For a large part of my youth, my “family” was a combination of people with various social and economic circumstances—some vastly different from my own. Caribbean family stories are often like that, stories of biological and found families, people who come together and pull apart for various reasons. 

Often, the novels that are most transformative for me are those that explore atypical family dynamics and transcend conventional family stories. These eight Caribbean family sagas portray families formed by biology or culture, proximity or shared experiences. 

Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein

The Saroop family dynamics begin to fall apart when Hans Saroop gets a new job serving as night watchman on the Changoor farm after the wealthy owner goes missing. The Changoor farm offers Hans comforts he doesn’t have at his home in the dilapidated barrack where he lives with his wife Marlee and son, and a host of other poor Hindu families. When Hans Saroop falls for his employer, he sets in motion questions about loyalty, sacrifice, and what it takes to get ahead, and upends both his biological family and the family living in the close confines of the barrack.

Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique

Land of Love and Drowning follows three generations of the Bradshaw family living on the Virgin Islands in the early 1900s—all descendants of Captain Owen Arthur Bradshaw whose ship sinks around the time the Virgin Islands are transferred to American rule. The book revolves around his three children: Eeona, who is exiled to the island of Tortola after her mother discovers the captain has had an incestuous relationship with his older daughter; Annette, who considers herself the historian of the family; and Jacob, born to the captain’s mistress. Each child has a magical gift that they rely on once they are orphaned, a gift that can either save or destroy their lives. 

What a Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You by Sharma Taylor

When Dinah, a domestic worker, becomes pregnant in her late teens, she gives up her baby to a wealthy expat couple working in Jamaica. The couple disappears and eighteen years later, when a young man, Apollo, visits the family for whom Dinah now works, Dinah is convinced the young man is her long-lost son. Apollo is also curious about the strange woman who thinks she knows him and his Jamaican heritage, which his parents do not discuss. Class and race collide in this saga about biological and adopted families. 

Book of the Little Axe by Lauren Francis-Sharma

Rosa Rendón would rather work on her family’s farm than do domestic work. But when the British capture Trinidad and it becomes clear that free black property owners will lose their land and their freedom, Rosa leaves the island and heads north to live among the Crow Nation in Montana. There she marries a Crow Chief but her son Victor increasingly realizes his mother has kept many secrets about his family ties from him. In this multi-generational saga, Rosa has to retrace her own journey to help her son forge his own path to manhood.

The Island of Forgetting by Jasmine Sealy

Spanning four generations, this novel begins in 1962 with Iapetus, driven mad by the memory of watching his brother, Cronus, murder their father. Cronus encourages Iapetus to forget and later takes in Iapetus’ son, Atlas. But Iapetus and each generation of his descendants remain tied to Cronus even after Cronus dies. Atlas shelves his dream to leave Barbados to study and instead takes on a role helping his cousin manage the hotel Cronus owned. We also meet Atlas’s teenage daughter, Calypso who falls for and has a child with a much older Canadian real estate developer, who is in business with her uncle. And Calypso’s son, also raised at the hotel, battles with his own sense of identity and his mother’s movement in and out of his life. With echoes of Greek mythology, this novel explores the sometimes impossible task of shedding family legacy and forging one’s own path.  

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

When Eleanor Bennett dies, she leaves behind a long voice recording for her children, Byron and Benny, along with a traditional black cake. Eleanor’s message describes a swimmer who escapes her island on her wedding day just after her new husband collapses and dies, and a baby born during her time in England. Estranged siblings, Byron and Benny, are both reeling with the secrets their mother has chosen to disclose only after her death, the new family stories they uncover, and their own broken relationship. The book explores how family stories can both upend and unite a family. 

The Book of Lost Saints by Daniel José Older

Marisol’s ghost wants the story of her disappearance during the Cuban Revolution told. To do so, she haunts her nephew Ramón, floating through the book and shadowing her nephew through every public and private aspect of his life. Through Marisol’s haunting, Ramón uncovers his family’s buried history, Marisol’s capture and imprisonment during the revolution, and his family’s escape to America. As Ramón learns Marisol’s story, and the reasons his mother prefers not to talk about this period in her family’s life, he engineers a family reunion no one thought possible.

Dominicana by Angie Cruz

Growing up in a struggling family in the Dominican Republic, fifteen-year-old Ana Canción is pushed into a marriage with a much older man as part of her mother’s plan to move her family from their poverty stricken community to America. Juan Ruiz, who has been living in New York City, marries the teen to obtain the Canción family’s land. When Ana moves with her new husband to New York, she finds a rundown apartment and herself in circumstances that don’t allow her to take care of her family financially as her mother expects. This family saga is one of determination and desire, and a young woman finding her way out of circumstances set up for her to fail.

The post 8 Books on Love, Loss, and Betrayal in the Caribbean appeared first on Electric Literature.

Life Studies may have been one of the first books to introduce confessionalism into American poetry, but the term confessional is most often linked with Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and other women poets whose writing is too commonly misread and dismissed as autobiographical gushings of emotion rather than crafted, intentional social commentary. My new book of poems, DIARY, interrogates these ideas about the confessional and gender. Rather than engaging in the acrobatics of trying to come across as not too emotional, not too messy, not too personal; always measured and buttoned up and chill and universal, the poems in my book indulge in the mundane, the feminine, the bratty and sad and bodily and TMI. I’m so excited and inspired by other contemporary writing by women and gender-fluid poets who push back on antiquated and sexist ideas around the confessional by doing the same. Here’s a list of 8 books in this vein:

Gravitas by Amy Berkowitz

Speaking of graduate school, this necessary book digs into “the tendency of MFA programs to teach women that their lives aren’t worth writing about.” These crafted, conversational poems insist on the power and merit of everyday speech in women’s writing, referencing the free-wheeling poetics of both Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems and Paule Marshall’s “From the Poets in the Kitchen.” Gravitas interrogates an academic space that closes its eyes to a serial abuser professor on staff while chronically dismissing poems about the everyday by women: “Believing that poetry about the life of a young woman lacks gravitas / believing that the life of a young woman lacks gravitas / enables a certain cognitive dissonance.”

The Gone Thing by Monica Mcclure 

The followup to McClure’s 2015 book Tender Data, The Gone Thing explores family history, class mobility, labor, and loss in elegant, unflinching poems. One of my favorite things about Monica’s work is how her speaker fucks with us, calls the reader to task, and plays with our assumptions: “Yes I am talking about being poor in America / Suck my dick I am no longer poor I’m high-salaried”. Pastoral beauty and designer perfume mixes with despair, disgust, filth, and astute commentary on systemic oppression, work and labor. 

mahogany by erica lewis 

Written during the years when the author cared for her mother at the end of her life and after her mother’s death, mahogany subverts conventional narratives around grief and the confessional with haunting poems about family, loss, and the struggle to make it through each day. Lewis weaves pop culture, politics, contemporary and historical literature into poems that draw their titles and inspiration from songs by Diana Ross and The Supremes or Ross’s solo career: “my mother used to clean houses / as a child / some days I can barely / get out of bed /in my mind / she’s like diana ross / scrubbing the white lady’s stairs / in lady sings the blues / except prettier / and with green eyes”

Bruise/bruise/break by Jennif(f)er Tamayo 

Printed in vibrant full color and blending poetry, prose, photography, and other visual elements, Tamayo’s radical book connects the dots between cycles and systems of violence in U.S. history—from the genocide of native people that the country was built on to the American poetry world’s colonialist roots. Interspersed with images of U.S. immigration forms doctored to tell the poet’s own family story, bruise/bruise/break digs into familial and global histories while blasting open conventions around genre, grammar, gender and respectability. 

