Rebecca McClanahan’s In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays is an exploration of what it means to live in a place, and, in fact, what it means to live at all. It’s a haunting book, with many detailed glimpses into the everyday realities of apartment-dwelling, rent-paying, and meaning-making in a city that’s at once glorious and difficult. This book is a love letter to New York—a letter that, perhaps, both we and the city need now more than ever.
I read this book in the middle of the COVID 19 pandemic, and as I read, I couldn’t help but think of New York in the grips of the virus, reeling from grief, loss, and confusion. And yet, despite everything, it’s also a city discovering, as it always seems to, a spirit of shared humanity and community.
Read full review by Vivian Wagner here.
Girls and women caught between myth and the modern world.
Selected by Ann Hood as the winner of the Red Hen Fiction Award, Ehrlich’s debut collection contains 15 stories, some as short as a paragraph. Protagonists range from girls dealing with absent mothers, first kisses, and female friendships to grown women, mothers and would-be mothers themselves. Many feature animals (swan, deer, bear, raccoon, and more) or mythic creatures (the Marsh King, the Undertoad), and most have at least one foot in a liminal space between fantasy and reality, between what we dream of and what we’ll ultimately accept.
Read more here.
A ghost story that focuses not on a single spirit but on an entire city whose layered history haunts its occupants.
“Meg had the unsettling sense that she was seeing all the layers of the city transposed over one another, like scrims in a play going haywire.” Meg Rhys proudly carries her “Spinster Librarian card” and does not believe in love, thank you very much. Instead she believes in ghosts, and in New York City there is no shortage of phantasmal company. Haunted by (accompanied by?) the ghost of her sister, who died at 25, Meg armors herself with the weapons that might otherwise be used to attack her: She’s 40 and single, she’s a librarian, and she has a cat named Virginia Wolf (a misspelling only Meg finds funny as well as a wink toward Shearn’s fondness for multi-comma’d sentences).
Read the full review here!
Amy Shearn’s modern fable Unseen City is anchored by smart, sly humor. It delves into the layered social, psychological, and historical architecture of New York City, a place that’s paved over the bones of its dead, who are transmuted by needs of the living or clarified by their own unmet demands. Somewhere between the two poles lies the finite present, a co-constructed mythology that’s revealed to be volatile, and as susceptible to emotional anesthesia as it is to radical hope.
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Seagulls swoop and dive, crying in the salty air. The waves of Nushagak Bay crash on sandbars and rocky shores. Machines rattle the warehouses on the cannery side of the village “where the beach flattened and the boardwalks grew tall.”
From an investigation of silence
So many sounds; so many stories. Yet as I page through Mia Heavener’s new novel Under Nushagak Bluff under the long shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is the novel’s subtle and steady investigation of silence that most captivates me.
To an investigation of memory
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Reading Deborah Lott’s memoir of her dysfunctional upbringing feels like the literary equivalent of rubbernecking: her childhood was a series of trainwrecks, but somehow you can’t stop turning around to watch. Lott was the youngest of three children; her mother was stable, but her father, Ira, was excessive. A hypochondriac, a fantasist, a narcissist – the man knew no boundaries, neither physical nor mental. And he made Deborah his sidekick, his confidante, his ally against his wife’s attempts to normalize him.
When her story starts, Deborah is four and the counterman at the post office has just died, and Ira is insisting that since this is her “first death,” she should try to remember it forever. Then she’s in bed with her parents, feeling cozy with her daddy’s hairy chest and his big belly and his “funny” poke-his-moles games, and yes, you feel an instinctive “eeeuw” rising up. But not only is young Deborah notbothered by her father’s casual undress, she is intrigued by problematic aspects of his physique — his deformed fingers and his uneven legs. Before long, you’re in the kitchen with this man, who has decided to create a buffet from canned spaghetti, Hormel tamales, and tinned sardines, which brings up his botulism theories, and before long he’s throwing out one can after another because it doesn’t make a little “pffft” sound when it’s pierced. Even worse, he’s roped Deborah’s older brother into inspecting all the cans, and soon you wonder if they will ever get anything to eat. Actually, not only does Ira eat continually, there’s a terrifying scene in a Las Vegas restaurant, when the rest of the family wants to leave after breakfast so they can explore the casinos, but Ira talks his daughter into eating a second full breakfast with him, just to forestall the family’s foray.
