into convulsions of pleasure when I bit there softly.
We fall back into your bed. After kissing and coming and kissing and coming we lay in damp sheets, feverish. There was a faint acridity in the air—your cat’s litter needed to be changed. The day was slipping away, had slipped away, was almost gone. Soon, it would be Monday. I needed something to hold on to. “How did they meet?” I asked, turning my head to face you.
“How did who meet?” The hairs on your chin were longer than anywhere else on your face. They say it takes five years on T to grow a real beard.
“The Orthodox men, the ones who shook hands.”
You laughed. “Right, the yeshiva boys.” Tracing my eyebrows now: “Let’s say they met in gan. You know what it is?”
“No.”
“Nursery school, actually it literally means ‘garden.’”
“They met in the garden.”
“Licking honey off Hebrew letters.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it’s part of how the boys learn to love Torah.” When you said the word torah your voice twanged into an unexpected diphthong. Toy-rah. It sounded Yiddish. Our fingers were entwined. “May learning be sweet in your mouth.”
“Did you do that?”
“I told you, we weren’t Orthodox like that,” you said.
“Sorry.” Pause. “What are their names?”
You brought our fingers to your lips. “Imagine this being forbidden.”
Imagine. “What are their names?” I asked again.
“You choose.”
“Jonathan and David.”
You sounded a little too surprised when you laughed. “You know about King David?”
“You think just because I’m not Jewish I’ve never read the Bible?” I said it incredulously, but what did I really remember from church? Drooping pantyhose, the wafer becoming gummy in my mouth.
“So you know about Jonathan and David.”
“Yeah, I took a class in college on queering biblical narratives.”
You paused. Our past lives were foreign countries.
“Jonathan and David,” I repeated.
“Okay, Yonatan and David.” The way you said the name David it sounded exotic. Davíd. “They met in gan.”
“In the garden.”
“Licking honey.”
Our mouths drew closer and closer. Torah sweet like honey.
Obviously, we weren’t monogamous. It was the same for every one we knew except those few assimilated lesbian couples who cared about marriage equality. You and I had regular conversations about our respective needs and our capacities. It was almost empirical, the way we measured ourselves out. “Do you have the bandwidth to talk about some feelings of jealousy that are coming up for me?” You had a boyfriend who had a husband. For a while, I’d been sleeping with a cute trans dyke, but by that summer anyone who was not you felt like an attempt to distract myself from you. What do I mean? Maybe that my desires began to whittle down almost monotheistically to you.
Every time you were on your phone, I tried not to think about who you were texting, what plans you were making. You were not mine. I had to remind myself again and again. I was not yours. Maybe I didn’t know how to belong to myself.
“Tell me a story.” You were on your phone in my bed.
“Hm?” Not looking up.
“About the boys.”
Another Friday after work. When the sun set it would be Shabbat, I had learned. But it was mid-June, and the sun was hours from setting.
I tried again, “David and Jonathan. What are they learning in school?”
You put down your phone. “How old are they?”
“Nine.”
“By nine, they’re learning how to tell time.”
“Time? In third grade?”
“Well yes, but—”
“Is this a joke about literacy rates?”
You rolled your eyes. “Will you just listen?”
I waited.
“For us, there was secular time and then there was religious time.”
“Religious time,” I repeated.
“Right, it sets the times to pray and stuff. Zmanim, the hours.”
“Zmanim.” I wasn’t sure if I was saying it right.
“There is no clock for zmanim.” You rolled onto your back, looking up at the ceiling. “The times aren’t fixed. They’re proportions of the day in sunlight.”
“Is that how Muslims do it?” I had never imagined the day except in hours.
“I don’t know,” you admitted.
“But you learned how to set prayer times?”
“No, girls don’t learn that. I just prayed when they told me to.”
A whole other clock, a whole other calendar—the days and years divided into divine undertakings, set by the moon and sun. You had left that world, left Los Angeles, which apparently has Orthodox Jews, who knew. You left behind your old name in that world of plastic tablecloths and long-sleeved shirts worn under dresses and never ever, ever, singing in the presence of men. You left your old pronouns out west. You came east, lost time, found work. Now, we both had jobs that were remote and involved a lot of team messaging.
You left so much behind. But did you take the clocks with you? The internal clocks that correlate the day to God. Did you still think in the secret names I would eventually google? Shacharit, Mincha, Maariv.
“Wait which one is which?” I asked. “One of them had evil twink energy.” Ruddy cheeks, boyish, fey. “Remember?”
I watched your mouth when you laughed. “Amazing, okay, that’s David.”
“So the tall one is Jonathan.”
“Right.”
“And they are learning to tell the zmanim.”
“Good memory.”
“It’s only been a week.” A week since you were last in my bed. I put my chin on your shoulder, looking at you while you looked at the ceiling.
“Okay, so they are nine years old and their morehis quizzing them.”
“A morehis a teacher?”
“Yeah, he quizzes them, ‘From what time is it possible to recite the Shema? Dovi?’ That’s how he calls David. And David doesn’t know the answer because his parents are baal tshuvah.”
“Are what?”
“Like, born again maybe you’d say? Jews who weren’t raised Orthodox but became observant as adults. Often they end up being like, the most religious people of all but the way I’m imagining it, David hasn’t learned from his father about the zmanim yet. So he’s not sure how to answer the moreh’s question about how early you can pray.”
I did not grasp any of the specifics, but I got that the boys were being quizzed about religious time. “David doesn’t know the answer.”
“Right. David is fidgeting. And Jonathan is noticing how much smaller David is, his delicacy.”
“Oh, I like this.”
“Well the morehdoesn’t. He’s annoyed, ‘Nu? Dovi?’ He’s a thin man in his twenties who feels this position is beneath him. David is so unsure when he guesses, ‘Maybe six?’”
As far as I knew that might be correct.
“Which is like, an answer so wrong it shows that David didn’t even understand the moreh’s question, so the morehis like, ‘Six? What are you? A goy? Or just a hole in my head?’ Everyone always laughed when our teachers used Yiddish. That meant they were really pissed. Anyway, everyone is laughing, whispering, not just about the morehbut about David and his parents and why he doesn’t know the zmanim. Their moreh slams his ruler down on his desk. The laughter stops.”
Were you imagining one of the boys as me and one as you? Or were they both you? That was probably it. They were both you: Jonathan and David, Yonathan and Dovi, versions of you if you’d been born a boy, I mean, a boy in a way that your family could recognize. Born a son. Would you have stayed? Would you be one of those yeshiva boys on the sidewalk, shaking hands in the sticky summer heat.
They were both you: Jonathan and David, Yonathan and Dovi, versions of you if you’d been born a boy, I mean, a boy in a way that your family could recognize. Born a son.
“Of all the boys, only Yonatan did not laugh at Dovi. Now the morehturns to him. ‘Yoni? From when?’ Obviously Yonatan’s father showed him this part of Berakhot. He knows the answer: from the pre-dawn light in which it’s possible to recognize an acquaintance (or, some say, to differentiate the colors of the sky), until the end of the first fourth of the day.”
“Did your dad teach you that?”
“What?” You looked startled. Maybe you’d forgotten I was there. “Oh, no, mostly I learned about modesty. Modesty and Shabbat.”
I felt bad that I’d broken the spell of your story. “But Jonathan’s father has taught him.”
“Yes, a father teaches his son.”
“Does he answer the teacher’s question?”
We were back in the boys’ classroom together. Cramped desks, posters of sages and martyrs hanging around the classroom. A serious little boy is hesitating to answer the question his teacher has asked. Jonathan knows that he is being used to ridicule David: when he gives the answer, it will confirm that David is stupid. David, whose face is tight with the effort of not crying.
“I forget,” Jonathan whispers.
David looks at him in shock. Their eyes meet. An invisible thread is knotting between them as they hold out their hands for the moreh’s punitive ruler-smack.
“Is this a love story?” I whispered. I hoped I sounded playful, careless.
“Let’s find out,” you said as you rolled on top of me.
I think we both knew that when the obsession faded, I’d be the one left in love. A familiar pattern: the more I wanted, the more you’d pull away, the harder I’d try, the farther you’d go, until we weren’t talking by winter. All of it happened and all of it was anticipatable. But for now it was summer, and we wanted to keep fucking.
David and Jonathan. Dovi and Yoni. One slight and smooth cheeked, one taller and more masc. Me and you or you and me or you and you.
When you were on dates with your partner and his husband—apparently sometimes you all went together—I forced myself not to text you. The three of you went away for the July Fourth weekend. “Boys Trip!” you called it, when you posted the beach photos online.
I was trying to live differently than my parents. I did not want to conflate love with possession; I wanted, in the parlance of the polyamory workbooks, to “cultivate abundance,” which we understood as having romance, love, and commitment beyond the nuclear family model. We were idealistic. Even back then I wondered if I was different than you in some fundamental way. For you, love was a community garden: a scrappy, anti-capitalist collective effort, yielding sweetness and green to be shared. What was love for me? A burning house. A sailor throwing his body against the jagged shoreline. What was love but that drive to lose yourself? Lose the self? An annihilation.
When will I see you again? I typed out as if to text you. I couldn’t send that. Too needy. I erased it, letter by letter. I typed, How was the fourth? No, too clingy. Erased. I tried again. Do the other boys tease David because his parents are—I paused to Google the spelling—baal tshevuah? My phone kept trying to correct “baal tshevuah” to “baby t-shirt.” Sent.