Bedroom Vowel by Zoe Tuck

Zoe Tuck’s poems break the fourth wall, inviting in talk about everything from work and money to friends and even commentary on the poems themselves: “I’m sick of the I / I wish I could just write about mythological and historical themes”. Accounts of everyday life—cooking dinner on a phone call with a friend, planning how to make “like $1,000 this month,” staying up late watching Encino Man—are balanced with reflections on the French Renaissance, tarot, Ancient Greece, Hannah Arendt, The Odyssey, The X-Files, “The Thong Song.” The result is a constellation of references that builds on itself into the size of a whole life. 

Killing Kanoko by Hiromi Itō, translated by Jeffrey Angles

Groundbreaking Japanese poet Hiromi Itō has been writing about feminist issues surrounding sexuality, reproduction and the body since the early 1980s. Turning away from the formal poetic conventions of the era, her poetry uses colloquial, sometimes childlike and vulgar language which brought to her being considered a “shamanness” pulling her language “from some mysterious source deep within.” In Killing Kanoko, originally published in 1980 and translated in 2009, Itō writes about childbirth, menopause, abortion, and ambivalence around motherhood in ways that still feel very much taboo even today. 

Dark Beds by Diana Whitney

Diana Whitney’s quietly explosive collection of poems explores womanhood, motherhood, grief, the spaces where being the parent of a girl child and being a woman overlap with scars left over from childhood. There’s “danger everywhere” in these moody, atmospheric poems that bring a modern, feminist spin to the pastoral as they conjure the natural world, dark skies, early morning gardens and frozen rivers. Time passes and everything grows so fast and also in slow motion—chickens, lilacs, girls, relationships strained by the years. As Whitney’s poem “The Long Goodbye” asks, “How can you savor what you have / when it demands so much attention?”

What You Refuse to Remember by MT Vallarta 

This book’s speaker tells us, “I once wrote on a fellowship application that I write poetry because it is the only way I can scream. I didn’t get the fellowship.” This is just one example of how these powerful poems exploring queer Filipinx identity, trauma, immigration, colonization, and art call into question the rules of academia and the so-called rational world. In a white supremacist patriarchal culture where science and logic are so often privileged over the spiritual, emotional, and intangible, these poems insist the full spectrum of humanity has a right to exist, thrive, and be taken seriously. 

The post 8 Unapologetically TMI Books by Feminist Poets appeared first on Electric Literature.

I have a certain type of book that epitomizes a winter read to me. A dense but approachable text that promises not only to challenge me, but to last for a while. A quiet but urgent literary mystery that makes me want to read carefully and pick the book up again and again. A slow, steady pace with a historical timeline that begs to be read closely over long afternoon stretches, with time and attention, when the only thing to do is stay inside.

The settings of these books are primarily inside, too, but they’re still escapist. Big, drafty houses. Warm, dusty libraries. The action of the novels happens here, in these indoor settings, with university archives or local historical records or personal art collections. The protagonists who piece together revelations or unearth new artifacts are graduate students distracted by personal upheaval, historians nearing an unsatisfying retirement, disenfranchised writers concerned for their family’s wellbeing. They are deep thinkers with astute attention to detail as well as personal blind spots that unravel throughout the course of the novel. 

The books below fit this category perfectly, and many of them follow an academic calendar. After beginning in fall, they ease into thick, knit sweaters and snow packed into place underfoot. Not every book follows this calendar, and not every one features an academic protagonist tracking down a discovery. But every novel includes a library or an archive where action takes place, literary mysteries that drive the story, and searching for a hidden truth with lots and lots of close reading. Perfect fodder for slow, satisfying winter reading to last you through the final stretch before spring. 

Possession by A.S. Byatt

Novelist and literary critic A.S. Byatt died last year, and if you haven’t read her Booker-winning Possession yet, now is the time. In the novel, Roland Michell is an American scholar unhappy with his position researching the fictional Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash and unsure whether he will commit to his girlfriend, his academic career, and his life in London. When he finds a stray document in the archive that suggests a relationship between the subject of his research and another fictional Victorian poet Christabel LaMotte, he steals it from the London Library. Roland approaches Dr. Maud Bailey, an expert on LaMotte, and together they search libraries, texts, archives, and even closed-up rooms in a cold, drafty old country house to get to the bottom of the literary mystery. Even better, they fall in love while doing so. 

Landscapes by Christine Lai

Christine Lai’s recent debut Landscapes is a beautiful exploration of art, memory, and preservation against the backdrop of ecological disaster in the near future. Told primarily in first-person journal entries, the novel follows art historian and archivist Penelope as she catalogs the collection of art, books, and ephemera at Morningside, the great English country house where her partner Aiden grew up and where she has lived and worked since graduate school. The house will be sold in April, and just before the property changes hands, Aiden’s brother Julian will return for one last visit, his first in decades after leaving abruptly after a violent altercation with Penelope. Penelope’s journal entries begin in September and continue through spring, as she spends the winter working through the contents of the library, hosting climate refugees in the halls of the great house, and bracing herself to face Julian after all these years. 

The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish

Like Possession, this novel begins with a fictional discovery. In her final year before retirement, historian Helen Watt receives a call from a former student who found seventeenth-century documents in his home. The documents include household accounts as well as correspondence of a rabbi who lived in the house, written by the rabbi’s scribe, a young woman named Ester. Helen, who is ill, begrudgingly enlists the support of American graduate student Aaron Levy. Together, Helen and Aaron work quickly to translate the documents, search for the identity of the scribe, and uncover connections to prominent historical figures before Helen’s retirement—and before the documents become available to other, more prominent scholars. In the novel’s 1660s storyline, the stakes are even higher, particularly with the plague looming. While the stakes are high, the pacing is measured and Kadish’s writing is beautiful, dense with detailed descriptions. Including plenty of cold winter drafts and thick knit sweaters.

The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. by Lee Kravetz

The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. is structured like Michael Cunningham’s Day, with a similar blurring of fact and fiction. In the novel, Estee is a curator for the small, Boston-based St. Ambrose Auction House. While cataloging the contents of an estate, she discovers a handwritten draft of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and embarks on the process of verifying its authenticity ahead of a sale. The other two threads take place during Plath’s life: Dr. Ruth Barnhouse is a psychiatrist who treats Plath while she is institutionalized, and Boston Rhoades, based on Anne Sexton, is a competitive classmate in Robert Lowell’s famed poetry seminar. Throughout the novel, as Estee spends months focused on the newly discovered handwritten notebook, it becomes clear how these storylines, and these women, connect. 

