The world is burning, and the smoke is all the proof we need. Over 18,000 Palestinians have been killed, “collateral damage” in the ongoing war, and over 1.5 million Gazans have been displaced from their homes. In Sudan, the civil war has resulted in a mass ethnic cleansing. Since April of 2023, more than 18,800 people have died in the civil war. And half of the population, 25 million people, are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance and protection.
We have witnessed in these past few months apocalyptic scenes of Palestinians being starved to death and the indiscriminate bombings of helpless children, women and men with no place to flee, their bodies burnt to ashes while schools and hospitals are destroyed, becoming a graveyard of rubble.
To metabolize grief and suffering of this magnitude is an excruciating experience, but poetry can offer us a space for reflection, healing, and activism. To borrow Mahmoud Darwish’s words: “all beautiful poetry is an act of resistance” and “language is the greatest weapon against oppression.”
“In silence, we become accomplices,” Darwish iterates, and so in these collections below, the writers, defiant in the face of oppression and persecution, have chosen to rebel and fight against tyranny. Every collection is an outcry of indignation and a rallying call for peace, justice, and liberation:
Palestinian American poet and journalist Hindi asks “Might we define this as a collective trauma? a. Whose trauma? b. A gathering of bodies might be called a circus to some // and a graveyard to others.” On many occasions in the collection, Hindi communicates as one who has witnessed the cruelest forms of oppressions firsthand. The collection triumphs for its urgency, and its searing, honest and unapologetic rebellion in the face of decades-long persecution against Palestinians. Hindi seeks to instigate us into rebellion against oppression, showing us that writing can be a medium to start a revolution.
In her book, Smith focuses on Black Americans who have suffered from the poison of racism: from Oscar Grant, the doting father; Tamir Rice, the lanky, lovable son; to Breonna Taylor, the decorated first responder. Dark Testament is an interactive text and she beseeches the reader to engage with the blacked out spaces on the page as a pause of remembrance: “silence is often an act in which those still living undertake to be worthy of those who died.” The collection aches in the sensibilities of what it means to be human in a dying, burning world. Smith questions the worth of a life and the commonality with which we treat genocide like an everyday accident. Smith mourns a massacre of people with families, hopes and dreams: “each of whom was once dear to someone”. She tasks the reader with the duty of lighting a flame of conscience in honor of those killed by violence, and carrying that torch into a brighter and more just future.
Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American physician, poet, and translator and his collection, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, captivates its readers for its lyrical allegory and unflinching examination of the violence and terror wrought by Israeli and American occupation. The most wrenching line in the collection is a reminder that “We were / granted the right to exist.” Joudah’s language serves as an anatomical inquiry into what connects and what breaks us apart, examining the aftermath of war in footnotes. The collection is an archaeology into the fossils of a dystopian world. In the titular poem, he writes “I call the finding of certain things loss.” Joudah articulates rage and grief with an attention to the body and language, mixing magic, science, and skepticism to tame the heart’s machinery.
In this book, Stewart rebels against stereotypes, against objectification, against -isms, and against cages. She refuses to be tamed. She refuses to have her freedom barred. And so she rages, rabidly, with sharp teeth. Here is a book of unfathomable intensity that triumphs in its colloquialisms to create a voice that exudes fear-defying confidence and is wickedly unapologetic about going all out uncensored. Ebony writes: “break the patterns / write on shredded paper / do not become complacent in the holocaust.”
Danez begins the collection, saying: “In the film, townsfolk name themselves Prince Charming, queue up to wake the sleeping beauty.” The collection challenges white supremacy and societal prejudices against Black bodies, bringing attention to the epidemic of police brutality on Black Americans. Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Renisha McBride, Brandon Zachary, and a host of others who have fallen to this oppression are mourned, commiserated with, and fought for in vengeance. They demand the justice they deserve, so the dead can receive a proper elegy. This collection is half-elegy, half-protest. Danez fantasizes about a world where their people are safe, free and alive, or in their words: “a safe house / made of ox tails & pork rinds / a place to be black & not dead.”
This poetry collection, written from a formalist lens, is filled with grief and loss, and begins with a history lesson about the Partition of India and Pakistan. Asghar interrogates the borders created by colonial powers, examining how countries, identities, and citizenship can shift and change overnight: “you’re kashmiri until they burn your home. take your orchards. stake a different flag.” Exploring the many ways in which violence manifests, they question what it means to be safe as a Pakistani Muslim woman in post-9/11 America: “…you’re muslim until it’s too dangerous. you’re safe until you’re alone. you’re american until the towers fall. until there’s a border on your back.” If They Come For Us is an education on the harsh realities of the world: an education on ancestral trauma, on losing your homeland, on being an orphan.
Abu Toha’s lyricism dwells in a marriage of soul between poetry and politics in which the verse is a weapon of resistance. In the company of a new generation of Palestinian poets, Abu Toha’s poems are a testament to the plight and the resilience of the Palestinian people. A native Gazan, Abu Toha writes about life in an open-air prison, constantly under surveillance, with the ever-present threat of destruction and assault looming large: “The drone’s buzzing sound, / the roar of an F-16, / the screams of bombs falling on houses, / on fields, and on bodies, / of rockets flying away— / rid my small ear canal of them all.”
On November 19th, 2023, Abu Toha was detained by the Israeli Defense Forces on suspicion of “terror” while attempting to flee Gaza with his wife and children. Two days later, Abu Toha was released but not without wounds from his time in custody. He writes: “In Gaza you don’t know what you’re guilty of. It feels like living in a Kafka novel.”
I grew up loving books because of my grandmother, who curated a library just for me. The narrow hallways of her house were crowded with bookshelves filled with Caldecotts, Newberys, and Coretta Scott King’s, collections of works by Alcott, Twain, and Poe, Penguin classics, and Nelson Doubleday’s Junior Deluxe Editions, which sparked my forever love of folk and fairy tales and mythology. Under my grandmother’s tutelage, books became my own personal portal, my escape into another realm.
As an adult, I became a children’s librarian, stocking my shelves with the same award winners as my grandmother. Like her, I did whatever I could to spark my students’ love of reading and writing, actively seeking out books which reflected their backgrounds and interests. I believed, then and now, that everyone is a reader, that they just have to find the book that speaks to them.
I left the library a few years back, but I’ve remained fascinated by librarians of all flavors—the fictional ones I loved in works by Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, their onscreen counterparts like Taystee Jefferson from “Orange Is the New Black” and Mary in the indie classic Party Girl, the archivists who focus on science, history, music, film, and more, or those who specialize in providing services for people of all abilities. However, the librarians who excite me the most are the ones who are also writers, like The Magic School Bus’s Joanna Cole, Beverly Cleary of the Ramonaseries, and Overdue’s Amanda Oliver. In honor of librarians everywhere, I’ve curated the following list.
Before she became known as a poet, professor, and activist, Audre Lorde served as a librarian at Hunter College, Columbia University, and in Mount Vernon. Lorde was the author of many acclaimed works, but is best known for her groundbreaking essay collection Sister,Outsider, which interrogates racism, sexism, class, homophobia and ageism, and explores the complexities of intersectional identity, advocating for the visibility of marginalized voices. Central to Lorde’s work is her belief in the importance of building community to enact social change. “You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same,” Lorde writes. “What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order for us to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.”
Even thoughMadeleine L’Engle wrote more than sixty books, she is best remembered for her Newbery-award winning novel, A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels. Much of L’Engle’s work was written in New York’s Diocesan House of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where L’Engle served as a volunteer librarian and writer-in-residence for nearly four decades. In 2012, the Diocesan House became a designated Literary Landmark, with a plaque dedicated to L’Engle noting how her work reflected “both her Christian faith and interest in modern science.”
Today Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are remembered as German academics who collected and published folklore in the 1800s. The two established the framework, for better or worse, for what we modern readers know as fairy tales. However, like most writers, the Grimm brothers had to find some other profession to support themselves and their families. At different stages in their careers, both served as librarians. Both appear to have been principled— even losing their jobs when they refused to sign oaths of allegiance to Ernest Augustus, King of Hanover.
Jenny Han is best known as the dynamic co-showrunner of Prime Video’s The Summer I Turned Pretty, as well as the executive producer of Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. There she earned raves for disproving the long-held industry assumption that a series centering an Asian-American teenager couldn’t find a broad audience. However, before Hollywood, before The Summer I Turned Pretty topped the New York Times best-seller list, Han acquired books and coordinated programming in the middle and upper school library of New York City’s Calhoun School.
Former librarian Alisa Alering’s rural gothic novel, Smothermoss, which debuts from Tin House in July, follows the saga of two half-sisters in 1980s Appalachia, the reverberations of the murders of two hikers on the Appalachian Trail, as well as other threats imperiling the sisters and their community. Praised by both Samantha Hunt and Karen Joy Fowler, Smothermoss is delightfully uncanny, and has been described as propulsive and hauntingly atmospheric.
Due to her strict Southern Baptist upbringing, queer Floridian author Kristen Arnett’s early access to literature was restricted. However, in part due to books provided by teachers and librarians, Arnett fell in love with reading. After graduating from Florida State with a Master’s in Library Science, Arnett became a reference librarian and worked in libraries for nearly two decades. Arnett even wrote much of her first novel, Mostly Dead Thingson the job, coming in early in the morning, staying late in the evening, and even working through her lunch break.
During his six decade career, novelist, historian, and librarian Dee Brown authored or co-authored more than thirty books, but is best remembered for his 1970 classic, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. This is not a cheerful book, but history has a way of intruding upon the present,” Brown, a white Southerner, wrote in the introduction. Relying on primary sources by Native American interpreters who attended treaty sessions, tribal councils, meetings with US army officers, and eye-witness accounts of battles and other events, Brown’s book documents the genocide of Native Americans by the US government, concluding with the 1890 massacre in South Dakota at Wounded Knee, when the 7th US Cavalry disarmed and slaughtered 300 Sioux, including women and children. Not without controversy, both for its unflinching debunking of the noble pioneer myth, as well as for reducing Indigenous history to near-extinction, since its publication Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee has changed the way Americans view history, been adapted into a movie, translated into at least 15 languages, and sparked a counter-narrative, David Treuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee.
For over a decade, Maisy Card has served as a public librarian in New Jersey. She’s also taught at Columbia University and is a fiction editor for The Brooklyn Rail. Card’s 2021 novel, These Ghosts Are Family, is an intergenerational narrative exploring the repercussions of a faked death which also chronicles the family migration from colonial Jamaica to present-day America. Card’s nuanced exploration of the way each family member wrestles with their personal ghosts led to These Ghosts Are Family being honored with an American Book Award, among other accolades.
Thomas A. Dodson serves as an assistant professor and librarian at Southern Oregon University but in his free time he writes short fiction. In his exquisitely crafted collection No Use Pretending, beekeepers, traumatized veterans, distant fathers, and other disparate narrators are forced into seemingly unbearable situations, and each work charts their attempts to alleviate their discomfort. Winner of the 2023 Iowa Award for Short Fiction, No Use Pretending is a must-read for lovers of the genre, with characters I still think about months after finishing the book.
Former teen librarian Kelly Jensen is an anti-authoritarian powerhouse. Since leaving the library, Jensen has edited three books (Body Talk: 37 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy, (Don’t) Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy, and Here We Are: 44 Voices Write, Draw, and Speak About Feminism for the Real World), joined the team at Book Riot, and runs the aptly-named newsletter Well-Sourced, which addresses all things related to books, censorship, and the current dystopian landscape for libraries.
Poet Emilie Menzel serves as a librarian at Duke University and the Seventh Wave community. This September, their debut book length lyric, The Girl Who Became A Rabbit, a dark, ruminative poem exploring how the body carries and shapes grief, as well as what it means to tell a story, will be published by beloved Southern indie press Hub City. Drawing comparisons to Max Porter and Maggie Nelson, Menzel remixes myth and fairytale to rewrite the body’s history. “It is important to make something beautiful,” Menzel writes, “To shape it into a form even when horrifically right.”
New Jersey reference librarian and poet Laura Sims’ 2023 psychological thriller How Can I Help You? draws directly from her workplace. Set in a small town public library, Sims’ novel pits two staff members against each other, with a new employee digging deep into her coworker’s sinister past. An insightful, edgy exploration of workplace politics, How Can I Help You? was A New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Book Riot, and CrimeReads Best Book of the Year.
Anne Spencer, poet
The majority of poet, gardener, teacher, and civil rights activist Anne Spencer’s work was published during the Harlem Renaissance—her poetry was so widely regarded that she became the second African American included in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1973). During Spencer’s lifetime, her home and garden was a gathering place for leading Black activists and intellectuals, including W.E.B. Dubois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Martin Luther King, Jr. However Spencer’s true passion was ensuring that the Black citizens of her community had equal access to libraries, and her advocacy led to the formation of the first library for Black citizens in Lynchburg, Virginia, which she led until 1942.
Melbourne-based Ruby Todd grew up in a family of librarians and worked in libraries for years. Bright Objects, her July debut, is a thriller following the obsessed widow of a hit and run accident waiting for the arrival of a once in a lifetime comet. For fans of Emma Cline and Otessa Mashfegh, Bright Objects offers mystery, astronomy, and romance.
Ohio librarianDouglas Westerbeke’s delightful novel A Short Walk Through a Wide World, which debuted in April, is my current go-to recommendation for anyone seeking a captivating, immersive read. A Short Walk follows the globetrotting adventures of Aubry Tourvel, who, after an encounter with a mysterious wooden puzzle ball, realizes she can live only if she keeps moving. From a riverboat in Siam to the sand dunes, from the peaks of the Himalayas to the jungle, with periodic detours in the type of library which could only be conjured by a librarian, A Short Walk Through a Wide World is a fantastic narrative, which explores the timeless question of how to find meaning in seemingly impossible circumstances.
For a long time, much of what was published about El Salvador was a grim monolith, authored by outsiders: gringo historians, mid-century anthropologists, Céline models. If you read Joan Didion’s terse little book on the place, Salvador, you might have the idea that “terror is the given of the place.” I could write for a long time about the historic erasure and suppression of Salvadoran writers, about the limitations of imagination in certain literary markets, about perverse appetites for humorless, untextured stories of suffering, about stories that don’t even go to the trouble of imbuing their characters with human consciousnesses and instead allude to “faceless brown masses.” To rephrase another visitor to the country, Carolyn Forché (in my opinion, a far more perceptive witness): what you have heard is not exactly true. What’s been left out of these explanatory narratives, what you may not have heard about the place, is a rich variety of Salvadoran voices. The people of El Salvador and its diaspora are more than vessels for terror and misery, and perfectly capable of artfully telling stories, and of writing into desire, joy, and even the nightmares of collective memory, on our own terms.
When I set out to write my own novel The Volcano Daughters, I had to contend with that grim monolith. Despite it, the voices of my narrators (and their cackles, bossiness, secrets and desires) were vivid in my ears. I heard their voices in my siblings, my friends, and in the lines of the poets I admired. I grew up in San Francisco, and El Salvador was my father’s country, a place I had only visited. Growing up we ate pupusas at El Zocalo, but I didn’t speak Spanish fluently. My connection to the place, only half a generation away, felt distant, in terms of family, myth, and history. Reading many of the books on this list affirmed the specificity of my own diasporic relationship to the place, and I found myself in community.