You didn’t reply immediately. I spent that day feeling insane. Checking my phone, promising myself I would not check it, then checking it again only to throw it across the room when everyone in the fucking world had texted me except you. I fell asleep anxiously in my rumpled bed, my phone under my pillow in case it buzzed with a text message from you, which eventually it did.
Yeah, the other boys tease David because of his parents. Not Yoni, ofc. Yoni doesn’t tease David but also like doesn’t intervene when the other boys do.
I could have wept from relief. You were there. You had not abandoned me, no, you were texting me back. Are they still in third grade?
No, now they are in middle school and there is this little shit named Shmuly, and he’s like, My dad says baalat tshuvah girls are for practice, not marriage.
I could see them. Yoni and Dovi, Jonathan and David. They were maybe eleven, eating chips from a kosher bodega after school. The other boy saying what he says to the group of boys but really, and everyone knows this, he is saying it to David. It is a provocation: Your mom doesn’t count.
Shmuly’s such a little shit, I responded. What does David do?
He doesn’t show that he’s embarrassed. He doesn’t give away his power. I read the words and felt almost indicted. When I had every held on to my power? There were more dots as you kept writing. He says, Your father should know better than to talk like that.
Damn.
Right? You were typing more so I waited. Yoni’s like whoa bc it’s something an adult would say.
Impressive. I could imagine the moment. This slight boy, short for his age and natural outsider, delivering a censure more powerful than any retaliatory insult. Yoni is watching. Is he thinking it? He must be: David and Goliath.
Walking home from the train through the August heat, I felt great pity at the sight of harried Jewish women with their strollers. Pity for the life of diapers and kids, never learning math, heavy polyester clothes all summer. Pity for them, pity for you, what you had to survive. All of those rules, all of those boundaries, all of that restriction built around the empty grave of God. This is all made up! I wanted to shout when I saw them pouring out of services. I suppose I thought I was free.
“We should get up and do something,” I said.
We lay in your rumpled bed, fan pointed directly at us, reality TV streaming from a laptop. Outside was bright as midday, but it was already 5pm on a Saturday. Were you like this with your other lovers? Slipping so quickly into something almost domestic? By late summer, you and I had begun to watch a lot more TV, dating shows mostly. In this one, contestants were kept apart for the first few episodes, separated by a wall, no touching, no seeing, just talking. “I feel like I already know you,” a woman said to a man, both of them lying on couches, invisible to each other. You watched them and I watched you. Somewhere else, your parents were praying or eating blessed food or even making love, which you told me was especially sacred on Shabbat. Once, this had been the jewel in your week—the day when the world to come was lived on earth. Everything special, everything separate. But for us, the day was fading unremarkably.
“Do you think they’re Zionists?” I asked. The man was telling the woman about his parents’ divorce, they were both crying, touching the wall that hid them from each other.
You glanced at me. “I mean probably? Isn’t everyone on this show like evangelical?” It was you who’d explained to me about the millions of Christian Zionists and their eschatological fantasies.
“No, no, David and Yoni.”
“Mm.” You understood now. I liked watching you think. “Yeah, but not in the way you’re imagining it.”
“How am I imagining it?”
“As a political stance, like having an opinion on abortion or unions.” The woman was telling the camera she was in love with the unseen man.
“Okay, so how do they think about it?”
You hit space bar to pause the show. “They don’t think about it at all. It’s a belief so fundamental they don’t think of it as a belief.” You hesitated, looking for a word.
“An axiom?” I offered.
“An axiom, yes.” You looked from my eyes to my lips and back. I could see a filament of desire move through you. You liked words. “And that axiom is that the world is a series of divisions. Jewish and gentile, day and night, Shabbat and the rest of the week, Israel and the rest of the world.”
“I want them to be alone together, the boys. Could that happen?”
“Sure, they could study Talmud together. Do you—
“—I know what the Talmud is.” I’d googled it.
“Okay, well let’s say they’re fourteen, paired together to study the halakha, the rules of observing Chanukah.”
“At yeshiva?”
You laughed. “Very good, yeah, at yeshiva.” You closed your laptop. Gently, with your finger, you drew a line up my belly, over my sternum, stopping at the fragile center of my throat. My eyes fluttered closed. When your attention was on me, I felt like the only person in the world.
“Yoni and David lean over open volumes in a low-ceilinged room with long tables and fluorescent lighting. All around them are other boys studying in pairs, whispering with their foreheads resting on their hands, and all the pages rustling. It’s winter, the room is cold.” Your finger gently circled the folds of my ear, sending tingles deep into my shoulders. I gasped. “They’re studying the Rambam, Sefer Z’manim.” I tried to hold on to the words. “The Book of Times,” you clarified, your fingertips following the sensation as it ran back down my body. You’d cut off your tits but I still had mine, which meant I felt everything as you ran your hand over the nub of my nipple. It felt so good I almost hated it. “Pay attention,” you whispered, “or I’ll stop.”
I nodded vigorously. We both liked when you had power.
“What book are they reading?” you asked, your voice teasing as you took your hand away from my body.
“The Times!” I exclaimed.
I loved hearing the smile in your voice. “Close enough.” You traced down my stomach so, so slowly.
“The mitzvah requires one lamp be kindled in each and every house,” you said. “Yoni is sight-translating this sentence. ‘That is the minimum,’ he says, glancing over at David who nods.” Instead of dipping below my bellybutton, your fingers made their way back up my ribcage in slow swirls, like you were telling a story with your hands. “‘One who beautifies the mitzvah will light a lamp according to the number of people of the house’—but David interrupts to ask, ‘What’s that about a minyan?’” Your fingers were traveling down again. You are Yoni. You are Yoni and I am David.
Yoni pauses, looking up at Dovi in confusion. “What minyan?” Maybe he has jumped ahead in the text?
Dovi is embarrassed. He knows he is misunderstanding something, but not sure what. “ce-minyan habiyt,” he reads from the page in Hebrew. “So aren’t they talking about a minyan?”
The clouds clear from Yoni’s understanding. “Ohh,” he says, “no, no, ‘ceminyan’ means relating to the number of.”
You whispered in my ear, your fingers pausing at my hip bones in a way that made me thrust involuntarily. “Not one menorah for the whole household, but one menorah for each person. Does that make sense, David?”
I nodded.
“So ‘ceminyan’here means something like, ‘for every’: one lamp for every person in the house,” Yoni continues. Dovi does not look up at him. Yoni fears he has been too harsh, or too condescending. He adds, “I understand why you thought that, about it meaning the men were being counted for a minyan.”
“So it means like, the same number of,” Dovi says.
Their classmate Shmuly walks by their table, tougher and less kind every year. Yoni waits until he has passed to say, “Yes, one menorah for each person in the house, the way we do it now,” Yoni says. Softly, patiently. He likes the feeling of helping David. “Look,” he points to the next line. “We know it’s not a minyan because Rambam says right here, Whether they are men or whether they are women, and obviously we don’t count women for a minyan.”
“You’re so good at this,” Dovi says.
Yoni feels a light flicker inside him. “Really?”
“So good,” Dovi repeats. “I learn a lot from you.”
The light in Yoni is growing, glowing through his skin as if he himself were a Chanukah lamp.
I levitated under your hands as we become two boys.
Baby.
Yeah?
I want them to be alone.
Hm?
David and Jonathan. I want them to be alone.
You want the two yeshiva boys all alone?
Yes please.
Okay, how about they study Talmud somewhere, just the two of them.
Yes, like a cafe?
That’s impossible. But maybe at Yoni’s, in his father’s study.
With the door closed.
Okay, with the door closed.
Can they study something sexy? Is the Talmud sexy?
Weirdly, it’s very sexy in certain places. These really charged interludes. Not stuff David and Yoni would study at school.
So what they are reading is forbidden?
Not exactly forbidden, no. It’s more like, there are parts of the Talmud that their teachers would emphasize—stuff about Jewish law. When is a meat dish rendered unkosher, what constitutes a violation of Shabbat, how to resolve a dispute involving property lines. More important than these contingencies themselves is the hermeneutic framework they develop.
I like the way that sounds, hermeneutic framework. But when does it get sexy?
Stop exoticizing them for one second and listen to me.
Fine, fine.
The Talmud is a conversation with many parts, all happening concurrently across time. And there are these stories woven in. Strange stuff. Burning mansions, walking trees, demons, ruins, ghosts, heretics, sleepwalkers. All of this, their teachers skip over.
Because the stories are forbidden?
No, just less important. When they are alone, Yoni and David study texts that are neither encouraged nor forbidden.
Sitting side by side.
Yes, in Yoni’s father’s study, surrounded by brown leather volumes embossed in gold. My father has a room like that.
The door is closed.
Yes, and they are reading from Bava Metzia—
—Baba what?
Just one of the volumes, but they are learning about a sage who was famous for being incredibly hot.
Very funny.
I’m being serious. Rabbi Yochanan. The descriptions of him are ecstatic, like, You want to know the beauty of Rabbi Yochanan? Well listen up. He is a silver chalice overflowing with pomegranate seeds and rose petals, set in partial shade. A man without a beard. Beautiful. So beautiful that once he was bathing in the River Jordan, a bandit jumped in after him.
Does it really say this? In a religious text?