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

In Unsheltered, Willia Knox and her family move into an old home that has fallen into disrepair. The house lacks a foundation and threatens to fall over, according to a local, and the stability of the Knox family is similarly tenuous. Willa has recently lost her job when her magazine folded, and her husband Iano has a one-year appointment that may not be renewed at the local college, after the university where he taught for his career abruptly closed. Their adrift daughter Tig moves back in with them, and so does their son, Zeke, after his wife dies by suicide. Zeke brings his newborn baby with him The final member of their household is Iano’s father, who is ill. The novel follows Willa as she tries to save the house, keep her family together during this time of upheaval, and searches the local archive and more for a historical connection to Mary Treat, an accomplished an undervalued scientist who collaborated with Charles Darwin. The novel includes a 19th century storyline that explores Treat’s work and her life, particularly this correspondence. The scientist is a real historical figure, but the cold, drafty house where the Knox family lives for this transformative year, is fictional. 

Cities of Women by Kathleen B. Jones

This is another thick book with two timelines. In the first, modern-day narrative, history professor Verity Frazier is feeling unsettled and unmotivated when she finds a clue that the illustrator of Christine de Pizan’s illuminated manuscript is a woman named Anastasia, and she heads to London during her sabbatical to prove this theory. The second timeline, my favorite, follows Anastasia’s journey in the 14th century—who she is, how she began illustrating, and how she became connected with Christine de Pizan. 

Babel by R.F. Kuang

Unlike any of the others on the list, this book is fantasy. But the magical elements of R.F. Kuang’s Babel exist so seamlessly in a real historical world that it fits the same winter mood: close, slow reading, cozy atmosphere, and an archive-driven literary mystery. The novel takes place in an alternative 19th-century England, where the nation’s global power is backed by magic, which is derived from capturing the meaning of words that is inevitably lost in translation between languages. Because of this, Oxford houses the Royal Institute of Translation, which is nicknamed Babel. Our main character, an orphan from Canton, assumes the name Robin Swift when he is adopted by professor Richard Lovell as a boy. Lovell quickly begins tutoring the boy in Latin, Greek, and more to prepare him for Oxford and Babel. The book follows Robin through this preparation, his entry to Babel, and as he and the other translators realize the value of their work—and begin to question their contribution to Britain’s colonial power.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Many of the books on this list blend fact and fiction, but Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book is explicitly inspired by true events. In the more recent storyline, in 1996, famed rare book expert Hanna Heath is invited by the UN to analyze the Sarajevo Haggadah, a real document that is one of the earliest illustrated Jewish documents. In its fragile binding, she finds tiny preserved objects, including a piece of an insect wing, stain from wine, and crystals of salt, which she uses to explore the book’s creation and its use since. The other timelines provide a background to the ancient text’s past, bringing the reader through Hanna’s discoveries in a wonderfully atmospheric read.

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

This one doesn’t exactly include a library, but the literary mystery does include unearthed ephemera and ultimately hinge on a document. Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries takes place during the gold rush in 1860s New Zealand and reads like a Victorian novel. In 1866, Walter Moody arrives in Hokitika from Edinburgh intent on making a fortune. His first night, he overhears a meeting of twelve local men. A complicated, convoluted, mystery unfolds. The novel demands close reading over long, uninterrupted stretches of time—and, in some cases, goads you into playing the role of researcher, grabbing a pen and paper to keep track of information or to sketch out the zodiac reference, if you’re so inclined . Even more than other wonderful books on this list, The Luminaries has a slow, steady pace that builds into a propulsive literary mystery.

The post 9 Literary Mysteries With a Big Winter Mood appeared first on Electric Literature.

Empire State Editions: Colorful Palate by Raj Tawney

Food is an anchor in this coming of age story which explores Tawney’s relationship with his family from childhood to adulthood. Interspersed with the recipes that were staples of growing up with Indian, Puerto Rican, and Italian heritages, the memoir always comes back to the kitchen. Even when teenage Raj is trying to be cool and throws a party so his band can perform, his mother and grandmother cook food from their respective cultures—and the party-goers love it, even though Raj was worried. Later, he bonds with an elderly woman over her grocery-store purchased rainbow cookies. When he actually finds some success as a musician, he’s sent off on tour with Arroz Negro. On the first date with the woman who becomes his wife, they have Korean hot pot, a food Raj has never before tried. This is a book that shows food as emotional, cultural, and sometimes just caloric sustenance—but always centers what it means to share these experiences with the people who make us who we are.

McSweeney’s: Rotten Evidence by Ahmed Naji, translated from the Arabic by Katharine Halls 

When a chapter of his forthcoming novel is excerpted in a popular Cairo-based magazine, what for many writers is a nice piece of pre-publication publicity becomes a nightmare for Ahmed Naji. After a trial with a dubiously reasoned verdict, Naji is sent to prison for “offending public morality” and eventually serves 10 months of a 2 year sentence in an Egyptian prison. Even against the backdrop of corrupt politics and the chilling consequences for artistic expression, this memoir focuses mostly on connection: the relationships he builds on the cellblock, the support he receives from family and friends, and his own continued engagement with his writing. While Cairo’s Tora prison is a dangerous and dirty place that retains the social hierarchies of the outside world, the inmates also care for one another. The light touch Naji takes with his narrative—he jokes, he earnestly recounts his dreams—buttresses the power of his account rather than diminishes it. He is, along with everyone else, trying to survive. A beautifully written account that also serves as a deep reminder of the importance of a free press.

Unnamed Press: Upcountry by Chin-Sun Lee

In Caliban, a small town in the Catskills, worlds collide. Claire and her husband Sebastian are Manhattan transplants, April and her children are locals, and pregnant Anna is a member of a strict religious order that supports themselves through carpentry and running café. The women see themselves as very different from one another, but they are linked by circumstance, by geography, and by the ways that every person in a small town is only one degree of separation from another. It is the local, April, who forms an uneasy alliance with Anna, after she is shunned; and it is April who finds a kind of tentative truce with Claire, who has purchased her family home after April can no longer afford it. Throughout the novel, there is class anxiety, tension around race and religion, but it ultimately is a novel about women trying to find their way. With Upcountry, Chin-Sun Lee establishes herself as a writer to watch.

Ig Publishing: Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me And Has Failed: Notes From Periracial America by Kim McLarin

In this incredible collection of essays, Kim McLarin details everything from earning her motorcycle license at age fifty, to getting a gun permit as violent white nationalism escalates. In many scenarios, she is the only Black person in the room. She also writes of her divorce, of the passing of her dog, and the rejection of travel as a luxury—positing that it is a necessity for people, whether going across town or across the world. Deftly, she both in no uncertain terms underscores how the fight for racial justice is imperative and writes compellingly about hosting dinner parties. The title is after the seminal Lucille Clifton poem won’t you celebrate with me and the book is laced with the legacy of other influential Black writers, in particular Baldwin. The real power of Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me And Has Failed is the concise clarity of McLarin’s voice. She is a writer who knows not just what she wants to say, but exactly how and why to say it. Every single page of this book is necessary and should be required reading.

