In a world that clings so ferociously to binaries, the witness occupies a disruptive place. Both insider and out, relevant and marginal, the witness is the one who sees, who hears, who straddles the competing exigencies of see-something-say-something and mind your own business. To speak up involves risk. To remain silent exacts a psychic toll. The witness must decide whether to step out of the shadows or stay hidden. To not decide is still to make a decision.
These ideas stalked me as I wrote my psychological thriller, The Department. When a college girl goes missing, a washed-up philosophy professor stumbles into the mystery of her disappearance, only to uncover a trove of disturbing secrets within his academic department. Exposing them means dragging his own long-buried traumas into the light. But remaining silent means succumbing to his lifelong fear of being a powerless bystander. Now, that fear is put to the test, and his choices will have repercussions, not only for his future, but also for his past.
As I wrote this novel, I looked to literary precursors that, in various ways, engaged with the question of the witness, the voyeur, the spectator in hopes of understanding what we can offer one another and where we fall short. The following list reveals just how complex the role of the witness truly is.
Rear Window by Cornell Woolrich
Before Alfred Hitchcock introduced audiences to James Stewart and Grace Kelly in his 1954 critically acclaimed adaptation of Rear Window, it was a short story by Cornell Woolrich, originally published in 1942 under the title, “It Had to Be Murder.” Over eight decades later, it remains a gripping, claustrophobic exploration about the permeable boundary between witnessing and voyeurism. Through Woolrich’s sparse prose, we meet Jeffries, bound to his apartment, peeping through his blinds. Jeffries is convinced that his neighbor murdered his wife, and we must decide whether we are privy to the delusional ravings of a madman or the urgent warning of a witness. Woolrich is the original master of a trope that traces its throughline to contemporary mysteries like Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, and A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window.
This gorgeous thriller was Tana French’s debut and introduced the world to her lush prose and rich characters. It’s included on the list because it circles around a character who is haunted by his own inability to become a veritable witness in a crime perpetrated against him. The novel opens with the disappearance of three children in the woods. Only one resurfaces, but he recalls nothing of the harrowing event, or the fates of his best friends. Twenty years later, they are still missing and he’s on the Dublin Murder Squad, investigating another crime in those same dark woods. The question is: can he quiet his own demons enough to solve it?
What if you discovered that your witness testimony put the wrong person behind bars and now that man is dead? Do you let sleeping dogs lie or do you go digging? This is the dilemma that Hannah Jones must face a decade after her college roommate’s body was found and Hannah’s word helped send the culprit to prison. When a journalist comes around suggesting that the past might not be what it seems, Hannah embarks on a deep dive into the lives of her once-best friends only to discover that witnessing can be a terrible burden, especially when you get it wrong.
Academia lends itself well to the complexities of the witness. This next book is about a professor who must confront her own buried knowledge about an old campus murder when she returns to her alma mater to teach a class. The novel feels like a fresh, exciting departure from Makkai’s stellar third book, The Great Believers, which was a finalist for the National Book Awards. In her latest novel, Makkai explores the dangers of refusing to acknowledge one’s past and the haunted form that memories take when one is relegated to the role of the bystander.
Pay attention to every detail because you never know if you’re witnessing something important. This is the agony that Laurel Mack lives with ten years after her daughter Ellie Mack’s disappearance. Struggling between the onward march of life and the unrelenting grip of the past, Laurel finds momentary relief in the company of a seemingly good man. But when his daughter turns out to bear an uncanny resemblance to her own missing girl, Laurel must scrutinize every aspect of her world in search of the clue she failed to see.
The disturbing premise alone will set you on edge. On her morning commute, Zoe Walker sees a grainy picture of her own face in the local paper. Soon she discovers that she’s not alone. Other women’s pictures appear in the ad, and now they’re turning up dead. As Zoe struggles to balance her justified worry with her reluctance to alarm her family, the novel twists and turns its way into the terrifying terrain of the stalker. It hits close to home as we realize that our repetitive daily actions, like a seemingly innocuous ride to work, can make us vulnerable. The idea of the witness is turned on its head when any one of us can sit in the crosshairs of someone else’s gaze.
This exquisite novel is about sight and sightlessness and the very delicate line between the two. Young and poor, Patch saves the local town beauty from an attempted kidnapping, only to be taken himself. Held in darkness, Patch comes to rely on the calming presence of a girl that he cannot see, but grows to love during their captivity. His freedom comes at a terrible price, as he spends his life searching for her, painting her from feel and from the haunting sound of her voice in his memories. The question at the beating heart of this novel is about the kind of witnessing we can bear and what we owe to those we love.
When a poet is first granted the expanse of a full-length collection to fill, their attention and technique can be stretched and warped into unexpected new shapes. This exploration often yields dazzling results: new forms, new perspectives, new agencies.
The poets on this list are stretching their imaginations to new heights to create impressive, laudable first full-length books. Some pursue a single narrative; others patchwork a lifetime of strange and fascinating experiences. They come from diverse backgrounds, and the poems often reflect those varied identities. These debut poets are united, though, by their search for connection and belonging in the world.
Sadly, it would be impossible to compile a list of every debut poetry book coming out this year. With that in mind, this list is weighted toward books coming out in the first half of 2025, which have more publication information available. I sought to include work from a variety of publishers, and ended up gravitating toward small presses, which are publishing particularly urgent, daring material.
Maria Zoccola audaciously reimagines Helen of Troy as a housewife in Tennessee in this slick, stylish collection. Zoccola’s version of the Homeric heroine defies the stultifying norms of her small town, coming into her own agency when she flees. An undercurrent of ’90s Americana combines with Helen’s epic journey to create this wholly original and hotly anticipated work of narrative poetry.
Through praise songs, erasures, and grammatical interrogations, Mia S. Willis crafts a lyric celebration of Blackness and queerness in the South. Their dynamic, singular poetic voice stands out and marks Willis as a rising poet to watch. the space between men is “an ode to the way life has cracked this body open” and a standout debut collection.
Lauren K. Watel concocts potions (“poem + fiction”) on the page, dreamy prose poems that flit between fear, elation, and fury. Watel drifts through scenes in the natural world, in the “white rooms” of operating tables and mental asylums, and in her speaker’s dreamscape. The poems play with the limits of phrase and sentence, creating units of meaning that strain at the seams and sustain the collection’s tension.
“If in place of a mentor you had a hostile mirror,” begins this virtuosic riot of a collection. Sarah Lyn Rogers invokes pop culture symbols from Charlie Brown to “Little Edie” Beale to Natalie Wood, from tarot cards to guided meditations, as she rages against society’s inherited myths. Defying the limits of form and language itself, Rogers asserts a shining new poetics of self-creation.
Isabelle Baafi chronicles the breakdown of her marriage and uncovers the marks of adolescent trauma in this incisive, fresh debut. Baafi plays with chronologies and tests the capacity of poetic form as she interrogates her own past. Through five deeply felt sections that magnify slices of time, she excavates the pieces of memory that make up a life.
In a voice of remarkable clarity and starkness, Patrycja Humienik shares intergenerational memories of her family’s migration from Poland to the United States. “Some eruptions start small in us,” Humienik confesses as she recounts her grief and desire. This collection is a moving, cohesive work animated by questions of diaspora, agency, language, and borders.
In this Yale Series of Younger Poets prize winner, John Liles examines the Earth’s changing ecology through a scientific lens. As judge Rae Armantrout writes, “In this book feeling isn’t confined to a single, privileged perspective.” Instead, Liles imbues the natural world with emotion, from the trees to the moon to the honeybees. His language is subtly musical, drawing in the reader to celebrate our planet.
These poems inhabit dreamlike realms: a mermaid village, a bustling World’s Fair, a surreal Tokyo street. Yuki Tanaka draws influence from Japanese lyric traditions like the tanka to craft slick, otherworldly poems. He shows off a layered use of vocality and gorgeous, hyperrealistic imagery in this stunner of a first collection.
Robin Walter’s greatest strength is her perceptive eye, which she employs to great effect in Little Mercy, winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award. The scenery of Colorado comes alive on the page: chickadees sing, honeybees flit, lilies blossom. Walter’s delicate poems hold the reader close and extol the beauty of the natural world.
Najya Williams flexes her range in this alluring new collection. The poems range from expansive free verse influenced by Williams’ spoken-word background to sensual pantoums that tease potential lovers with their recursive structure. on a date with disappointment is a triumphant reclamation of the body and a celebration of Black womanhood.
Jessica Bebenek’s poems move from hospital hallways to overgrown cemeteries in this lyrical exploration of medical trauma. The book explores two poignant stretches of time, one in which a young woman cares for her ailing grandmother and a later section in which the woman offers her younger self compassion. Bebenek’s deft poetic voice seems to leap from the page and become a breathing thing.