Yeah, your queering the bible class could never. But listen to what he says. So this highway robber type guy jumps in, one day the two of them will be study partners but this is all before. The bandit jumps in and says, You are as beautiful as any woman.
This is so gay.
The two men approach each other, wading through the River Jordan with coiled, tentative power.
David is touching Yoni’s wrist as he reads, excitedly, from the Talmud.
One clothed, one naked.
Yoni is staring at David’s hand where it is gripping his wrist.
One hardened, the other smooth and unblemished as a girl. But better than a girl. Cleaner.
Yoni is noticing how soft David’s hands are, how hairless the knuckles.
The two men approach each other, wading through the River Jordan with coiled, tentative power.
The study door opens suddenly.
What? No! It was just getting good.
The door opens and it’s Yoni’s mother, asking pointedly, Do you boys need anything? She’s taking in their bodies, their relative positions. Yoni sees her seeing how close he is sitting to David. Behind her, two sisters, watching.
Is it forbidden?
Almost, but not yet.
September was hotter than August that summer. I had air conditioning, which meant you came over to work from my place almost every day, even if you left in the evening to see someone else. Many nights when we each finished work—each signing off the app that tracked our productivity—we melted into my couch to watch the dating show with the wall between contestants.
As the show progressed, the wall came down, and the paired-off contestants lived together to test compatibility. Every couple, every couple without exception, was nostalgic for the period of their romance before they had seen each other. “I want it to be how it was back then,” a bewildered man in sales said. “Back behind the wall.” They missed being separate. It was that boundary that created the erotic.
When we first started imagining Yoni and David, I had pitied them. Now I wasn’t sure. Now I wondered if they wouldn’t pity me, my life without God, my world without boundaries, which is to say without meaning. Did you miss how clearly defined the world was in your old life? There is no meaning without definition, there is no definition without a boundary, there is no boundary without a wall. The word itself to define coming from the Latin for a boundary. What? Did you think you were the only one who knew dead languages? Not that you ever asked about where I came from, no matter how much I asked about you. We never spoke of my parents’ suburb, the Latin tutor and the horseback riding lessons. But what I wanted to know was this: When you live in a world defined by boundaries—between holy and the secular, between your people and all other people, between men and women, between men and men—is the potential for erotic everywhere? Is the world buzzing with terrible, consequential possibilities? Is that how it felt for Yoni and David, when their knees touched under the yeshiva table? What in my life would ever feel that profound?
I wondered what Yoni and David were doing while we watched reality TV. They were studying Talmud, of course. They are seventeen. This year, the other boys in their class have begun to talk about what they’ll do when they graduate. Some will stay in Brooklyn to study, others will go to yeshiva in Jerusalem. Jocks like Shmuly might even go to an Orthodox mechina in the West Bank to study while serving in the IDF—guns under the yeshiva benches, praying in the ruins of ancient synagogues before beating Palestinian shepherds half to death. But not Yoni and David, no, they are lost in the secret life of letters, studying a Rabbinic commentary that imagines the alphabet itself speaking to God.
Twelve years ago, Yoni and Dovi were licking honey off of Hebrew letters. Now, Dovi is sight-translating a midrash on Genesis. Yoni feels something like pride to see how capable Dovi has become.
Dovi translates, “Then it says, ‘For twenty-six generations, the letter alif complained before the throne of the Holy One.’” Looking up. “Wait, where do you think her mouth is?”
Yoni frowns. “Whose mouth?” Just those words together make him embarrassed.
Dovi’s eyes are mischievous. “The letter alif! Where is her mouth that she can speak to hashem?”
Yoni rolls his eyes. “Keep reading.”
“This is what she says,” Dovi says, suddenly shifting into a high and plaintive whine, “Master of the Universe, I am the first letter of the alphabet.” Softly, breathily, Dovi is voicing her complaint. “Why not begin Torah with me? Why that little slut, bes?”
Dovi looks up at Yoni, clearly expecting him to laugh, but Yoni is frozen. Something is contracting deep, deep in his stomach at the sound of Dovi’s whine.
How did I know this? You hadn’t told me about this text. We hadn’t imagined it together. It was nothing I had found online. But at some point, I could see them, Yoni and David. I could see them poring over a shared leather-bound volume, knees almost but not quite touching in a room with a door now left open—a new rule in Yoni’s house. Imagine this being forbidden.
Yoni’s father’s study. Just before nightfall.
Dovi: Hold up your hand.
Yoni: My hand is so much bigger.
Dovi: Yes.
Yoni: Like you’re a girl.
Dovi: Yes.
When Yoni’s palm brushes against Dovi’s palm, Yoni feels his nerves dance. He tries not to breathe too fast. Any second, his father might walk by or walk in.
Fall came to our city, and with it that wind that says, Everything has been over for a long, long time.
On the holiest day of the Jewish year, we ate bagel breakfast sandwiches while across the country, your family fasted and prayed. “Do you want to hear what they are reading?” you asked me.
“Reading where?”
“In synagogue.”
“David and Yoni?”
“My parents.”
“Of course.” We sat on my living room floor to stay closer to the cool air.
You intoned, “It is an abomination. To lie with your sister, to sacrifice your own children, to lie with a barn animal. It is an abomination. To lie with a man as you would a woman.”
“That’s what you read on Yom Kippur?”
“In the afternoon, yeah.” You paused. Sometimes, you seemed so far away—remembering something that would take too long to explain.
“What are you thinking about?” I hoped I wasn’t annoying you.
“How everyone watches in a neighborhood like that. Everyone sees.”
In shul, the silver pointer travels overs the sacred scroll. Letters no man has ever touched by hand. So holy that it’s impure. Yoni is now seventeen, his body filled with impulses and secret currents. His eyes are closed. He sees David’s body as a text, silver yad across that narrow chest, no. It is an abomination. No. Yoni rests his forehead in his palm, aware of the women behind him who watch from the balcony, watch as the men pray. Rabbi of the World, Yoni says in his heart. Please tell me you did not make me like that, an abomination.
You were talking about moving in with your partner—the cis-man married to another cis-man.
“Why with them?” I asked. Feeling stupid but needing to know why it wasn’t me.
“We all get along so well,” you said, not really looking at me. “And also it just feels so good, like, that these gay guys see me as a guy.”
“I see you as a guy.”
“Right, but I mean…”
But it didn’t count, not like the approval of men.
I felt fate pressing down on me. Would it have been different had our love faced profound obstacles? When you get what you want, it dilutes, it ebbs away. When you can’t, it’s perfect forever. I began to feel envy for those men whom we imagined, men who could never be together because of watchful sisters, stern fathers, rigid communities, sacred clocks, lives oriented not toward pleasure but toward God. Maybe I wanted someone to strong-arm me through life—tell me what to wear and eat, tell me who to love. Then at least I could have someone other than myself to blame for my unhappiness.
After Sukkot, the boys go back to yeshiva for senior year. Yoni’s father speaks to him on a quiet Shabbat afternoon.
“You and David are close,” he says. Not a question. It’s just the two of them at the dining room table, reading after shul.
“We study together, yes,” Yoni replies. We touch hands in your study. We put words in each other’s mouths.
Yoni’s father does not look up from his book. “Study at school.”
It happened so quickly: a conversation at that same stupid cafe. You told me in the measured, practiced way of people who live like us that you didn’t have “capacity” for another “partnership” at the moment, but you were here to “hold space” for my feelings.
Over your shoulder, I watched the kosher greengrocer folding boxes. Like at the beginning, only now it was winter and nearly dark. Imagine this being forbidden.
Then, I answered you in turn, that I “appreciated” you being “transparent” with me about your “bandwidth” even if I was disappointed that our “needs” did not “align.” This was the language of people who lived like us, no less claustrophobic than the secret language you’d left behind. We do what our words tell us to do.
Yoni explains about his father on the walk from school. “He needs his study during the day,” Yoni lies. For months, they have been walking this way together after school—walking to Yoni’s to study.
Dovi looks up at him, cheeks appling. “Should we study at your dining-room table?”
Yoni hesitates. “No I—” he looks away. “No, we can’t.”
Dovi nods slowly. “Oh.”
Now, here they are, standing on a street corner in dying light. They must part ways at the greengrocer’s, each to the home of his parents. They must, but they linger.
“Did you hear about the rabbi in Bnei Brak who forbids the bechorim from shaking hands?” David asks. His voice is teasing, but Yoni knows him well enough to detect a sadness.
Yoni plays along. “Forbids them from shaking whose hands?” He is not sure if this is a joke. Obviously, nobody shakes hands with women.
“Men,” Dovi says. “He forbids men from shaking hands with other men.” When he speaks, puffs of vapor hang in the air.
They part to allow a girl pushing a stroller to pass, the infant in his heavy jacket sprawled out in his sleeping. Across the street is the secular coffee shop that they all know not to look at. A treyf place filled with treyf people and a Black Lives Matter flag.
When the girl is out of earshot, Dovi speaks again. “The bechorim, they cannot shake hands with one another in this yeshiva.”
“Can that be true?” How could that be true? Men forbidden from touching other men. Dangerous possibilities moved beneath the surface of that prohibition. He thinks of his father: Study at school. He didn’t say why.
Dovi’s smooth cheeks are flushed. Yoni can smell the salt of him on the cold air. Dovi holds out his right hand. “Imagine this being forbidden.”
