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.
When people think about loss, what usually comes to mind is the death of a loved one, but there are so many other things we have to let go of, and say goodbye to, as we move through life—relationships (romantic and otherwise), youth, health, homes, innocence, life as we know it. We are always saying goodbye to something, letting something go.
All of the stories in The Goodbye Processshare a central theme of letting go, and moving on. I’ve always gravitated towards these kinds of stories in literature. They are stories of growth and the human capacity for change, but more than anything, they are stories of resilience. How do we survive what happens to us? How do we go on? Who are we on the other side?
In the following books, the characters find themselves at the ends of various things—ready (or sometimes not) to let go and move on.
In We the Animals three brothers navigate their tumultuous childhood and struggle to make sense of their parents’ relationship. As the unnamed narrator matures, he comes to understand that in order to form his own identity and find his place in the world, he must let go of his childhood innocence and separate from his family.
Small Things Like These is set in a small Irish town in 1985 during the weeks before Christmas. When Bill Furlong, a coal merchant, discovers a local convent’s cruel treatment of unmarried mothers, he is forced to let go of his fear of societal expectations and act, regardless of the inevitable life-changing consequences.
Everything I Never Told Youexplores the aftermath of a teenage girl’s mysterious death in 1970s Ohio. It delves into the family’s secrets, misunderstandings, and the process of coming to terms with loss and finding a way to move on.
All Fours has been described as a middle age coming-of-age story. In this novel, the 45–year-old narrator plans a cross-country drive from Los Angeles to New York, only to find herself holed up at a motel about thirty minutes from her home for two weeks. This leads her on a wild journey of self-discovery in which she lets go of her ideas of what family is, what emotional and physical intimacy mean, and what getting older does and doesn’t change.
The characters in all of the stories in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies navigate the challenges of letting go of past regrets, unfulfilled desires, and cultural expectations. Through glimpsing key moments in their lives, Lahiri shows the emotional toll of loss and letting go.
In Lucy, the narrator, Lucy, leaves her family and home in Antigua to work as an au pair for a wealthy family in the United States. While there, she gains a deeper understanding of her relationship with her mother, as well as her relationship to her homeland, ultimately releasing herself from both and redefining herself on her own terms.
The memoir Wild follows Strayed as she hikes 1,100 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail four years after her beloved mother’s death from cancer. Strayed confronts her grief head-on, processing memories of her mother’s death and the dissolution of her marriage. Each step is a step toward letting go of her pain, and moving on from her past mistakes and traumas.
Housekeeping begins in the aftermath: Ruthie and her sister Lucile’s mother has committed suicide (and long before this, their grandfather died in a tragic train accident). They are abandoned by their caretakers, and left in the hands of their eccentric and unconventional Aunt Sylvie. The tension in this novel comes not necessarily from wanting to know what will happen, but how (and if) the girls will survive what has alreadyhappened.
An interesting exploration of this theme occurs when characters are not able to let go and move on… In Evening by Susan Minot, Ann Grant is at the end of her life and consumed with memories of a brief love affair that took place 40 years (and three marriages) earlier when she was just 25. “If every life had high points and low points, there would have to be one point higher than the rest—the highest point in one’s life. So, she thought, this had been hers.” This affair is something that the narrator never fully recovers from; something she dwells upon even in her final moments.
Because a love story must occur between two particular people, in a particular society that the characters need to appease or disregard or acknowledge in some way, it also becomes a rich social portrait of that particular place in time; which makes the novels on this list—from a young boyhood romance in 1970s Brazil to unresolved tension between a hotel guest and his guide in South Korea—as much about love as about the entanglements of love and place. And if this place is inaccessible to the English language? It doesn’t matter. The experience of reading fiction is mysterious and unpredictable, full of deceptions and slanted truths and the unexpected pleasures of imagination. In that way it only ever speaks one language.