Two Dollar Radio: Other Minds and Other Stories by Bennett Sims 

In this collection of a dozen stories, ekphrastic flash fiction is interspersed with longer narratives where the characters find themselves in eerie and unnerving situations. A private detective takes a case that leads him to a nearly abandoned seaside hotel where he and the subject of in investigation are the only guests, but never physically see one another; a locavore tries to kill his chickens humanely, but instead engages in cruelty; a man loans his phone to a woman he does not know, only to receive a series of increasingly alarming messages from an unknown number. There is a deep current of paranoia in these stories, and it’s often like a rip tide. In Other Minds, things usually start off with reasonable calm, until an unseen—or unforeseen—event pulls a character under. Richly imagined and skillfully executed. 

Haunted Doll House: Barely Half in an Awkward Line by Jay Halsey 

In this mixed-media, multi-genre work, the author’s compelling and austere photographs are interspersed with deeply emotionally prose and verse. In a work that does not have a clear categorization, there is a clear thread that runs through it: the world is a hard and sometimes unforgiving place, full of addiction and poverty and violence, despite some moments of mercy. A young man of color confronts his racist step-father, another man is razzed by his friends for living in a shelter. A boy who is young enough to have a He-Man action figure is taken to a sex worker’s house by his biological father. What Halsey captures in a starkly effective way, through both the images and the writing, is the sometimes tiny space between being almost okay and everything falling apart, and the deeply complicated ways that blood and found family love one another. A stunningly original book that defies genre.

Braddock Avenue Books: Heading North by Holly M. Wendt

Viktor Myrnikov wants nothing more than to play in the National Hockey League. In his native Russia, he’s skating at the top of his game—and he’s falling in love. Yet, in a sport that both in the novel and in real life has no openly gay players, Viktor knows that if anyone finds out about him and Nikolai, it could threaten more than just their ice time. When a catastrophic plane crash kills the entire team that Viktor has just been traded from, Nikolai is among the dead, and Viktor is devastated and guilt ridden: he should have been on that plane. Later, playing in San Francisco, a world of LGBTQ acceptance is illuminated for Viktor, and he can’t share it with Nikolai. He also can’t escape Nikolai’s family, who are powerful in the ecosystem of hockey. Viktor has long accepted himself, but will his teammates and the league do the same? A thoughtful debut with a complex and satisfying plot. 

Clash Books: All Things Edible, Random & Odd: Essays on Grief, Love & Food by Sheila Squillante

This collection of short essays form a strong narrative arc of the reckoning Sheila Squillante has with the loss of her father, a divorce, an ill child. However, while there are challenging experiences and a full spectrum of grief, it is largely a reclamation. In an essay that stands out for braiding many of the themes of the book together, Mother-Out-Law, she tells of visiting her former-mother in law with her new husband, the anxiety about her ex-husband being at the Thanksgiving table, and to top it all off Squillante is newly pregnant and her ex publicly demonstrates he’s found Jesus in an unusual way. Food is central—whether that is exploring what it means to claim the title of “foodie”, giving up dairy for medical reasons, trying new flavors, cooking as care—and offers a tangible, sensory grounding in a collection that often explores unreconciled feelings. All Things Edible is as clear-eyed as it is poetic and impressionistic. 

Black Lawrence Press: Dressing the Saints by Aracelis González Asendorf 

A collection of linked stories, Dressing the Saints tells of the Cuban exile diaspora living in Florida. In many of the stories, the characters are well beyond middle age. The plots are refreshing in the exploration of not only the history of counter-revolutionary Cubans, but also the vibrant lives of women in assisted living, the sex appeal of both long marriages or relationships that come later in life, and the way in which aging and all of the loss—and wisdom—that may come with it can either open up the heart or clamp it down tight. As families handle past traumas and recent ones, and as social norms change, the characters in Dressing the Saints embody the complexity of what it means to exist in a changing world. Asendorf gorgeously offers a lament for what is lost, and a hope for what is to come. 

Tin House: Nonfiction by Julie Myerson 

The speaker of Nonfiction—a novel—is a writer who watches her daughter slip into addiction. She and her husband work to navigate the complicated terrain of wanting to help their only child, but also not enable her. None of the characters have names, but names aren’t needed: readers already know the disapproving mother, the old flame who is heady in one moment and non-committal in the next, the husband who can’t take it anymore, the daughter who is bent on destroying herself, and the woman who is trying to tie all of the threads of her life together. There are no answers in Nonfiction. The situations are bleak at best and the outcomes inevitably disastrous. Yet in this beautifully written book, Myserson speaks to the most unspeakable pains, addressing terrifying grief and deep regret. A masterful novel.  

Rare Bird Books: The Dirt in Our Skin by J.J. Anselmi 

Ryan and Jason are best friends and dedicated BMX bikers. As high schoolers, they spend hours hand digging complicated tracks and building jumps, and they are both skilled enough riders to start getting some attention outside of their small Connecticut town. Yet, as high school ends, they find themselves on different paths—and trying to navigate their friendship. Written like non-fiction, with journal entries and photographs, The Dirt in Our Skin is a novel about young men figuring out what it means to love, and how to express it. There are intense parties and sexual dynamics in the BMX scene, and both Ryan and Jason have to figure out their relationship to the culture of the sport they love, and understand their relationship to one another. This voice-driven novel lands big leaps and twisting curves with the same skill and execution of the riders Ryan and Jason admire.

West Virginia University Press: Roxy and Coco by Terese Svoboda

Roxy and Coco are sisters and harpies—mythical bird-women who appear in both Greek and Roman mythology—living in contemporary America and working for Child Protective Services. Over centuries, even though they can still fly at supersonic speeds, they’ve learned to blend in with humans. In their exceptionally long lives, both have become dedicated to guarding children. Yet, when Roxy becomes enamored with their new supervisor at the agency, Coco is suspicious. At the same time, Interpol is investigating Coco for a series of murders that have one strange thing in common: predators of children who seem to have fallen to their deaths from great heights, even when there is no structure nearby. Roxy and Coco is trademark Svoboda, where outsiders are the stars. As action-packed as the novel is, at the core is the deep love for a sibling, and in this case the love has grown for a millennium. A dazzling story that is compulsively readable and deeply relatable. 

Black Rose Writing: The Last Bird of Paradise by Clifford Garstang 

Aislinn Givens has worked hard to get on the partner track at a NYC law firm. Her husband, Liam, has his own lucrative job in finance. On the surface, Aislinn and Liam are a classic Manhattan power couple. Yet, when Liam accepts a position in Singapore—without consulting Aislinn—the first of many fissures surface. Their union started from an affair, so Aislinn knows her husband can be deceptive, just as she can be. Yet, when they move to Southeast Asia, the cracks widen. Aislinn becomes obsessed with a British colonial-era painter who lived in Singapore nearly a century earlier, and with the shopkeeper who has sold her some of the paintings. Though she does not know it, the painter has lived a parallel life to Aislinn’s, and though many decades separate them, the grip of powerful men has not loosened. The Last Bird of Paradise asks what we will sacrifice for power, for money, and, most importantly, for love. 