Yoni hesitates. Neither of them wear gloves. He thinks of Rav Leikesh jumping into the river to wade toward Rabbi Yochanan. He thinks of Dovi voicing the letter alif with a plaintive lisp. He thinks of mother’s eyes traveling between their two bodies. Then, Yoni takes Dovi’s hand. They shake. Yoni’s hands are bigger. He savors the feeling of encasing Dovi, as if he knows himself better in this moment than in anyone before, but all he says is, “Your hands are cold.”
For a moment, just for a moment, Yoni is watching himself from the cafe across the street. He is in that other world, living by his animalistic urges, living without purpose, living without time—not real time—watching two men in black suits shake hands as the greengrocer comes out with folded produce boxes, not looking up at Yoni and David because what is there to see? Just two bechorim shaking hands.
It happens so quickly. A first date in the popular hotel lobby, drinking iced water while the girl’s thick-ankled aunt sits nearby to chaperone, then a second date on a walk with all of their parents, and then they are engaged—Yoni and a painfully thin girl. Painfully thin, with bony hands and skin dry around the knuckles.
It happens so quickly.
Now, here is Yoni, feeling like a boy, playing the part of the groom on Purim.
“Today, you will become whole,” his father tells him.
His bride—how is this possible? how is this word, bride, possible?—his bride is elsewhere, praying psalms. Yoni is flanked by his father and her father. They are holding him up or are they holding him down or are they dragging him toward the chuppah, singing of the world and the world to come.
Here she is, here is Yoni’s bride in her ill-fitting dress, a mother on either side, her face covered by the veil as thick as a polyester napkin.
Yoni is dazed as she circles him. Flanked by older women, she circles him faceless. Where is Dovi? Not in the crowd. Where is Dovi?
Had you stayed, this would have been you. You would have been the bride being offered. Here you are. Held up by your mother and his mother, gripping your arm to hold you up, to drag you in circles around Yoni who is me, who is waiting for you, who is shaking and praying.
You circle Yoni like the hills circle Jerusalem. This is what will make him a man. Your body will make him a man.
And me, what am I doing here? I do not belong here—fantasizing an alternate version of your life.
I do not belong here, but here I am, crossing the street that divides my world from theirs. Walking past bakeries and toy stores, past packs of girls in dark swishing skirts and puffy black coats, past what I assume are synagogues but I don’t know everything with Hebrew writing on it looks like a synagogue to me. Walking with my cold hands balled in my pockets. Walking as if I knew where I was going.
Here I am. I am the sickly bride and I am the absent lover and I am the helpless groom. That’s how dreams work, is it not? Everyone is an aspect of the dreamer. What I want more than love is a boundary that keeps love at arm’s length from me forever, so that I never have to lose anyone ever again, so that I can live in the moment before the veil is lifted, praying, Let it be Dovi. Just for a moment, just for one moment, please, let it be Dovi waiting under the veil with flushed cheeks. Before the cloth is lifted. Before all the possibilities narrow down to one. Before it’s too late. Let it be him.
My personal shorthand for describing the place I grew up—New Port Richey, Florida—is to say that the culture is defined by the absence of culture, but this isn’t quite true. To be more precise, it feels like there’s no culture because no culture has won the day, no way of being has outstripped the others for supremacy. There’s such varied competition when it comes to manners, customs, and values that the atmosphere remains a rich, even static of influences. This still holds true for parts of Florida like mine, and was even more true in the 90s, when Penalties of June, my new book, takes place—coastal Pasco and Hernando counties are not rural since no one farms, not urban by a long shot, not small-town charming like places in Mississippi, not suburban since people don’t drive to Tampa for work or possess the wherewithal to follow the fashion trends, gritty but not particularly blighted (except to some degree by meth and pills, like a lot of places), not ritzy, not even beachy. The Long Islanders act like Long Islanders. The Carolinians act like Carolinians. The Minnesotans like Minnesotans. The Cubans like Cubans.
For a writer like me who has always believed in a bit of random wantonness when it comes to plot, who wants characters to say things the reader could not have expected, who wants both the zany Florida-man brand of crime and the ruthless, efficient heights of organized crime, Florida has always seemed the American state with the most narrative latitude. Anything can happen. Anyone can be there. No religion or philosophy or commercial ambition seems unlikely.
When I was in high school, native Floridians were rare. It was, and largely still is, a state everyone moves to, rather than a state people have roots in. This self-selection regarding being Floridian causes, necessarily, an abundance of risk-takers, of escapees from other lives, of schemers and opportunists, of people in recovery from something, of people who believe the grass might be greener (it might be, if you keep the sprinklers pumping day and night)—in short, Florida is, decade after decade, flooded with a disproportionate glut of human beings who are not meek nor content nor predisposed to toe the line.
Pratt, the main character of Penalties of June, grew naturally out of my home territory in that he has no roots—his parents are deceased and when he emerges from a stay in prison, he’s faced with starting his life over. He grew out of this place because he’s beset by contradictions: Bonne, the crime boss, is at once the person who helps him most and the person who puts him in the most danger; Kallie, his not-quite-old-flame, is everything beautiful in the world and also his greatest worry; the most morally sound of his acquaintances is a pawn shop owner, and the most devious is a detective. The only thing clear is that he’s going to have to do something bad in order to do any good.
The nine books I’ve selected comprise a dizzying tour of divergent Florida experiences and styles whose kinship, if they share any, is tied up in heat and crime and displacement and unpredictability.
I’m equally likely to run into someone who’s never heard of Charles Willeford as someone who says he’s their favorite crime writer. I chose this of the four Hoke Moseley novels because it’s the oddest. It breaks the conventions of the detective novel to a shocking degree, but it succeeds precisely because it breaks those expectations. In short, all the domestic and romantic strife Willeford puts Moseley through, all the bureaucratic mire, all the unglamorous random hassles—all these things, combined with countless idiosyncratic details that seem too random to make up, create the disconcerting feeling of real life (real, but much more interesting than yours).
I was first introduced to this book in a dialogue class. Open at almost any page, and you see characters talking to other characters. Hurston was trained as an anthropologist, and has a great ear for accents and dialects (phonetic dialogue is rare enough these days that it might take readers a few pages to get used to it, but it’s worth it). The book was received coldly by critics upon its publication in 1937, mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the book—for example, Richard Wright and other black writers and scholars thought Their Eyes Were Watching God wasn’t political or bitter enough. In later days, it became celebrated. The story is consistently entertaining, and when it’s sad it’s really sad. It’s the story of one woman’s coming-of-age through the narrative scaffolding of three marriages—the old husband she leaves, the rich husband she hates who dies on her, and the poor husband she loves who she’s forced to kill.
One of the best attempts made to untangle the knots that tied 1960s-1980s Miami to Washington and Havana and Moscow and Nicaragua. For those in exile, Miami was a place where paranoia couldn’t really exist; if you were involved with la lucha, somebody was out to get you. Didion’s reporting spans from dry congressional reports to poetic descriptions of the physical and spiritual atmosphere of the tropic metropolis. She takes on racial strife and cultural difference, from events as serious as the McDuffie Riots to the following amusing account of what Cubans thought of Americans:
[They] never touched one another, nor did they argue. Americans did not share the attachment to family which characterized Cuban life. Americans did not share the attachment to patria that characterized Cuban life. Americans placed undue importance on being on time…they were by temperament “naïve,” a people who could live and die without ever understanding those nuances of conspiracy and allegiance on which, in the Cuban view, the world turned.
This book is from a time (the early 70s) when literary zest and passion and abandon and individuality were valued as a commodity in themselves and considered well worth sacrificing clean plotlines and easy themes for. I’ll say this: this guy is a wizard in the tight spaces of sentences and a wizard in the commonplace darknesses of the human psyche. The book’s jacket (my edition anyway) quotes somebody named L.E. Sissman, who says it better than I can: “McGuane shares with Celine a genius for seeing the profuse, disparate materials of everyday life as a highly organized nightmare.” Literally, the book is about Thomas Skelton, a prodigal son come home to Key West to be a fishing guide, and his conflict with the already-established top guide Nichol Dance. More importantly, it’s about Skelton finding a way to stay sane despite the cultures of both America and the Keys deteriorating around him. 1
Joy Williams is my favorite writer. A dangerous writer to adopt as a model because she intentionally eschews overarching, suspenseful plotlines in favor of what she does so damn well, which is let interesting and peculiar characters be interesting and peculiar. She’s a writer to savor sentence-by-sentence—to really enjoy her, one has to surrender the comfort of knowing where the greater narrative is going. In B&E, Willie and Liberty are a young couple that keeps a roof over their heads by breaking into vacation homes while the rich owners are away. From the first page, a bit of Williams’ magic for making characters in no time:
“Liberty and Willie saw the guard each morning. He was an old, lonely man, rather glossy and puffed up, his jaw puckered in and his chest puffed out like a child concentrating on making a muscle. He told Willie he had a cancer, but that grapefruit was curing it. He told Willie that they had wanted to cut again, but he had chosen grapefruit instead. He talked quite openly to Willie, as though they had been correspondents for years, just now meeting. Willie and Liberty must have reminded him of people he thought he knew, people who must’ve looked appropriate living in a million-dollar soaring cypress house on the beach.”