I’m heartened that more writers from the Salvadoran diaspora are being published and more Salvadoran writers are being translated and reaching wider audiences now than in previous literary eras (though, traditionally published or not, there are writers on this list who have been writing for decades.) Three of the books on this list were published just in the past year. Three are recent, excellent translations. These books—poetry, short stories, memoir, novels, myth, and even a cookbook—represent just some of the writing that comes from El Salvador and from the Salvadoran diaspora in the United States. These writers create work that transcends token representation and instead offers, to curious, discerning readers, visions of surprise, transformation, mischief, memory, grief, sex, food, dreams, formal innovation, and the future.
The words “Popol Vuh” mean “the book of the woven mat.” Poet Michael Bazzettt’s translation of the Mesoamerican creation story is an intricate epic that subverts the laws of linear time, and it’s full of mischief, beauty, and a very metal cosmology. Ilan Stavans’s translation of Popol Vuh is also an excellent introduction to the oldest book of the Americas, and it features some gorgeous illustrations by Salvadoran artist Gabriela Larios, as well as a great foreword by Homero Aridjis.
This short novel is a maniacal, paranoid, somehow delightful rant narrated by a writer with liver problems (hypnosis isn’t taking; could be the poor quality of rum he’s drinking) on the verge of returning home to El Salvador from his exile in Mexico City. His mysterious old friend, Mr. Rabbit appears in the midst of this madness, often at a taco shop, and invites him to participate in half-baked criminal plots, green salsa dripping through his fingers.
Roque Dalton, who wrote that “we were all born half dead” after La Matanza massacre in 1932, and that “I believe the world is beautiful and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone,” dedicated his life to anti-fascist revolution and poetry before being murdered by his own comrades. This volume contains a comprehensive collection of Dalton’s poetry voiced by five different heteronym personas, as well as several brilliant essays from poet Christropher Soto, Margaret Randall, and others, which place Dalton’s work in its time, and highlight his relevance today.
Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández, translated by Julia Sanches
This novel takes on the long aftermath of war and separation through the voices of a family of ordinary women—four daughters, one estranged, and their mother, an ex-revolutionary. When the mother leaves the country to travel to Paris to reunite with the adult daughter who was taken from her and adopted by a French family during the war, a frame opens up in the narrative, forcing the mother, an interpreter, and the unknown daughter, to return to a place and time beyond memory. Part dreamy haunting and part bureaucratic tangle (“Her mother’s life story doesn’t fit in the assigned box on the university’s financial-aid application form”) Hernández’s novel is astonishing. About her book, Hernández says, “It’s nothing. I don’t do anything. I just listen.” Sanches’s gorgeous translation honors Hernández’s subtle, poetic structure that shapes each line.
Hernández Linares is queen-comadre of San Francisco’s Mission District arts and culture scene. I fell in love with her razor-edged words, her poetry and performance art, her commitment to justice, community, education, and to mothering. Her work introduced me to Prudencia Ayala, “the girl with the birds in her head,” a Salvadoran poet of the 1930s who ran for president before women could even vote. Decades later in San Francisco we became friends and literary co-conspirators. But let me tell you about her poetry. This woman takes on academic machos, centers community in the midst of gentrification, and conjures La Siguanaba walking down 24th street in tacones, all her power reclaimed from the myth’s shallow waters. The images in this collection will break your heart and nibble on your tongue. In “Luna de Papel,” she writes: “I tried to wrestle with the moon/y me mordió la lengua.”
Lovato’s tender, intense, sweeping memoir is a love letter to his complicated father, and a commitment to unearthing the truth where it is buried. Lovato makes explicit the deep, exploitative, and counterrevolutionary ties between the U.S. and Salvadoran governments that are responsible for the terror. From a forensics lab to the Evangelical churches of San Francisco’s Mission District to his grandmother’s sewing machine, Lovato takes readers through the heart of histories he refuses to leave forgotten.
Regalado’s poetry draws lavish lines between El Salvador and Miami, Florida as she writes back through her familial history and interrogates motherhood, class, power, bonds, and ruptures. From her poem “Salvadoran Road Bingo”:
“Every car is a carreta bruja on this highway, we’ve gone Red and bathed in red, oh deep colors bleed, a poem I found on the wash tag of a bath towel when I was twelve. Ours is the luck of my great grandfather who, one night, like any typical night, in a game of cards, lost a velvet sachet filled with his wife’s diamonds, and the title of their house. The cantor calls out the Lotería in a riddle: El Salvador whom is going to save us, whom are we to save? Day after day, our fingers in the wounds—here it is, touch it, there is the proof—surviving is what we do best.”
The stories in this collection are playful, hilarious, queer, and delightfully speculative. They imagine new worlds and write into boundless futures. Reyes’s stories are formally inventive and delightful. A taste for mangoes leads to elaborate familial exploitation. A son comes out to his dead father, who has returned in the form of a tiny robot. One story title iterates throughout the collection, inviting the reader to imagine an alternate Salvadoran history, or perhaps the world, in which the Pipil defeat the conquistadors in 1524, or in which a tyrannical dictator leads an excavation of dinosaur that brings fortune to the country. Is terror present, too? Yes. In that dinosaur story the bones are human, unearthed and refashioned into a lucrative fiction for the patrimony: “It was 1941. The memory of the massacre nine years prior was still in sight. Terror hid and rewrote details about everything, including the discovery,” Reyes writes.
This is no ordinary cookbook. It’s culinary documentation, historical research, and an archive of memory. And, Vasquez’s book, published in 2024, is the first traditionally published Salvadoran cookbook. Growing up in Los Angeles, surrounded by Salvadoran cuisine, Vasquez wondered why she couldn’t find any Salvadoran cookbooks. War and its destruction of cultural artifacts was one reason. Aforementioned flawed capitalist notions of “what the reading market truly desires” is another one. Recipes for quesadilla, pupusas, riguas, flor de izote (the edible national flower) yuca frita, and curtido were carried on the tongue. So Vasquez sought out the recipe-holders–friends, relatives, and community members–she calls them the “SalviSoul women.” In the pages of this book are recipes, and ingenious consejos from the SalviSoul women (stand on a ladder while stirring masa for more leverage). Especially compelling are the stories that some of the women share along their recipes and consejos: Ruth draws a throughline between losing her shoes during her journey to the United States as a child and later selling pupusas to a sweaty Leonardo DiCaprio at Coachella; Estelita remembers her last night in her beloved grandmother’s adobe home before leaving to join her mother in the United States; and on returning to El Salvador after decades away, Isabel says, “Tu corazón no puede renunciar a su tierra,” (Your heart can’t give up its land.)
Zamora’s debut poetry collection includes persona poems from young parents, and vivid moments of pain, abandon, and love. It’s a gorgeous map of the world that he writes about later in his memoir Solito, infused with music, longing, and rage.
Here’s the close of “The Pier of La Herradura”:
“There’s a village where men train cormorants to fish: rope-end tied to sterns,
another to necks, so their beaks won’t swallow the fish they catch.
My father is one of those birds. He’s the scarred man.”
There are the stories and books that we simply read and cherish, and then there are those that we cannot stop thinking about, can quote verbatim, and find ourselves returning to. Why certain works transcend into the indelible is a mystery but we recognize it when it happens. For writers, these works become touchstones to not only aspire towards, but also to reread for comfort and renewed marvel.
This interview features three writers whose short stories I always return to and reread. Jamel Brinkley is the author of the story collections A Lucky Man and Witness. His debut, A Lucky Man, invokes questions around masculinity as it explores the nuanced relationships of Black men and boys. Brinkley’s latest collection, Witness, scrutinizes what it means to see the world around us and how we then choose to carry all that which we’ve seen. Both books dazzle with precise language that reveals the complexities of longing. Xuan Juliana Wang is the author of Home Remedies, a collection that is divided into three parts: “Family,” “Love,” and “Time and Space.” Wang’s stories depict the dynamic and fearless youth of a new generation of Chinese and Chinese Americans as they grapple with each of these themes, painting for us a contemporary landscape of the Chinese diaspora. Sidik Fofana is the author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, a linked story collection that gives voices to the tenants of Banneker Terrace, a high rise in Harlem, as they face gentrification. While Fofana flexes his impressive control and range of voice in each story, the true gift is in taking a step back and realizing what these voices accomplish when put together. We discussed fiction that they are obsessed with, how they read their own work while writing, and whether form, be it short story or novel, affects their reading.
Brandon J. Choi: Can you introduce your collection and what you were reading and rereading while working on it?
Jamel Brinkley: Some of the writers that I find myself continually rereading showed up when I was working on both A Lucky Man and Witness. I would say James Baldwin and William Trevor bridge the two collections in terms of my rereading. Not necessarily the same stories but something about the sensibilities of those writers stayed with me. For A Lucky Man, I was thinking about a story called “Three People” by William Trevor, whereas for Witness, I was thinking more about a story called “A Day.” Both stories fascinate me for different reasons. With Baldwin, there’s the obvious “Sonny’s Blues” influence on A Lucky Man. For the recent collection, it wasn’t so much Baldwin’s fiction but more of his nonfiction. I was thinking more philosophically about Baldwin and his idea of being a witness and what it means to face troubles of the world as a writer. In terms of differences, I was thinking about the work of Yiyun Li with A Lucky Man but for Witness, I was thinking about the work of Gina Berriault, who’s a writer not as well known as she should be. Her short stories are fantastic and have been collected in various volumes such as Women in Their Beds or Stolen Pleasures.
BJC: Are the writers you reread the same ones who you aspire to write like? Or are there writers whose works you can’t help but return to regardless?
JB: Toni Morrison is one of those people who I reread, even though I don’t think I write like her and wouldn’t try to write like her. In fact, I think it’s a deadly trap to try to write like Toni Morrison because 99.5% of writers who do that fail spectacularly. The imitative attempt with her is so obvious. One of the books that I’ve been rereading and have taught multiple times is Sula. It’s a slim book and there’s nothing in the book that I want to write back to or imitate in my own work. There’s something so fascinating in that book to me. It’s called Sula but when you read it, it’s so much more than a portrait of one character. It’s a portrait of a community, a friendship, the friend herself. Morrison’s biographical sensibility in her fiction is so expansive. It’s not a book that starts with the birth of Sula and ends strictly on her death. You’re in this book for dozens of pages before you even meet Sula. I reread to think about Sula’s presence and what it means to tell a story of a character that’s really the story of what’s around the character too. But I don’t want to try to write like Sula. Conversely, there’s a certain subset of my stories that feel like they have the influences of William Trevor, Yiyun Li, or Edward P. Jones. Their works feel more natural to the way I want to tell a story.
BJC: Did your writing process or reading influences change between collections?
JB: I think so. I wrote the bulk of that first collection while I was in graduate school when I was really just trying to learn how to write a story. I was thinking: what is a short story? Why are they so difficult? Who does this well? Let me look to them. With Witness, my attitude was more experimental. Not in the way that people commonly understand experimental fiction, but experimentation with the elements of storytelling. I thought a lot about the possibilities of first person narration. What does it mean to tell a story in the first person? What are the possibilities with this form that, despite the power of voice, can be quite limiting and difficult to pull off? I was experimenting with point of view, whereas with A Lucky Man, I was a bit more on the rails, so to speak, and not trying to play within the space of the story as much.
BJC: And what works do you go to for studying the capabilities of first person?
Something about obsessive rereading still guides me.
JB: One of the stories that I reread often is “Gold Coast” by James Alan McPherson. It starts off with a voice that jumps out. It’s funny and the personality jumps off the page. You’re getting a page or two of this big, enjoyable voice. What’s fascinating about the story is McPherson’s masterful job of manipulating and modulating the first person voice. It starts off big, present, and voicey, with tone, attitude, and personality, and then, he allows that voice to recede. It’s important to have that voice recede at certain times because all the other elements of the story get to pour in and fill in that space. By the end, which is very “I” heavy, it’s so moving when we come back to that strong first person voice, but it’s moving because he didn’t allow the voice to dominate the story from beginning to end. When it returns, the effect is just earth shattering.
BJC: Do you reread stories and novels differently?
JB: The first piece of literature I can remember rereading obsessively is Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. I was a sophomore or junior in high school and I would literally get to the end of that book and then start it immediately over again. I did this multiple times, so much so that my mom thought something was wrong with me. Something about that obsessive rereading still guides me. I was a young reader, probably not a very good reader, but what I remember is the feeling of total absorption. It was a spell being cast either by the language or the intelligence of the voice. There was this dim sense that the novel’s design was working on me somehow. As I moved through the book, it was sequenced and structured in a way to achieve an effect and something about reading one chapter after another did something to me. That kind of absorption and pleasure in language, that the work’s form is working on me in a way, and that I have to grasp and make an effort to understand it guides all of my rereading.
A lot of the works I reread have a sense of scope about them. No matter their length, they just feel big. Even Edward P. Jones’s “First Day,” which is just a few pages, feels massive to me. How do you tell a story about your first day of going to school and it feels like you’re telling the story of your whole life? For me, no matter how short or long the piece is, it has something to do with feeling that the work is even larger and that I’m trying to catch up to it. In rereading, I might pick up a few new things but it still feels like the work is beyond me. I like that feeling so I go after that whether it’s in short stories or novels.
BJC: What would you recommend to readers to read, if they haven’t already, or reread with a new perspective?
JB: I have been rereading The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, which I’m also teaching this fall. The scope of that book is incredible but feels intimate to me at the same time. Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks, which is her only novel. People know her as the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, but she wrote fiction. This book is composed of vignettes and doesn’t really have a plot but I think the way she captures this little girl growing into a woman’s life is brilliant. The Street by Ann Petry, which is another novel. A story to reread is Edward P. Jones’s “Old Boys, Old Girls.” It’s a strange story—one of those untidy stories—and the ending leaves people confused but if you read it and reread it, it will continually reward you.
Xuan Juliana Wang: Home Remedies spans the entire length of my 20s. The collection begins with ideas about family, chosen family, and all of the joys and burdens of loving your family. By the middle of my 20s, I was more interested in the stakes of romantic love. Not just falling in love, but also disappointment and revenge. By the end, I had more existential questions about what it meant to be alive. That’s when I started to do more speculative fiction with a goal towards getting at some truth in a different way.
While working on my collection, I was rereading Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of my Youth, which is a collection of essays that I find I can never move too far out of my bookshelf. I was also reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, which made a huge impact on me.
Brandon J. Choi: What about rereading draws you in? Is your experience different depending on the form?