My own novel The Fertile Earth is a love story between Vijaya and Krishna. When they meet for the first time as children, their connection is magnetic and intense and results in a fateful adventure into the hills surrounding their village; the repercussions of which echo across their lives and the lives of their families. Set in rural Telangana, in the volatile early decades of post-independence India, the novel occurs in a time and place which is totally inaccessible to the English language. But this book exists—by luck and chance and all the people who’ve helped me along the way—yet essentially because English is my first language when I write, though it is my second when I speak.
Here are seven novels, their hearts threaded around a love story, inaccessible to the English language had it not been for their translators’ love of two languages.
Delia and Nini have been around each other their whole lives. They are both poor, imprisoned in a provincial village that limits their possibilities in life, but there is one road that connects their home to the city; only Delia and Nini have different ways of arriving there. Will they still end up together? This novel is 94 pages long. It is perfect and complete and too poignant and too emotionally rich to be called stark. For longtime Ginzburg fans, it will be gratifying to know that this was her debut, published under the pseudonym Alissa Tornimparte.
This novel’s tagline “Cinderella meets Bonnie and Clyde” sounds like a page turner. Indeed, Wes Anderson considers The Grand Budapest Hotel to be influenced by Stefan Zweig’s work. And it is—a page tuner—but for all the right reasons. The novel opens with Christine—our post office girl—sitting in her chair in the middle of a silent afternoon in post-Great War Austria. How will Christine’s path cross with the wounded war veteran Ferdinand? Will their lives head toward happiness or tragedy?
Camilo and Cosme are two boys who unexpectedly fall in love one summer in 1970’s Rio de Janeiro. This novel is a portrait of first love found and lost, and the years that follow, set against a beautifully rendered depiction of Brazilian society during the military dictatorship.
Winter in Sokchoby Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins
In this novel, the unnamed narrator is a young French Korean woman who spends her days working at a rundown guesthouse in Sokcho, a small town in South Korea that sits on the border with North Korea. Yan, a French cartoonist, arrives one night to begin an extended stay, looking to Sokcho for inspiration for his artwork. Helplessly intrigued, she and Yan travel together, exchange stories and histories, yet remain complete enigmas to each other. A vivid and mysterious and utterly surprising novel.
Every morning, a housekeeper and a professor are introduced to each other; the professor has a traumatic brain injury that allows him only 80 minutes’ worth of short-term memory. Sometimes, the housekeeper brings her son to work with her. Can you forge familial bonds without history? This is a tender, warm-hearted novel about chosen families, what they give you no matter how fleeting your time together.
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann
This is a love story set in East Germany in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. There is a looming suspicion from the very first page that the relationship between 19-year-old Katharina and 50-year-old Hans will turn insidious—it does—and the hurt will land on only one of them. But which one? The novel is inventive, yet has terrific velocity. Cruelty, passion, self-destruction; these traits are never judged or philosophized, yet the reader understands perfectly how a relationship like this works.
Ties by Domenico Starnone, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri
Aldo and Vanda, long married, return home to Naples after their annual seaside holiday. They find their home robbed and the cat missing. Ties is about family love: Between Aldo and Vanda, between Aldo and the woman for whom he leaves Vanda, between Aldo and his children. What remains of a family broken and put back together? The structure of this novel is intricate and masterful, and like the finest made structures, it is shaped by the storytelling and not the other way around.
After his mother dies, the protagonist of Kat Tang’s debut novel, Five-Star Stranger, chances into a gig as a “rental stranger”: someone hired via app to be whomever the client needs. For ten years, he immerses himself in roles ranging from airline hypeman to mourner, lives alone in a utilitarian apartment, and zealously enforces boundaries personal and professional.
When a nosy new client, Darlene, threatens to undermine his long-running role as father to a girl named Lily, Stranger must confront the trauma that launched his career and try to make sense of a future without it. In wry, lucid, and compassionate prose, Tang explores the costs of intimacy and performance.
I had a chance to speak with Tang over FaceTime about persona, real-life rental strangers, and the lessons we can take from loneliness.