Based on the true horror story of the Dozier School for Boys in the Florida panhandle, this is simply one of the best books I’ve read. An instant classic. It succeeds on every level a novel might—complex, compelling characters; vivid, charged setting; heart-wrenching plot; narrative inventiveness—and at the same time illuminates real historical events. For my money, it easily outshines Whitehead’s other Pulitzer-winning novel, The Underground Railroad. Elwood Curtis, the protagonist of The Nickel Boys, is one of the best drawn and most genuinely sympathetic main characters you’ll come across—the devastation you’ll feel at his (and all the boys at Nickel Academy) treatment is only magnified by the fact that the real place only closed down in 2011.
Cracker Westerns is a series focused on the cattle culture of the frontier days Florida is a jungly place to raise cattle, and so cows were constantly getting lost in the thick vegetation. The rough-mannered cowboys hired to extract them (who often went into business for themselves, corralling and overbranding the wayward livestock) were called crackers because of the extra-long whips they carried. (In later days, people started calling anyone born in Florida a ‘Florida cracker.’) These books are meant to be light entertainment—Alligator Gold features a secret trove of treasure and a villain named Snake—but as light entertainment goes, they’re some of the best around.
If you grew up on the lower side of middle class in pre-smartphone Florida, the details and atmosphere in this collection will leave you stricken with their accuracy—the retention ponds; the juvenile delinquency at shopping malls; hopping from bare foot to bare foot on hot pavement. This book feels grounded in the real, the gritty, the physical, the desperately routine, and yet something big is always happening: suicide and miscarriage and cancer and violent muggings and eaten pets and the fetishizing of feet and threats delivered via handjob. Moniz’s greatest strength might be her ability to fully, sometimes shockingly inhabit the mindsets and attitudes of her usually female and often adolescent/teen protagonists—within a page, she can sink you completely and unquestionably into the psyche of her main character, and from there does with you what she wishes.
This is a novel, but if it didn’t say that on the cover, you’d think it was an odd sort of memoir. Sometimes it’s an essay. Occasionally, a treatise on speculative neuroscience. You have to earn your readerly footing. At the beginning, the book hides its narrator—there’s a 1st person voice, but we don’t know who it’s attached to; a girl is spoken about in the 3rd person, and then we realize that girl is the 1st person narrator, a first-person narrator that imagines other people’s lives so fully that those characters sometimes get POV. Many of the described events (especially toward the beginning of the book) feel deliciously theoretical, and the timeline is mostly in order but that order feels incidental and unimportant. Amazingly, the narrative gymnastics never outstrip Corin’s intellectual agility, her uncanny talent for turning a seeming tangent into exactly the relevant passage you didn’t know you needed. The world of the novel feels both real and unreal, perhaps due to the larding of mythical and fairytale and historical references—Repunzel and Cinderella and the Venus de Milo; griffins and Egyptian gods and Joan of Arc; Anne Boleyn and the Grimm tales and eventually, yes, Leonard Lake and Jeffrey Dahmer and Danny Rolling. It’s Hollywood, Florida some thirty-five or forty years ago, described with familiar details—orange groves, last-gasp strip malls, white-out-sniffing—but also it’s Corin’s unique creation.
As a side dish, the short documentary All That Is Sacred chronicles the period when Key West was not yet the ordered vacation spot it is today, when it was crawling with ragged outcasts and drugged-fueled artists (Jim Harrison, Richard Brautigan, and Thomas McGuane among them) and when tarpon fishermen numbered in the tens rather than the hundreds. ↩︎
One of the great joys of working for Electric Literature is the opportunity to celebrate the best books of the year. It seems that every year produces better and better books; or perhaps readers continue to fall more in love with reading. Or maybe two things, or many things, are true. Either way, what I know to be true is that every year, our most-loved novels are filled with extraordinary characters who soar into your hearts, burrowing into them, and remaining. They are original, unforgettable, un-put-downable, and we are lucky to have them.This year’s list features a number of well-known authors and their best-loved books, as well as remarkable debut authors, whose voices we will luxuriate in for years to come. These books wrapped themselves around us, warming and comforting us in a time of great turmoil. If you haven’t explored these novels, do so as soon as possible. You won’t be sorry, you’ll simply fall deeper in love—with reading, and with books.
The novels included on this list were chosen by a vote from the EL community. Here are Electric Lit’s Top 5 novels of 2024, followed by the best novels of the year.
How would an alien in Northeast Philly record observations of earth? Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland contains a simple answer: using a fax machine she found discarded on the street. The story of Bertino’s third novel follows Adina, an alien, born on earth who is sent to record humanity’s happenings. The result is a tender, incisive reckoning with what it means to be human.
Martyr-obsessed Cyrus Shams is haunted by a number of tragedies when we meet him, high and drunk, in the pages of Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!. His father recently suffered a stroke and died. His mother was killed in the late 1980s, when the U.S, Navy shot down a flight she was on over the Persian Gulf. So, he decided to craft a book about historical martyrs and along the way discovers Orkideh, a terminally ill artist, who spurs questions about Cyrus’ mother. Short-listed for the National Book Award, the fresh family saga ask what it takes for life and death to be consequential.
This multilayered sapphic road trip novel is a delightful surprise that plays with the themes of queer ancestry, embodiment, American politics, photography, and the artistic life. Bernie and Leah’s drive across Pennsylvania is inspired by a real-life historical trip taken by photographer Bernice Abbott and art critic Elizabeth McCausland, but Bernie and Leah are ultra-modern and grounded in the concerns of the frantic present. The characters’ journey toward both relational intimacy and artistic collaboration guides the trajectory of this enthralling debut novel.
An international bestseller, Vanessa Chan’s incredibly gripping debut novel is set in World War II and follows Cecily, a Malayan housewife who agrees to act as a spy for a general that dreams of an “Asia for Asians.” When Cecily finds her nation crumbling years later, she does everything in her power to save them. This historical fiction novel effortlessly leaps through time and its central family’s perspectives to deliver a story of secrets and survival in times of tragedy.
A multi-generational family saga, City of Laughter centers on a Jewish woman, Shiva, whose family has been visited by a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years. Shiva travels to Ropshitz, Poland, colloquially known as the “City of Laughter,” to learn more about her family secrets. The tale deftly moves between perspectives, capturing the family’s joy, shame and everything in between.
After a decade of writing her supposedly groundbreaking second novel—what her husband calls a “mulatto War and Peace”—Jane’s efforts and expectations fall flat. In a bid of desperation, she turns to Hollywood, thinking it may be her way out of her precarious lifestyle as a novelist. Danzy Senna’s latest novel, Colored Television, is a hilarious and sharp take on the racial-industrial complex, ambition, and reinvention.
Ko’s sophomore novel tracks three lifelong friends, roving from their 1980’s girlhood to their Y2K-era years in New York to their adulthood in the dystopian 2040’s. Though starkly different from one another, the women are brought together by their identities as outsiders who find comfort on the fringes. Refreshingly honest and driven by female-centric relationships, this novel digs into questions about documentation and survival at the edges of society.
In his National Book Award winning novel, Percival Everett reimagines the (in)famous Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. When he hears he is going to be sold, and thus separated from his family, he escapes to an island to form a plan. While many of the same beats of Huckleberry Finn can be found, James brings the story into an entirely new light, showcasing Jim’s agency, compassion, and wits as he takes back control of his life.
An RA aspires to buy a home. A visiting writer starts an affair with a student after secretly mining private conversations for a Money Diaries-esque column. A disgraced batton twirler tries to find community as a transfer student in a new state In her zany, sophomore novel, Kiley Ried skewers assumptions about race, class, and American university culture.
The titular Anita de Monte is one of three narrators in Xochitl Gonzalez’s sophomore novel Anita de Monte Laughs Last. After de Monte is found dead in her apartment, her work as a conceptual artist is nearly forgotten until Raquel Toro, a graduate student in art history, begins uncovering her story.
The National Book Award finalist All Fours follows an unnamed artist as she seeks reinvention. Confronting middle age and menopause, she embarks on a journey of self discovery that forces her to reevaluate her ideas of family and intimacy. Described as frank, captivating, and irresistible, the novel reckons with what does (and doesn’t) change as we get older.
The magic of this novel lies in the hyperrealistic dynamic between sisters Jules and Poppy: their constant push and pull, their paradoxical desire for both personal space and intense closeness. Tanner’s prose has a unique, captivating beauty as she traces the sisters’ meandering journey through their twenties in New York City, shadowed by their overbearing mother and by the specter of the Internet.
Our unnamed narrator has migrated from Palestine to New York City after the death of her parents, pursuing a semblance of the American dream. The narrator struggles against the hypnotic pull of capitalism but finds herself scheming with her situationship, a homeless man called Trenchcoat, to resell Birkin bags to the wealthy. The nonlinear, unraveling story of her movement through the city includes meditations on the environment, individualism, the body, and the accumulation of wealth.
The premise of The Anthropologists is simple: Asya, a documentary filmmaker, and her husband Manu, an employee of a nonprofit organization, search for apartments in a foreign country. Like so much of our daily lives, the moments that seem mundane are filled with profundity. The Anthropologists is a great love story about aging parents, romantic love, and what it means to call a place home.
Jiaming Tang’s stunning debut novel is an engrossing portrait of gay men in rural China — and the women that marry them. Opening in a movie theater known for being a pickup spot for gay men in 1980s China, the novel tracks criss-crossed lovers as secret romances are exposed, and as desperate treks to America are taken. Cinema Love aches with tenderness and heart as it explores desire, immigration, grief, and survival.