In her glowing debut, Kiyoko Reidy studies the cosmos and traces her family lineage. Reidy displays her experimental sensibilities, playing with structures like a contrapuntal and an interconnected triptych. Black Holes & Their Feeding Habits is a breathtaking and touching exhibition of new talent.
The innovative structure of this book mirrors the layout of an accessible art museum. Rob Macaisa Colgate orients the reader with a list of accessibility symbols and uses them to guide the reader through poems shaped like galleries. Hardly Creatures is an impressive titan of formalism and radical inclusion.
This astonishing collection tracks the improbable connection between the speaker and her incarcerated beloved. Leigh Sugar’s close narration seizes your attention, daring you to look away from the tenderness and brutality of the world. Freeland raises urgent questions about prison abolition, mental healthcare, race, and selfhood.
Disclaimer: Mia Nelson is a friend and former college housemate of mine.
Nelson is unflinching when it comes to matters of the heart, turning an incisive eye upon friends and ex-lovers alike. Her sun-soaked, magnetic poetic voice is utterly singular.
Ally Ang’s poems are made of houseplants and melatonin, leather and bloodstains, fresh fruit and rumpled bedsheets. They assert queer self-creation on the page in a poetic voice that is at once expansive and precise. Let the Moon Wobble is a striking, impressive first collection.
In my opinion, most crossword puzzles have too many boring trivia about sports, obscure historical events, and science questions (seriously, who cares how many molecules are in an atom?). So, we decided to take out the bits we didn’t like to create a crossword puzzle tailored for those of us with English degrees or who simply love to read. Forget baseball stats or presidential timelines; this puzzle is all about literature along with a couple cheeky little references that you’ll be able to guess by looking on our homepage.
Prefer solving puzzles the old-fashioned way? You can grab a printable PDF of this crossword here. If you get stuck, don’t worry—the answer key is waiting at the bottom of the page.
Answer key
Across:
2. Zadie 4. Bulb 6. Ahab 7. Indie 8. Poe 9. Romantasy 12. SciFi 13. TBR 15. Best 19. Cusk 20. Out 21. Joan 23. Tell 24. Happy 25. Joyce 26. Pen 27. Amazon 29. Mary 30. Narrator 32. Lizzie 33. Lewis 36. Meter 40. God 43. Intermezzo 45. Emma 46. Tolkien 49. ER 50. Red 51. Memoir 53. March 54. Eyre 56. MFA 57. Kang 58. NBA 59. Watson 61. Everything 63. Shelf
Down
1. Tiger 3. Fable 4. BookTok 5. Pilot 10. Library 11. French 14. Satire 16. Publishing 17. Chapters 18. Body 22. HEA 25. James 28. Tale 31. Ove 32. Lake 34. Editor 35. Myth 37. Banned 38. Kindle 39. Tree 41. Denmark 42. Clue 44. Ode 47. Ireland 48. Novel 52. Keegan 55. Passing 56. Marquez 60. Less 62. IV
Beside me, a staircase leads to nothing but open, blue sky. My breathing is ragged, my feet moving quickly. I pass a fork sticking perpendicularly out of a telephone pole, and just past that, the pile of bricks under which there used to be a red lacy bra. These are the familiar objects of my neighborhood. Any direction I turn out my front door, the aftermath of disaster is all around. I pick up the pace.
It is 2012, a year after a tornado has flattened Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and I have just moved from my nice, intact apartment in my still-intact neighborhood to an area half a mile away—a neighborhood that was, and still is, mostly destroyed. Why would you possibly move there, my friend asked. Is it, like, attraction to a car crash?
I wonder this on my daily runs, as I wave at the same construction crews again and again, as I watch bright red poppies bloom in a perfect row along a walkway toward what was once a house, now just an empty lot. I am on mile three of my looping run through the neighborhood, jogging up and down roads that hug the lake and snake around churches. Tuscaloosa was a college town filled with pine trees and brick houses and reverential statues of football coaches, until those things were gone.
A few houses down from my own, there’s a cardboard sign on a stick jammed into the ground in front of a pile of rubble. It reads: We will be back! There’s a smiley face beside the words. It hasn’t budged in a year.
Why are you moving to that part of town? For a long time, I wasn’t quite sure.
Everything can be lost.
There is plenty of research on our attraction to disaster. A place to rehearse our reaction to catastrophe without consequence, one idea goes. An exercise in human sympathy, a part of our pro-social behavior, another says. The urban disaster, a favorite landscape of the apocalyptic film genre, attracts us because of its vulnerability, still another idea says. The high-rises, concrete, intentionally-sculpted trees proclaim human triumph over nature. But once they’re flattened, there is no clearer indication of our susceptibility. Everything can be lost.
The sky was blue, and then slate, and then green. April 26, 2011. I was in class, a graduate seminar on William James at the University of Alabama, where I was an MFA student, when the tornado sirens rang out. We were a little giddy, a little scared. None of us were tornado people. The forecasters had been prepping us for days with how big the storm system looked, how worried we should be. Once-in-a-lifetime kind of storm. But unlike the approach of a hurricane where specific towns and counties are ordered to evacuate, there is no precise estimate for a tornado, no way to say you, get out of town. There’s just the waiting and seeing.
It was not the first tornado warning in the nearly two years I’d been living in Tuscaloosa. They came regularly in central Alabama and never amounted to much, so I’d carried on with my day as usual: teaching freshman composition, writing, heading into my seminar that afternoon, checking my phone every few minutes for updates—though not, like everyone else, about the weather.
Six months before, back in California, where I’m from, my mom had a massive stroke. No warning signs, no preexisting conditions. A headache sent her to bed, and by the time my stepdad joined her a few hours later, she was covered in vomit and shit. She was in a coma for a week. We have no way to know how much she will recover, if she will recover, the doctors told us. We always want to be optimistic, they said, and we nodded. But we also want to be realistic, they said. With this level of a brain bleed, most people don’t really come back.
Because there was no way to imagine that, we didn’t.
When they woke her up a week later, she was fully paralyzed, with no cognitive function or ability to communicate. I was twenty-six.
I have written about my mom’s stroke before, about what it felt like to be in the room with her once she was awake, the ledge of her head where her skull was removed, the bulge of brain still bleeding, how her eyes stared off into space and did not make eye contact, how her hand would not respond to squeezes. I have written before about how her swollen brain, bursting open where her skull had been removed, made me think of popcorn bursting from its kernel. I feel horror at having already written that, printed it, and also at the fact that I’m still thinking about it: half-popped popcorn kernel as mother’s skull. I am still there. I’ve written about all of this before, and here I am again, trying to untangle all that remains a knot.
Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet, writes, “go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”
Her brain as a kernel of bursting popcorn. Her shaking hand in the hospital bed.
The row of delicate Icelandic poppies planted along a walkway leading up to a pile of debris that had once been a house.
The storm itself is not what haunts. The ghosts grew after, in the days that followed, in the weeks, in the year where I tied on my running shoes each day and set out amid the rubble. Flying back across the country as often as I could to visit my mom in the hospital. Flying home to Alabama and the wreckage. That is where I get lost. Why did you move there?
The tornado warning siren was compounded by police sirens, a loudspeaker telling everyone to take shelter immediately. We could hear it from Morgan Hall, where those of us who’d been in class had gathered in a nebulous pack in the central hallway, unsure of what to do next. Someone, looking at her phone, said: the tornado has touched down.
What I hadn’t known before, not having been a tornado person, was that this was the information you were always waiting to learn: has the tornado kept itself tucked up in the sky, or has it touched down to earth? The former could bring bad winds, the latter was devastating.
We opened the outside door to run a hundred feet in the blasting rain to the next building, which had a basement, and that’s when I saw the sky. I had never seen anything like it. Though it was mid-afternoon, the sky was mauve, a deep bruise over the clouds. And behind those clouds, as far as I could see, green. Pond-green. Patches that seemed almost neon.
It was April, and the fresh leaves and little white flowers from the tree outside were smeared across the concrete. The branches whipped to near-snapping. I’d never seen anything like any of it. I remember that moment so vividly, those few seconds first stepping outside the door, because it was the first time I understood that here might be another disaster.
My main disaster, always, was what was happening to my mother. My family, across the country in California, was always in emergency. There was the current question of where my stepdad would live, after months of couch-surfing between neighbors, since they’d lost their house right as my mom had her stroke. He’d hinted to me, our little secret, that he did not think he would live if she died, once she died. That he did not intend to. She was his whole world, his singular focus. So it was also my job to keep him alive. There was my brother, after all, twenty-one and in college, and it would not do for him to lose both parents. What had happened to my family was mine alone to fix, mine to hold while holding the hand of my mom, tubes in every vein, eyes rolled toward some distant corner of the room while I kept my mouth shut, knowing it was too selfish to beg her to come back.
In her craft book Body Work, Melissa Febos states that her compulsion to write her first memoir, which was about sex work, addiction, her childhood and more, “was an expression of [her] need to understand what the connections were between those things.” This is what I’m aiming to get at; the connections between things.