Moonstruck Books: The Rain Artist by Claire Rudy Foster

In a not-so-distant future, Celine, Yochanna, and Paul are an unlikely trio. Celine is the last umbrella maker in a world so ravaged by climate change that rain is a manufactured luxury enjoyed only by the upper class; Yochanna is an office worker saddled with such debilitating student debt she is forced to steal; and Paul is an ex-convict who was sentenced for a brutal crime and now runs flower shop as a front. Yet, what the three have in common is living under the regime of the ultra-rich, with no visible future. When Celine is ensnared in a murder plot, Paul and Yochanna are her allies. They make their way through a constantly surveilled, crumbling, and chemically poisoned New York City, only to have another dangerous encounter in the underworld. C. R. Foster’s The Rain Artist is strikingly written and artfully imagined with characters who are beautifully flawed. There is no other book this season that makes speculative horror feel so close to our everyday lives. Unforgettable.

Santa Fe Writers Project: Horse Show by Jess Bowers

The voices of carnival barkers, old time radio, early Hollywood, and 1970s-era television meet literary fiction in this equine-inspired collection from debut author Jess Bowers. An old mare drowns in a homemade country swimming pool, a young one dies on a film set when a director does not have enough imagination to get his shot without catapulting her into a reservoir. A woman rides a mechanical horse, a poet says goodbye to his saddle mule. Each story is punctuated by vivid imagery and a unique voice, and in the final story, an abandoned gelding is a harbinger of doom for a young couple’s marriage. Horse Show has a sweeping, cinematic quality to it, and a thematic cohesion that tightly ties the stories together. A distinctive accomplishment.

The post 15 Small Press Books You Should Be Reading This Winter appeared first on Electric Literature.

As a writer, I’m often thinking about new ways to tell stories. I’m also a podcaster, so I include audio in my thoughts. And as I considered a new project, I wanted to create something I’d found to be rare: literary fiction that only works in audio form. 

My resulting show, Wyrd Woman, is one of just a few audio dramas in this niche. There are many excellent fiction podcasts out there, modern radio dramas that are often based in the genres of mystery, science fiction and more. But it takes a bit of work to find fiction podcasts that bring the lyrical writing, the conceptual nuance, and the complexity and satisfaction of literary fiction into audio drama form. 

Wyrd Woman only works as an audio drama. The limited series features an isolated woman recording her dreams of strangers, women across time who become increasingly persistent and desperate through sound. Over nine nights, each woman—old, broken, unnatural, mad, and ugly—becomes a stronger voice and presence through audio production and sound design. And as these women come together, connecting across time and space as worlds die, reality becomes fantasy, past and future meld, and fate binds and beckons. 

These seven podcasts also use audio and sound to create stories that are rich, compelling, utterly disquieting, and thoroughly enjoyable. Just like literary novels, these shows use different formats and structures, question the lines between reality and fiction, and push us to think and engage. Some are one-person shows, like mine. Some are slightly bigger. Some use full casts and extensive production. All can be your new favorite stories. 

Modes of Thought in Anterran Literature by Alexander Kemp and Winnie Kemp

A renowned professor leads a class exploring the culture of a newly-discovered ancient civilization. The only issue: there is no proof of the discovery, or the civilization itself. Has the professor, who disappeared for some time before teaching this class, broken with reality? Or is there really a lost civilization with a rich literary history known only by a few? The show is structured as recordings of each lecture, with occasional interjections from confused or suspicious students and grad assistants. Each episode dives deep into a particular aspect of Anterran literature, with a slowly-advancing plot behind the story. Listeners get deeply erudite lectures on this world, so complete that we stop caring if Anterra is real— because what is real? This feels like a wild literary novel to which you must just submit.

Mabel by Becca De La Rosa and Maybell Marten

It starts relatively simple. Ana, a home health nurse, is taking care of a 90-year-old woman in an old, isolated house. She calls the woman’s granddaughter, Mabel, to ask about some letters Ana has found. But Mabel doesn’t answer. Even as Ana keeps calling. Even as Ana leaves longer and longer messages, describing strange happenings and discoveries in and around the house. Even as Ana becomes increasingly desperate, and increasingly detached from the world. For the first few episodes, we think we’re witnessing an isolated woman’s descent. But then—we finally hear from Mabel. And things get so much weirder and darker. The show is thoughtful and beautiful, painting the picture of a gothic, fantastical place that may be very real. The use of music and sound is crucial to the story, with each installment ratcheting up the goosebumps and dread.

Beef and Dairy Network Podcast by Benjamin Partridge

This is brilliant, ferociously funny satire that’s just bonkers. The show purports to be the online news engine for the Beef and Dairy Network in the UK. In each episode the host talks to a supposed expert in the field, with an interview that goes delightfully off the rails. One episode features a cow wrangler on film sets that contends all major acting is actually done by cows; another includes a former child actress from yoghurt commercials who claims trauma from standing in butter too long; another is a recurring character of a slaughterhouse owner who believes safety guidelines are rubbish, because his employees learn their safety lessons by losing fingers and hands. Each episode skewers the corporate culture behind food, along with the painfully cheerful marketing rah-rah energy demanded by companies today. I don’t know if the creator is vegan like me, but it feels right to say he is.

Gone by Sunny Moraine

A woman wakes one morning to find her wife gone, along with all her neighbors. The light and the air feels different. The power starts blinking in and out. She’s cut off from the world, if it still exists. And soon even the sun starts to disappear. She records her experience, and her changes—because as much as she fears for and misses her wife, her anger grows. Why did her wife keep so many secrets? Why did she work such long hours at her research lab? What exactly did she do? And who are the voices and shadows that start to people the narrator’s world? Beyond the fearful concept, the show really drills down into relationships—how we cede ourselves, how we diminish one another. It’s an exploration of our needs for companionship, for safety, for light.

Silt Verses by John Ware and Muna Hussen

Carpenter and Faulkner are two apostles of an outlawed religion, one that offers sacrifices to their river god. In this world, there are accepted religions and gods—those of commerce, of coffee, of the electric company. And there is illegal worship—those deep rural gods of the poor, displaced by rising waters and religious wars, gods of dirt and land and water. The two apostles are traveling their river to suss out other devotees, and to look for miracles. In their journey they find other dangerous gods (and their even more dangerous acolytes), an investigator looking into illegal deaths for rural religions, and a refugee fleeing her corporate job, which just sacrificed non-performers to their new deity. The episodes are structured with lyrical narration and violent dialogue, with different characters taking the lead. It’s a remarkably dark, rich, fascinating and weird story with exceptional writing and acting. Note: there are many intense elements of horror.