Read the full review here.
Daugherty’s engrossing latest (after the collection American Originals) focuses on the small community of Midland, Tex., in the late 1950s as it reels from severe weather, Cold War paranoia, and school integration. Troy, the asthmatic protagonist, is 10 when his mother is first stricken by a migraine during a dust storm. At school, Troy helps his friend Stevie, who has arthritis, get on the ground during “duck and cover” drills. And when the school board moves to convert an abandoned Quonset hut on school property into classroom space for students from a neighboring Black high school that was damaged in a storm, local tensions come to a head.
Read the full article here.
Shearn’s luminous latest (after The Mermaid from Brooklyn) follows a self-avowed librarian spinster; a man researching the history of his father’s Crown Heights, Brooklyn, home; and the ghost of an orphaned girl from Civil War–era Manhattan. Meg Rhys lives in the perfect apartment: it’s rent-controlled, close to her job at the Brooklyn Library, and also home to the ghost of her dead sister, Kate. When Meg’s landlord decides to sell the building, Meg must face the dizzying and depressing prospect of finding a new apartment, the “lingua franca of New York.” Meanwhile, widower Ellis Williams helps his father with his Crown Heights multifamily rental property, which has never been able to keep any tenants. The first floor rattles, there’s a draft coming from nowhere, and the doors keep slamming when no one is around. When Ellis seeks Meg’s help to research the building’s history, the two stumble upon more than they bargained for. Interwoven with the contemporary narrative is the story of a girl whose orphanage burned down during the Draft Riots of 1863 and who then moved in with a new family in Weeksville, a settlement of free Blacks that existed in what is present-day Crown Heights. The presence of ghosts is easily believable, helped along by the characters’ shared sense of grief. Shearn’s nimble storytelling unearths a fascinating and fraught history. (Oct.)
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Aimee Liu’s Glorious Boy gives readers a portrait of a young mother and fledgling anthropologist caught in a remote outpost in the midst of World War Two. Two of Liu’s three previous novels (Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face) were set in Asia, and all deal with themes of race, colonialism, and women strengthening their identities.
Glorious Boy takes readers to the remote Andaman Islands, a territory of India in the Bay of Bengal, where in 1936, twenty-one-year-old Claire embarks on an anthropology career with the encouragement of her husband Shep, a British civil surgeon. Fascinated by the Biya, a fictional Andaman tribe based on the Aka-Bea people, Claire finds her work interrupted by motherhood, and her son Ty— mysteriously mute and highly willful—inscrutable. She is only able to continue researching her beloved tribe with the help of servants, including thirteen-year-old Naila, orphaned by a tsunami, whose especially close connection with Ty makes her the only caretaker who can translate his needs. When the Japanese invade the Andamans in 1942, Naila disappears into the forest with four-year-old Ty as Claire hastily packs to leave. Shep dispatches a frantic Claire on a ship and tries to search for the boy himself.
Read the full review here!
En la novela Cerdos, de Johanna Stoberock, hay una isla innombrada en algún mar desconocido, cuatro niños se dan a la tarea de recoger la basura que llega a la orilla de la playa y utilizarla como alimento para seis cerdos. El mar es tóxico, por alguna razón cuya explicación huelga. Los cerdos tienen apetito voraz. Se comen todo. Los niños no saben cómo ni de dónde llegaron. Ni ellos ni los cerdos. La eternidad dura mientras tengan memoria de lo que viven. Como han vivido toda la vida allí, se podría decir nacieron niños y que solo podrán ser niños.
No cuestionan su presente. No tienen pasado.
Los protagonistas de la novela -Luisa, Mimi, Natasha y Andrew- cumplen una función autómata en un sistema de eliminación de desperdicios que llegan desde todas partes del mundo, pero da igual de dónde provienen. Los niños son conscientes de que deben alimentar los cerdos y hacer desaparecer toda la basura que se acumula a la orilla de la isla, pero nada realmente desaparece del todo. Esto ellos no lo saben. Aún.
Lee el artículo por español aquí!
The stories in Boy Oh Boy by Zachary Doss are playful, surreal, sometimes dark, and always magical. This wonderful collection of inventive queer fabulist stories and flash fictions won the 2018 Grace Paley Prize.