Thirty or so of us made it through the pelting rain and wind into the building next door. We took the stairs into the basement, paced, and then sat down in the narrow hallway on dirty off-white tiles that usually gleamed under the fluorescent lighting. But everything was dark. The power was out. We could hear the storm outside, a story above us. The hiss of rain, and then the moaning of wild wind.
One person had a radio, and turned it loud for the emergency weather information. The tornado had been in the next town over, but now, the voice told us, the tornado was on the ground right here, in Tuscaloosa. We held hands, our hearts thudding. My friend Jess, petrified of tornados, crawled into my lap.
The wind was as loud as I’d ever heard. Ashley was calling her husband over and over again. He was home with their dog in the part of town we’d just heard had been razed. He was not answering the phone.
The radio told us it was the biggest tornado Alabama had ever seen. It was a mile wide. No, a mile and a half. It was on the ground. All of us in the dark, straining toward the one radio. It was gaining strength, moving quickly, and then: it was headed for the University of Alabama campus.
Jess was shaking on my lap, pinching my arms. The sounds above us grew louder, smashing, metal torn apart, a machine cranked to high right above our heads. Cracks so loud someone said: gunshots. I tensed my muscles, ready for the roof to fly off, thinking about what it would feel like to be sucked up into the sky. Wondering how my family would survive a tragedy on top of a tragedy.
Back home, bad luck compounded. The most recent surgery to try to quell the relentless bleeding in my mom’s brain had resulted in sepsis, an infection so serious we’d had to wear astronaut suits and gloves and masks to visit her, and the only purpose of that visit, we’d been told, was to say goodbye. Alarms screamed, her eyes closed or opened in shock, but without focus. Nurses rushing in and out.
And then she died.
But that was not her final death.
Later, I would learn that when the tornado first touched down in Tuscaloosa, it tore through the Tamko Roofing plant, sucking a warehouse of nails and shingles up into the sky. So the tornado, as it tore through our town, was filled with weaponry.
Not long before the tornado, Jess had passed me a little love note. She had also recently lost someone important to her, a friend and former love. The note said we were sisters in grief, going through the same experience, and here was a thing she was doing to help with her grief and maybe I should try it. No, I said to her. Don’t try to connect these things. She later told me I snapped at her. It is not the same, I said. I didn’t want connection. I only had space for emergency, and the only way I knew to survive emergency was totally and completely on my own.
In our underground bunker, Jess curled into a ball, crying, the tornado above us. She was so scared, I thought right then, because she had room inside her to be scared. At first it made me angry, that she had space to be afraid. Then I was embarrassed for her. I was all filled up with grief and disaster and so could sit inside a tornado and wonder, with relative calm, what it would feel like to be suctioned up into the sky.
We waited, tensed. All of us straining to listen. After a few minutes, the cacophonous sounds grew fainter. But the radio had told us there was more than one tornado close by. We weren’t safe yet. We waited.
And then someone climbed the steps out of the basement, peeked out to ground level. Tree limbs were down, garbage cans and equipment knocked over. But the building stood. She could see no dead bodies. The rest of us emerged, blinking, into the afternoon. It was drizzling but we didn’t care. Someone put on music. We stood in a little pack between dumpsters, and people started dancing, laughing wildly. Hugging. What I remember is the overwhelming smell of pine, fresh, sharp, bringing me back to a memory of camping as a child and using pine needles to make beds for the fairies I was trying to catch. There were all of us here, alive. Ashley’s husband was ok. Jess had stopped shaking. I hadn’t learned yet that the air smelled like pine because all the trees for miles had been split or knocked down. That the cracking we’d thought was gunfire were the trees snapping in half. That the tornado had, amazingly, lifted its toe and stepped right over us, but that on either side of us, just past where we could see, there was nearly nothing left.
The storm left scars in the earth so deep, they can be seen from space.
My mom died of septic shock, but then they brought her back to life. Her brain still bled, her right side was still fully paralyzed, she could not communicate, but she was no longer dead. In her advanced directives, she’d written No Resuscitation.
We still never really knew what function or cognition would come back, what would be forever missing.
In the days following the tornado, the list of missing persons in Tuscaloosa alone was over four hundred. We heard stories of severed limbs in people’s yards. Of people’s bodies wrapped around tree branches like old mylar balloons. We heard the dead floated in all the bodies of water in town. I thought about it every time I ran by the small lake a block from where I’d later live, because I’d never heard for sure whether it was true.
Another of the first buildings to be flattened: the Tuscaloosa Emergency Management Agency. It was made of steel and 18-inch concrete walls, built to withstand nuclear fallout. The Emergency Operations Center, which held much of the city’s emergency rescue equipment, crumbled.
Sixty-two tornados hit Alabama that day. 240 people died, plus hundreds more killed in nearby states. It was the largest tornado outbreak in US history. The storm left scars in the earth so deep, they can be seen from space. Later, I would listen to the recording of a call between a policeman and dispatcher in Tuscaloosa. A bunch of babies are trapped in a building, the dispatcher says to the officer. Confirm your address. I am behind the precinct, the policeman says, and the dispatcher is confused, or growing irritated. Where are you, she says, there are trapped babies, you need to go. Confirm your address, the dispatcher says again.
I can’t confirm the address, he answers back. There are no addresses anymore.
We left our storm shelter, a big group of us convening at a friend’s house with the sturdiest basement. There was no question of going home to be alone for anyone; we were in it together. When we could find the emergency weather reports, they told us we had a couple of hours to take shelter again before another tornado would hit, this one much worse than the first. We bought as much beer as we could carry, made our way to the house, and when the tornado sirens rang out again, all sat on the dirt and concrete basement, in the dark, drinking, waiting for the worst of it.
But it didn’t come. This tornado was over. It was one of our friend’s birthdays, and eventually, after enough beer in the dark dirt of the basement, we crawled out into the yard, no lights but a hint of moon glow to see one another by, which told us that the storm had passed. Someone played music from their phone. We danced again.
The morning after the storm, the sun rose like it was any regular day. We emerged from the houses where we’d slept, and in a little pack went to go check on friends, on homes we hadn’t been able to access the night before. All of Jess’s windows had been shattered, and there were tree limbs in her living room, storm water and debris. We helped her pull out what could be salvaged, and then kept walking. Our friends and teachers were still not all accounted for. Trees and telephone poles were down across every road, so there could be no driving. What we didn’t understand yet was that we were still on the roads where nothing much had happened. We walked in a pack, shuffling like zombies. Stepped over downed power lines. And then we saw.
In the pictures I’d seen of storm wreckage up to that point, there were recognizable shapes: houses, their foundations or walls semi-intact but blown over, a car crushed, but clearly a car. What we came upon lacked anything recognizable. Nothing in the shape of a house, a car, a store.
We began walking toward friends’ apartments and houses, to see if they were alive. One of them, we knew already, had huddled in his bathtub while the rest of his apartment flew up into the sky. But we couldn’t make it to that part of town yet.
We ran into a frantic woman on a main four lane road. She was walking up and down the median and collecting scattered items, shirts and books and little plastic tchotskies. Nothing felt like reality because we could suddenly see the shopping center a mile and a half away, a collection of buildings we’d never considered from over here because it was all the way on the other side of town. All the buildings and trees that normally block the view were gone.
The woman was unloosed, muttering to herself. A looter, we whispered to one another, hanging back to keep our eyes on her. We knew to look for the bad guys. The national guard hadn’t yet arrived, though a day from now they’d be lining the edges of the neighborhoods with huge guns strapped across their chests. And a day from now, do-gooders would flood in from surrounding towns in pickup trucks, passing out sandwiches, bottles of water, hopping out of the back with chainsaws. President Obama hadn’t yet come to assess the damage, to say that he’d never seen anything like it. For now, there were just us.
The woman sat down on the curb and put her hands on her head. “Are you ok?” one of my friends asked, sitting beside her.
“I don’t know,” she said. Her dark hair was messy, ruffled by her nervous fingers.
“Do you need help?”
“No,” she said. “Maybe. It’s my husband. He died two weeks ago. I had a container of everything he owned being shipped back to his hometown. The tornado picked it up from the storage facility and dropped it here.” We looked at the road. It was covered in stuff. Shoe horns. Loose papers. Foam fingers. A twisted, half-intact metal shipping container.
“This is his,” the woman said, gesturing toward everything.
Our zombie pack started picking up the dead husband’s items. There were a few worn baseball caps near one another. I collected them, walked back to the woman on the ground, holding them in front of me. She nodded. I set them beside her, on a small pile of random goods she’d already begun assembling. We carried on like this for a long time.
“I just got a call,” she said when I brought over a car seat that was not hers. “Someone found his birth certificate.” I nodded, encouragingly. “In Georgia.”