Midnight Burger by Joe Fisher and Finlay Stevenson

Gloria opened her dream restaurant in Phoenix just before the pandemic. That restaurant failed. So one day she answers an ad for a job at a diner called Midnight Burger. Except this diner is just visiting Phoenix —at the end of the shift, it will travel again, across time, across dimensions, across space.

Gloria joins a bizarre team at the diner, including a couple of old-timey pastors on a radio, a former smuggler who can always MacGuyer a problem’s solution, a physicist who just wants to drink and write in her booth, and a guy named Caspar who’s just… there? And each time they stop, there’s something weird going on, and someone who probably needs help. Trust me—that description barely covers the surface of this show. It is wild, with a fantastic concept, lines that make me cry from laughing, and amazingly deep philosophical and empathetic discussions of humanity. Over their three seasons and 50 episodes so far, the writers create wonderfully rich story lines, hilarious villains (like a space species of capitalists called the Teds), and characters that have me beyond invested.

Tanis by Nic Silver and Terry Miles

All of these shows are hard to describe, but this one may be the hardest. Nic is the host of a podcast, a docudrama called Tanis. He is exploring a concept (or place? or person?) called Tanis—chasing it through the historical circles and myths of Alastair Crowley, the pages of a science fiction magazine and a never-published manuscript, the buried classifieds of Craigslist, the hoarded cassette recordings of numbers stations, the conspiracies around the deaths of Eliot Smith and Kurt Cobain, and so much more. Along the way, Nic relies increasingly on a secretive deep web expert named Meercatnip, and a growing list of people who alternately encourage and warn him from his quest. We want to believe in conspiracy and mystery, Nic says, especially in this age of instant info that masquerades as the answers to everything. Tanis, he believes, may be the ultimate and only remaining internet mystery.

Each episode nails the format of a investigative series, one which threatens to fall apart under the weight of all the threads being pulled. Nic himself plays a version of a reporter and enthusiast who may be in over his head. But just as he says—we are fascinated by mystery, and may not really care how everything fits together. The search is all.

The post 7 Fiction Podcasts as Rich as Literary Novels appeared first on Electric Literature.

Lifelong residents may write confidently of their homeland, but among the travelogs and novels and poems and memoirs that give shape to a city, I’m partial to books written from the perspective of those still calibrating their relationship to a place. These include children, wide-eyed visitors, and locals caught in the midst of historic transformations. 

My debut novel Holiday Country follows a young Turkish American woman who spends her summers on the Turkish Aegean. Not yet all that comfortable with the country’s culture and customs, she’s hyper-aware of her surroundings, interactions, and the linguistic nuances she spends an inordinate amount of time picking apart. All this, she hopes, will give her the answers she’s seeking about herself. 

Below, I’ve gathered a list of novels, memoirs, and collections in which Turkey is thrown into high relief. In other words, books reflecting the experiences of those getting to know Turkey—or a new Turkey—inch by inch. Everything to them is peculiar, fascinating, worthy of exploration. It’s that time when all the senses are on high alert. Before everything fades into the background, and becomes once again, the setting for life as usual.

Dare to Disappoint by Özge Samancı

Samancı grew up along the Aegean, and her graphic memoir chronicles her burgeoning understanding of her country through an inquisitive child’s eyes. She recalls crushes on teachers, her admiration of Turkey’s first president, and the difficulty of navigating religious differences as a student. There’s a lot packed into this story from girlhood to university graduate, but approaching convoluted topics with a strong dose of innocence offers an entertaining glimpse into the life of a young woman making sense of a convoluted and evolving country—and her place in it. 

The Lovers by Vendela Vida

Yvonne travels from Vermont to Datça, a peninsula in southwestern Turkey, where she and her late husband once honeymooned. Though the area is surrounded by gorgeous beaches and happy vacationers, her experience is more of a harsh and deteriorating environment. Yvonne finds herself often feeling misplaced, on the wrong side of power dynamics, and second-guessing her interactions with various tourists and locals. As an unlikely friendship leads to devastating consequences, Yvonne has to come to terms with her actions—and her past—to escape the heavy sense of loneliness that violently clings to her. 

Portrait of a Turkish Family by İrfan Orga

Orga’s memoirs from childhood begin while he’s living in the lap of luxury, with house staff in a konak in the heart of Ottoman Istanbul. In the summer of 1914, his bourgeois world grinds to a halt with the onset of WWI. This book chronicles Istanbul’s transformation as the Ottoman Empire transitions to the Turkish Republic through the lens of a single family. Perhaps most aptly symbolized by Orga’s grandmother, who refuses to abandon her aristocratic airs as life falls apart around her, it’s a tale of pride and survival, and of how to rebuild life again and again without losing hope. 

An Island in Istanbul: At Home on Heybeliada by M.A. Whitten

Northern California native and world-traveling diplomat Whitten and her husband become enamored by a trip to Turkey, and eventually make their way once again to Istanbul where they settle on one of the Princes’ Islands, Heybeliada. Whitten’s chronicle of island life is divided into two sections: the first detailing the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of procuring and remodeling an old island home, and the second, an in-depth exploration of life in Istanbul. Written with the friendliness and accessibility of a travel guide, it’s a great read for those unfamiliar with Turkish culture, fans of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, and who love to live vicariously through those building their dream lives abroad. 

Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières

An expansive and gorgeously detailed novel told through the perspectives of an eclectic cast of characters in a Turkish village. Neighbors of various ethnic and religious backgrounds live lives deeply integrated with one another, until war strikes and brings everyone a jarring new perspective on nationality and religion. As developments in war and legislation shape allies and enemies, the villagers find themselves pulled apart from each other in the most shocking of ways. Brimming with witty proverbs, historical anecdotes, heartfelt love stories, and, ultimately, unimaginable grief. 

The Four Humors by Mina Seçkin

Turkish-American college student Sibel brings along her American boyfriend for a summer in Istanbul, where she mostly watches soap operas all day. While she juggles taking care of her ailing grandmother, tending to her sister’s eating disorder, and self-diagnosing her own mysterious headaches, she simultaneously avoids and desperately seeks connection with her dead father. As a family secret as complicated as Turkey’s chaotic history begins to unravel, Sibel starts to finally find an end to her grief, and a better understanding of her relationships. 

Turkish Coast Through Writers’ Eyes by Rupert Scott

A collection of writing about Turkey’s southwestern coast that includes excerpts from authors and travelers both ancient and contemporary. Perfect to dip in and out of while vacationing on the Turquoise coast, the selections range from explorations of  the finer points of Turkish cuisine to underwater discoveries, from chronicles of the plants and animals of the region to the stories behind its archeological ruins. The book also includes excerpts from other writers mentioned in this list, including İrfan Orga and Louis de Bernières.

The post 7 Books Set In Turkey appeared first on Electric Literature.