XJW: I really like rereading short stories in particular. There are certain ones that I read over and over again, like “Emergency” by Denis Johnson. Another is “Another Manhattan” by Donald Antrim, which I read whenever I am writing and need to remind myself that there could be an internal escalation. I reread James Salter’s short stories as well as Julian Barnes’s work. You can reread for different reasons. Sometimes, I’m just trying to get myself back in the vernacular. It’s like if you’re trying to hang out with these sophisticated friends, after I listen to them talk a little bit, I will become more sophisticated. The music of a James Salter story is nice to get into writing. I’m also a huge fan of Mary Gaitskill. Her exactitude of language and sharpness of her sentences and observations… I read her work just to sit up straight. Usually, when I reread a short story, it’s because I want to remember why I liked it in the first place. By the end of page one, I’m hooked again. How did it do that? I no longer have to try to enjoy it as a story but I can dissect it and try to figure out its parts.
The staying power of a short story is really fascinating to me.
BJC: How do you read your own work when writing and editing?
XJW: Alexander Chee once said in a class that he prints out his work with weird margins so it doesn’t look like his own writing anymore before he edits it. That’s really the only way. Now that I’m writing a novel, I have so many words in so many Scribner files. My problem is that if I start to read it, I start to edit it, and then I don’t know if that’s even an important part of the book. It feels like I’ve written many books because of this constant rereading. These days, I am trying not to reread that much. I’m letting it live, marking it as done, and writing a description of what I thought happened in it before moving on. When I do need to edit a story or something short, I print it out and go to a coffee shop. I usually try to put somebody in the coffee shop in the edit so it feels new. I can change a description to a person actually standing there so it feels fresh to me. For that final copy edit, I rely on a professional but before that, I read it aloud to myself. There’s really no better editor than listening.
BJC: Now that you’re working on a novel, do you find yourself still returning to the story form?
XJW: I just love the short story so much that I can’t stop thinking of everything as a short story. With my novel, I thought that if I wrote it as linked stories, I would find a way to make them into a novel. But five to seven years of doing that later, I realized it was still not a novel. So during the pandemic, I tried to shut down all of the threads that didn’t lead back to the original story. I still try to make every chapter as sharp as I would want in a short story. Every chapter deserves that.
I’m teaching an Asian American short story class right now. I’m amazed that there’s no anthology for Asian and contemporary Asian American short fiction. In preparation for teaching this class, I feel like I’ve read at least part of every Asian American short story collection published since 2000. I can’t help but notice technically what the story is doing, the trends that are happening throughout time, and what devices writers are favoring to highlight certain themes. Sometimes the themes are repeated, but they’re being sought out in a completely different way. It depends more on when it’s being told than who’s telling it.
BJC: On a related note, what stories do you always want to teach and put on your syllabus?
XJW: I like to teach Hilary Leichter. There’s something about the way she opens up the narrative that’s unexpected and makes students excited and want to write. I really like to teach a Bryan Washington story. His voice is very infectious and inviting. A lot of stories I put on the syllabus are because I’m reading it then and I think it’s doing something that I can see you learning from and doing yourself. It’s never somebody who is such a virtuoso that there is no way you can do that. I’ve always wanted to teach more Asian American literature so I’m glad to be able to do that now.
When I’m trying to write a story, I find the best part and make everything as good as that part.
The staying power of a short story is really fascinating to me. There are very few novels that I can tell you what happens next. But for a short story, there are a lot that I can tell you exactly what the sentence said or what happened in a scene. I think it has to do with length. It’s like a poem—you can carry it around, memorize it, and it stays with you. I find myself always wanting to teach “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff. The end of that story is just a refrain of “they is, they is, they is.” If I think about those two words, that whole story comes back to me. When I’m trying to write a story, I find the best part and make everything as good as that part. Make every sentence and every transition as alluring to you as the best run in the story. With a story, you can do that. It has to accomplish the emotional goal that you want the reader to walk away with, but other than that, you can do it in any form you want. Aspire to make it something that people can’t forget about.
BJC: What would you recommend to readers to read, if they haven’t already, or reread with a new perspective?
XJW: The final three stories in Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri. They’re linked and address each other. Maybe it’s because of our culture—I just watched Challengers and there’s also Past Lives—but there are a lot of love triangles in these stories too. They’re filled with information and the love triangles are intergenerational. All of the details are supplied for you but that feeling is still as intense even though nothing wild is happening, per se. The stories are worth reading for that intensity of the love triangles.
Sidik Fofana:Stories from the Tenants Downstairs is a collection of eight stories that takes place in a fictional high rise in Harlem. Each story is told from a resident in the building. Since all the stories take place in one building, I was thinking about books that occur in a building, a part of a city, or just any one geographical location, as well as multiple perspective narratives. One book that I still hold dear to my heart is A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Another is The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor. There’s a book called The Yacoubian Buildingby Alaa Al Aswany, which is basically Stories but in a building in Egypt. There’s also The Madonnas of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse and the ground zero of multiple perspectives set in one location: Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.
Brandon J. Choi: What stories, collections, or writers do you find yourself returning to?
SF: I’m a big Junot Diaz fan, so stories like “Fiesta, 1980” or “The Cheater’s Guide to Love.” I read “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” while writing my collection and I was in despair. I thought to myself, I quit! I’m stepping into this arena? Push by Sapphire was a book that definitely comes to mind. I also find myself coming back to Toni Cade Bambara. You could tell a lot about a writer’s process by the stories that they think about, the stories that they come back to, and why. I’m super fascinated by short stories and how short fiction can encapsulate a whole world. I’m even more fascinated by what happens after one finishes a short story. For the stories that I find myself coming back to, I can remember the beginning, middle, and end of it six or even twelve months after reading it. An example of that is “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff. It just resonates. There’s something so universal about capturing someone’s whole life in the moment.
If there’s a certain narrative issue that you’re trying to figure out, there’s always a short story for that. Just like hip hop where, no matter life’s problem, there’s always a song for that. I refer a lot to Flannery O’Conner and how she can navigate closed spaces, like in “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” I go back to it anytime that I have multiple characters in the same place who are interacting. George Saunders is a master of voice and humor so I go back to his work frequently too. It boils down to: what kind of narrative issue am I trying to figure out and what story helps me think through it?
BJC: How do you read your own work when writing and editing?
You could tell a lot about a writer’s process by the stories that they think about, the stories that they come back to, and why.
SF: For a first draft, I’ll just write it all the way through. I’m not willing to go back to the work from the day before and look. When I first started writing, I wanted to write as close to a perfect draft as possible. Now, I focus on just getting it down on the page. After that draft is done, I’ll go on to something else and try not to come back to that draft for six months or a year. The goal is, when I come back, I want the words to be totally strange like a different author wrote it. Preliminary edits are to cut as much as possible. While looking at the old draft, I’ll rewrite from scratch. If it works, then I barely remember that I’ve written these words and I’m more critical of them. I’ll go through that process until around draft five, which is usually when I feel okay showing it to other people. I compare it to going to the barbershop in the hood. You can’t go in with messed up hair. You realize you have to get your hair semi-together so they can get it all the way through. My draft is not going to be perfect but I’m getting it to a place where people can help it. From drafts five to ten, I either go back to the drawing board or take suggestions. Sometimes, I abandon them. Stories has eight stories but, during that time period, I must have written close to forty.
BJC: How has teaching affected your reading?
SF: The pros of teaching in a public school are remarkable. I am one book in and maybe the hype or attention is due to the fact that I’m new. If it does turn out that I have any staying power in this industry, I’m going to attribute it to being a public school teacher. At a prestigious university, the readers are willing readers, especially in a graduate school for creative writing. Everybody wants to read, be blown away by a text, and think about literature. In public school, that’s not always the case. As a matter of fact, it’s rarely the case. You mostly have reluctant readers. What I’ve learned is that when a text hits, I don’t care if you read at a third grade level. It hits. I always think, how or why does that happen?
What kind of narrative issue am I trying to figure out, and what story helps me think through it?
In public education, there’s this idea of universal design. If you have an access point for the lowest common denominator, not only does the lowest level of learner have access, but the highest has access too. For example, if you’re reading The Great Gatsby and people don’t understand the language, so you use the movie to help you out or have the kids act it out, that will help the kids who are not reading at as high of a level, but it will also help kids who do read at a high level because they’re exposed to different ways of accessing the text. Kids will react to “A&P” by John Updike and it’ll be kids who read at a third or fourth grade level, but this is also a story that was in The New Yorker. As an artist, you wonder how you can do that. As a teacher, rereading those texts and seeing every year how they resonate with kids is priceless. There’s “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid, “Thank You, Ma’am” by Langston Hughes, and “The Fix” by Percival Everett. For the most part, even if they hate reading, students love this stuff. Students love Junot Diaz. They think it’s against the rules, that his work is not supposed to be academic. For me, there’s complicated reasons for why I stay a teacher. I am here for the kids but that’s not the only reason. What I learn about fiction writing, audience, and how to connect with someone who’s not necessarily a reader is priceless. Going to those stories over and over again has been invaluable in ways that I can’t even enumerate.
BJC: What would you recommend to readers to read, if they haven’t already, or reread with a new perspective?
SF: Certain stories are anthologized over and over for good reason. I talked about Flannery O’Connor already. I also find myself coming back to “Old Boys, Old Girls” by Edward P. Jones, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie, “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” by George Saunders, and “People Like That Are the Only People Here” by Loorie Moore.
For more contemporary work: “Belles Lettres” by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, “We Love You, Crispina” by Jenny Zhang, “Shadow Families” by Mia Alvar, “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain” by Danielle Evans, “No More Than a Bubble” by Jamel Brinkley, “Peach Cobbler” by Deesha Philyaw, “Animals” by Uche Okonkwo, “Smash and Grab” by Michael Knight, and “Higher Power” Megan Cummins. In the next five years, I think someone is going to take on the task of doing a contemporary anthology, especially of writers of color. I can almost guarantee that some of these writers will be included.
An excerpt from Swallow the Ghost by Eugenie Montague
When Jane wakes up, her throat hurts. She reaches for the glass of water she keeps by the bed. The glass is solid and cold from the room, and it has made the water cold. It’s too harsh on her throat, which is raw and scratchy, and she wishes the water were a few degrees warmer. It is still dark outside, and cold, she knows. She can almost feel it from the color of the sky. She wants to skip her run, make coffee, sit on her bed, and read things on her phone until it’s time to go to work. The coffee will feel good on her throat, and the words on her phone will float upward with the touch of her finger. But she had woken up with the feeling that something was wrong, that she had done something wrong. She waits for the shame to loose its hold on her, to realize it belonged to some dream, but then she remembers, and the dread she perceived, which felt like a heavy but lifeless presence, transforms into something restless and grasping. In her dresser, she finds clothes warm enough to run in.
Outside, the air hits her lungs like she is breathing hand sanitizer. Jane runs fast, except she slows down around corners, because she has run into too many people, and it seems to her that her body remembers now even when she forgets, as if it retains somewhere inside it the memory of slamming hard into another person, the bloody knees and the guilt, picking someone up off the sidewalk with palms torn from concrete, too tender to close properly around the outstretched hand. Though as she rounds a corner to turn toward the river, both her mind and body forget, and she has to leap out of the way of a woman and her dog. The woman glares at her, the dog barks, and Jane says sorry and runs even faster so she can reach the jogging path.
Up ahead, she can see the guy with the green running shoes. They are the same brand as hers but newer, and she wonders if he actually buys things like sneakers and toothbrushes on the schedules they suggest, backs up his work, replaces the vacuum bag. Jane’s nose is running when she passes him. She sniffs at the wetness above her lip. Some days, she pretends not to notice him. Today, she smiles. Last week, the smile was more like a nod: I recognize you. Now it’s something different: Oh, hi. Oh, hi. She smiles, and then she can see FDR Drive, dull and loud. The cars are out in numbers before the people on the streets. She jogs in place until she can cross, and when she does, it feels like her run properly starts. She can hear the gentle lapping of the East River. The streetlamps are still on and make patterns on the water. The path is laid out before her, wide and gray.
At home, Jane straightens up her room, showers, and pulls a pair of sweater tights from her drawer. She tugs them over one foot and then the other. She has small feet, and the tights remind her of being a child, a memory assembled from pictures of herself as a toddler, mittens hanging from her coat, her mom holding her on her hip so Jane’s pinafore dress is hiked up and the tights are on full display. She almost remembers the feeling, crying as her mom put them on her, how scratchy they were. They don’t feel scratchy now. Jane has them in six different colors. She hangs them to dry so they will retain their shape longer, and after laundry day, the bookshelf in the corner of her room resembles the kind of tree Dr. Seuss might have thought up or the yarn-bombed fence surrounding a construction site she passes every day on her way to work. A neon weeping willow.
On the subway, she plays a word scramble, two geography puzzles, and then a mini-crossword, which she tries to finish before the train gets to her stop. When she makes it, she thinks it will be a better day than it was yesterday, that she will be better.
At work, the client team meets in the conference room with mugs of coffee and a plate of croissants and fruit, because one of their clients is here. The conference room is at the back of their mostly open office space, cordoned off from the rest with frosted-glass walls. There is a black metal table on a colorful Moroccan rug. The walls are blank so they can be projected on from any angle, except the wall facing the street, which has a series of large windows from which Jane can see brick, tree branches hitting the glass, a slice of sky, and more brick. She is nervous, so she looks at how the tree branches move with the wind.
Her boss likes to bring clients in periodically for presentations by the project leader. Much of what Jane does, if she does it right, should be invisible, so in these meetings, it is her job to show her work so the client can see it. The client group is twice as big as it was when Jane started, and her boss has asked the whole team to come in, as well as a few people from Creative. The fact that Tom has asked so many people to sit in is a compliment, though he hasn’t said that. He comes in after everyone is already seated, walking slowly through the door because he is reading something on his phone. He shakes the client’s hand, finds an open seat, and sits down. Jane tries to catch his eye because she is not sure if she is supposed to start or if he wants to say something, but he is cleaning his glasses, then leaning forward to grab a piece of fruit, then back on his phone.
“Jane, will you take everybody through it?” Tom asks, his mouth full of apple.
Jane smooths her skirt by rubbing her palms down her thighs three times, then she stands up, smiling. Her heels sink into the rug.
Their client is a young author named Jeremy who wrote a literary thriller on Twitter. All of the characters have different fake Twitter accounts, including Rita Hadzic (@ritahadzic), a twenty-one-year-old student at Hunter, though she has stopped tweeting since she went missing. Rita wanted to be an urban planner and was a nanny for a Brooklyn family when she wasn’t in class. She paid a monthly fee at Hunter to use the ceramic studio and posted pictures of her finished bowls and vases on her Instagram account, bowls and vases that are actually made by Jane’s friend Amelia. For four months starting at the end of 2018, Rita tweeted like a person addicted to Twitter—somewhere between twenty and forty times a day, more if she decided to live-tweet a TV show or a protest or discuss an article she was reading in school. As Rita tweeted, so did a number of other characters Jeremy created—an ex-boyfriend, the mother and father in the family Rita nannied for, friends from Hunter, a city council commissioner. Rather, Jeremy created most of the characters, but as Jeremy and Jane met to discuss how to make them come alive on Twitter, they changed slightly—or sometimes a lot—as Jane brought up the possibilities and limitations of the platform. Jeremy knew who the characters were and what he wanted to happen in the investigation, but Jane was the one who knew how to use their tweeting habits as characterization: who would retweet what, who would engage with trolls, who would apologize and who would double down. And so the characters they’d invented tweeted and retweeted and followed and unfollowed—each other, but also real people. They had opinions about current events; they piled on where it would be appropriate to pile on; they made jokes that didn’t come off and deleted them. Then, when Jeremy and Jane were sure they had sufficient material for the coming investigation, Jane used her background in social media marketing to make Rita go viral, and they disappeared her.