We kept on with her for a while, helping to box some stuff and tuck it back into the wrecked container. She said a friend with a truck was going to come as soon as the roads were opened.
We did what we could. It wasn’t much. The road was still covered in people’s lives.
After Hurricane Katrina, countless stories were circulated in the media of looters, rapists, gangs of people who were taking advantage of the storm to steal from others. In these stories, the bad guys were usually Black. I have no doubt that racism abounded in the cleanup from the Tuscaloosa tornado. And also, what I saw, again and again, were all kinds of people helping one another.
The woman left eventually, and we did too. I’m sure she never got all her husband’s stuff. The morning we met her was likely just the beginning of the real difficulty, except it wasn’t the beginning, and that is the whole point. She was already inside her own private tragedy when the tornado came.
The critic Rebecca Solnit writes about our response to catastrophe in her landmark book A Paradise Built in Hell, in which she explains that, “in the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones.” In opposition to the story commonly perpetuated about looters and violence after a crisis, Solnit looks closely at the way communities came together after five disparate disasters, and how most—not all, but most—people chose altruistic collectivism. This, she says, is the kind of paradise of community that can arise in the midst of hell.
I’m spending time here, on the tornado and days just after, trying to get it right, because there is not much I can write about what comes in the weeks and then months to follow. Because this was the day I walked through my destroyed city with my friends and helped slice a tree into pieces so we could clear it off someone’s house. This was the day strangers began walking up the road from far-off to help, carting their chainsaws and axes, when people lugged coolers of PB&Js in Ziplocs and handed them out to every stranger they saw, this day, and the few that came after it, were the times I gathered with my community in this hellscape of destruction and found mostly—almost everywhere—people working from sunrise to sunset to help one another. I was there too, helping, doing what I could. Then I stopped.
“When will you be here?” my stepdad asked. I’d called him the day after the tornado to let him know I was alive. He hadn’t known about the tornado at all. “When can you be here?” It was all the reminder I needed. I didn’t have space for this new tragedy, for altruism, for community. I was still inside my own private disaster.
The pull of my private catastrophe was greater than this public one.
So I left. Flew home to be with my mom, days after the tornado. Probably I went because there was another emergency. I don’t remember now. But I do remember, vividly, what it felt like to take off from the Birmingham airport. Watching the trees and buildings grow smaller from the airplane window, I felt it all the way through my body. All my friends were back in Tuscaloosa, making crock pots of chili to share and sorting through donated clothes and chain-sawing downed trees, all of them there together, helping. There would be thousands of people who, like me, would leave the city while it was destroyed, those with the means to do so, but everyone else would be left to clean up the mess. I’d always thought of myself as a person who stayed to help. But here I was, leaving. The pull of my private catastrophe was greater than this public one.
I was extremely lucky, of course. I didn’t lose anyone or my home in the tornado, while so many others did. But I had many friends who also didn’t lose much personally, who stayed all summer in Tuscaloosa and helped with the relief efforts. I was back in California with my mom, waiting to see whether she could make any sounds now that her trach was removed, wondering whether this next brain surgery would successfully reintroduce the bone plate into her skull. My stepdad was falling apart at every turn, my brother did not come home from college, so I was there, alone, to do the work of keeping everyone alive.
One friend was out early every morning in Tuscaloosa, volunteering wherever she could, at first just rogue, wandering the streets and helping as soon as she found someone she could help. But then the national guard was there, the nonprofits descended to give order to the chaos, and she volunteered with them. Every day she went, morning to evening. Later, she told me about the overwhelming trauma of sorting through wreckage for so many days, weeks. Maybe she found dead bodies, I can’t remember. She started talking to a therapist about it, trying to process the experience, and as she described what it had been like out there, the therapist started crying. Can you believe it, my friend said. The therapist told me she’d never heard anyone describe the devastation of the tornado so effectively. And what I felt, hearing my friend’s story, was jealousy. She had been a part of something so big, so collective, that her grief was shared.
This, I think, is what pointed me toward the wrecked neighborhood. This is the beginning of the answer. Why did you move to that part of town?
Then it’s a year after the tornado, and I’m living in one of the neighborhoods I’d wandered through with my zombie pack, trying to help. The roads are clear. The power is on. I take long, looping runs past all that remains of the destruction. The Icelandic poppies are mostly open, their petals papery and thin, a bright red-orange against their green stems and the darker purple bulb of their interior. They are carefully spaced along the walkway, a stem arising every three or four inches.
The poppies are a marvel to me because they still bloom in such a meticulously straight row. Like the dirt here never got the message that everything above was different now. I slow down while I run past this brightness, wipe the sweat that is always blossoming from the humidity. The poppies’ walkway is concrete and leads to a step that leads to a front door, except there is no front door because there is no house at all. There’s a large, cracked, concrete foundation. Above that, where a house once stood, there is only air.
There are many beautiful places in Tuscaloosa I could run instead. There’s a path that runs alongside the Black Warrior River, for example, a wide calm waterway with low-hanging willows and brass bridges so pretty that in the spring, they’re clogged with high schoolers posing for prom photos. There’s also wide-open space a few miles away where, the story goes, a golf course had been donated to the city and left to grow wild, tall grasses and little yellow wildflowers springing up where there once had been so much order. It runs alongside an arboretum, and in there, tall, thin trees lose orange and red leaves in the fall that make the ground look aflame.
But I don’t run in those places. I run here, where I’d put my arms around a stranger and told her I was sure her son was ok, wherever he was. I run here, past the family of feral cats, and the glint of something buried deep in the dirt that, on closer inspection, is a button eye. I run past the one perfectly intact house with columns and a gazebo and no neighbors. Beside it, a real estate sign posted on an empty lot full of debris reads: “Gorgeous Waterfront Property!”
There were other factors in my decision to move to the neighborhood, though in retrospect, they were small. My old apartment’s rent was increasing by $25, and Jess, whose own apartment had been destroyed in the tornado while she’d been curled on my lap, needed a new place to live. There was no obligation for me to step in. I was perfectly happy living alone. But she was looking for a new place, and some string that was trying to tether me to something good, to another anchor point in the world, maybe some internal guide pointing me toward what I kept missing in the solitude of my grief said me, I want to live with you, and let’s move to Forest Lake.
A group of geese live in the small lake alongside tornado debris—a dumpster, a crane, unconfirmed dead bodies—a block from our house. The debris stands tall out of the water like it is meant to be there, a statue in a botanical garden.
Like most of the other houses for miles, the house Jess and I share still has the spray-painted X on the outside that signals disaster. X-codes, they’re called, or search codes by FEMA, and drawn on by first responders. The four quadrants around the X indicate emergency information: to the left of the X, who was in the crew, on top, the date and time, to the right, the hazards found inside, and on the bottom, the number of people inside, alive or dead.
X-codes still mark nearly every house. Even the houses that have been repaired, moved back into, maintain their X-codes. They’re a sort of remembrance, I think. I saw them in New Orleans, after Katrina. And I will see them once more: near my home in Asheville after Hurricane Helene, during the writing of this essay.
Back in Tuscaloosa, back to 2012. I run past a house on the corner whose yard is overflowing with flowers: pansies, roses, lilac. The lot looks almost normal, except for the black plastic still nailed over a section of the roof, and its spray-painted X-code. No bodies inside that one. The black plastic flutters in rhythm with the tall blooms as wind passes down the street in strong gusts, common now since there are no tall trees or buildings to block it. In the house next door, the young man who lives with three dogs emerges from his door each morning, shirtless, and practices some form of martial arts on his weedy lawn. I say hello to him when I run, to the construction workers repairing a roof, to the tractor driver clearing debris, to the dozens of lots with no humans but cicadas grinding their legs, and then I run home. Jess will be there, wrapped in the calf-length purple down coat she wore as a robe, pouring coffee. Why did I move to the disaster? Maybe a deeper part of me understood there was more work to be done connecting the threads, that the coming together I’d missed by leaving didn’t mean I’d lost it all.
It feels too easy, that idea. But I like what it suggests about humans, about me. Instead of the story I usually tell myself about how I was lost in grief and emergency, maybe this story is about unconscious choices acting in service of what I needed to be ok. That’s a generous idea. The world’s mysteries being answered by some inner music, singing you toward what you need.
There was nothing I could do to help my mom after her stroke. I stood against the hospital walls, sat on the edge of hospital beds. I held her hands, talked to doctors and social workers and nurses and hospice, but nothing was actually helping. I tried to teach my mom basic sign language and how to hold a pen to write yes or no or thumbs up thumbs down or to nod, anything to communicate—and failed. Time stomped forward. A month of that, a year. Six years. I have written about this before, but doing so has not enabled me to escape this central truth of my life. The almost unbearable weight of witnessing so much suffering. Living inside your own impotence right alongside it. Being there, alone.
A major loss in our own lives often isolates us from community, Rebecca Solnit writes. Nobody else is suffering in this way we are suffering; we are alone in our grief, in our loss.