Throughout the year I keep a running list, adding new names whenever I learn about an upcoming queer book—from Tweets, publicist pitches, endless NetGalley scrolls—and I usually start writing the blurbs for each book a few months before the list is due. Let me also add that, because I am a novelist myself, someone who works very hard to put words on the page in a good-enough order for someone to respond to them, I try and read at least a little of each book featured. And here’s an incredible truth that’s both deeply satisfying and makes my job surprisingly difficult: there are more and more queer books published every year. There was a time when I could complete a list like this in an afternoon; I was lucky to find a dozen explicitly queer titles. Now there’s a pretty solid chance I miss a good number of them. 

In mid-December—at the half-way point, and a couple days after my birthday—I looked at the list, halfway done then, and thought, “There’s no way I can do this. There’s no way I can finish putting together this list in a way that does each book justice.” Partly it was the volume, yes, and partly it was the ambient dread of being alive in 2023. Partly it was also because of the lingering emotional hangover from publishing my debut novel and the approaching completion of my second—experiences that have left me excited, enervated, vulnerable, and protective of my own mental health. Partly I’ve become wary—weary?—of continuing to delineate LGBTQ stories from cis-straight ones, as if our identity is a genre, as if I’m daring hetero readers to overlook these books because of who the protagonists and authors choose to fuck. Partly—maybe superficially—I felt a crippling nihilism at the idea of putting so much time into this list only to have to promote it on the hollowed-out shell of an app whose home screen now serves as a violent reminder of how much we’ve lost at the whims of idiotic wannabe despots. 

Here’s how I finally finished this list: I read all the other ones. I went through most of the “best of” lists from last year, the “anticipated” lists for this one. And while we’re thrown a couple bones every now and then, given some gestures at progressive appeasement, our stories are still routinely passed over. Queer culture—our fashion, our humor, our art—has always moved everyone forward, toward a better, freer, more-fun world; we are and have been the tide that lifts, so our stories deserve not only to be included but centered. 

Here are 42 works of literature that will lift us all this year—bold new books by Judith Butler, Carlos Maurice Ruffin, Brontez Purnell, Lucas Rijneveld, Garrard Conley, R.O. Kwon, and Miranda July; and auspicious debuts from Daniel Lefferts, Emma Copley Eisenberg, and Ursula Villarreal-Moura.

You Only Call When You’re In Trouble by Stephen McCauley (Jan. 9)

Tom is an architect in his sixties, constructing what he hopes will be his “masterpiece.” But his longtime boyfriend has recently broken up with him, and both his sister and his niece—the latter of whom is the center of his life—are soliciting his help in solving crises of their own. Less author Andrew Sean Greer says McCauley’s “poignant, joyous, explosive” latest is one to cherish: “A book that loves you back. What more could you want, my gosh? Read it!”

City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter (Jan. 16)

Grieving the dual losses of both her father and the end of her first queer relationship, Shiva Margolin, a student of Jewish folklore, embarks on a sojourn to Poland, her family’s ancestral homeland. Danielle Evans calls Fruchter’s debut “a gorgeous and full-hearted exploration of inheritance, grief, desire, and connection, at once a story about what it means to go looking for the ghosts we always knew were there and what it means to be in the right place to encounter the unexpected things we didn’t know we were waiting for.” 

Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte (Jan. 16)

The newest from French-Canadian cartoonist Delporte is a beautiful, moving look at coming out later in life, a diary-style graphic memoir about the queer liberation of both the body and mind. 

Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn (Jan. 23)

How To Wrestle a Girl, Blackburn’s 2021 story collection, was a revelation, barbed and bold. She writes so well about the weirdness of grief and the grief of being weird. Her new novel centers on a successful speculative fiction author who discovers her brother dead by suicide and carries on pretending he’s still alive, a reality-shattering charade with far-reaching consequences. 

How We Named the Stars by Andrés N. Ordorica (Jan. 30)

Ordorica, a poet, weaves a tapestry of love in loss in his fiction debut, a tenderhearted coming-of-age story about a closeted college student who falls in love with his also-closeted roommate. Fellow poet Eduardo C. Corral calls the novel “majestic.”

Interesting Facts About Space by Emily Austin (Jan. 30)

The bestselling author of BookTok fave Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead returns with a novel about a partially deaf lesbian obsessed with black holes and true crime podcasts struggling to balance new connections—both with her formerly estranged half-sisters and her first serious relationship. 

Antiquity by Hanna Johansson, trans. by Kira Josefsson (Feb. 6)

Imagine a female-fronted version of Call Me by Your Name told from Oliver’s point of view and set on a Greek island and you’ll get something like Johansson’s award-winning novel. Translated from the Swedish, it follows a thirtysomething woman to Ermoupoli as she becomes entangled in a complex relationship between an elegant older artist and her teenage daughter. 

Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner (Feb. 6)

Waidner’s last novel, the Kafkaesque Sterling Karat Gold, won the prestigious Goldsmiths Prize, and their latest surreal romp is about an author who wins a prestigious book prize. The catch? The trophy and monetary award are difficult to obtain, possibly impossible, and the quest for it sends the author back and forth through time. 

Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly (Feb. 6)

The titular siblings of Reilly’s charming debut are lovelorn flatmates in New Zealand, navigating their own queer heartbreaks and learning what their place in the world is—both as individuals and as members of a multiracial family. 

Ways and Means by Daniel Lefferts (Feb. 6)

Alistair McCabe, a young gay college student from the Rust Belt, dreams of a career in high finance, a fantasy turned nightmare when he finds himself entangled with an enigmatic billionaire whose nefarious ambition puts Alistair’s life at risk. Lefferts’s debut, an astute examination the complex intersection of money and intimacy, traces Alistair’s descent alongside the dissolution of the relationship between his paramours, an artistic couple with their own financial and existential woes.

Bugsy & Other Stories by Rafael Frumkin (Feb. 13)

The author of last year’s Highsmithian heist dramedy, Confidence, returns with a delirious, thrilling short fiction collection, including one story about a lonely college dropout who reinvents herself as a boom operator for porn shoots, and another about a Twitch streamer whose life is upended by the odd behavior of her best friend and the reply guy fan who’s come to declare his love. 

I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante (Feb. 13)

Often it’s easier to think and write about others’ lives, easier to dig for the truth in someone else’s story than it is to search for one’s own. Such as it had been for Sante, an acclaimed chronicler of iconoclastic queer life who found it difficult to confront her own identity, a confrontation made even more difficult by society’s discouragement of gender fluidity. Sante’s achingly poignant memoir charts her late-in-life transition, the shock and euphoria of self-recognition. 

Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt by Brontez Purnell (Feb. 13)

100 Boyfriends was a bawdy, brutal, and beautifully raw chronicle of queer Black life, and Purnell’s follow-up, a memoir-in-verse, promises even more of what made that book a must-read. 

The Rain Artist by Claire Rudy Foster (Feb. 24)

When I was an editor at O Magazine, I had the pleasure and privilege of publishing the dizzyingly good short story upon which this novel is based. It centers on a woman named Celine who is one of the sole remaining umbrella makers in a world in which water (and rain) has become a rare commodity only available to the uber-wealthy. For such a short story, the world Foster built already felt expansive, and I’m excited to see it expanded further. 