E.Y. Zhao: Stranger projects many versions of himself. Consciously, he doesn’t want to be seen through. But when he’s with Mari and Lily, the family where he’s played a father for eight years, he subconsciously hopes that they will see through him. Especially at a time when we project so many personas, how do you think about the tension between wanting to be taken at face taken at face value versus wanting to be seen through?
Kat Tang: There’s so much fear in projection. We’re always wanting people to see us a certain way on social media or even to our families. And there’s a fear that if it is known who we truly are or what we are really like, we might be rejected. So I think that’s what he’s toeing the line between. He wants to be perfect but he also wants to be known, and he doesn’t know how to let people in and let himself be vulnerable. He hasn’t really had experience doing that, and he sees that when he’s working with other clients, when they are vulnerable, it can be ugly. It’s a very ugly part of people. I don’t think that it’s easy for us to show that, especially nowadays, when everything’s so curated. But it’s so necessary to remember that we are messy. We make mistakes and that’s okay. We shouldn’t have our lives ruined if we say something or if we do something wrong, it’s all about changing and being able to change from that.
EYZ: The idea for rental strangers came from real rental services in Japan. What questions or insights about American society did the premise raise for you?
KT: The rental stranger business in Japan made a lot of sense to me for Japanese society because it is very image-focused, family is an important thing, divorce rates are not as high, so it’s less likely that a child will grow up without both parents. So I can see why renting a parent might be more normal there. Transporting that concept to the US, I ended up thinking about what it is that people, let’s just say in a big city like New York City, might want. And I think other than the family aspect of it, a lot of it seemed similar, at least in my imagination. Of people who just don’t want to appear alone. Who want to be seen as desirable in front of their friends or family. That applies across the board. It could be having fans at an event or having a mourner at a funeral. It’s all just to show that we were loved and cared for by someone at some point. So I thought that was quite universal.
EYZ: Darlene initially hires Stranger to play an alcoholic brother. After first you think she’s practicing an intervention with her own alcoholic brother, but actually, she’s writing a novel about a protagonist with an alcoholic brother. It’s a funny reversal, conducting real-life rehearsal for fictional work when we often think of fiction as something that enhances real life. Can reading and storytelling be a rehearsal for real life or vice versa?
KT: I think that oftentimes when people turn to literature, even if they don’t know it, they’re seeking something. And whatever it is, we’ll find it on the page, whether or not the author intended it. It’s what I’ve come to realize after hearing people talking about my book. Like, “Oh, that’s what you got from it? Great, I love that, but I never even thought about it.” We each come to literature with our own wants, our own needs, our own worldview. And I think that whatever we find in there is often what we want to hear or what we are already thinking about. And then the other way around, at least for me, as a writer, there’s so much that comes from my life that influences my fiction. How can it not when you’re just one person with one little monkey working in your own skull?
EZY: Another central concern of the book is white lies. I was curious if writing this book challenged or changed the way that you think about white lies in everyday life.
KT: There’s this part of the novel where Stranger talks about when someone isn’t well and you say, “Oh, is there anything I can do for you?” or “Do you need anything?”, but you don’t actually mean to do it. You just say that as words of sympathy and there’s no real intention behind it. That in some ways is a lie, and you’re just using it to show that you care. So I’ve been thinking about that recently, and in my own life, I’ve tried to do less of this performative lying, so to speak. Saying things or doing things where I’m just saying it because I think that that’s what someone else wants to hear. But if they were to actually say, “Oh, yeah, I would love some chicken soup,” then I would be like, “Oh, I didn’t intend to do that at all.” So in that way, I’ve been thinking more about the intentions behind words, even if they’re meant to soothe. How if you don’t actually plan on carrying them out, they can hurt people. How much are you saying things to manipulate people versus saying it because you mean it?
EZY: Sometimes we say the thing that comes next in the script, not because we want to deceive anybody or because we’ve got pernicious intentions, but because that’s the smoothest way to keep the situation going.