Vinson Cunningham, a former Obama campaign staffer, introduces us in his autofictive debut novel to David, a Black man (and Pip figure) working for an unnamed presidential Candidate who closely resembles Obama. Cunningham’s prose sparkles with energy and offers juicy tidbits about the less-than-glamorous reality of the campaign trail. The story raises resonant questions about privilege, the intersection of race and class, and authenticity in the political realm.
Longlisted for the National Book Award, Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection is a novel-in-stories that satirizes the rejects of our world. Described as a modern classic, Tulathimutte is unrelenting as he explores the delusion and desire of our time through seven linked portraits.
This generational saga set in the fictional Texas-Mexico border town of La Cienega traces a family curse from the 1940’s to the 1990’s. The driving voices of the braided narrative are two equally proud, obstinate women who address the injuries of the past and embrace their futures. Fuentes writes captivating dialogue and cinematic scenes that arrest the reader’s attention throughout this entertaining debut novel.
Following the tale of a secret resistance helmed by Black women in pre-Civil War New Orleans, this gripping historical novel explores hope, resistance, and the triumphant power of community. After being separated from her mother, Ady—a sharp and curious enslaved woman—must embark on a journey toward liberation and self-discovery. Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s latest is riveting, inventive, and inspiring.
Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange’s follow up to There, There, begins with survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek massacre Jude Star. Star, who is part of the Cheyenne tribe, is forced to learn English and assimilate into Christianity. The novel follows his descendants, eventually landing on the Red Feather family, familiar to readers from There, There. In the present day, the novel examines how the family copes with inherited trauma, addiction and the pains of assimilation.
Sally Rooney’s fourth novel follows brothers Peter and Ivan. A lawyer and a chess prodigy, respectively, the men are reeling from the loss of their father and Rooney deftly chronicles their misadventures in life and love. Peter is unable to choose between two women: one older, one younger. Ivan meets Margaret, an arts program director, and the two begin a secret relationship.
This debut, from Booker Prize-winning translator Jennifer Croft, trodes on familiar material. The titular character Irena Rey brings eight translators to her home to translate one of her books. Then, she goes missing and a surprising, remarkable tale ensues.
After the death of her younger brother, Akúa flies from Canada to Jamaica to spread his ashes, reconnect with her sister, and revisit significant locations from their childhood in Kingston. Akúa’s journey brings her to question her ethnic identity as a member of the Jamaican diaspora and as a lesbian pushing back against a restrictively religious family. Drifting across continents, Broughtupsy is at once a queer bildungsroman, a tale of displacement, and a tender family saga.
If Jin doesn’t keep her old familial curse a secret, she risks losing everything she has. And yet, this doesn’t stop her from confiding in Lidija—a woman she’s found a sudden, intense connection to, and who helps her explore her deepest, most hidden desires. This hypnotic and sensual narrative is razor sharp as it explores rebirth, identity, pain, and pleasure. R.O. Kwon writes with an urgency like no other.
Blurring the lines between tragedy and humor, past and present, John Vercher’s latest novel follows our biracial narrator as he inherits land from his estranged white grandfather. While he expected to resell the land, things take a turn when he discovers he is now the Black owner of what used to be a plantation, passed down for generations. With raw honesty and aplomb, Devil Is Fine dissects the relationship between legacy, memory, and destiny.
The holidays just got a whole lot more exciting—our fifth annual Book Cover Tournament kicks off on Monday! For an entire year, we’ve judged thousands and thousands of book covers, and the 32 designs below represent the very best. But in the end, there can only be one winner.
Now, it’s your turn to take the reins! Head over to our Twitter and Instagram Stories next week to cast your votes in the most aesthetic showdown of the year. Want to up the fun? Download the full bracket, predict your winners, and follow the drama as it unfolds.
Here’s how it works: 32 books, 16 pairs will face off in round one. Voting begins Monday for round one, Tuesday for round two, quarterfinals on Wednesday, semifinals on Thursday, and the grand finale on Friday.
Click to enlarge
Here are the best book covers of 2024:
Left: Design by Alicia Tatone, art by Shannon Cartier Lucy Right: Design by Jaya Nicely, art by Zack Rosebrugh
Below is a list of the 475 writers Electric Literature has published so far in 2024. Every single one, from Aaron to two different Zoës.
We need to raise $25,000 by December 31, 2024 to keep Electric Literature going into next year, and we are almost there! Please help us down the homestretch by making a donation in honor of one of these writers. You will be prompted to add their name when you make your contribution.
It’s amazing how quickly you get used to thinking your mother may never wake up again.
A week ago, my uncle woke me up from a post-dinner nap to tell me my mom had a stroke. We – my small collection of immediate family – assembled at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens, the hospital forever known to all Queens natives as Booth Memorial. We slept huddled in chairs, hoods over our heads, and listened to the ghost-like sounds of early early early morning news broadcasts while they ran tests and gave her scans; we were told in the actual morning that she would have a minimally invasive craniotomy that night.
All I knew was that ‘minimally invasive’ did not sound like words that should go anywhere next to ‘craniotomy.’
No one really knew what would happen after that. All I knew was that “minimally invasive” did not sound like words that should go anywhere next to “craniotomy.”
It’s a week later and the lobby is vibrating at 7 pm. Shift change. It’s begun to feel like I have never lived a life before Booth Memorial, always feeling vaguely nauseated, and with the expectation that every person wearing scrubs is coming to tell me that my worst fears have been confirmed: that this is how it will be forever. My family and I are waiting for some signs of “waking” – a word I have learned that has a spectrum of meanings and interpretations that you can collect while watching someone recover from a brain injury.
But I can’t put off my job forever. So now, on this particular shift change, I’m balancing the thin paper cup of hospital coffee in the same hand that’s holding my cell phone; my wallet is shoved under my arm as I scan the seating outside the lobby cafe. On the connected shoulder, my school bag straps buckle under the weight of my laptop, its charger and extension cord, and the pile of still ungraded papers I carry with me at all times. My other arm is wrapped around the books I brought from home that I did not have time to shove back in my bag when we were ushered out of the ICU and I piled into the elevator with other patients’ attendants to find a place to kill an hour somewhere in the more public areas of the hospital. Draped over that same arm is also my puffy down coat that I use as a blanket. The revolving doors and picture windows do not insulate well against the New York March nights.
This is my personal version of the copyrighted fitness routine that builds muscle through schlepping a collection of sundry, seemingly found, heavily weighted objects from one end of the room to the other. But instead of piles of tires, I weigh down my body with student writing I’ll never read, novels I’m teaching, and the monographs I need for dissertation research as I move through the six-mile triangle perimeter of my commute through the various neighborhoods of Flushing: from my childhood home, to the Queens College campus where I’ve taught for three years, and to Booth Memorial (or Queens-Pres, or whatever).
I manage to find a table near a wall outlet – I depend on this time to charge my computer, since the outlets around my mother’s bed are, you know, generally spoken for. When I drop my belongings on the table and its surrounding chairs, I spill some coffee out of the pin-sized hole inexplicably located at the center of all disposable cup covers. I run back to the counter holding scratchy, one-ply napkins and flimsy plastic cutlery while still wearing my bag, not so much because I’m worried about the financial loss of a stolen computer, but more because I don’t know the last time I backed up the files of my long-abandoned dissertation chapters that I still call “in progress”.
I settle at the table, organizing my papers into piles of priority, neatly stacking books on top of papers to protect them against the wind-suck of the revolving door, and – with some risk to the machine – I open my computer in the pocket of space still open. I untangle the charging cable and stretch it to the outlet. But the table is farther from the wall than I had originally thought and I can’t move it closer without disrupting the people sitting at the table next to mine.
I recognize them: a middle-aged woman and a man who has the same nose and looks a few years younger. They belong to the patient on the ventilator in the corner of the ICU room that is diagonally across from my mother. The woman, I presume the patient’s daughter, is at the hospital all day, every day. She usually wears the same yellow fleece hooded sweatshirt and unfitted jeans. Her hair is dyed light brown with untouched gray roots and is always tied into a frizzy ponytail with a dark green scrunchy.
This is her hospital uniform.
Everyone who takes the dayshift at someone’s sickbed has a hospital uniform.
The base of mine is my formerly favorite jeans that have lost their luster and gained a hospital disinfectant smell I can’t wash out, my tops are an awkward layering of sleeveless tanks under long-sleeve t-shirts under sweatshirts under my winter coat and blanket scarf, so I’m ready for any permutation of hot or freezing in any part of the hospital. My hair is always tied back into a bun when it is out-of-the-shower wet, straight enough to force all of it into one hair tie.
Though the rest of my family with “normal” jobs don’t make it back to the hospital until after night shift change, Yellow Sweatshirt’s companion – presumably her brother – comes at six, around an hour before. He always looks tired, but it’s the tired of a man who now has to go to the ICU after a days’ work. It’s not the same vacant expression of someone whose thinking is interrupted all day by the staccato rhythm of the sound of twenty respirators, that beep in temporary, often unnecessary alerts, in unsynced rhythm. He’s always wearing a dress-shirt and slacks, and I wonder how long he has to wear those clothes in this new workday schedule that includes nights in the ICU.