Public disasters on the other hand, Solnit posits, usually have the effect of bringing a community closer together. For me, maybe I was still so deeply inside my private disaster when the tornado happened that I did not find the feeling of togetherness that so many did afterward. Or maybe I did for a few days, and then I left. Why did you move to this part of town? When I came back, I was outside the cohesion. Maybe by running to bear witness, I was trying to find my way back in.
Now, writing this, it is 2024, and Hurricane Helene has just taken out every road in and out of my city, Asheville. All of them are closed, gone. The water is out and power is out and cell service is out and internet is out. I have just completed this essay I’ve been thinking about for years, about public and private disasters, when another disaster arrives.
This time, I do not have a mother I am traveling back to see. She is long dead. This time, I have a child. She is two and a half, loves to sing, and has just gotten into poop jokes.
When a single road opens a few days after the storm, we pack our camper van and leave. I have a small child. There is no other choice.
We leave, and I get my daughter and husband settled at his mom’s house in Tennessee. I take a shower, I drink some water. And then I come back to Asheville, alone.
My camper van is filled all the way up with drinking water, shelf-stable food, diapers, wipes, pet food, flashlights, hygiene products, anything on any list I could find that people might need. I drive supplies deep into parts of the county with nothing left. I deliver them to the doorsteps of mothers I connect with on Facebook who need size 2 diapers, Similac formula, toddler snacks. I deliver latex gloves, Ziploc bags, cat food. And water, for everyone. I cook food, I knock on doorsteps to search for the missing, I comfort a man whose son-in-law was washed away in the river.
There’s no heroic conclusion to reach here about the right way to move through a disaster during the emergency or the long tail of its aftermath. This likely won’t be my last disaster, with the way things seem to be going. But I will tell you that for the five days I was back in Asheville alone after the hurricane, from sun-up to long after sun-down, I did not stop moving, driving, stacking, clearing, and each day, many times per day, I thought about the last disaster. I remembered not so much how the land had looked from the departing airplane window, but the feeling of getting further and further away from it. I remembered that as this time, I said yes to anything, feeling my hand graze a stranger’s as I helped peel away waterlogged drywall, as I passed along a box of pull-ups. So far, the feeling has been simpler. Gratitude, again, for not having lost much myself. And for getting to be here this time, in the middle of it. With all the other people in the middle of it.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Hothouse Bloomby Austyn Wohlers, which will be published by Hub City Press on August 26 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.
In the vein of Rachel Cusk, Han Kang, and Clarice Lispector, Hothouse Bloom follows a young woman who renounces her painting career and all her human relationships to become one with her late grandfather’s apple orchard.
Anna arrives at the orchard with the intention to abjure social life, deverbalize her experience, and adjust her consciousness to the rhythms of the trees. She succeeds, for a time, until the arrival of her old friend Jan, nomadic and lively and at work on a book about the painter Charles Burchfield. Alarmed by her isolation and declining health, he tries to get her painting again, while Anna is determined to show him the orchard as she sees it.
As the harvest approaches, the outside world descends in the form of pickers, contractors, neighbors, and pomologists. Anna realizes that the only way back to her idyllic life is to turn a profit. It becomes an obsession, much like her former in the way it consumes her, the way an apple oxidizes, might rot.
Hothouse Bloom is a millennial pastoral, both painterly and critical in its ideas about art, permaculture, subjectivity, and the natural world.
Here is the cover, designed by Meg Reid, with art by Daniel Ablitt.
Author Austyn Wohlers: “Hothouse Bloom is a novel in part about the emotional and material necessity of other people that masquerades as a slow, painterly, and solitary nature novel for its first half. As we were looking for cover art, I was emphatic that I didn’t want it to just look like a run-of-the-mill American nature novel, and that I wanted it to feel a little psychedelic, since so much of the language of the book is watercolory, dizzying, and elemental. I’m happy to have found Daniel’s painting, which unites a lot of those elements. The blurriness of landscape and setting—in the background forested mountains, a tree, or a colored ray of light. The focus on flora, which takes up all of Anna’s vision. The two red silhouettes, which could stand for a number of people in the novel but most likely Jan and Anna, which are both stark and a little vague, a little mysterious, and red like the apples Anna cultivates.
It took us a long time to decide how we wanted to do the typography. I have always liked how older books, poetry books, and certain presses like NYRB look where there is more focus on the design and less on big text, and I like the starkness and austerity of the typography we went with. At the same time, I wanted it, again, to look a little ‘psychedelic’ or ‘off,’ to key readers in to some of the wonkiness of the book, and was playing with some very minor visual distortions of the title text. We ended up going with a barely perceptible gold inkstain around the white text that you might not even notice at first glance, as though Anna’s painting were spilling or some celestial substance oozing out of the title.”
Designer Meg Reid: “It was a joy to work with Austyn on this cover. I love when authors know exactly how they want their book to present itself in the world and it’s my job to simply put ideas in front of them and refine. I loved how the image reflected the overwhelming intensity of the natural world that Anna yearns to belong to with branches reaching in and intertwining with the figures and I was especially struck by the vivid red of the two silhouettes—an intense hue that evokes Anna’s paints, apples, and blood—against the bruised colors of the mountain and sky.”
Artist Daniel Ablitt: “‘Time and place (red silhouette)’ is drawn from a memory I have from a family holiday in the U.S. We visited Yosemite National Park for a few days camping. This painting is of myself with my younger brother. My aim was to capture that feeling you get with a memory; of the details being blurred but the strong emotional connection to that moment remains clear.”
On January 29th, 2025 the Lunar New Year sheds its skin, and emerges into the Year of the Wood Snake.
Mysterious and maligned, the Snake is a misunderstood beast. Sixth of the twelve animals of the Chinese Zodiac’s cycling universe, the coils of the Snake represent the inner self, the unknown, and that which cannot be held.
For a writer, the Snake is the sting of mystery. Can the world’s white noise be rendered graspable? Can we reassess the familiar, and remember that some part will always be out of reach?
The Wood Snake in particular, invokes the blank slate, the empty page. When linked to the element of Wood, the Snake stands for the infinite possibility of emptiness. It is a time for new beginnings, to try new things, to keep in mind all that can be possible when preconceptions clear away.
Strongest in early Summer the Snake is associated with the quiet, inner fire of life, and paves the way for the heedless exuberance of next year’s Fire Horse.
Here is a look into the kind of fortune the Snake might portend for writers of every year sign.
This year the details seem to slip away. No matter how many problems you open up, smaller problems seem to rest inside. Words can only ever approximate the truth: pick a favorite problem and see if you can reframe it. Is the failure a problem, or is it part of the unevenness and texture that is reality?
As your Arts Star transitions to the Robbery Star the year sharpens to a blade before you. You will have to grasp one end or the other. It is a year for loss and ruthlessness. You will lose favorite words, scenes, pages, ideas, and yet, the Snake reminds us nothing is ever lost. Absence is also presence, one that is subtle and potent.
This year the ground shifts beneath your feet. Maybe you’re seeing a project in a new light, maybe the outside world is intruding on your routine. It may bring you peace to make your own stability. Carve out a time and space to which you can be constant, and it will bring you constancy in return.
This year you are part of the Western Triad—between the Ox and Snake persistence meets flexibility. For professional gains look to the Rooster’s social flair, reaching out, pitching ideas, coordinating projects, and putting yourself in the public eye. Pay attention to first impressions. Flash isn’t everything, but sometimes substance finds it a useful friend.
As your ominously named Death Star rises in the Snake, this is a year to take stock of your situation. The slipperiness of the Snake is said to frustrate the Tiger—this may be a year where nothing much seems to make sense, where all around you seem to be false fronts and false starts. Trust yourself, and focus on the process, the moment, the page, the simple pleasure of picking one more word.
Like a sunning snake or sleepy cat, this is also a year to bask. Try to rest mindfully. Don’t slump into vice as a mere distraction, avoidance, or guilty escape. Commit to pleasure. Be mindful of what you do for joy and you may be surprised how it feeds your art. Whether the tiger eats or rests, loves or hunts, it does exactly as it should.
In your native element of Wood, you may find your natural sensitivities amplified. Terms like joy, anger, and anxiety are rough umbrellas for countless sensations too specific and precise to name. When you next journal, stop and consider not just your thoughts, but these infinite feelings that we name too bluntly. Can you pinpoint the fine distinctions? Can you name what makes them yours? What do they become when they meet the page?
The Snake is also your Travelling Horse Star, suggesting movement. It’s a year in which you may cover a lot of ground, move from idea to idea, or else circle a restless pivot that won’t sit quite right. When in doubt, cut the snare, be free.
As the year of the Wood Dragon ends and your Age Star passes, you enter a new phase of life. Things may feel upside down this year as the fullness of the Dragon shifts to the emptiness of the Snake. Take this chance to pay attention to what is confounding or strange in your writing: scenes that confuse, images that captivate you alone, visions that feel potent for reasons you don’t understand. A new horizon is strange by necessity.