KT: Totally. And everyone does it all the time. And honestly, I think when people say, “Oh, do you want anything?”, everyone usually says no, because there’s this communal understanding that this is what we say, we don’t actually want to ask anything of you. But I think we can do better. I think we can be more attentive to what we say and intentional in what we ask for or offer each other. And the times that I have felt the most cared for or seen is when someone offers me something and then they do it. I’m like, “Oh, wow. You weren’t just paying lip service to that. That’s incredible.”
EYZ: Stranger’s waking life is all scripts and roles. What is Stranger’s self if all of the external trappings belong to other people? How do you build him or think about him?
KT: I’ve been asked this question a couple times, in different ways. Someone asked me, “How do you write a main character with no name? Who is Stranger?” And surprisingly, even though he’s always taking on these other roles, his self was relatively easy to pin down because he’s so observant and he does have a personality in his judgments. He’s actually quite judgmental, because I feel like people who are observant oftentimes can be judgmental. And the other thing is that the way he portrays himself is very constant, because he’s always trying to take care of other people or to predict their needs. And trying to not think about himself. But in that way, he’s showing who he is by the things that he does or does not do for himself. And that’s how I was able to think about who he is as a character. That and also his past and how he’s trying to push all that away. But he very much has a past: as an Asian American, or half-Asian, growing up in LA. He didn’t come from nowhere. And a lot of that influences the way that he thinks about his surroundings, living in New York, being raised poor. He has a lot of characteristics to him that, because it’s in first person, you get to learn about as he’s going about his other jobs.
EYZ: In some ways, somebody so disciplined about his values and judgments is a more consistent character than people in real life. Because in real life, most of us are inconsistent and change our minds.
KT: Yeah, it’s like those rules that you were trying to follow until they break you or until you grow beyond those bounds. And that’s what’s happening with him as he’s growing too big for the rules that he set for himself. Which, like you said, oftentimes is easier to pin down. Because I’m working on a novel right now and the main character is all over the place with their wants and needs. I think most people are like that. But it’s tough to write.
EYZ: Throughout the book, Stranger gets to play out a variety of situations. How did you curate them?
KT: The early draft of this novel was a bunch of vignettes of him in different jobs with different names and third persons. It wasn’t until later on that you realize they’re all the same person. A lot of what ended up in this version came from that. I had a lot of input from friends. I would tell them like, “Hey, so I’m writing this novel about a rental stranger.” And then some would be like, “Oh, have you considered he could be rented for this, he can be rented for that?” And the one where he’s in line at the airport and he’s being paid to say how wonderful the airline is? That was because I was in the airport in San Jose, and it was winter, and there had been a big storm. The lines were crazy and it was awful. And someone in front of me was like, “I’ve been with this airline since I was in college. They always take care of you. It’s totally fine.” And I was like, what a plant! Who would say that out of the blue? And then I was like, wait, this is great.
EYZ: If you were to rent a stranger for an event, what would it be?
KT: I actually went to Japan in April and rented a father. And it was so different than what I expected. I, as the client, felt the need to keep him interested, even though I was paying for the interaction. I was like, “Oh, gosh, I hope he likes me. What does he think about me?” And because he was a rental father, I ended up asking him a lot of questions I thought one should ask your dad, but I realized I never even asked my own dad. And so after that, I asked my dad the same questions and he had some really great answers. And I was like, I can’t believe it took me renting a pretend father to realize the things that maybe I should talk to my own father about.
EYZ: It is like getting to rehearse things that are very scary to approach with people we know.
KT: Exactly. And with the pretend father, there are certain things he said or expressed where I was like, “I don’t think I agree with that.” But because I didn’t have to ever see him again, I was like, “I’m not gonna fight with him.” And then I thought, why don’t I have the same kind of grace with my family? It’s just so interesting to have the real thing and the fake thing. To compare those two and be like, “Oh, I could change this about how I treat my real dad.”
EYZ: Did you get to ask him why he was in the profession?
KT: Yeah. For the most part, when he meets with Japanese clients, they just want someone to listen to them. Usually in Japanese society, older men are always telling people what to do. Often you’ll get female clients who will just want to talk to him and have him listen and encourage them. Apparently, the age he’s at is considered non-threatening for women. I was like, sure, not in America. But then we talked a bit about that. And I asked him about his own family. And he was like, oh, yeah, I’m actually divorced and estranged from my son. I was like, Ooh, interesting that you would then be taking on this role to meet with other people and even pretend to be their dad when you’re not close with your own son.