At night, before my day at the ICU ends, I frequently catch Yellow Sweatshirt and her brother out of the corner of my eye, sitting with their mother. Unlike my own mother, theirs is mostly awake throughout the day, but she cannot speak because of her intubation. She wears the same puffy white mittens on her hands that my mother has on her left hand. The mittens are meant to keep the patient from pulling out their tubing. They seem like their own form of torture independent of having machines breathing for you.
I constantly find myself making assumptions like this about what it must be like to be a patient in the ICU. To find yourself with new disabilities, to live in (dis)harmony with the life-supporting technologies and prosthetics that the hospital provides. And then I constantly find myself realizing how ableist I sound, how clueless I am, and how much useless guilt I feel as a liberal scholar in an intensive care ward who has studied these questions of medical care in the safe sterility of the academy without ever having to live them myself.
My mother has only one glove because only her left hand is a threat to her intubation. The right hand is motionless next to her, and has been since her stroke. When I stare at it, I think sometimes that I see a finger move, the same way when I was a kid I would think I finally saw the picture embedded in a Magic Eye image after desperately staring at it for minutes.
After this first week, I have grown tired of voicing these visions of reflexive wrist flicks and finger tremors out loud. Because while you’re worrying about whether your mother will ever wake up again, if she’ll talk again, if she’ll breathe on her own again, you also have to worry about constructing yourself as a reliable witness: a witness for the doctors who don’t spend hours at her bedside observing her every move, for the friends who call everyday and feel comforted in their own pessimism, and for the family members who need your observations to gel with their sense of medical expertise.
My mother’s eyes are not open, but I’m sure she’s aware of the glove. She stretches her left arm across her body, trying to find leverage anywhere to pry the velcro open.
I should note here that she never went for her tubing, just for the glove.
Her attempts to get her glove off interrupt the cyclical movement of her left arm that started a few days after her surgery. Eyes closed and seemingly unresponsive to all stimuli except for the glove, she moves her left arm off the bed and draws it back in a straight line, until it arches and lands next to her head, forearm now resting on the pillow. She waits a minute and then lifts the arm again, bringing it in reverse motion back to her torso. She can repeat this motion for hours. It’s so casual, so graceful, and so bizarre that it seems like it must be purposeful, so repetitive it seems automated.
Earlier today, before the shift change, I asked her nurse, Bernadette, if I could take the glove off.
“So long as you don’t let her pull out the works, honey.”
I pulled her hand out from the netted glove, and I could feel the dampness in the fake woolen padding that supports the imprisoned palm. It smelled like sweat, dead skin, and rancid body lotion. I tried to turn the glove inside out to let it dry before I would have to put it back on my mother’s hand when I’m kicked out for shift change. The glove is meant to be cushy, but it is stiff as a board, and un-manipulatable. Admitting defeat, I left it on the nightstand next to her bed and tried to tent the opening so that the inside of the glove could air out. The material kept folding in on itself and – having spent too much time in the effort – I refused to give up.
Finally satisfied that it would at least stay open for as long as it took me to turn back to my mother, I looked over to see her arm back at it. It was in mid-descent, heading back to the thin plastic hospital mattress. In mid-rise though, her hand stopped to feel the guardrail next to the bed. Her hand climbed up the metal fencing until it caught the fabric of my t-shirt. It moved around my belly, crawl-gliding up to the bottom of my ribcage and then back down to where my stomach met the railing.
She continued that exploration for much of the afternoon. When I sat in a chair next to her, and my face was closer to the rail, her hand moved up and down my face, spreading across my mouth so I couldn’t breathe, grabbing my nose, cupping at the top of my forehead, grabbing at the ugly nineties-wide headband I was wearing to keep the hair that had curled out of my bun close to my head. She spent the day pawing at my face and stomach, once traveling up my body and grabbing my boob on the way to my face.
I called her rude. She honked my nose and lowered her hand.
I don’t know how – or whether – to assign this squeeze any meaning. What I think is agentive action, I’m later told, is no sign of anything at all.When one day I think she is making more conscious action, the next will follow with no seemingly deliberate movement, save for the constant sway of her left arm, but without its conscious exploring. I am comforted when her hand clasps my nose, but I don’t know if I have any right to be.
When I was told to leave for shift change, the glove was still wet, despite my best efforts.
Now, in the Booth Memorial lobby, I become desperate to find a table that’s even closer to an outlet. I turn into the woman in the big plastic glasses hopelessly holding her charger’s extension cord, eyes combing the room for empty chairs and hidden outlets. I only have half an hour to restore my computer battery before I have to go back up to the ICU.
“Miss! You can sit here!”
I don’t realize he’s talking to me until the fourth “Miss” catches my attention. I turn around and I see Yellow Sweatshirt’s brother waving at me. Yellow Sweatshirt herself is pointing at the empty chair at the table.
I’m terrible at talking to strangers.
But I also really need the outlet.
“I don’t want to bother you, and I have so much stuff with me.” I gesture with my head at my piles of books and papers on the table I had already claimed.
“Nah, you’re fine! Bring it all over here!”
I turn around to organize my piles into a slightly more draggable formation. Aware that they’re watching me, though, I panic and cram as much as I can carry into my bag so I need as little of their table as possible. A pile of loose paper is jutting out on a diagonal from the pouch of my bag, my wallet is just barely secure in a front pocket, and when I hook the bag under my shoulder the spines of two library books dig into the fleshy part of my tricep. Another file of papers is shoved loose into a folder and I drop that and another book on top of my laptop. The charger is now looped and bulging through the back of my bag and once I drop everything onto the table, I realize I left my cell phone behind. When I turn back after it, I see Yellow Sweatshirt’s brother picking my jacket off the floor. I’m not even sure it ever made its way onto a chair.
At least I didn’t spill my coffee.
Yellow Sweatshirt introduces herself as Yolanda and her brother as Jorge. Yolanda is a retired teacher – she recognizes me as a fellow traveler when she sees my loose papers and fancy grading pens – and Jorge runs a nonprofit formed in response to the most recent hurricane in Haiti. The lobby is too loud and his voice too soft and deep for me to hear the more detailed description of his work and I’m too nervous to ask him to clarify.
They ask where I teach, what I teach, my research interests, and as usual, I give an answer that’s too long for polite conversation.
In a hospital lobby.
When we’re each thinking about our respective mothers in the ICU.
And then there’s the awkward silence when we run out of out-of-hospital small talk, and we almost compulsorily transition to the in-hospital version that is in no way small and no one really wants to talk about.
Yolanda breaks the silence. “Is that your mom?” Her head gestures back to the elevator bank we’ll all return to when we go back to the seventh floor in forty minutes.
“Mhm. And you?”
“Yes.” A pause, and then Yolanda answers the follow-up question I didn’t ask. “She was actually here for a broken leg. On the fourth floor. And then…something happened. She couldn’t breathe. They intubated and moved her to the ICU.”
“And they don’t know what happened?” They both shake their heads. “Or what to do now?”
Jorge adds, “They want to put in a trach; she’s been intubated for too long. But the doctor says that because of her age, once they do, it’ll be permanent. She won’t be strong enough for them to remove it. Ever.”
I don’t know what to say. The finality is suffocating. “I’m so sorry.” I think longer, like there must be something else to say. But of course there isn’t.
“We want to get a second opinion,” Yolanda adds. “There must be other answers out there.”
‘These doctors don’t know anything.’
I agree immediately, but I also don’t feel much hope for them. It’s true that I, too, don’t have much faith in Dr. Ramirez, the daytime ICU attending for our side of the room. But I also don’t have much faith in the state of geriatric intensive care in any other hospital across the country. I join them anyway in the usual chorus you hear among family members of hospital patients: “These doctors don’t know anything.”
And I feel this. In this one week we’ve met four different doctors from four different specialties with four different predictions for how long it will take her to wake up and what we will find when she does.
“She’ll wake up tomorrow and she’ll have full mobility back in six months,” her neurosurgeon told us the day of her surgery. Five days later and she’s still not awake.
“She may never breathe again on her own,” Dr. Ramirez said last night, surprised it had never occurred to me.
Because it hadn’t. She was breathing on her own when she was brought to the ER and was only intubated as a precaution against aspiration (doctor for choking on your own spit). I had spent nights thinking about whether she would be able to speak, to walk, to come home. But I had found comfort in her ability to breathe when she was in the emergency room. Like one certainty was ticked off the master list of unknowns.
Tears streamed down my face with the weight of the unanswerable questions I had yet to consider. If this were any day before my mother’s stroke, I would have excused myself elegantly and found a private place to cry.
But there is no privacy in this hospital.
I learned this on the day of my mother’s surgery, the afternoon after her stroke. I could count on my hands the number of times I’ve seen my father cry that didn’t involve Holocaust documentaries. And when I walked in on him crying over my mother hours before the procedure, I couldn’t handle it. I was standing inside the doors of the ICU and turned back on my heels to go back out the same door I had just walked through. I found the floor’s one public bathroom and turned the handle.
It didn’t budge.
I pressed against the door again and it still wouldn’t move. I knew some poor person was in there and I didn’t care. I banged angrily on the door and shouted at the crappily laminated bathroom sign.