Lastly, with the Robbery Star, it’s a time to both hoard and discard. What preconceptions you shed and what new obsessions you take on is up to you alone, regardless of how peculiar. What a dragon deems precious is treasure by default.
As you meet your own year, a Zodiac is said to meet their Age Star. The sign of a new phase of life, it is a delicate transition, a tender new skin. Somewhere a radical transformation is ready to take place, perhaps one that scares you. Change arrives where we least expect, but the Snake has power to shape themselves. What is the transformation you are looking for? What is the first step to making it reality? Writing so often hinges on transformation—are there any that you haven’t considered yet, ready to fruit, and surprise even you?
The Age Star is also a time for reflection and caution. What is the heart of your work, your end goal, your life? Not everything needs to change, if you have the awareness not to let it.
This is a year for acceleration. The Wood Snake is spark and tinder ready to feed your hidden Fire, ready to burst forth next year.
For now, let yourself run wild. Chase your desires. When you want to write, write. When you want to daydream, daydream. You may be surprised how one feeds the other. Avoid self-editing and just see how long and far you can travel when you want to travel, both on the page and in your mind.
This year the Wood Snake is also your Death Star, which in your case means courage. Take ten minutes to answer the question: what about your work most scares you, and why? After doing this exercise, face the work again, acknowledge the fear, and move forwards.
The Wood Snake may deplete your hidden Earth element. When mystery hollows you, and meaning seems elusive, this is a good year to look outwards. What can you move or touch with your bare hands that brings you pleasure? What palpable measures of your work bring you fulfillment?
Reach out to others, be open about your craft and you are more likely to find like-minded souls. Push to get your writing somewhere it will be read, whether that’s in a published medium, a group workshop, or even just the hands of a trusted friend. Who is it you want to speak to, and how can you reach them? There might be more avenues available than you think, if you’re willing to take the leap.
Curiosity and mystery, the Monkey and Snake are a natural pair. Where the two come together, they create Water energy, the element of the subconscious, of endings, of letting go.
Consider journaling for ten minutes just before you go to bed, or just after you wake up. Follow no prompt at all, except for the first image that pops into your head. Pursue it, no matter how strange. You may write something interesting, but that isn’t the goal. It is enough to converse with the thing inside us that creates, unfiltered. Where water flows once, it flows easier after.
It is also a good year for work – even when it seems to go nowhere. Nothing truly disappears, and our choices settle within us like stones, lending their weight, even long after they’ve fallen from view.
This year you sparkle like silver, traveling from your Metal-partnership with the Dragon, to the Metal generating Western Triad. It is a year to play with nuance. What happens when a problem has no good solution? How are characters, are we, then forced to change? It’s also a good year to play with voice and humor. Push yourself, laugh, ventriloquize. You might be surprised who you meet.
To fill out your Triad you are seeking the persistence of the Ox. Keep showing up and answers will come. Surround yourself with reliable people, and you will find your own patterns growing more reliable.
As you exit your opposition to the Dragon, many things settle into place, and new challenges arise to replace them. The Red Phoenix Star and Death Star both meet you with the Snake, suggesting a year of passion and unease. Desire is a powerful force under the Red Phoenix. This may be a time to consider how desire drives story, and how it functions in your work. What do your characters really want, and what do they become if their desires are thwarted, or impossible?
We may also look at the year through the lens of our own desires. It is easy to assume all we want is the achievement of our goals. But there are always more goals, and hunger is a hard master. Fulfillment is not a place you arrive, but a relationship with travel. Where do you feel yours?
The Snake and Pig are natural opposites. Where the Pig lives in the moment, in the body, the Snake is of the ineffable. As the Snake loops its coils without a center, this year we may find the familiar grows unfamiliar. We may wonder what makes us who we are beyond a series of external poses, styles, or genres. But opposition years are a time for introspection, a good time to resolve what is unsure within ourselves.
If your writing stalls, take ten minutes to journal with one of the following questions: Why do I write? What do I want my writing to be? What do I need from my writing and why? What keeps me from writing? Write by hand so the process feels casual. Afterwards, let yourself return to the work, and see if the answers settle.
From Robert Coover’s The Public Burning to Lance Olsen’s Always Crashing in the Same Car, many novels over the past half century have used public figures like Richard Nixon and David Bowie as significant fictional characters.
Unlike traditional fiction where characters are “loosely based on” or “inspired by” real people, Coover’s and Olsen’s novels rely heavily on factual, biographical details. They name names. Yet, Coover and Olsen are neither biographers nor documentary novelists. They unapologetically invent, blending fact and fiction into a higher symbolic truth.
My debut short story collection, Alternative Facts, likewise names names and explores the porous boundaries between fact and fiction, focusing specifically on figures who have ushered in our post-truth era. George W. Bush almost tells Jay Leno the truth about his paintings, Kellyanne Conway lands a punch, and Paris Hilton falls from a helicopter onto Thomas Pynchon’s fire escape, leading to a surreal adventure full of magical dentists, talking dogs, and unexpected friendships.
Compared to fictionalizing public figures in novels, fictionalizing public figures in short story collections presents unique challenges. The characters have less time to develop, and their stories must also converse with each other, returning to similar themes and building an arc across the collection. At the same time, the stories must vary enough stylistically and structurally to maintain the reader’s interest.
Here are seven of my favorites, all masters of the form.
A finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, Various Antidotes depicts both historical and imagined figures reckoning with scientific and medical innovations, including the mental asylum, progressive relaxation techniques, and chloroform. Throughout, Scott dazzles with her ability to write in a range of voices and prose styles while developing subtle linkages between individual stories. An early story about Charlotte Corday’s guillotine beheading, for example, resonates in a later story about Topsy the elephant’s public electrocution. Likewise, my three favorite stories in the collection—about the microscopist Antonie von Leeuwenhoek, the blind beekeeper Francis Huber, and a man proved sane by X-ray—revolve around themes of lost and enhanced vision. Although Scott is perhaps better known for her biographical novels Arrogance and Careers for Women, her beautifully and intelligently crafted collection of short biographical fictions holds its own.
Millet’s Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and for good reason. The ten short stories, all revolving around human and animal relationships, show Millet at the height of her powers: satirical and insightful, hilarious and touching. The title story focuses on Harry Harlow, the famed American psychologist who cruelly separated infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers, demonstrating the importance of maternal contact. In Millet’s story, one of the mother monkeys confronts a drunk and depressed Harlow in a dream. In “Sexing the Pheasant,” one of my favorite stories in the collection, Madonna shoots a pheasant on her country estate and struggles over what to do with the dying bird. Relieve it of its misery? Wait for her husband to return and finish the job? Millet brilliantly depicts the pop star’s self-absorption and vulnerability, ending on a surprisingly tender note.
As the title suggests, Martone’s debut collection includes eight short stories about well-known individuals, both living (at the time of publication) and dead, with ties to Indiana. In the poignant opening story, “Everybody Watching and the Time Passing like That,” James Dean’s indignant, flustered high school drama teacher, Adeline Mart Nall, recalls where she was when she learned of her famous former pupil’s death. In another favorite, the understated “Whistler’s Father,” the painter James McNeill Whistler’s father, who died when his son was only sixteen, quietly muses from beyond the grave about why his son didn’t paint his portrait. Although the collection was published when Martone was only in his late twenties, the writing already displays his later fiction’s hallmark playfulness, pop cultural fluency, and home state affection.
This collection features stories about fascinating yet under-appreciated women from history, many with ties to more famous literary men, including Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce, a dancer; Dolly Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s witty and eccentric niece; and Allegra Byron, Lord Byron’s illegitimate daughter who died during childhood. Throughout, Bergman excels at bringing these historical women to life without airbrushing them, allowing them to exist on the page in all their messiness and complexity. Whether writing about the first racially integrated all-female jazz band, The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, or the female survivors of Bergen-Belsen, Bergman renders her characters with honesty and emotional nuance.
Another debut collection, Haskell’s I Am Not Jackson Pollock, offers an intensely psychological, philosophically rich look at the larger-than-life characters who populate our movies and mythologies, such as Jackson Pollock, Janet Leigh, Orson Welles, and Joan of Arc. In many of the stories, Haskell weaves together disparate vignettes, building subtle associational tensions and resonances. In “Elephant Feelings,” for example, he deftly shifts between threads about the elephant Topsy (again!), whose electrocution was filmed by Thomas Edison; Saartjie Baartman, an enslaved African woman exhibited across Europe as the Hottentot Venus; and Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god. A former actor and performance artist, Haskell is at his best portraying characters losing themselves in their roles and struggling to reconcile themselves with their personas.