EYZ: It is exactly the dynamic that you portrayed in the book, right? Where it’s painful to be truly intimate.
KT: Yeah. But you can get a little hit of that from pretending.
EYZ: Stranger tells himself that he chose his vocation as atonement for his mother’s suicide. He let her down and now he wants to support other people in moments of need. But at the end, he reveals this is made up. It’s a literally narrative-shattering revelation, where the things that we believed as readers aren’t true either. It’s a really bold ending. How did you get there?
KT: I always knew that he was going to leave for California. And I think I had a shattering moment too when I realized the reason why. When I thought of the ending, I was like, “Oh, of course it has to be this way.” Because the whole story, as much as I know a lot of people want it to be about him and Lily or him and Darlene, it is just a story about Stranger. And his coming to terms with himself and accepting himself. And I’ve had people tell me, “Oh, why is this such a sad ending?” Actually, I think it is a really hopeful ending.
EYZ: He’s able to change.
KT: He’s able to let go of the narrative he had about punishing himself and look into the future. He wasn’t able to do that before because he wanted so much to matter to his mother, he wanted so much to atone for something that he never had a part to play in in the first place. I was talking to a friend, maybe two years ago, and he was talking about the horror of indifference from a parent. And I think that’s when it really clicked what it was that was going on with Stranger all along.
EYZ: Which he tries to replicate, as often happens.
KT: Yeah, exactly. And so I think that’s when the ending really clicked into place. And I was able to finish.
EYZ: And I felt implicated as the reader, because Stranger kept saying, “It’s my fault she killed herself.” And eventually I was like, maybe? But it’s never a child’s fault that their parent killed herself.
KT: Yeah, that’s part of it too! The things that he says, the reasons to back it up, are pretty flimsy. I did want the reader to be like, Really? there must be something more, he must have done something really bad. But no, it’s just him trying to keep the reader at arm’s length.
EYZ: What do you think the role of loneliness is in our lives? What can we learn from Stranger?
KT: Even though a lot of the book is about people running away from their loneliness, I do think that there is a place for it in our lives, as long as it’s a stillness. The ability to be with oneself. For the book, there’s a big way in which people reached out in order to assuage their loneliness, but not necessarily to the right people, always to these strangers, to drugs, to partying, to whatever it is, to make you feel a little bit less lonely. But at the end of the day, I think what Stranger realizes is that he isn’t able to make these people less lonely. And so it’s actually like, within oneself or more genuine connection that is necessary. And not just a quick fix.
In 1947, the British ended their long and extractive colonial rule in India with a final cruel act: dividing it into two nations, Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.
Despite my family’s roots in India, I had little idea of Partition’s impact on my own family. I knew my father’s family had moved from Hyderabad Deccan to Karachi, but we never spoke about it, and I never thought deeply about what they lost, or who they left behind. I didn’t even quite process that they were part of the 15 million refugees Partition created. But that changed when I started investigating another dark period in my family’s life—one where my paternal grandmother left my father and his six siblings for a period of nearly two decades.
As I immersed myself in archival research and literature about the period leading to the British leaving India, it helped me understand the massive political upheaval during my grandmother’s life, exacerbating the personal turmoil she faced as a woman of her generation with little agency over her own life, married off at 14, only to become a widow in mid-thirties. It brought home how vital it is to see history through not just ordinary people’s lives, but ordinary women’s lives.
Authors Kamila Shamsie and Sunjeev Sahota have discussed the painful irony women of my grandmother’sgeneration in the subcontinent experienced: while the campaign for azaadi, freedom from the British, succeeded in 1947, that it did not extend to women’s everyday lives.
Nor did it bring the unbridled joy expected after answering to foreign overlords for centuries. The weight of colonial rule was replaced by communal violence and fractured communities, Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Subh-e-Azadi famously referring to the beginning of this new era as a “mottled dawn.”