Told in the second person, the stories feel personal, as if you are being pulled into the scene rather than feeling gimmicky. Reading Boy Oh Boy feels like it could be my own relationship unfolding before me.
Read the full review here.
In Kristen Millares Young’s Subduction, one of the main characters, Peter, a member of the Makah tribe, talks about the past as a physical place that can hold you. In the heart of the book, Peter says he thinks that he has been pulled “into his past until he was here, but not here, inhabiting the places [the family] had been happy together, for time is a place, he was sure of it, and his soul was stretched thin across it, near to breaking, an aching that was his only memory of love.” To be in the past, for Peter, is to take away from being in the present. And Peter’s past is traumatic—making it all the easier to gravitate to, and all the easier to get stuck in, and rendering it difficult for him to keep a grasp on the present. Subduction explores this idea of people’s histories and stories, whether personal or communal, as places that can anchor or be explored and learned from.
The novel follows two main characters, Peter and Claudia, as they spend time in Neah Bay at the Makah reservation. Claudia is a Latina anthropologist who has just been left by her husband for her sister; she has lost any sense of family that she had. She goes to Neah Bay in order to visit an old interview subject, Maggie, who suffers from dementia. Claudia hopes that after working with Maggie she can finish her book, and success will take her to a place where she doesn’t have to live in the past anymore. Meanwhile, Peter, Maggie’s son, returns to the reservation for the first time in years, having left after his father was tragically killed at home. Peter comes back in order to help his mother and hopefully learn something that lets him fully leave his past behind.
Read the full essay here.
The Taipei of Yu-Han Chao’s debut story collection Sex & Taipei City both bustles and glistens. It’s a city of industry and aspiration—skyscrapers and metro trains, prep schools and department stores. Yet beneath the veneer lies something seedier and more lurid. Not the karaoke bars where “princesses” in high heels rent out their attention by the hour, nor the betel nut booths in which young women flaunt their bodies beyond the neon lights. No, in Sex & Taipei City—a captivating, panoramic portrait of intimacy and isolation—the most perverse and secretive place is the human heart.
Take the character of Lee Lei, who rebels against her abusive husband by spitting into his omelet, releasing her resentment “little by little, so that I can still like him.” Or Lily, a music teacher who loses her students one by one because she refuses to wear a bra, attempting to subvert Taiwanese mores by “[not] acting all ashamed of the female body.” Or Sonnie, a bachelor in his thirties who remains closeted because in Asia, “the word ‘gay’ did not really exist unless you were making fun of someone.”
This rich, diverse collection is less about sex than it is about longing and loss. The characters of Sex & Taipei City—who run the gamut of age, gender and class—are more repressed than fulfilled, their desires often stifled by the East Asian values of modesty and politeness. There’s no “true love” or “happily ever after” in these stories, yet Chao’s technique is so nimble and her touch so light, the collection as a whole manages to resist both pity and pessimism.
Read more of this review here!
Marie Tozier’s new book, Open the Dark, is a lyrical guide to the life in Northwest Alaska experienced by the Iñupiaq poet and her family. It touches on themes that can be universally understood by the careful reader and on others that need the cultural context that Tozier’s poetry provides to be understood. Like most books of good poems, it is also a gallery of images for revisiting time after time.
Many of the pieces in the first section of Open the Dark are narrative poems that end with a turn. For example, the first lines of “Grandmother’s Bible” describes how the poet’s grandmother ran her hand down the front page of her Bible, over the Iñupiaq names, birthdates, and deaths of family members listed there. By watching her grandmother, the poet learned who she and others of her generation were named after, “…Eskimo names given/To remember/Dear friends, siblings lost too young, esteemed/Elders.” For the poet and her grandmother, “There is no why,/Only who.”
Read the full review here.
“Whose fault // our fault” the poem “Three Dreams, 2018” opens. Tess Taylor’s fourth collection of poems, Rift Zone, tenders to her reader the language of fault, rift and fracture as her songs and aubades touch upon the geological, ecological and political of our lives.
Evoking California with poems set in Berkeley, Sacramento, and El Cerrito, Taylor carries her reader to place after place, from little hill, to quake, to peak. Sometimes the place is an event in time, as “Loma Prieta, 1989,” which features the earthquake of the same name that affected the San Francisco and Monterey Bay regions. In this poem, the speaker recounts:
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