Translated from Italian by Gini Alhadeff, I Am the Brother of XX includes twenty-one haunting and geographically diverse short stories peppered with fictionalizations of well-known writers, scientists, and saints. Rendered in Jaeggy’s beautifully compact prose, these very brief fictions, most only a few pages long, feature isolated characters contemplating voids, nothingness, and silence. In “Negde,” the poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky takes an evening walk to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, looking across the East River to where the Twin Towers once stood. In “An Encounter in the Bronx,” an unnamed narrator dining with the neurologist Oliver Sacks obsessively fixates on one of the fish in the restaurant’s aquarium who will subsequently be cooked and served to customers. The Austrian poet and author Ingeborg Bachmann also makes several appearances throughout, even entertaining the writer Italo Calvino at her rented Tuscan vacation home in the collection’s final story.
Years before Oates wrote Blonde, her magnum opus novel about Marilyn Monroe, she had already begun mixing fact and fiction in these five short stories about the final days (or afterlives) of Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway. In each expertly crafted tale, Oates’s literary icons are brought down to earth, unable to escape their corporal frailties and vulnerabilities. Dickinson, revived as a robot, is sexually assaulted; Hemingway, no longer young or vigorous, confronts an ailing mind and body; and an elderly James, volunteering at a hospital for wounded soldiers, realizes he can no longer hide his erotic desires. Even more impressively, Oates evokes the distinct prose styles of her subjects, from Poe’s exuberant exclamations to Hemingway’s terse minimalism.
Literary merit has, for generations, been viewed as synonymous with gravitas, solemnity, and not smiling in your author photo. This especially holds true for books that tackle the topic of race (because it’s always a “tackling”), which readers often crack open expecting to be educated or to cry. (In a very funny 2006 guest essay for the New York Times, Paul Beatty describes reading Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Singsand “growing more oppressed with each maudlin passage.”)
Of course, there have always been “serious” writers who approach the topic of race satirically, Booker Prize-winning Beatty amongst them. These are the authors whose work has always called to me and who I credit (and/or blame) for making me want to become a writer myself. There is something so absurd about race—this thing that is simultaneously a complete fabrication and also one of the most socially, politically, and materially real aspects of our lives—that only satire (in my unbiased opinion as a satirist) can capture.
Each of the books on the list below captures the absurdity of race in its own funny, probing, and heartfelt way. Some of the books include speculative elements, some are darkly comedic, some are laugh-out-loud funny. Some focus on the Black American experience, others on Asian American, Mexican American, mixed-race, and white American experiences.
My debut short story collection We’re Gonna Get Through This Togetherbuilds off of the satirical (and also, at times, earnest) sensibility of these books. In several stories, I look at the well-meaning and also harmful ways that white people (especially those on the left) are engaging with race in our contemporary moment. In one of my stories, a white antiracist coach tries to keep her practice afloat after her Mexican-American business partner breaks up with her. In another, an aging white man sends an array of letters to a childhood friend, fundraising her to support Black lives. My hope is that my book—like the seven listed below—can create space for readers to look at race in new/funny/heartfelt ways.
In Colored Television, Danzy Senna tells the story of Jane Gibson, a biracial novelist living in LA who finally finishes working on her 450-page novel about mixed-race people called Nusu Nusu (Swahili for “partly-partly”). When she receives word from her agent that the book—a decade in the making—isn’t fit for print, Jane shifts gears and tries to pitch “a Mulatto sitcom” to a slippery television producer. Senna’s book is full of edgy (and deeply funny) banter about identity alongside earnest insights into racial dynamics in the U.S., such as Jane’s father telling her, “Black people didn’t want to be white […] They only wanted to have what white people had.”
Interior Chinatown playfully (and, at times, poignantly) satirizes Hollywood’s reliance on racist tropes about Asians and Asian Americans. Charles Yu takes his readers through a metafictional maze as he tells the story of Willis Wu, a second-generation background actor playing “Generic Asian Man” on a police procedural called Black and White that is perpetually being filmed. It is impossible to know what in the novel is happening on or off set, Yu’s way of communicating that Asian stereotypes are staples of both fictive worlds and our own. Amidst the tongue-in-cheek humor in this novel there are also many sincere moments, such as when a character calls out the painful contradiction of Asians being seen as “perpetual foreigners” in the U.S. despite a two-hundred-year presence in this country.
Nafissa Thompson-Spires, in her debut short story collection Heads of the Colored People, directs her unflinching gaze onto the lives of middle-class Black Americans, who navigate passive-aggressive white colleagues, suicidality, reality television cameras, and, in the haunting titular story, police violence. Thompson-Spires’s approach to satire is darkly comedic, with irony and agony sitting side by side. The funniest story in the bunch is “Belles Lettres,” a tense epistolary exchange between Dr. Lucinda Johnston, PsyD, and Monica Willis, PhD, two middle class Black mothers who argue in academic prose over the fraught relationship between their nine-year-old daughters.
My Name is Iris is a dystopian satirical novel that imagines a United States in which private citizens are required to wear technological ID bands (à la Apple watches) in order to enter their workplaces, go to the grocery store, and more. The hitch: in order to access one, you must be able to prove that at least one of your parents was born in the U.S. Iris Prince (born Inés Soto), Brando Skyhorse’s conservative second-generation Mexican-American protagonist, has to reckon with her politics, her challenging family dynamics, and her identity as she tries to procure a band, all while watching an ominous (and possibly imaginary) wall grow around her house. Skyhorse’s novel asks if it is possible to ignore or hide your racial identity when the state corporate nexus does not.
In Mat Johnson’s laugh-out-loud novel Loving Day, biracial comic book artist Warren Duffy returns home to Philadelphia to sell his recently-deceased father’s house and meets a rude Jewish teen named Tal who turns out to be his daughter. As the two try to build a relationship, they find their way to a mixed-race community called the “Mélange Center,” where people who identify more with their white side (like Tal) are forced to take courses about Blackness and people more identified with their Blackness (like Warren) must attend classes about the importance of embracing their white culture and ancestry. In this novel, Johnson packs endless punches about the absurdity of rigid racial categories and the lengths people will go to find a sense of belonging.
Jess Row’s Your Face in Mine is centered on a satirical premise—a white Jewish Baltimorean named Martin receives racial reassignment surgery to become Black—and, while it has its funny moments, the book approaches the topic of racial identity in a serious, almost philosophical way. The novel is narrated by a white reporter named Kelly who was friends with Martin in high school (when he was white) and meets him again as a Black adult, agreeing to help Martin tell his story of navigating “Racial Identity Dysphoria Syndrome.” (At one point Martin attributes his life-long struggles with depression, agoraphobia, and “involvement in illegal activities” as “the result of being born in the wrong physical body.”) In addition to commenting on the commodification of Blackness, Row touches on the fetishization of Asian identities in this novel as well.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut short story collection Friday Black, published a few years before his blockbuster 2023 novel Chain-Gang All-Stars, features his trademark satirical and speculative style. Using both humor and horror, Adjei-Brenyah spotlights the layers of violence that Black Americans are forced to navigate. In “Zimmer Land,” a Black employee at a theme park must feign both aggression and pain as white parkgoers “protect” their neighborhood from him. In “The Finkelstein 5,” a white man is found not guilty after using a chainsaw to decapitate five Black children who were standing outside of a library. Friday Black is ultimately an absurdist text pushing readers to consider the many-tentacled nature of white supremacy.
Firmly in the mess of her mid-twenties, Vi is fresh off a breakup, pretending to submit Peace Corps applications, and working at the front desk of a hotel in a midwestern college town. Outside of a dive bar one night, Vi finds a blob. She thinks about the slime she used to make as a kid, the kind made from Elmer’s glue and shaving cream, among other things. But, this blob breathes. Or, if breathing is too strong a word, at least at first, the blob’s body moves up and down. It’s alive. And it has beady eyes that seem sort of sad.
Lonely and wanting, Vi brings the blob home to her basement apartment. There, limb by limb, the blob becomes a man, aptly named Bob. Raised on a steady diet of Lucky Charms and television, his looks inspired by a collage of heartthrobs curated by Vi herself, Bob is a hot, blank canvas onto which Vi can project her greatest desire: to be loved.
With humor and honesty, in her debut novel Blob, Maggie Su crafts an absurd, compelling creation story that raises questions about love, belonging, identity, and what truly makes us human. Is a perfectly curated partner a dream or a nightmare? How does what we consume impact how we become who we are? How can relationships influence the stories we tell about ourselves? Can we ever really know anyone else?
I talked to Maggie Su about creation myths, efforts at control, relationships, and critiquing elements of culture that have caused harm.
Jacqueline Alnes: Can you just talk to me about Blob/Bob? I love him and want to know where he came from.
Maggie Su: I’ve always been really interested in speculative conceits and playing around with “what if” scenarios. At the time, I was really interested in relationships and how people connect. I found it so alien and strange and unlikely that you would meet someone. For some reason, it just blew my mind. I wanted to take the idea of romantic connection and make it into something as unlikely as I feel like it is to find a partner.