Rita’s followers have grown by thousands since she disappeared; her final post, a picture of a blue ceramic bowl with the caption Big news soon. Watch this space! The follower counts for the rest of the characters who populate her world have likewise continued to grow exponentially. They, of course, have continued to tweet—looking for her, mourning her, writing earnest and mostly ill-advised threads in the middle of the night that are “accidentally” self-incriminating. Or incriminating of someone else. Joshua—Jeremy’s alter ego, a writer figure who stumbled across the Rita mystery researching something for his own novel—continues to document his findings: interviews he conducts with campus security guards, live-tweets of stakeouts he undertakes where he follows whoever is at the top of his suspect list at the moment, successful attempts to trick the police into showing him witness statements. Every once in a while, he uploads blurry photographs of someone he believes might be Rita riding her bike but who is actually Jane’s friend Amelia.
It was Jane’s idea, the Twitter mystery. Jeremy had come to them looking to increase his follower count before sending out his recently finished manuscript, a book he planned to pitch to agents as a novel of ideas that utilized and subverted the tropes of detective fiction. Her boss often shakes his head at her when they walk by each other in the office. She loves working with Jeremy. They both sign their emails J, and it does feel like that, that the project is theirs, impossible without the two of them, so dependent on both their labor that it would be difficult to separate her contribution from his. Sometimes she feels like she has disappeared into his project, but not in a way that feels deficient. Like they both know exactly what they are good at and slotted into each other like pieces of IKEA furniture. The bespoke tool made for their particular product is the internet.
Jane walks the team through the various Reddits and subreddits dedicated to Jeremy’s mystery; a writer from BuzzFeed who has started collecting relevant Twitter threads; an article on Medium analyzing the various leads; biographical sketches of the suspects. Even some fan fiction. Mutually beneficial, Jane tells the group. Keeping in line with the dead and absented author. Some of what Jane tells the group about, she made happen—reached out to journalists she knew, @ed the right people, created the first meme off a cringey tweet posted by one of the characters (the father in the family Rita used to nanny for, an unfortunate “tribute” to Rita that Jane wrote deliberately, making sure it was cringey enough to meme). Then she watched it multiply, sucking in a larger and larger audience—some of whom would never understand that a fictional character was the original source material but a significant amount who did or who went back to find out what the original said and why and got caught up in the mystery. But some of what Jane shares with the group has happened without her doing anything at all. More and more each day, it has a life of its own.
Some of what Jane tells the group about, she made happen—reached out to journalists she knew, @ed the right people, created the first meme off a cringey tweet posted by one of the characters.
After the meeting, a smaller group decides to go to lunch across the street at Mika’s and they all drink wine. Jane is lightheaded after her salad. Jeremy is smart; he didn’t have an agent for his book before he hired them. His first book was published in a contest run by a respected indie publisher, a slim novel that centered on a man whose wife went missing and where the primary action consisted mostly of the man wandering through his house, thinking about things. It was experimental, received critical praise from the small indie reviewers who covered it, and sold two hundred copies. He was paid one thousand dollars. When he finished another book, he came to Stile looking for a way to increase his follower count before he sent it to agents. Now agents are contacting him. He fingers Jane in the bathroom, her sweater tights pulled down to her ankles. She had wondered if he was flirting with her. Sometimes she reread his emails, trying to discern what kind of energy was in them. In the past week, they talked on the phone before bed almost every night, but she hadn’t been sure until today. When they are done, she makes him leave before she pulls her tights up so he doesn’t see her yank them up to her breasts, the reverse karate chop necessary to move the crotch back up between her legs. She fixes the ribbing that snakes around her calves, lines straight down her shins into ankle boots with uneven soles.
After lunch, she works, scrolling through various feeds, tracking analytics, editing tweets, uploading Instagram stories, following links, changing her music, texting with Jeremy—which makes her feel pointed and alive until around three, when he stops writing her back. She reads through the Twitter account of a young Vulture reporter, scrolls through Instagram, reads a profile of an actress she likes written by a profiler she likes. There is threat all around her.
At four, Kaya comes for her, and they put on their coats and gloves and walk to get coffee. Usually, she and Kaya talk about work on their walk, but today they talk about Jeremy. Jane can’t look at her.
“What?” Kaya screeches as something hot bursts at the back of Jane’s throat. “Jeremy fingerbanged you while I had to listen to Tom explain how to grow basil? He and his wife are trying to make the perfect tomato sauce or something.” Kaya shakes her head, laughing. “That bathroom has seen a lot of action,” she continues, because Kaya is sleeping with one of the waiters there. The restaurant is across the street from their office and when Billy works the lunch shift, Kaya goes over to see him. Sometimes when Jane is in the bathroom looking at herself in the mirror, she imagines she sees Kaya’s back in the reflection, Billy’s determined face over her shoulder. When she orders from him now, she looks just to the right of him.
Kaya is staring at her, and Jane knows she is imagining Jeremy’s finger inside her. Kaya is always coming to her desk and asking questions like “Do you think Tom has sex with his wife in the shower?” and other things Jane doesn’t want to think about. It is because of this, and because of the fact that Jeremy stopped texting her, that Jane hadn’t planned to tell Kaya about what happened. But she couldn’t help it. With every passing moment, it became more uncomfortable to keep inside her. Both unreal and painful. A dream that hurt. When Kaya came to get her, she barely got into the street before it all came tumbling out of her, a relief, the words hot and streaming. Her breath makes her scarf wet where she’d wrapped it around her mouth.
Now Kaya is scrolling through Jane and Jeremy’s text exchange, her glove hanging from her mouth from when she tugged it off with her teeth.
“No, you’re good,” she says, handing Jane her phone back. “Just make sure to be the one who goes dark first next time.”
“But what if there isn’t a next time?”
“There will be.”
Kaya is dismissively confident. It’s Jane’s favorite kind of confident. She allows it to seep into her.
At the coffee shop, Kaya laughs with the baristas, a skateboarder with gauges in his earlobes and a slight female drummer who wears platform high-tops. Kaya is funny; Jane always goes to her when she needs to use humor for a client. Jane has spent years trying to understand humor. What happens when we laugh? How does humor make us trust people online and in real life? What is funny? People tell Jane she is funny too sometimes, but it makes her nervous that she can’t pinpoint the source of it, the same way she can never tell why men want to kiss her. It feels scary to have important things like that both inside her and also completely out of her control.
Kaya and Jane live in the same neighborhood and they often walk home from work together, reach Jane’s block, and keep going.
“I have to go to the pharmacy,” Kaya will say, “do you want to come?” and they’ll turn away from Jane’s apartment, run errands, grab dinner, take Kaya’s dog to the dog park, suit up for a run or a yoga class until it is past dark. Jane has spent full Saturdays at Kaya’s, the sky darkening outside the window, their positions changing on the couch, sweaters added or discarded. A surprising absence of memories; hours, days, where she has retained nothing but the sense of a surprised laugh warming her chest on the way out—or the sense she is about to say something funny, the knowledge of it shaping her mouth, altering the tone of her voice, the satisfaction of Kaya’s laughter, the whole body of joy of it, like hot summer nights with no rain, only lightning.
Kaya pays for their coffees and says something to the drummer that makes the young woman laugh. Kaya can do it with anyone, but Jane can do it comfortably only with Kaya. Jane makes Jeremy laugh too, but she feels nervous.
The rest of the workday is marked by waiting for a text she does not expect to come. Still, every few minutes, she notices the absence of it. She switches screens back to her computer. She wants to create a Tumblr for Rita, the presumably murdered college senior at the center of Jeremy’s Twitter mystery. It’s supposed to be her old Tumblr, something she stopped using in high school. Jane’s experimenting with another Tumblr now—song lyrics scrawled across pictures of empty subway stations—backdating posts versus manipulating the HTML code to hide when the posts were uploaded, both of which Tom had just taught her to do. She sends various versions to him to see if he can find the date anywhere using web browsers or applications.
Rita’s about to reveal her teenage self as a soulbonder. Jane had needed to explain the concept to Jeremy, but he’d immediately gravitated to it.
“So they think they’re a fictional character?” he’d asked.
“No, it’s more an intense bond with a fictional character to the point where they exist in your own head,” she told him. “That thing that happens when you’re a kid reading books but times a million so you think they were written for you, exist inside you.”
“Like multiple personalities?”
“No. The character is still the character, and they have their own life, but they also exist in your head. Or some people believe there’s a soulscape where your soul and theirs meet, but it feels like it’s in your head. Plus soulbonds don’t front, for the most part.”
“Front?”
“A multiple personality fronts—becomes dominant. Soulbonds don’t do things like that.”
“And how do they meet? Why do they bond?”
“Well, they meet in fiction. And it can get a little convoluted after that. Some people believe it’s essentially just a soulmate situation. Some SBs believe it’s related to the multiverse—where, of all the possible worlds, there is one world where the fictional character exists and lives the life they lived in the book. There’s something about reading that opens the portal between the worlds—possibly because to write the book in the first place, someone from this world had access to that world. Somehow.”
“SBs?”
“Soulbonders. It was a Tumblr thing. I guess you were never on Tumblr?”
“No.”
“So you hate it?”
“No.”
“Really?” The relief she felt was palpable, troubling. “I thought it worked on a few levels, because there’s all these people identifying with Rita—who’s not real—and she does the same thing, so there’s a sense of unreality/reality all the way down.”
“It’s perfect,” he said. “There’s also this concept of the double in mysteries.”
“Why?”
“Because we can only see what we are.”
“So you really like it?”
“No, I love it,” he said. “And this is a real thing that people believe in?” “Yeah. Well, some people. Mostly on Tumblr.”
“What about you? Do you have one?”
“No. I just like to eavesdrop on people on the internet. They’ll tell you anything.”
“So, then, is the bond part of them or something they want to fuck?”
“It’s unclear. Both, either. It can be a romantic interest or a part of yourself you’re too scared to express. Sometimes, it’s more like a guardian angel.”
“Amazing.”
It was the first time they’d texted all night, sending possibilities for Rita’s soulbond back and forth, watching snippets of movies, quoting from books they’d loved as teenagers.
When Jane got home that night, Jeremy followed up with texts full of links. He’d been on a deep dive into the soulbond universe and had some questions. It was the first time they’d texted all night, sending possibilities for Rita’s soulbond back and forth, watching snippets of movies, quoting from books they’d loved as teenagers. She came to work bleary-eyed and ecstatic.
At the end of the day, Kaya gets her for yoga. Amanda is teaching, and they love Amanda. She is less earnest than the other teachers, and her classes are hard, but she never seems like she is trying to make people fail, which they both agree Leslie does. Jane has fallen on her face in Leslie’s class, her arms buckling after the nine hundredth chaturanga. In Amanda’s class, Jane’s arm balances have gotten longer and steadier. Most days, she’s sure she’s never experienced progress like this before in her life.
During savasana, the sweat chills on Jane’s body. She feels rooted to the floor. Amanda comes by and pulls gently on all her limbs like she is trying to make her a little bit taller. Kaya is asleep, snoring lightly. Jane is not asleep, but still, when Amanda begins speaking again to guide them through the end of class, she feels as if she is pulling herself up from under something heavy.
They eat at the Whole Foods salad bar with their yoga mats rolled up by their feet. Kaya buys a small bag of Mexican wedding cookies and eats them with one leg pulled up on her chair, powdered sugar on her fingers.
A couple from their yoga class is wandering the aisles. They plan their meals for the week and grocery shop according to this menu. Jane and Kaya have seen them do this after Amanda’s class for the past six months. They are reading the ingredients on a bottle of salad dressing.
“How often do you think they have sex?” Kaya asks.
“God. Why do you do this?”
“How do you not do this? I picture people having sex within the first minute of meeting them.”
“That is not normal.”
“He seems like the kind of guy who would make sex all about flexibility.
Like, ‘Let’s see how far we can bend each other.’”
“He is pretty flexible,” Jane concedes as the images populate her mind.
“Fuck. I’m never going to be able to unsee this now.”
“It makes class go by faster,” Kaya says. She pushes her cookies across the table at Jane. “Please, eat the rest. I’ve already eaten three.”
Jane peeks in the small paper bag at the remaining cookies. “I’m full.” “Well, take them for later, at least. I can’t take them or I’ll eat them.” “Okay, sure.”
It’s almost ten by the time they get to their neighborhood, but Jane doesn’t really feel like going home, so she sits on the stairs of Kaya’s building while Kaya gets her dog, and then they walk around the block together. Kaya’s dog is strong, barrel-chested. He yanks Kaya toward cracks in the sidewalk, tree stumps, cockroaches, feral cats. A rat crosses their path, running nimbly over the broken sidewalk. He disappears somewhere near the stairs of a brownstone.
“Randy,” Kaya says, nodding at the rat’s retreating back.
“And a good evening to you, sir,” Jane adds. “Give our best to your family.” At home, Jane showers and puts on an extra-large hooded sweatshirt that makes her feel like she is disappearing. Jeremy has not texted her, but he has sent her an email about work, drafts of some possible tweets, an outline of upcoming plot points. Regular tone. No signaling about the bathroom except for the final line: Hope you were able to get some work done after all that wine. I basically passed out—J.
She smiles, relieved that he has alluded to it at all and then a little elated, because if he passed out, that could explain why he suddenly stopped writing her back. But the more she rereads it, she wonders if it’s meant to imply that he was very drunk, and what happened was the result of that drunkenness and not anything else, like mutual attraction. Wonders also whether he is giving her the opportunity to cosign this interpretation so they can move on, egos intact, without the need to talk about it ever again. She forwards the email to Kaya with a question mark, then clips her nails as she waits for her to write back, but she doesn’t. Jane puts the clippers away, washes her hands in the bathroom, searches for Kaya’s leftover cookies in her purse, and eats them while composing her response. She licks the sugar off her fingers and rubs them on her arm to dry them before typing.