Here are seven books about Partition—what led to this rupture, the horrors of that time, how these new nations were built, and how all of this has reverberated in subsequent generations, especially for women.
Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition by Saadat Hasan Manto
Saadat Hasan Manto was one of the most prolific writers of his time — a journalist, screenwriter and literary master. Born in 1912 in Punjab, Manto was determined to stay in Bombay where he settled post-Partition but eventually moved to Pakistan when communal violence shook him. Mottled Dawn, referring to Faiz’s famous poem, is a collection depicting the violence and madness of that time. One of the most memorable is “Toba Tek Singh”, following a Sikh patient held in a Pakistani asylum for years after Partition. As he and others are moved to “their” new countries, Manto artfully reflects the wider bewilderment and resistance in these patients, who were “dead set against the entire operation.”
What if you didn’t just hear ancestral stories, but you experienced them? That’s the premise of this incredible intergenerational yarn unspooled by debut author Asha Thanki. Three generations of women are connected through a tapestry, our guide in this narrative, Ayukta, explains to her wife her hesitancy to have a child. The saga spans three generations of women, connected through a tapestry, following her family’s journey from Pakistan to India during Partition, and onwards to the U.S. where Ayukta shares her family’s mysterious abilities for the first time.
The intricacy of calligraphy and artistry of perfume first bring together two youngsters in 1938 Lahore, and over a decade, Samir Vij and Firdaus Khan’s innocent love for one another grows until the fallout from Partition wrenches them apart. Malhotra uses her deep knowledge as a historian and skill as a storyteller to paint a vivid portrait of Lahore during this tense period, while also creating a rich characters who inherit both craft and allegiances. Although this is Malhotra’s debut novel, this work can be seen as a continuation of her deep examination of Partition, with non-fiction titles including Remnants of Partition: 21 Objects from a Continent Divided and In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition.
Originally published in 2009, this pivotal non-fiction title was updated in 2019 by Yasmin Khan, an associate professor of modern history at Oxford. Khan’s careful effort to “humanise and pluralise Partition stories” spans how the British Raj fell to the fractured families Partition left behind. She also worked to avoid the simplistic narrative of Hindu-Muslim-Sikh rivalries creating an inevitable subcontinental split, instead examining the people and circumstances that created this outcome, creating a multitude of consequences still felt today. As Khan writes: “Partition is just too complex to be reduced down to a harrowing foundational myth of national sacrifice and victimhood.”
Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar’s work from 2007 is based on deep research, including digging into archival and oral histories, and follows not just the making of borders, but the making of new nations. An associate professor of history at Brown University, Zamindar focuses on the role of refugees in nationhood, and the bureaucratic efforts to construct new identities, especially along the border, and examines the plight of north Indian Muslims in particular. Her work has inspired performance, film, and part of an animated anthology.
Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell
Geetanjali Shree won the International Booker in 2022 for her fifth book, written in Hindi, which follows an 80-year-old woman in northern India who becomes deeply depressed after becoming a widow. Her protagonist, known as Ma, emerges from her depression with a new vitality, becoming more progressive than even her daughter, who has shrugged off a traditional life. This sets her on a path to revisit her early life in Pakistan, despite her family’s protests, where she confronts the trauma she experienced as a teen. Lyrical and experimental, Shree’s work and Rockwell’s translation deserve careful reading.
Anjali Enjeti’s debut novel spans three generations of women from New Delhi to Atlanta, examining how political upheaval has echoes generations on. It begins in August 1947, where 16-year-old Deepa loses her secret boyfriend Amir to Lahore, which lands in the newly created Pakistan. Later, Deepa herself would be forced not only to leave India, but to leave the region altogether. Sixty years later, Deepa’s granddaughter Shan lives in Atlanta, and decides to search for her grandmother while grieving a pregnancy loss and marriage. As she uncovers how her family history was irrevocably changed by Partition, Shan also learns just how resilient the women in her family were.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