This started as a short story and turned into a five-minute play. By the time I started writing the novel for my dissertation, it was during COVID and I was stuck in my basement apartment (much like Vi) and I was feeling the isolation and loneliness. That’s where Blob and Bob came from –– moments of desperation and staying inside.
JA: I won’t spoil anything, but reading about Bob felt like a kind of creation story. Like a lot of creation myths, once the entity has agency, they can make their own decisions and the initial perfect premise is ruined, or changed. In love, you want someone to love you and stay with you, but you can’t force it; it’s such a devastating reality.
MS: It’s like the beginning of so many relationships, where you project your fantasies onto someone. The desire to control how things turn out. That’s one of Vi’s fatal flaws, is that she not only wants to control Bob, but also believes this myth that you can fully know someone. In her past relationship, she wants to know exactly what her ex-boyfriend is thinking. Every time he keeps something to himself, she wonders what it means. Blob allows her the opportunity to know everything about him because she created him. He is mine. I can keep him here. I think her realization that sometimes these things are outside of your control, you have to allow for space and allow people to be who they are, you can’t know everything about someone, are frightening and scary for her. I had fun playing with that balance through the speculative element.
JA: What Bob knows of the world comes from television and eating cereal. We see Bob watching something like Top Chef or wrestling and that becomes his language. It made me think about what we all consume on a daily basis, especially when we are in isolation. When we’re lonely and screens are what we turn to, our perception of the world can become so warped. Could you speak a little more to what Bob being new to the world allowed you to access?
MS: I loved being able to play with pop culture. The editors have these lists of my proper nouns and it became almost a found poem: Pop-Tarts, Fruity Pebbles, Top Chef, Padma Lakshmi. All these wonderful proper nouns pervade the book.
That’s how he’s learning about the world and that’s how we all learn about the world. I have a flashback where Vi is watching The Swan, that plastic surgery show that was on where they go in as “ugly ducklings” and come out after getting plastic surgery. I watched that as a kid, in my parents’ basement. There is critique there of the culture we grow up in and what we see represented. I think Vi not seeing herself represented anywhere and the microaggressions that exist in this small, midwestern town all came together to form her. I wanted race to be a part of the book, but I didn’t want it to be something that describes why she is the way she is; I wanted it to be a factor out of many. She is already an odd, difficult person, and you add this in and she’s wondering how her otherness fits within this society.
For Bob, I wanted to play with the newness, how he can see Jeopardy! or watch wrestling or consume porn. There was something exciting to me about having a character who doesn’t have as many hang-ups as Vi and seeing that creation –– and the difficulty he goes through about who he is and his identity crisis. Vi has that realization that everyone, even Bob, goes through this feeling of not knowing where they fit.
JA: And the way you do that with Rachel, too. She is this bubbly, blond coworker at the hotel and I think Vi has a perception that Rachel has it all together. But, the way she romanticizes her life means she never actually sees Rachel, in some ways.
MS: She feels like there are all these narratives that other people have and are able to follow and that for some reason, she’s not. She’s envious of people that are able to follow the scripts society has given them, or subvert them, or go between them more easily than she is.
JA: I longed for Vi to be able to accept love and also to finally love herself. Living as a Taiwanese-American in a midwestern college town and grappling with this quarter-life crisis on top of everything else –– things are rough for her at different points in the book. My question is, what did writing her allow you to explore?
MS: I was inspired by messy female characters. Some people will hate her and I won’t actually get offended by that, because I’m like, well, you hated her but you read the book, so something must have interested you about her. That’s all I can hope for. I rewatched that Season 2 Fleabag episode, the dinner episode, I think it’s fantastic. One thing I was learning from reading and thinking about flawed characters –– I mean, all characters are flawed! –– but I wanted there to be a mixture of lightness and darkness. I think the reason we are able to watch Fleabag is because there is that mix of comedy there as well.
I wanted to write a character who represented a messy Asian-American woman. I think we are seeing that more and more with Asian-American stories; it’s not just the Marie Kondo neat, perfect Asian-American daughter. There are bodily messy, socially messy, flawed women. The ways these stories connect to larger stories about race and go against the singular immigration narrative that has been really prevalent in Asian-American literature.
She’s a tricky character and I hope whether readers love her or hate her or find the horrible things she does forgivable or not, that they can see a character who is searching for love in the wrong places. It was important for me to have those vignettes of her backstory not necessarily to show why she does the things she does but instead: What are the forces that make us feel unlovable or unworthy or ungrateful? What is the guilt that we carry from place to place? There are certain things in our past, maybe, that we focus on where we made a mistake or didn’t do the right thing and Vi holds those closer to herself than anything else. She has this script for self-hatred and she’s having to unlearn that. It’s corny, but the love story is very much a self-love journey.
JA: Some of this relates to something you said earlier in our conversation about representation. Every person that Vi collages into Bob was in a magazine as like the “hottest hunk you should date.” I think the traits of what we see in movies or magazines or the qualities that were romanticized are narratives that don’t serve us. In the end, those are never real people.
MS: Definitely. It’s ironic because Bob is new and he is somehow still more socially adept than she is. He is able to find a connection with these frat boys and Vi is like, what? How are you able to do this?
JA: Parts of the story feel so absurd and hilarious, which helps lighten the darker moments or bring relief to Vi doing something that feels inexplicable. This book seemed fun to write. What did humor allow for?
MS: I remember complaining to my thesis advisor and she was like, you just wrote a scene where a man pops out of a pool like it’s a porno. How are you struggling? And I was like, that’s true.
It was a fun conceit. Bob added a lot of lightness to the book and optimism, in certain ways. His newness helped Vi get out of this stuck feeling she was feeling –– and he felt like that to me, too. When COVID was happening, there were a lot of dark news stories and a lot of isolation. To be able to escape into my writing and escape into these absurd situations brought me a lot of joy. I don’t ever write with the intention of being humorous, so I’m always a little surprised when it happens, but I like contradictions, I like putting things that are dissimilar together and seeing what happens.
The absurdity of working at a hotel, I had that summer job working the front desk at a hotel and sometimes when you are in that really mundane setting, you can find a lot of little humorous moments.
JA: I worked at a bed and breakfast and what struck me about working there –– and what you capture so well in Blob –– is just that humans are so weird. When they are walking through the lobby, making requests at the front desks, having interactions or fights that you get snippets of, it’s all so wild.
MS: I think when people are in hotels, they forget! They’ll come down in pajamas, more power to them, but you see glimpses into families, volleyball tournaments, dynamics. It was a fascinating ecosystem.
JA: For you, working through isolation especially, what was in the front of your mind to work through while writing this book? What questions were you interested in answering?
MS: I am in a very different place now. While writing, I was in isolation, in my twenties. I think it was me trying to digest the messiness of the dating scene, connection and relationships, intense loneliness, and really reflecting on what it meant to me to grow up in the midwest. Obviously Vi is not me, but so many of those experiences of feeling that otherness were. The pandemic and sitting with myself and sitting with my own thoughts and sitting alone really allowed me to channel it into something I could deal with. I started going to therapy for the first time, so I think that helped. A lot of people during the pandemic had to really come to a crisis point where they looked at their own lives and partially this book was that. And my thesis advisor was saying, your first book has been living in you for a really long time and it’s the one you need to get out. I felt that way about this book. I’m excited to move on.
JA: Reading this made me think about how hard it can be to see ourselves in that way where it’s raw and honest. It’s difficult to want to fully perceive yourself. It seems that Bob almost becomes this mirror for Vi, where when he enters her apartment she suddenly realizes the state of her apartment, she thinks about what she wears, she starts buying food. She starts being perceived in a way she has tried to ignore for the past few years of her life. Relationships, even if they are not right for you, can encourage self-reflection.
MS: So much of the book is how these external forces shape our characters. Vi is waiting for an external force to shape her, in some ways. She thought that her ex-boyfriend was this lifeline where, okay, I can just hold onto this person who seems normal and that will be my lifeline into this scripted, normal life that I’ve watched on TV. That will save me from loneliness. With Bob, it’s something she can control. In that way, I gave her what she thought she wanted. She thinks she can figure out how to be a person in the world through Bob. But I think you’re right. I think he provides a lens for her to want better for herself, in some ways, because she has to take care of him and therefore take care of herself.
JA: What did you learn from writing this book?
MS: I wrote a few novels for NaNoWriMo, but I would just abandon drafts so easily after that. The process taught me to trust myself and to follow what felt good in terms of writing. It’s very Yoga With Adriene. It’s been a dream of mine since I was a kid to publish a book, but it taught me a lot about trusting the process and trusting the reader. I wondered if it would be too much for people, is this unforgivable character going to pull people in or push people away, but it’s been really wonderful to learn that people have connected to some of her, regardless of whether you’d get a beer with her or not.
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