Me too, she writes, and includes a GIF of Nicolas Cage loading bottles into a shopping cart. Then she reads what he has sent her and starts editing. When they began, after Jane pitched Jeremy the idea of the Twitter mystery, he would go home and write it, consulting with her occasionally about how it could be accomplished online. Slowly that had changed, because Jeremy didn’t really understand the internet—he just knew he needed it. They met once in the beginning to discuss ideas for how they could position the ex-boyfriend as a suspect—what Jeremy had planned for him and what they could do before and after Rita went missing to lay the proper foundation. Jeremy came to the meeting with some cryptic tweets the ex-boyfriend could post as well as a list of incriminating information his alter ego, Joshua, would discover after Rita disappeared (it looked like he was reading her emails; some indications he was cheating on her before they broke up; explosive fights described by a witness; a temper—maybe they could upload a photo of Rita’s cracked phone and somehow insinuate he had done that). Jane told him these all sounded like good ideas but suggested another possibility: They could upload a picture the boyfriend took at a concert and post it some night before Rita disappeared. On the same night, they would upload a picture of the same concert from a similar angle—under the account of one of Rita’s best friends. Rita’s tweets from that night, meanwhile, would show she was at the library. Jeremy didn’t see the point but agreed Jane could do it, so she and Kaya went to see Billy’s band play and Jane took a hundred pictures on her phone. When she got home, she deliberated for hours about which two to use and how to crop them. After Rita went missing, Jane used another fake Twitter account they had created to “notice” the angle of the two photographs they’d posted months earlier; thousands of people argued online for three days about whether you could tell from the pictures if Rita’s ex and Rita’s best friend had been at the concert together.
Now Jeremy talks to her about everything he is thinking, sends her whatever he writes, and she figures out how to make it move on Twitter, tweaking the language so it fits the medium, retweeting real tweets that she thinks the characters would retweet, commenting on posts, responding when people @ them. Jeremy does this too, but Jane does far more of it than she did in the beginning because Jeremy didn’t understand how much energy was needed to make each of the characters a presence, what it took to be real and coherent in a place like Twitter. So slowly, without it ever really being discussed, it became more of a collaboration. Or like a director and cinematographer, him telling her what shots he wanted, Jane the one with the camera making it happen. She feels indispensable.
She goes to the kitchen and finds a bag of pretzels and brings them back into her room after extricating herself from a conversation with one of her roommates by pleading work. She reads the replies to her various posts, chooses particularly funny or emphatic ones to amplify. She opens a document on her computer and begins a list to show her colleagues at check-in tomorrow: teenage girls and their videos, a meme based on the detective figure, a website that simply tracks the minutes since Rita’s last post, a gushing stan tweet from a mildly famous Hollywood actor asking if he can play Joshua in the movie. The pretzels feel a little bland, a little empty. She watches the likes accumulate on the Hollywood actor’s post and wonders if she has any cream cheese. She does, and that makes the pretzels feel more substantial but saltier, and suddenly she is craving something sweet to break through. She has some peanut butter and, she thinks, maybe some chocolate chips, but she can hear, now, both her roommates, and she does not want to talk to them or take food in front of them. She searches her room, but all she finds is an old pack of Halls that tastes like Listerine. She sucks on one until she hears the voices die outside her door.
In the kitchen, she leaves the water running as she rummages in her drawer, locates the peanut butter, the chocolate chips. Because she doesn’t want to have to come back out and risk seeing her roommates, she also takes a knife and four pieces of bread from the refrigerator. She wishes she had something more sugary than chocolate chips, something where chocolate was just one element of the sweetness. Briefly, she considers running to the store, but she knows she has to respond to the Hollywood actor. She brings the food and her laptop back to her bed, creates a little spread on her comforter. She sucks the peanut butter off the knife, wipes the crumbs off her hands, and writes from one of the accounts she’s been using for the project.
@ChrisOke I’d see that movie. How about @edithdellman for Rita?
She waits. Edith Dellman has a substantial fan base and a public crush on Chris Oke. Also, she’d just retweeted something. Jane felt struck by inspiration when she thought of her, how Newton must have felt when he understood gravity, like he could perceive a blue-tinted schematic overlaying a force that nobody could see but everyone felt. Pressing down on them.
Time on the internet was excruciating. Too fast. A complete standstill. Forever. It has been seconds since she tagged Edith Dellman, but Jane feels like she might run out of breath soon. Peanut butter stuck in a tooth. She digs at it with her tongue.
Thirty minutes later, Edith Dellman replies: Omg @ChrisOke, what is this? Where is @ritahadzic? Her fans start retweeting. The traffic to @joshtweeting spikes. Chris Oke responds to Edith Dellman, and Jane thinks she might faint. She texts Kaya: Omg I made a ship. Please help. Kaya doesn’t respond. Jane adds the new developments to her document for the check-in and sends the thread to Jeremy—not in a text, the way she probably would have done it the night before, but in an email. She regrets it immediately.
He writes her back: !!
Jane feels the adrenaline draining out of her. Time returns to normal, the pointed quality to each second flattening out so there is no distinction between one moment and the next. Her ears are ringing slightly, like she’s been at a loud concert. Her computer whirs audibly and is hot to the touch. Her bed is covered in crumbs. There’s a typo in her last post. She’s retweeted someone who, she sees now, tweets frequently about how his ex-girlfriend is a fucking bitch. Jane goes into the bathroom and turns on the shower. She thinks, as she often does, her head over the toilet, her finger touching the back of her throat, that she doesn’t really have the right personality for her job. It all happens too fast. She never has any time to think about things except when it’s all done and irreversible and all she can do is see—over and over—everything she’s done wrong.
When Jane wakes up, her throat hurts. She reaches for the glass of water she keeps by the bed. The glass is solid and cold from the room, and it has made the water cold. It’s too harsh on her throat, which is raw and scratchy, and she wishes the water were a few degrees warmer. It is still dark outside, and cold, she knows. She can almost feel it from the color of the sky. She wants to skip her run, make coffee, sit on her bed, and read things on her phone until it’s time to go to work. The coffee will feel good on her throat, and the words on her phone will float upward with the touch of her finger. But she had woken up with the feeling that something was wrong, that she had done something wrong. She waits for the shame to loose its hold on her, to realize it belonged to some dream, but then she remembers, and the dread she perceived, which felt like a heavy but lifeless presence, transforms into something restless and grasping. In her dresser, she finds clothes warm enough to run in.
Ghosts and spirits have a heavy presence in Jewish folklore, from Talmudic ghost-summoning rituals to Yiddish folk stories passed down through generations. There’s a touch of magic in those tales, always with the very Jewish common denominator that the unexplainable doesn’t need to be explained, that the mysterious doesn’t need to be solved.
When I tell people that the earliest drafts of Rules for Ghostingdidn’t include any Jewish elements, I tend to get a lot of baffled looks in return. I understand why—the Jewishness of the story in its current form has made it the book that it is, and looking back at those initial outlines, the book is almost unrecognizable. It was a Jewish funeral that clicked that final missing puzzle piece into place, and the weight of grief, history, and community in the room that made me understand that whether or not you believe in ghosts, they have a presence all the same.
Judaism is about asking questions and fighting over the possible answers, and in Rules for Ghosting, there is, intentionally, no explanation given for why Ezra can see ghosts. In fact, his attempts to bring logic and order to the mystical, only show that while rules and limits might be a comfort, they don’t actually contain the uncontainable.
One of my favorite quotes about Judaism is that there are twice as many ways to be Jewish as there are Jews in the world, and in reading and researching Jewish folklore and ghost stories, I think I’ve determined that the same rule applies to Jewish novels as well. Jewish myths and legends lend themselves to an infinite number of possibilities for storytelling, and the addition of queerness to those narratives only adds to the potential for new exploration and depth. The books on this list are just a small sampling of the ways Jewish folklore—and all its related themes, griefs, and legacies—can take the stories we think we know and make them new again.
Imagine Good Omens, but a thousand times more Jewish, and with its central angel and demon characters focused on the simple task of helping one person, rather than thwarting the apocalypse. Lamb’s novel follows Uriel, an angel, and Little Ash (short for Ashmedai), a demon, who have been studying together in their tiny shtetl for centuries. When a young girl from their shtetl goes missing in America, Uriel and Little Ash set off to follow her. Along the way, they befriend Rose Cohen, a scrappy young lesbian still bristling from her best friend’s unexpected marriage, help the ghost of a rabbi find his daughter in America so that she can formally mourn him and prevent him from becoming a dybbuk, join a labor union, and stop a corrupt local factory owner. With elements of historical fiction, Jewish folklore, and explorations of what it means to be a person, Lamb has taken a traditional immigrant story, added a twist of fantasy, and created a gorgeous meditation on love, community, and identity.
This rich, immersive, deeply queer story spans four generations of Eastern European Jewish women, linked together in a chain of secrecy, trauma, curses, and family lore. With a nonlinear structure and multiple points of view, the plot begins with Shiva, a newly out queer Modern Orthodox Jew, mourning her father and attempting to repair her fractured relationship with her mother. Coming back again and again to S. Dansky’s The Dybbuk, a play she first watched with her father, Shiva enrolls in graduate school determined to explore the Jewish folklore as a connection to her family’s past, and ends up opening a door to a queer community that spans generations. Fruchter writes with a mix of academic expertise and almost dreamlike intimacy, bringing in meticulous research and a joyful engagement with queerness—past, present, and future.
Hunger sits at the core of this 2019 novel—the hunger of desire, the hunger for intimacy, the hunger for acceptance, the hunger for a sense of a fulfilled self. Rachel, the main character, is a calorie-obsessed secular Jewish woman who finds herself fascinated with fat, frum Miriam, who works at her family’s frozen yogurt shop and refuses to accept Rachel’s insistence on only plain yogurt with no toppings. A therapy exercise resulting in a clay sculpture that Rachel decides is both a golem and a symbol for Miriam and all she represents leads to Rachel exploring Jewish mysticism and dreaming of Rabbi Judah Leow ben Bezazel, talking about divinity, desire, and the mitzvah of a good snack. Broder’s writing is at once irreverent and compassionate, and paints a portrait of yearning that makes every page glow.
A more traditional fantasy, this debut is richly grounded in Eastern European Jewish mysticism and immersive from the first word until the how dare you, actually cliffhanger of the final page. Following Dmitri, the fallen tsar of Novo-Svitsevo, as he plots to retake his throne from his husband Alexey, who has used what he calls the Holy Science to make himself an unstoppable immortal. The Sins on Their Bones takes all of the elements of a brilliant fantasy—high stakes, meticulous worldbuilding, and incredible characters—and adds a deeply human element that refuses to shy away from trauma, abuse, and the ways that religion can be both a comforting balm and a twisted path to violence. Samotin’s knowledge of Jewish folklore infuses every page, blending recognizable prayers and rituals with obscure demonology and mystical traditions. I might be biased, but if The Sins on Their Bones launches a new genre of Jewish-inspired queer fantasy, I will be a happy reader indeed.
I couldn’t write this list without including another brilliant Jewish ghost story. Depart, Depart! seamlessly blends commentaries on social justice and climate change with meditations on community, identity, trauma, and sacrifice. The novella’s main character, Noah Mishner, finds himself seeking shelter in the Dallas Mavericks’ arena after a massive hurricane devastates the city of Houston. He finds a collection of other queer refugees, but fears that as conditions in the shelter deteriorate, his safety as a trans Jewish man will put him at risk—and that anxiety only builds as he starts to see visions of his great-grandfather, Abe, who fled Nazi Germany as a young boy. Depart, Depart! is deeply timely, forces the reader to dig into hard questions about who we are and what we value, and offers a profound hope for what becomes possible when we focus on connection, not despair.
Elements of family and legacy are an inextricable part of any Jewish story, mystical or not, and From Dust, A Flame is no exception to the rule. Like City of Laughter, this novel explores self-discovery and the intergenerational impact of unresolved trauma; unlike City of Laughter, From Dust, A Flame brings a more literal transformation and physical manifestations of those family traumas. Hannah, the main character, follows a path of Jewish ancestry, legends, and family histories, as Podos seamlessly weaves themes of religion, bodily autonomy, gender identity, and queer desire. The elements of Jewish folklore add new dimension to some classic YA fantasy tropes, with a side of sweet romance and an emerging clarity of self not just for Hannah, but for the reader, as well. (Yes, I cried. So will you.)
The Dyke and the Dybbuk by Ellen Galford
A road trip novel with a queer Jewish twist—what more could you want? The Dyke and the Dybbuk is something of a cult classic, and might be one of the first great pieces of sapphic Jewish fantasy. An imprisoned demon breaks out of confinement to hunt down the descendant of a woman she was instructed to haunt nine generations ago, who happens to be a lesbian taxi driver in London. The choice to make Kokos, the titular dybbuk, the narrator of the story brings a wicked, irreverent edge to the story, which is as much a love letter to 90s lesbian culture as it is to Jewish folklore and ancestry. Galford explores humanity, queerness, and kinship with tenderness and humor, and has some of the most authentic Jewish family—born and found—that I’ve ever read.
Though they’ve been icons of cinema for a while—see: Sadako, Shutter—it’s taken English literature a little longer to catch up to Asian women front and centre in stories of ghosts and horror.
The prevalence of female ghosts across Asia has always interested me: how often their origin is rooted in concepts of failed femininity and spoiled maternity; how they simultaneously embody marginalisation, fearsome empowerment, and freedom from restrictive gender norms. Multiple female artists in Singapore and Malaysia, for example, have resonated with complex and sympathetic takes on the vampiric pontianak.
On the flipside, the marginality of living women in both Asia and diaspora has produced social works and ingrained trauma in which darkness begins from systemic roots. More often than not, female Asian horror is explicitly intersectional, especially from the dimension of queer writers.
In my novel The Dark We Know, Chinese American art student Isadora Chang returns to her secluded hometown in the mountains for the funeral of her abusive father. But her return forces her to reckon with everything she’s been holding at bay: her tense relationship with her silent, cooped-up mother and their haunted house; the sudden suicides of two of her friends and the reunion with the third friend that she left behind; the religious community she removed herself from; the nightmarish drawings she doesn’t remember making, and a supernatural entity that takes the town’s children. Still, it’s a novel about healing as much as haunting, and demanding the right to survive.
These are some books about haunted Asian girls and women. There are ghosts and terrible visions in the literal sense, but hauntings underlie spectres of other kinds: violent patriarchy, colonialism, racism, fraught families, grief, and unresolved injustices. After all, these things create ghosts in themselves.
In Han Kang’s Booker-winning novel, a Korean woman is so possessed by nightmares of butchery that she disavows eating meat and aspires to become more ‘plant-like’—a decision that puts her at increasingly violent odds with the patriarchal, tightly conformist social mores around her. A dark, surreal book about carnivorism, patriarchy, abuse, and female autonomy, The Vegetarian is a book my mind goes back to time and time again.
Closeted bisexual Jade Nguyen reluctantly heads to Vietnam for the first time to spend the summer with her estranged father and the old French manor he’s renovating into a bed-and-breakfast. But though the manor is verdant and seemingly idyllic, Jade’s relationship with her father and Vietnam are fraught. There’s a beautiful, wickedly sharp girl she’s starting to fall for. A ghost bride is telling her not to eat, and the Flower House is haunted by colonial histories and bloodshed that stain it far beyond the Nguyens’ family troubles. The desires of the house, the ghosts, and Jade herself are lush and hungry.
In another sapphic gothic, the daughters of a trailblazing Chinese Hollywood starlet gather ather sprawling mansion for the reading of her will, only for another estranged family to be gifted the inheritance. However, both families soon find that the manor is also inhabited by something else entirely. Told in dual timelines and spanning three generations, Li’s tense and dreamy adult debut follows roots through toxic ambition, grief, and the curse of the American Dream.