I desperately searched for any corner out of the way, but the intensive care floor is cruelly open-concept. At the other side of the elevator bank is a nine-foot high plastic “7”. I ducked between the wall and the leg of the seven and sobbed. It was only once I was done that I had the presence of mind to realize I would have looked less conspicuous just crying on the floor in the middle of the family lounge, with everyone else.
I tried the bathroom again and the knob turned. The lights inside were flickering; the walls and floor were the same gray tile and some of them were starting to peel off; the mirror hung at a slight angle like it was about to fall at any minute. I looked so hard into my own face that I couldn’t really see where my eyes were anymore, and the flickering lights made me seem like I was a side character about to die in a B-rated horror movie, or like I had become the monster myself, my pale skin already made to look sallower in the light now turned waxy and ghoulish, like it should signal my eventual decline into haunted barbarism. I sighed so hard that I felt my lungs rattle and my belly shake, and I thought to myself that I must remember how I look on this day, at this moment, because I may never again have the opportunity to know exactly what I look like when I’m scared shitless.
I never cried in that bathroom or next to the “7” again.
At this point, though, in the fishbowl of the Queens-Pres ICU, crying felt like sweating. It was something you’d rather not do in public, but was ultimately uncontrollable and relatively excusable.
Ramirez disagreed, apparently. One could assume that he would be used to family tears as an ICU attending. Maybe it was my own lack of shame he found uncomfortable. He stood there for a few seconds watching my shoes before turning to the nurses’ station to grab a thin box of hospital tissues. The box was bright pink with purple trim and purple hearts. Nothing quite says Valentine’s Day like one-ply tissue paper.
He didn’t even hand the box to me. He left it on the table at the foot of my mother’s bed where they leave the plastic water pitcher that’s standard across US hospitals. Returning his gaze to my shoes, he said, “For when you’re ready to clean yourself up,” and went back to the computer bank next to the door.
These doctors don’t know anything.
“What happened to your mom?” Yolanda asks.
“Stroke, last week.”
“She hasn’t woken up yet? I shake my head.
“What are they saying?”
“Who knows? Everyone says something different.”
And it really is everyone. It’s not just the doctors. It’s everyone.
Everyone with Google access. Everyone with doctor friends. Everyone who sits next to a doctor on Saturday morning in synagogue. Everyone with PubMed credentials.
We’re Jewish. Not to lean into stereotypes, but that’s…a lot of people.
“The neurologist in my office says she should be awake by tomorrow,” my uncle says on the phone.
“I’ve read a bunch of articles that suggest it should be another three days,” my sister writes over text.
“The guy who sits next to me in shul says your mom will be just fine! But the man who sits on the other side of me says she should be dead already.” I admit this is fake, but if I had slipped it into the daily list of assurances and warnings I repeated to everyone who called, no one would call bullshit.
“Your mother came to me in a dream and said she’s fine.” Lots of people called bullshit on this one: the dream of a friend from my mother’s hippie days, a friend she met thirty years ago in line in a natural foods grocery in Fresh Meadows.
At first I judge myself for finding this last assurance to be the most comforting, but I eventually accept that if no one has answers, I’d rather go with the dream version of my mother than with a collection of MDs who put their name on a study published five years ago. Any version of my mother would probably know her body better than any doctor. And no version of my mother could tolerate being wrong.
“These doctors don’t know anything,” Jorge says.
“Well, they all seem pretty certain they do.”
He laughs. “At least they’re confident.”
“We see you reading to your mom. It’s so sweet,” Yolanda says.
“I don’t know. I’m hoping she’ll eventually wake up just so she can beg me to stop.”
Yolanda laughs, not surprised to hear that Victorian literature is not unanimously popular with my students.
“Our mom’s awake, but she can’t talk because of the intubation. We bought a white board, but it only came with one marker and it’s run out already.”
I sit up straight. Finally, after days of useless sitting, I have a purpose.
“Do you want markers?” They’re so taken aback by my enthusiasm that they don’t answer right away. But already I’m rifling through my bag. I’m not even looking where I put my hand, just shoving my arm further inside, pawing around until I feel the smooth, cool plastic of my pencil case.
I start pulling board markers out of the case and placing them side-by-side on the table. There are the colors that come in any small pack you can buy in the limited school supplies aisle of a pharmacy: red, green, and blue. Knowing how quickly they run out, and how quickly I lose them, I also invested in a “mega” pack this semester that included 24 markers with two shades of every color. I pull a pink and yellow out of the case.
“Don’t take the yellow. No one can ever see it. I’m really just taking it out now because I keep forgetting to throw it out.”
They’re still staring at me, silent: confused, I assume, by my excitement.
“No, we can’t take these,” Yolanda says, “you’ll need them.”
“No! Take them! I have loads!”
I then go on to search the random places I tuck away markers when I’m rushing out of class. The random, barely usable, tiny zipper pockets inside and outside my bag. My jacket pocket. The bottom of the chasm of my purse. Tucked in my copy of Wuthering Heights. I also feel the bulge of one digging into my thigh through the fabric of my jeans front pocket, but I opt to leave that one in there. There’s obviously a pile more sitting in a drawer in my office on campus. I’m sure if I just give myself a wiggle, markers will rain out of several orifices of my body.
I teach literature. My skills are rarely useful to others, save for proofreading the odd email. Even now, the only reason I’m the one most often at my mother’s bedside is because I work within two miles of the hospital, and only have to literally be at work for six hours a week. I am my mother’s advocate purely by accident of circumstance. Being the only member of my family who actually knows how to use a semicolon does not seem to be a qualification for patient advocacy, nor does the ability to quote by heart semi-pornographic pamphlets from the 1920s.
But I am leaking school supplies.
My mother had a stroke.
Their mother will probably never breathe on her own again.
But I have school supplies.
I will always have school supplies.
We make small talk about my classes for a few more minutes before my phone rings. The screen says “Dad,” and, seeing this, Yolanda says, “You take that, we’re going to go wait for the elevator,” and we all laugh because we know that in this hospital you need to give that elevator at least twelve minutes before it will come, stop, and have room for you to get in.
They get up and I answer. Before I pick up, I already know the extent of the conversation.
“Anything new to report?”
He knows the answer to this question before I open my mouth. He knows there’s nothing new because I would have called already if there was. When you talk five times a day, there generally isn’t anything new to report by its end.
Dad’s call is the first of the night as “The Men” descend on the hospital in the after-work hours. Last night, after I “cleaned myself up” for the sake of Dr. Ramirez, my uncle found me crying in the hallway and then told my husband, who’d joined five minutes later and saw my re-puffed eyes, “We just had a situation with your wife.”
I’m a situation now.
What do they say about my mother when I’m not there to hear it?
Despite the slow elevator, we’re all back upstairs before rounds are over. Rounds should only take an hour, but usually go later. It’s a giant room with no privacy so it’s a HIPAA violation to have family present. But I also wonder if they’re worried family members would hear what their loved ones’ doctors actually think about their progress and prognosis.
What do they say about my mother when I’m not there to hear it?
I peek my head through the window to see if the doctors are still moving in one cohesive group from bed to bed like a school of tuna passing off information on new patients and updates on old ones, or if they’ve started flitting between patient beds and the nurses’ station. More often than not, I see them congregated by the bed next to the door, the last stop in the literal round they’re going to make that evening. I generally catch the eye of one of the nurses who signals to me with her fingers how many more minutes they need before letting people in. Tonight she holds up eight fingers.
I go to the lounge, which is packed with families eating dinner from the string of Chinese takeouts that line this part of Main Street. I sit on the floor next to the snack machines, wondering how many bags of McVitie’s salt and vinegar chips I can eat before I develop canker sores. By the end of my mother’s time in the ICU, I’ll find that the smell of hospital still permeates my nostrils every time I open a bag.
I can forgive my mother for a lot of things, but I can’t forgive her for ruining salt and vinegar potato chips.
I decide to forgo the chips for now, realizing that they won’t pair well with the coffee I’ve nursed past the point of tolerable coolness but now refuse to throw away. I look at the collection of chairs linked into a bench against the window across from me. There’s a family settled in them that I remember I saw crying next to a bed when I peeked through the windows of the CCU.
It’s been a week, but it feels both as though I first entered this room an hour ago and also as though my life has always been this way. Time is an amorphous thing on the seventh floor of Queens Pres, which is fitting considering how many people who use this hospital are stuck in a neighborhood past when it was still called Booth Memorial.
I’ll start to depend on the familiar faces in the ICU, especially after meeting Yolanda and Jorge. It’s not like we’re ICU buddies now. We won’t call across the aisle separating our mothers’ beds. We won’t sit together during shift changes after tonight. But we won’t just nod in recognition when we see each other, either. We will actually make eye contact and smile, and the more intentional, performative gestures make a difference.
The community of ICU patients will constantly rotate, and when I come in the morning and realize a face I’m used to seeing is no longer there, I’ll be too scared to ask where they went. But I will also feel jealous rage when I watch a patient transferred to a different floor, even though I know that nothing about recovery is linear. Leaving the ICU does not mean that you’re “healed,” just stable.
Months later, my mother will ask me to tell her the story of what happened to her, of how she came to be in a rehabilitation facility in downtown Flushing.
“You had a stroke. It was a hemorrhagic stroke on the left side of your brain. You had a minimally invasive craniotomy. You were in the ICU in Booth Memorial, and then you went to rehab in Glen Cove hospital. But then you had to go back to the ICU. And now you’re here.”
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