When their abusive father dies in the age of the Wild West, leaving them penniless orphans, two young Chinese sisters set out with his body on a horse and journey through the frontier searching for a place to bury him. The book itself reads like traveling a strange, inhospitable expanse studded with skeletons and stories of tigers and dragons. An immigrant family tragedy in the dust of the Gold Rush; How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a less traditional haunting, but haunted nonetheless.
Malaysian American Jess goes back to her grandmother’s home in Penang, accompanied by the ghost of her grandmother both questioning her about being a lesbian and sending her on a quest to settle a score. Unfortunately, Ah Ma had her own baggage: she was the medium of a vengeful deity called the Black Water Sister, who now has her eyes on Jess. The book enters the uniquely Malaysian Chinese world of gods, ghosts, gangs, and family. Cho’s work is always fantastical, witty, and heartfelt, even with the edge of darkness; as a Singaporean, this was a haunting of the home kind.
Another Malaysian novel, in which an elite all-girls’ boarding school is struck with a sudden wave of screaming hysteria. Two girls find themselves digging into the school’s history searching for the truth, unaware that something still lurks in the darkness. Alkaf explores mental health, trauma, healing, and the image of a school of perfect girls that isn’t so perfect anymore.
A richly atmospheric historical mystery in Jeju Island, Korea: Hwani returns to her home village to investigate the disappearance of her father in the forest that has also taken thirteen pretty girls, and where Hwani and her sister were once found near a dead body. There are whispers of a man in a white mask in the trees, and Hwani and her estranged shaman sister will need to uncover buried memories in order to find the truth.
It’s Hungry Ghost Month, and the gates to hell are open in New York’s Chinatown. Crime scene cleaner Cora Zeng is already traumatised by the murder of her sister, who was pushed in front of a train by a man shouting bat eater. She’s also haunted by inexplicable bite marks, germs, strangers’ hands, and the bat carcasses she keeps finding at crime scenes–murder scenes of East Asian women. With her debut horror, Lee Baker takes a subversive and reckoning knife to anti-Asian violence in America.
In Monika Kim’s debut, a Korean American college student becomes obsessed with eyes. Specifically, blue eyes. She sees them in her dreams. She sees them around campus. She sees them in the head of her mother’s horrible new Asian-fever white boyfriend, and imagines how they would crunch between her teeth. Cannibalism and coming-of-age cross sharply and deliciously with themes of sexism and fetishisation. In this one, she’s the killer.
Contemporary literature is one of those four-dimensional things that seem to expand whenever you take a closer look. No one really knows more than a corner of it, perhaps a very large one, but a corner nevertheless. This quality, this mercuriality, of literature makes it more endless than any ocean, more filled with uncharted islands and icebergs. Among literature’s many beautiful qualities is the fact that, for each of us, the map of what it is will always be different. That’s the reason we talk about it so much. For some, contemporary literature is Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. For others, James Joyce and T.S. Elliot are the be all, end all of the written word. Evidently, for the 2016 Nobel Prize committee, Bob Dylan was the pinnacle of contemporary literature. For most of us, these are all ridiculous statements.
In the vast, wild territory of the written word, publishing houses step in, identify individual authors, bundle them into categories and groups that often cut across easy identifiers, and make a public statement about what’s worth reading. Each press presents an opinion on what contemporary literature is, or should be. Every publication (ideally) moves the dial—sometimes a smidgen, sometimes a whole degree or two—making space for new voices and perspectives, drawing attention to ideas, and re-forming the literary maps of readers.
At least, this is what I hope for when I look to a new indie publisher—the most gratifying moments in my literary life are those that draw my attention to categories I hadn’t known existed. Moments that reveal whole continents of writing that weren’t on my radar. If you close your eyes and think about it, discovering a serious indie publisher might just be similar to catching sight of land while out at sea. It’s exciting, bracing, and full of untested possibilities.
This list, paired with recommendations on what to read, is designed to elicit such moments. These 7 international publishers make space so that writers from all over the cultural, geographical, and linguistic map can exist in English. Take a look, they’re sure to leave a blip on your literary map.
Based in London, Tilted Axis has an expansive vision that only seems to grow larger with every passing year. They promote the Global Majority, releasing literature that’s been “translated into or written in a variety of Englishes,” which, practically speaking, means that you’ll find Bengali, Chinese, Assamese, Armenian, Telugu, Kazakh, and countless other literatures represented in their list—it’s not uncommon for each of the six to nine titles they release in any given year to hail from a different part of the globe. Pair this relentless effort to broaden the literary horizons of English readers with a nose for beauty, wit, and experimentation, that’s Tilted Axis…But don’t take my word for it, read:
These are tales from the rainforest—more than that, these are stories informed by the decades of guerrilla warfare that rent the borderlands between Malaysia and Thailand. Hai Fan spent 13 years in those jungles as a Malayan Communist Party soldier, and his experiences are distilled into dark, absurd, humorous gems that fill this collection.
A mind bending archeology of genres and histories from one of Vietnam’s most prolific novelists, Elevator in Sài Gòn follows a Vietnamese expat’s return from Paris to Sài Gòn for her mother’s funeral. The mother’s death is an odd one—she fell down the elevator shaft in her son’s new home, which just so happens to be the first private elevator in all of Vietnam. More strange facts emerge and the daughter finds herself tracking down strangers and loose strands of family history, synthesizing the detective, the archivist, and the mourning daughter into one, fascinating role along the way.
In a world where ordinary services are being transformed into subscriptions and tailor-made experiences left and right, Unbound’s innovation feels inevitable. It calls itself a crowd-funding publisher—combining the freedom and adaptability of self-publishing with the expertise and discernment of a traditional publisher. “How does that work,” you ask? Well, like a traditional publisher, their titles are curated. But, before any of the production business gets underway, every book is listed on their website and has its own, individual fundraiser. Anyone can donate to the cause of seeing that particular book make it into the world and, in exchange, receive gifts that range from a signed copy of the yet-to-be-produced title to quirky merch and your name printed at the end of the book. Production only starts after a book gets fully crowd-funded, and if the funding doesn’t come, the book doesn’t get made either. It’s that simple. At this moment, Unbound has 31 titles in the crowdfunding stage, just go to their website to see a live count of how close a title is from getting made, and, if you want, contribute.
The fiction debut from a queer, Filipino author, this is a long-distance love story. Playing out between New York and Tokyo, two young men steeped in the modern ethos of intercontinental relationships and short term arrangements try to turn a passing affair into something more substantial. It’s a story of setting personal boundaries and then tossing them to the wind, of finding one’s own definition of love through heart wrenching trials and errors.
A museum professional and tour guide who pays special attention to uncovering marginalized narratives and voices in major institutions, Coward’s debut explores queer culture’s long unsung myths, fairy tales, and stories. Running the geohistorical gamut from Ancient Greeks to pirates to RuPaul, this is a deep dive into objects, images, and ideas that have been transformed over decades and centuries into touchstones of the LGBTQ+ community.
In little more than a decade, Tramp Press, one of Ireland’s only women-founded publishing houses, has garnered countless awards and launched the careers of writers like Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Sara Baume, and Ian Maleney. Their expansive vision of Irish literature embraces expat writers, peripheral voices, and overlooked titles sorely in need of reconsideration. The Recovered Voices series brings forgotten work from Irish women authors back into print, unearthing masterpieces like The Horse of Selene by Juanita Casey and A Struggle for Fame, by Charlotte Riddell, also known as the Irish Jane Austen.
A debut of interconnected short stories that’s garnered praise far and wide, Old Romantics traces a Dubliner’s interior life as she moves through young womanhood, juggling relationships, family responsibilities, and career misfires. It’s been described (in better words than mine) as a collection of “alternative romances told from a netherworld of love and disenchantment.” And, according to Niamh Donnelly, you’ll want to bathe in its prose.
McCormack’s novels are about the big things: memory, history, existence. What kind of lives are worth living? What kind of lives do we actually live? He’s gotten praised by the giants as well, John Banville reads him, so does Anne Enright, and Colm Tóibín. That’s enough to pique my interest, but if you need to know more, read on:
This Plague of Souls is a novel about a man who returns home from prison to find his house desolate, his wife and child inexplicably missing, and a stranger bent on arranging a meeting. When they do meet, an existential conversation ensues that spins out into today’s international chaoses and back again to brooding meditations on family, home, and what really happened to this man’s life.
Well, FIXI Novo is an imprint, so we’re breaking the rules a little here, but its parent publishing, Buku Fixi does a bit of everything—they champion Malaysian writing, run bookstores, produce the annual literary journal, Little Basket, for new Malaysian writing in English (that’s part of the FIXI Novo imprint), and have been steadily translating major international authors (think Murakami and Stephen King) into Malay. In short, they’re an independent publishing powerhouse. But back to FIXI Novo. This small imprint captures the rambunctious energy of a growing literary community: it publishes a Malaysian crime novel series, a running collection of story anthologies that each revolve around a different Malaysian locale, hosts writing contests, and has also branches out to publish writers from other regions of Southeast Asian. FIXI Novo has an abundance of riches for the English-language reader.
An anthology of pulpy Kuala Lumpur crime, these twenty stories bring together taxi drivers and cocktail waitresses, vampires and their slayers, druggies and terrifying figures from indigenous mythology. This is a chance for genre fans and literary aficionados to crack open the old conceits they think they know and reimagine crime fiction.
This is the chronicle of an imagined Malaysian town on the cusp of modernity, as observed by an eleven year old girl and a retired lychee factory owner. The odd duo narrate changes cropping up around town, stories of quirky inhabitants who live there, and the young girl’s coming of age. It’s a humorous, gentle novel from a celebrated Malaysian novelist.
Zubaan is a Hindustani word that’s used to dismiss gossip and female chatter. New Delhi-based Zubaan Books has taken that derision for talkative women and turned it on its head, becoming a powerful feminist press that publishes books by and for South Asian women. They’ve expanded from their 2003 founding as an imprint of Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing house, into a standalone press that publishes fiction, nonfiction, academic tracts, children’s literature, and runs a parallel nonprofit dedicated to supporting and documenting women’s movements in the region.
This is a collection of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and visual stories written by women and transpeople who call the Northeastern Indian state of Assam home. Bucking patriarchal politics and historical repressions that have silenced so many of these voices, this anthology puts forth new, messy, and provocative definitions of local identity and global power. In many cases, these are stories told for the first time.
A collection of essays from Pakistani women, this is an exploration of how feminism grows, changes, and fractures from one generation to the next. Each author centers their mother and, more precisely, the gap between the experiences that shaped an older generation and the ones that hold sway now. From the depths of these reflections, multiple overlapping feminisms emerge. How can bridges be built between them? How can conflicts, sorrows, and joys, become shared experiences rather than divisive wedges? These and other questions animate this book.
A storied book of magic bound in the hide of giant lemurs at a time, millennia ago, when India, Madagascar, and Australia were all connected into one giant landmass. At least that’s one of the meanings behind the word “Blaft.” It’s also an acronym for “Beguiling Literary Anomalies, Faithfully Transcribed.” Either way you want to take it, Blaft is the perfect namesake for this Indian publisher of English translations that’s made a home for genre fiction of all persuasions. From its debut anthology of Tamil pulp fiction translated into English to a collection of folktales and myths from the Indian state of Mizoram, Blaft brings the literary peripheries towards the center. They publish authors across Indian and African and have the distinction of releasing the first English translation of a novel written by a woman in an indigenous African dialect. That’s called Sin Is a Puppy That Follows You Home, but don’t stop reading Blaft’s book there!
This is just what it sounds like, a terrific send up of genre fiction from Gujarati writers with local magazine illustrator G. Sandhwani’s artwork thrown in too. In the spirit of Blaft’s anthologies, this is a sprawling work that embraces folklore and grunge, pop phenomena and the world of a thriving, yet under-translated literary culture.
A fantastically bizarre, uncategorizable book, Conversations Regarding the Fatalistic Outlook of the Common Man is a collection of 40ish conversations that are a little bit Platonic dialogue and a lot madcap message-board excess. Anonymous interlocutors skewer political language like “raising awareness,” take on racist and sexist tropes in traditional Southeastern cultures, and riff on the state of the world in biting, chatroom prose. Nothing is sacred here, yet, from a maelstrom of sarcasm, this book arrives at an outlook on the world that is anything but cynical.
A champion of English-language writing in Singapore and Southeast Asia more broadly, Epigram funds fiction competitions, operates its own bookstore, and publishes everything from children’s literature to treatises on economics, dramatic plays to poetry. They’re an eclectic, growing publisher that places a premium on building a community for their readers by continually offering new projects and ideas. During the pandemic they developed the Epigram Treehouse, an online slate of activities, videos, and children’s books-based games to engage all the young readers sequestered at home.
This debut story collection from a queer, Southeast Asian voice stumbles through multiple layers and iterations of Singapore, mixing the fantastic with the raw urges and experiences of youth. From sex workers to revenant mothers and lost children, these tales are caught between this world and another one—neither dreamscapes nor nightmares, yet always a bit of both.
Gus has been described as an unholy amalgam of Planet of the Apes, The Walking Dead, and The Jungle Book. It’s about talking monkeys leading a revolt against Singaporean government. In the ensuing chaos, Gus, the titular monkey who wants nothing to do with these apocalyptic events, tries to get back to his nature reserve and navigates the dense urban environment of downtown Singapore. Along the way, he encounters a cast of characters, each more colorful than the next—a grief stricken nurse, an aspiring clown, and a ferocious Monkey King. Gresham’s debut novel was a finalist for the 2023 Epigram Books Fiction Prize.
“What if the word Monster formed a kind of net with which to trawl the wide sea, gathering anything that didn’t resemble the creatures deemed familiar and permitted in your world?”—The Palace of Eros
In this epic rewriting of the myth of Eros and Psyche, Caro De Robertis connects trans and queer histories to ancient mythology. The myth of Eros and Psyche is well-known. Psyche, the youngest of the three daughters, is perceived as the most stunning, the most desired by men. Psyche’s beauty causes such a commotion Aphrodite herself is all like absolutely not and instructs her son, Eros, to shoot his bow of desire at a vile despicable monster to claim her as a wife. Bad boy Eros does not follow Aphrodite’s instructions and falls for our girl Psyche, builds a hidden palace for her full of riches. Psyche can only see her husband at night and although this, at first, proves to be more than she’d ever needed, eventually she yearns for more. The rest of the myth is easily Googleable.
In De Robertis’s The Palace of Eros we have Eros as a shapeshifting body. Eros is now a woman but also more than a woman. “My husband is a woman,” Psyche says when she first meets Eros in the dark. Eros can grow a phallus or change her entire body into a male. The changes in this divine body are seamless. Caro’s prose is magnificent, it incorporates language for a gender expansive body into a myth that is 2000 years old and makes it look easy. It is such a literary gift to see gender expansiveness depicted in an ancient myth with such grace and ease. Plus, a bonus of lesbian processing, loads of queer sex and divine gossip. Caro builds on a long history of trans and queer people rewriting history to expand the notion of what’s possible. They are also building on a Latin American tradition of using myth, magic and fable in fiction.
De Robertis and I have known each other for years and have many times talked at length about the erasure of trans and queer narratives from a larger collective history. Trans and queer history seems to be this niche knowledge that only some people know about, it’s not taught in schools, it’s not easily accessible at the local library (sometimes even banned from the local library). The reality is trans people have lived, loved and fucked since the beginning of times. Yes, we looked different. We had different names. But gender expansive people are part of the larger history of humanity. Period. The Palace of Eros is an incredible and beautiful ode to this history.
And why is our history so threatening? Trans history is a history of possibility and possibility is the enemy of greed and unchecked power under capitalism. Trans history shakes the whole system under which the mother and the father and the holy spirit have been built to keep us all subjugated while the top dudes amass power and wealth at the cost of everyone’s lives. Trans history disrupts the notion that this way of existing is “normal” and opens space for other futures. We are currently being used as a scapegoat. Look over there! The republicans say, it’s a transgender. We are believed to have no history, we are believed to be a trend and in this denying of our history we are being denied basic humanity.
And, now, because of Caro De Robertis’ brilliance, when anyone talks Greek myth and they ask is Eros trans? The response is, yes, she is. She’s one of us.
Julián Delgado Lopera: How did the idea of rewriting the myth of Psyche and Eros come to you? Why make it queer? Why make it trans?
Caro De Robertis: I have been obsessed with this myth for over 25 years. Something in the subtext of the story that pulled and fascinated me, but I couldn’t put my finger to what it was. During late pandemic, when I was exploring what book to write next, I got the idea of changing Eros—the god of love and desire—into a queer and trans genderfluid identity. Trans people have always existed throughout time, but we haven’t always had the vocabulary or the societal reflection to be able to have those experiences be legible as part of history. Changing Eros’ gender and her identity opened the story in a completely different way. It revealed other questions I wanted to explore: what does it mean to have a love, a passion or a desire that can only take place in the dark? How can desire catalyze a journey of liberation? What does it mean to have society deemed your desire and body monstrous? Although these elements belong to an ancient myth, a story at least two thousand years old, it holds elements that feel urgently relevant to our contemporary existence.
JDL: On the first page, Psyche calls attention to the ways the retelling of stories—legends and myths in particular—omit parts that are unfamiliar, different. Why is it important to insert trans/gender expansive bodies into history?
We need trans and queer stories looking back through histories to [see] who we have been as society, in order to see more who we are.
CR: Official histories have systematically erased transness and queerness from the record. Inserting queer and trans bodies into history and into the registry of our collective myths and stories is essential to knowing who we collectively are. This is my sixth novel. I spent many years working on five different novels set in Latin America where I grappled with the systemic erasure and silencing of queer and trans realities in Latin American culture and history. Writing these books only deepened my sense of urgency that we need trans and queer stories looking back through histories to recalibrate our sense of who we have been as society, in order to see more who we are.
JDL: There’s something very profound in Eros’ shifting not only of her gender but her genitals. As someone who is trans, this literal change and capacity of Eros’ body to transform felt special. One of my favorite parts of the book are the moments Eros grows a penis, the moments she shifts from being a woman to a man and the moments she inhabits both genders. All of it felt very seamless. How was it to write this shapeshifting body and to find the language and craft to incorporate it into the story.
CR: It was incredibly joyful and exhilarating to write Eros’ character into being including her relationship with her body, which is a divine body. She has the power to shift her outward expression, to grow a penis, to present as male. These are qualities materialized in this magical context but are qualities that are true to a trans experience. We are shapeshifters and that is part of our power, our vastness and richness. Dominant society pathologizes what it means to be trans and have a transformative or fluid relationship to your own gender and body but in fact you and I know trans experience is actually the opposite, it is an incredible richness. Also, this is very much in harmony with what is true in Greek myth. Ovid’s Metamorphosis, for instance, in which people are metamorphosing their bodies all the time, sometimes at will, sometimes against their will, is an incredible record of bodily change in ancient literature.
JDL: Psyche continues to call Eros her “husband” even when she first finds out Eros is a woman. “My husband was not a man,” Psyche says. Psyche also comes up with a name for Eros, “Pteron.” Talk about the choice of playing with gendered language and creating new language, which is a very queer craft choice.
CR: One avenue of research for this book was classical scholarship and classical literature. Another avenue of research was queer and feminist theory. Books likeFemale Masculinityby Jack Halberstam, Queer Latinidadby Juana María Rodríguez, and Female Husbandsby Jen Manion which looked at the historical record of people assigned female at birth who lived presenting as men and as husbands. All these books inspired me as I imagined how language might exist within the world of this book. I wanted to reflect and celebrate the incredible richness and range of experiences that people have with the trans and/or genderqueer phallus. People assigned female at birth have various relationships to phallic energy and this has existed within queer communities throughout time. Butches have phallic energy, transmac folks have phallic energy, nonbinary and genderqueer people, two spirit people and also femmes, have a relationship to phallic energy. In my attempt to create linguistic and bodily innovation in this book I was really drawing on an incredibly rich legacy of queer inventiveness and innovation.
JDL: Because I’m gay, I was drawn to Psyche’s revelation after experiencing queer sex and the different feelings attached to it, desire, shame, want. There’s something here which a lot of queer people experience around how unknown the world of queer intimacy is to the mainstream collective imaginary. Queer sex gets a lot of airtime on these pages, why?
How can desire catalyze a journey of liberation? What does it mean to have society deemed your desire and body monstrous?
CR: As fiction writers we convey what we value in part by what we center, what we give airtime, breath and space. Within a literary context there can be the idea that sex and the erotic are a less serious topic, which is a very heteronormative and white supremacist idea. It is a double standard because Henry Miller and Philip Roth were taken very seriously as literary writers when they wrote into erotic desire but when a queer or female person writes into the nature of desire and sexual expression it can be condescended to. Erotic desire, erotic joy and erotic expression are sites of knowledge, sites of self-development, growth, self-discovery and liberation.
JDL: Psyche’s revelation mirrors the experience of many queer people regarding queer sex. It is not only about the act of fucking itself but this larger shift in the paradigm of what’s possible in the world. After sex with Eros, Psyche questions everything about the world around her. This is such a queer experience. The power of queer sex is well beyond the fucking. There is this shifting in the way we understand the world and what’s possible, which is why queer sex is so persecuted.
CR: In a queer context, fucking can be a source of incredible power, of healing, of liberation. Joyful queer fucking is dangerous to the dominant system that’s designed to keep us diminished and silent. There is so much knowledge that can come through our desires, through our bodies. Before she understood herself to be queer, Psyche experienced patriarchy in very palpable ways. Because she is perceived as beautiful her father wants to get a suitor for her that will earn him privileges in society. He sees Psyche as a piece of his property at the expense of her wellbeing. That’s in direct opposition to Psyche’s desires and so her desires become a radical act.
JDL: Psyche and Eros’ relationship complicates after some time. When she first arrives to the palace, Psyche is overwhelmed with joy at the freedom and riches even if she can only see Eros, her only companion, at night, in the dark. Towards the middle of the story the palace feels like a “queered” extension of the patriarchal world Psyche left in which Eros, who is written as the more masculine one, sets all the rules. Talk about the relationship to power and gender between Psyche and Eros inside the Palace
CR: The original myth has a rupture in the relationship baked into it where Psyche experiences great passion, joy and satisfaction but then starts to want to see her husbands’ face, bringing light into the room that she’s been told needs to stay dark. This already built-in tension allowed me to explore the subtext of what it means to pursue freedom and autonomy within the context of intimate connection. Because we’re human, dynamics can come up that can urge us to shrink ourselves for someone that we love. How do we balance love, passion and connection with our own desire for autonomy? This is complicated in a queer context because for many of us, especially when our coming out is challenging and we’ve experienced familial homophobia, we would love to believe that all we must do is come out, express our desire and passion for a person we’re really into and then we’re in queer paradise. As someone who has experienced familial homophobia and had a complete rupture with most of my family of origin, I have a lot of heart for people who are in that part of the experience. Because we want to find home and refuge in queer space. And we can find our home and refuge in queer space but there are other things we must grapple with. In the case of the Eros, her desire to keep things in the dark, to keep the relationship hidden and shrouded is coming from a place of self-protection. This is her solution to the homophobia and transphobia of her world, and it reflects one of the pathways some queer people pursue. Sometimes we must keep a part of ourselves secret to be safe. And yet, Psyche wants to come out into the light, she wants to stand taller, wants to expand her universe. The story brings up a kind of grappling with the costs and potentialities of hiding versus speaking out and standing tall, concealing and revealing.
JDL: In the story, it is through song that tradition and indigenous ancestral knowledge is passed down to Psyche, which is also a way that histories of trans people are passed.
Within a literary context sex and the erotic [is regarded as] a less serious topic, which is a very heteronormative and white supremacist idea.
CR: I set the book in southern Italy right after colonization, like two generations after, so that Psyche is a descendant of colonized people, she has a relationship to indigeneity, to the land, to lost languages and it allowed me to weave in some themes that are meaningful to me as a Latin American writer. There can be a notion that the retelling of Greek myths somehow belongs to white writers. But if you think about the tradition of magical realism that we draw on as Latin American writers, that is a literary vein through which we can have a great deal to say when it comes to reimagining parables and myth. I first read One Hundred Years of Solitudewhen I was thirteen years old. I’ve been preparing for this project for more than twenty years. Latin American literature is one of the most powerful streams of global literature in terms of reimagining reality through the lens of what is thought as magical.
JDL: “Monster” and “monstrosity” are brought up many times throughout the book to imply gender difference and any deviation from the normative. And yet you shape this idea of the “monster” by complicating it, giving it a different form. Right now, the drag queen bans, and trans bans are framing trans people as monsters. Deeming communities and an art form that is unfamiliar to many people, bodies that are different from the norm, and assigning this monstrosity and therefore fear. Because we must fear the monster. We’re an easy target, an escape goat. I see a “monster” reclaiming too within trans communities as “monster” continues to be a trope weaponized against us.
CR: Monstrosity was used in the original story, which is part of the reason why this myth stayed with me below my consciousness for almost three decades. That something as powerful, passionate and beautiful as erotic desire and fulfillment could be monstrous. That notion of monstrosity has been weaponized in society, not only 2000 years ago but in my life. Monstrosity is a projection of fears onto trans and queer people and then there is our truth which is that we are amazing. And one of the ways we are amazing and rich and beautiful is in our possibility of many permutations and iterations. In the artistry that goes into our bodies, our identities, the way we move and breathe and exist in space. This conversation about monstrosity reminds me of Tupili Lea Arellano, a Chicanx elder on the trans spectrum that I interviewed for an oral history project. Many times during the interview they said we are shapeshifters and that is a powerful medicine. Trans people should root in and own and stand in that power.
Orbits, Collisions, and Ricochets by Amethyst Loscocco
My father and I gazed at the comet searing the night horizon. As he sometimes did after dinner, he had pulled out a small army-green telescope bought at a yard sale and placed it on top of our blue station wagon, where it stood at an easy height for his lanky six-and-a-half feet. At nine years old, I had to stand on an overturned five-gallon bucket to reach it.
Usually, he would quietly look through the eyepiece, making small adjustments with an occasional sigh. Then he would give me a chance to look, pointing out any planets that happened to be visible that night.
“See Venus right above the horizon? It’s much brighter than a star.” Or, “That over there would be Saturn. You can just barely make out the rings. Can you see them?”
In the spring of 1997, the telescope often stood neglected, because a comet blazed like a slow-moving firework across the sky, visible to the naked eye. High above us, dirty ice fractured and splintered, streaming behind the comet as it sped 100,000 miles per hour toward the sun.
Billions of eyes turned skyward to marvel at comet Hale-Bopp, later dubbed the Great Comet of 1997. The comet was visible for eighteen months between 1996 and 1997. A comet is frozen solid when it is far from the sun. But as it approaches, the crust heats and cracks, emitting dust and ice plumes to form a halo-like corona around the frozen nucleus. The larger the nucleus, the more luminous the comet. Hale-Bopp’s brilliance could be seen at dusk, even from cities with light pollution. It birthed a new generation of astronomers, and, as with previous great comets, it inspired awe and fear and longing.
My father wasn’t an astronomer. He was a potter. He gleaned facts about cosmic phenomena from the dusty National Geographic magazines piled up in the back of his pottery shop and the NPR reports he listened to while up to his elbows in clay.
“See how it has two tails?” my father pointed. “One of dust and one of gas.”
He explained that the slightly arced, pale-yellow tail on the bottom was made of billions and billions of tiny dust particles made visible by the sun. The straighter, blue-tinted tail was made of gas molecules ionized by solar radiation. The tails pointed away from the sun, blown back by the solar wind in a spectacular display.
As the comet faded, so did my father’s presence in my life.
If you saw Hale-Bopp, the image is probably singed in your memory, like the glow behind your eyelids after looking at the sun. Maybe you were four years old, balanced on your mother’s hip as she pointed to the horizon. Maybe you saw it through an airplane window on a flight to a place you’d never been, or you looked up at it when you snuck out into the backyard at night to smoke weed as a teenager. Maybe you were a long-haul trucker, and you pulled over in the middle of the country where everything was flat and there were no lights. You paused. The comet burned so bright, you felt as if you could reach out and touch it.
We were all sky watchers then. Separated from the comet by 120 million miles, we were connected by awe, by inevitability, by the inescapable pull of gravity.
As the comet faded, so did my father’s presence in my life.
Comets are like time capsules from the violent dawn of our solar system. About 4.6 billion years ago, a stellar explosion in a nebula—a ginormous cloud of gas and dust—caused part of the cloud to collapse into a condensed spinning disc. Intense heat and gravity at the center of the disc smashed together hydrogen atoms, turning them into helium and igniting in nuclear fusion. The sun was born.
In a period of epic tumult, hot gases churned and dust flash-heated into molten rock, crashing, clumping, and coalescing into the first asteroids, planetoids, and then planets. The rocky planets formed closer to the sun’s warmth, and the gaseous planets like Jupiter formed farther out. At the same time, mighty Jupiter flung chunks of rock and ice out to the edges of the solar system, where they remain today as a reservoir of thousands of icy comets. Tugged by gravity, many of these comets periodically orbit back toward the sun.
My father grew up on the West Coast, and my mother on the East. Each, in their own way, yearned to break free from their upbringing, looking for freedom, spirit, and connection. They met in New Mexico, often nicknamed the land of enchantment, a place where art and alternative lifestyles thrived, and the land and sky were palpable entities. But when I asked each of my parents how they met, neither version of their story was enchanting.
My father said they met at a party he wasn’t planning on going to. He had to kill his chickens because they wouldn’t survive the winter snow. After slitting a few of their throats, the knife slipped, and he cut his finger. “Really cut the shit out of it,” he said. At the time he was making jewelry and selling it at craft fairs, and an injury meant he wouldn’t be able to make enough for the big fair coming up soon. He was so angry about it that he stuffed all the chickens, both live and dead, into a burlap sack and left them in the forest for the coyotes. Then he went to the party where he met my mother. “We hit it off,” was all he said about that.
My mother said sometime later her car broke down. When she didn’t have enough money to pay the mechanic, he told her she could pay in “other ways.” Incensed, she walked away. My father was one of the few people she knew in the tiny mountain village of Vallecitos, so she asked him if she could borrow money to pay the “sleaze bag” mechanic. He lent her the money, and they got together shortly after.
At three years old, their second child, my older brother, was diagnosed with a seizure disorder. When my parents realized they would need to settle down to care for him, they decided they also wanted to adopt. Over the course of the next few years, they adopted five children: one newborn, and four biological siblings aged two, three, five, and eight. They had each experienced trauma in their birth family and the foster care system that, for some of them, had a lasting impact on their mental health that my parents weren’t equipped to deal with alone.
I’m the youngest of my parents’ three biological children, the third youngest in the group of us eight. I have no memory of a time when I didn’t have seven siblings, many close to my age. There was always someone to play elaborate make-believe games with, someone crying, someone to get in trouble with, and someone in trouble.
When I was four, my parents bought a sixteen-acre farm in the desert, outside of the small town of Truth or Consequences. They wanted fields for their eight kids to run in, cottonwood trees to climb, and food planted by their own hands. My father built a house and planted apple, pear, cherry, and apricot trees. He plowed the fields and sowed corn, squash, and beans. As kids, we swung from rope swings hung from a giant elm tree and got sick from eating unripe fruit from the orchard. We built forts from leftover construction materials and played restaurant with tin cans and mud. When my father asked us to weed the garden, we grumbled because the garden was an entire field. We wanted to explore the trails left by animals on the hillsides, walk the slippery-rocked creek and catch minnows, see if the old outhouse was haunted or if a raccoon had fallen in.
The two-story adobe house my father built had red brick floors and high ceilings of knotted pine. There was a two-story glass atrium with banana trees and cacti. Enormous floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the orchard and fields. The house had ten doors to the outside, one of which led to nowhere—a drop from the second floor. Maybe even as he built it, he was thinking of exits, of escape. That house could not hold onto everyone. The unstable mix of elements, personalities, and needs never found equilibrium. Some of my siblings stayed; some left in explosive outbursts of yelling and trails of broken things. That farm was like Jupiter, with immense gravity pulling ten people together and spinning them with such speed and ferocity, they collided and ricocheted far out and out and out, to California, to Colorado, to Louisiana.
To escape, I often slipped into other worlds and onto other planets by reading books, as many as I could get my hands on. Mostly I read fantasy that featured magic and adventure, and always had a child—The Chosen One—who escaped a harsh home life and ultimately saved the world from the forces of darkness. The year of the comet, I decided I wanted to be an astronomer after reading a biography about Maria Mitchell, a professional astronomer and professor in a time when few women existed in the field. In 1847, she discovered a comet, later named “Miss Mitchell’s Comet” in her honor.
I longed to discover my own comet. Sometimes, after washing the dinner dishes, I would lie on the dirt driveway and stare up at the sequined night sky. Far out in the countryside, there were no interfering city lights, just me, the enduring ribbon of the Milky Way, and the galactic tides of my dreams. I was sure somewhere out there, far, far away, there was a great destiny for me, as well as a comet speeding through space with my name on it.
A comet is named after the person or observatory that discovered it first. Sometimes the credit is shared, as was the case with Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp who independently discovered Hale-Bopp as it passed between Saturn and Jupiter on July 23, 1995. A comet’s name also includes a code with the year of discovery, and either a letter “C” designating a non-periodic orbit around the sun, or a “P” for a periodic orbit, meaning we can count on it to appear again within the next century. Halley’s comet, perhaps the most well-known periodic comet, makes an appearance every 76 years. Hale-Bopp C/1995 can’t be relied upon to return for thousands of years, if it returns at all. Comets with long, unpredictable orbits can easily veer off into interstellar space, leaving us wondering where they went.
On April 1, 1997, Hale-Bopp made its closest approach to the sun, known as its perihelion, then sped around the sun with such speed that it was flung back out, deep into space. It wobbled as it passed the mighty mass of Jupiter but sprang free. Then it faded into the distance, with no plans to return until the year 4385.
The day my father left, I watched him load his dresser—each drawer pulled out and still full of his clothes—into the back of his white truck. I was ten years old and didn’t know why he was suddenly choosing to leave. I didn’t know he was unhappy with the life he’d built, or that he insisted he’d never wanted to adopt so many kids. I didn’t know he was testing other futures with other women, although I soon caught on. All I knew was that he would live in a different house, thirty minutes away, and we would visit him one weekend a month.
Perhaps my father said something reassuring before he drove away. Then again, he was never one to get sentimental, so it’s more likely he just said, “See ya later.”
Later that day, I sat alone in my parents’ bedroom staring at the dust on the floor where the dresser had sat for years. The intense desert sun had faded the pale lavender wall, and the dresser’s absence exposed a darker rectangle. I was captivated by the newly empty space and didn’t yet understand the weight of absence. In my experience, solely informed by fantasy books, losing a parent meant a quest was ahead, a hero’s journey. Something exciting was finally happening. At the very least, I thought it would be fun to live in two houses.
By this time, most of my older siblings had moved out, and several others were in group home facilities where they could get more care than my mother alone could provide. All that remained were three pre-teen girls and my sick brother who lay in a hospital bed in our living room, unable to walk, talk, or feed himself. We all knew he was dying.
My mother explained to each of us what it meant for parents to get divorced. She read us children’s books written to help cope with a changing family and navigate all the contradictory feelings. Things might get difficult, she said, but parents will still be parents and try to do the right thing.
I was wrong that living in two households would be an exciting adventure. She was wrong that parents will always try to do the right thing.
While my mother was caring for my dying brother, taking kids to mental healthcare appointments two hours away, and managing her business and the farm, my father tried to take the house, tried to take us, tried to avoid paying child support. When that failed, he resorted to taking tools, farming equipment, and a hot tub he never used again because that wasn’t the point. He didn’t just want to leave my mother; he wanted to leave her with nothing.
I didn’t understand how someone who loved me would act this way. I didn’t understand how I loved someone who would act this way.
He often came by unannounced to take things that “belonged to him.” On one of these visits, he got back into the driver’s seat of his loaded van, clutching a large roll of thick industrial rope he planned to take. My mother pleaded with him to stop. She grasped the rope, trying to take it back. I watched, wanting to stop it but unable to move. He started to drive away while my mother still held the rope.
I didn’t understand how someone who loved me would act this way. I didn’t understand how I loved someone who would act this way.
Another day, he returned for a stack of corrugated metal that had sat beside the barn for years. My mother said the metal panels didn’t belong to him because they were the doors to the barn, and this was not his land anymore. He came anyway, along with three men and a large flatbed truck.
Without consulting my mother, my two sisters and I climbed on top of the four-foot-high stack of metal panels.
“Get off,” he told us. “This has nothing to do with you guys.”
“It does too,” we said. “These aren’t yours to take.”
“I don’t have time for your mother’s bullshit,” he said. “Move. Now.”
We didn’t say anything, just sat there cross-legged, holding hands, hearts pounding. We’d recently watched documentaries about the civil rights movement and the power of nonviolent protest. We were primed to stand up against injustice in the world and this seemed like a good time to start.
“Move!” he repeated.
The men were silent, hands in their pockets, staring at their boots. With them standing there, he couldn’t yell or drag us off. His eyes were steely gray, fuming. Eventually he had no choice but to leave. I feared he would blame our mother for our behavior, as he frequently did, but I knew we had to stop this constant violation. I didn’t understand that such a public humiliation by a few girls could only fuel the fire. I hoped he would see us, see what we needed, but he only saw that we stood together.
My mother eventually got a restraining order. For the first time, we locked the ten doors, the sheds, and the gates.
On the last farm down a long, dirt road, lived my mother and her last three daughters, trying to maintain a sixteen-acre farm. The good ol’ boys watched us from their dust-covered pick-up trucks, spitting tobacco, and speculating on how we would cope. Some offered to take the farm off my mother’s hands for a pittance. She refused.
Without my father, my sisters and I—all scrawny pre-teen and barely teen girls—learned how to irrigate the alfalfa fields. We mowed the 100-tree fruit orchard with a single small lawn mower because he had taken the tractor. We learned how to stucco the cracks woodpeckers had made in the house, exposing pale adobe. We fixed broken faucets and repaired fallen fences. When the Southwest monsoons came, the arroyos flooded, cutting rocky gullies across the dirt roads. We dug trenches to redirect the muddy torrents of water. Our hands blistered, then calloused. Our knees were always bruised.
I rarely had time to look up at the stars, more distant than ever, and less real than the demands of the land. My only dream was to leave, to escape this giant house that felt haunted by reneged promises. We all agreed we wanted to move away. But those ten doors that so effectively let everyone else out somehow locked the last of us in. It took six years to sell that farm, that oasis in the desert.
When I stood beside my father and marveled at the streaming tails and steady progress of Hale-Bopp, I thought him a stable force in my life. But stability is no more a prerequisite for parenthood than it is for the formation of planets. For my stability, at fourteen years old, I cut contact with my father. We didn’t talk for five years.
Hale-Bopp traveled an immense distance, pulled from the solar system’s outer reaches, from the Oort cloud where thousands of comets live. The Oort cloud is a spherical shell of rock debris and ice chunks surrounding the solar system. It lies at the edge of the sun’s gravitational pull, a desperately cold and utterly silent place where the sun is just another far-off star. The distance is so great that miles are meaningless, and scientists use Astronomical Units (AU) instead. One AU (93 million miles) equals the distance between the earth and the sun. The Oort cloud’s inner edge is around 2,000 AU from the sun, and the outer edge—where the sun’s gravity is no greater than that of the next closest star—is approximately 100,000 AU. Or, if you use time for scale, Voyager 1, launched in 1977, won’t reach the outer edge of the Oort cloud for another 30,000 years.
For years I felt betrayed by the loss of a future with two parents for support, a future with a father. Sometimes I would walk the empty dirt roads, out into the chaparral-scented desert. I would cry. I would scream where no one could hear but the rattlesnakes and the coyotes. Sometimes I wrote heartsick poetry, trying to explain what happened, why I made the choice to sever our bond. The words I wrote got progressively angrier and darker. Nothing erased the loss. I felt pulled apart. Pieces of myself and my possible futures shattered off, trailing behind me.
Once, when no one was home, I got some matches and a picture of my father. He still had his long hair, but with a mustache instead of the full beard I grew up with. His smile was more of a grimace, like he was putting up with whoever took the picture, maybe me, maybe one of my sisters, probably on one of those cheap disposable cameras we treasured long before we had phones.
I lit a match and held it to a corner of the photograph. It ignited, curling at the edges. The glossy veneer bubbled, bleeding brown and green chemicals. I set the picture on a blue ceramic plate that my father had made. The flames engulfed it.
At a yard sale, we sold my father’s old green telescope. A woman who lived in a trailer park by a gas station bought it for five dollars. That night, an unoccupied pickup truck rolled into a large propane tank at the gas station, triggering a massive explosion that sent flames a hundred feet into the air and broke windows for miles around. The trailer park burned, along with the telescope.
The last time Hale-Bopp passed by Earth, 4,200 years ago, the Egyptian pyramids were brand new. The Greek and then Roman Empires were yet to rise and conquer. People described these sky anomalies as sky snakes, stars with hair, or flaming swords. The word comet wouldn’t exist until much later, derived from the Greek komētēs, which literally means long hair.
Cultures worldwide associated their sudden appearance as divine omens that foretold something momentous, often a cataclysm, a catastrophe, or some end—maybe the end. People have associated comets with plagues, natural disasters, and the deaths of leaders like Julius Caesar. But occasionally, comets are paired with victories. In 1066, William the Conqueror believed Halley’s comet heralded his success in the Norman conquest of England. But, perhaps the defeated king of England saw it as an ill omen. There is always an event to connect and attach undue significance.
My father and I reconnected so slowly, so tentatively, that I barely remember how it happened. One Christmas, he bought my two sisters and me a subscription to National Geographic, misspelling my sister’s name. We were not impressed. My oldest brother, who hadn’t experienced the traumatic events surrounding the divorce, still talked to my father. My brother insisted we should talk to him, that he asked about us all the time, that he was still our father no matter what had happened. My father started calling once a year, then twice, sometimes on birthdays or holidays. We passed the phone from hand to hand with trepidation and the occasional eye roll.
I was ambivalent about the value of bringing this now stranger back into my life, as if nothing had happened. How do you speak after years of silence? Talking about the present was easier than talking about childhood, or about the moments he had missed—the birthdays, the graduations, the boyfriends, the depression, the surgeries, the struggles of our single mother to make ends meet, the tiny two-bedroom apartment four of us squished into once we moved to California after a white-knuckled drive in a U-Haul one rainy Christmas. What can a daughter say to a father she doesn’t know?
What can a daughter say to a father she doesn’t know?
Almost two decades have passed now, and my father calls me every month.
“I’m thinking of retiring,” he says one day. He’s been saying this for years, and I don’t believe him. His fingernails will always have clay or soil underneath them. He will always have a garden that can feed a family of ten but is now only for two. He is a maker who built two houses, planted trees, created pottery glazes the colors of a stellar nebula, built my family and then scrapped it like a cup that had slumped sideways on the potter’s wheel.
He talks about coming to San Francisco to visit soon. My brother and youngest sister live here, too. I tell him we’re thinking of taking a road trip to New Mexico to visit him sometime. But this is also something I’ve been saying for years, and maybe he doesn’t believe me.
“It only takes a day to get to Palm Springs from here,” he says. That’s where he grew up. “But it takes two days to get to San Francisco. The damn Grand Canyon is in the way.”
And he is right. The Grand Canyon separates us, but sometimes it may as well be the entire Milky Way. We don’t talk about the things that we hold close, our fragile dreams, our fears, our regrets. We don’t talk about the past. We talk about the fires ravaging both California and New Mexico, or our respective travel plans, or the abundance of his garden’s pea and broccoli crop this year.
We still sometimes compare notes on cosmic phenomena, like the recent eclipse and northern lights. In fall of this year, comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS C/2023 will appear. Since its discovery in 2023, astronomers have compared it to Hale-Bopp, speculating that Tsuchinshan-ATLAS might be a great comet, maybe the greatest comet of this century, though there have been conflicting observations as it moves closer. Predicting whether a comet will be great is notoriously difficult. Comets are unpredictable. From far off, they can promise to blaze brightly, to awe us. But there’s always a chance they’ll burn out before fulfilling that promise.
Halley’s comet appeared the year before I was born. Hale-Bopp preceded the end of my parent’s marriage. I know scientifically these things are not cosmically significant or connected. Comets are indifferent to events on Earth. They are commanded only by gravity, by the inescapable tug of the sun. But part of me, the part that used to spend hours lying in the dirt awed by the complex grandeur of the universe, searching for my destiny in the stars, wonders what this next comet will bring.
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