The American Daughters by Maurice Carlos Ruffin (Feb. 27)

The always-inventive author of the Pen/Faulkner finalist We Cast a Shadow returns with an electrifying work of historical fiction centered on a gutsy former slave girl who joins a clandestine band of female spies working to undermine the Confederacy. 

Green Dot by Madeleine Gray (Feb. 27)

Hera, the droll and extremely self-aware narrator of Gray’s debut, knows falling for a married man twice her age is an ill-fated cliche. And yet. Hera, who has only ever slept with women, works as a news outlet’s comment moderator, and it’s in the chilly, subterranean-seeming office she meets Arthur, a journalist who throws into disarray who she believes she is and who she wants to be. It’s Conversations with Friends meets Several People Are Typing.  

My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld (Mar. 2)

From the author of The Discomfort of Evening, the first Dutch book to win the International Book Prize, comes a queer and profane take on the Lolita archetype, following a pervy veternarian who becomes infatuated with a fourteen-year-old daughter of a local farmer—a girl who dreams of inhabiting a boy’s body. 

Ellipses by Vanessa Lawrence (Mar. 5)

Set amid the squalor and splendor of New York media, Lawrence’s debut follows Lily, a staff writer at a glossy fashion magazine who feels stalled both personally and professionally. Enter Billie, a cosmetics mogul who wants to mentor Lily…mostly from the distance of a phone screen. But what transpires in the digital realm seeps into real life until it’s all but impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. 

Thunder Song by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe (Mar. 5)

LaPointe follows up her award-winning memoir Red Paint with a collection of essays that explore the challenges and triumphs of proudly embracing a queer indigenous identity in the United States today, drawing on both personal experiences and the anthropological work of her great-grandmother. “Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe’s essays in Thunder Song are loud, bold, and startlingly majestic,” says Night of the Living Rez author Morgan Talty.

The Tower by Flora Carr (Mar. 5)

Set in sixteenth century Scotland, Carr’s fascinating work of historical fiction portrays the year-long imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots in a remote loch-surrounded castle, her only company a pair of inconspicuous-seeming chambermaids. Together, these three women—and later, a fourth, Mary’s lady-in-waiting—plot a daring path to freedom. 

Rainbow Black by Maggie Thrash (Mar. 19)

If you haven’t read Honor Girl, Thrash’s heartrending graphic memoir about queer summer camp love, then stop reading this and pick up a copy. Here, the author makes her first foray into prose, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of the 1990s Satanic Panic. 

Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler (Mar. 19)

It’s hard to imagine a more important moment for a new Judith Butler book, though their mountain-moving work has always and forever been significant and necessary. Here, Butler examines how authoritarians tie together and blame ideas like “gender theory” and “critical race theory” for the disorienting fear people have about the future of their ways of life, addressing what has become the cornerstone of conservative politics and culture wars: the notion that the very concept of gender—and the questioning of that concept—is a denial of nature and danger to civilization.

All The World Beside by Garrard Conley (Mar. 26)

Many of you might know Conley as the bestselling memoirist and activist behind Boy Erased, a beautifully written and important book about survival and identity and a complicated family. Get ready now for Conley the novelist. His full-length fiction debut is a lush, epic love story set in Puritan New England. Every one of his sentences is a heaven-sent spectacle. 

Like Happiness by Ursula Villarreal-Moura (Mar. 26)

In this debut novel, Tatum Vega, living a fulfilling life in Chile with her partner Vera, finds her past resurfacing when a reporter contacts her about allegations of abuse against the renowned author M. Domínguez, with whom she had an incredibly complicated relationship. 

Firebugs by Nino Bulling (Apr. 2)

How can it be true that the world we inhabit so often feels both plagued by stasis and altered by constant, irreversible transformation? And what does this mean for individuals hoping to find and understand their own identities? These are the big questions of fiction, questions Bulling illustrates in this graphic novel about a couple navigating intimacy and transition in an environment ablaze from climate change. 

A Good Happy Girl by Marissa Higgins (Apr. 2)

Higgins’s visceral and vivacious debut is about a young, anxiety-ridden, compellingly prickly lawyer who becomes the lover of a married lesbian couple, an arrangement that rearranges her sense of self and her place in the world. I got the chance to blurb this one early, but I’m just going to co-sign Halle Butler’s blurb here: “Sometimes I could not believe how easily this book moved from gross-out sadism into genuine sympathy. Totally surprising, totally compelling.”

Women! In! Peril! by Jessie Ren Marshall (Apr. 2)

An early contender for best title/cover combo. An award-winning playwright makes her prose debut with this collection of short stories, including one in which a lesbian’s wife becomes mysteriously pregnant, and another about an ambitious sexbot. 

The Long Hallway by Richard Scott Larson (Apr. 16)

I first came upon Larson’s work in the queer horror anthology It Came from the Closet, in which he wrote about how John Carpenter’s Halloween—about a boy triggered by heterosexual desire becoming a monstrous masked voyeur—was actually a gay coming out story. I was thrilled, then, to discover the author’s upcoming memoir is a sequel of sorts, exploring how terror on screen sometimes mirrors the terror of queer interiority. 

So Long, Sad Love by Mirion Malle (Apr. 30)

In this graphic novel from the author-illustrator of This is How I Disappear, a French woman who has moved to Montreal to be with her boyfriend begins to uncover dark truths about his past, which forces her to confront who he might be—and who she could become without him. 

First Love by Lilly Dancyger (May 7)

Two summers ago, at the Sewanee Writers Conference, I had the chance to hear Lilly Dancyger read part of an early version of this book, and I was totally stunned. As soon as the reading was over, I started counting down the days until I—and everyone else—could read the whole thing. And now here it is: a soul-stirring compilation of essays about how our earliest intimacies—sisterly, friendly—so often resemble the intensity of romance, how the delineations between different kinds of relationships can blur, how if and when those relationships change or end it can feel like the most devastating heartbreak. 

How It Works Out by Myriam LaCroix (May 7)

An early contender for Best Premise: when Myriam and Alison fall in love at a local punk show, their relationship begins to play out as different hypotheticals in different realities. What if the two of them became bestselling lifestyle celesbians? What if they embraced motherhood upon finding an abandoned baby in alley? What if one was a CEO and the other was her lowly employee? 

All Fours by Miranda July (May 14)

For me, July’s 2007 short story collection No One Belongs Here More than You was a formative reading experience, a book about weirdo women that fundamentally altered my ideas of what kinds of stories were possible—something Sally Rooney and I have in common. In her second novel, July brings her singular brand of sardonic melancholia and wide-eyed wisdom to bear on this tale of a semi-famous middle-aged artist who decides to take a left turn from the left turn she had already planned.

Oye by Melissa Mogollon (May 14)

Told through several one-sided telephone conversations between protagonist Luciana and her sister Mari, Mogollon’s inventive debut novel is a unique coming of age story about uncovering family secrets and the secrets of the self. 

We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons (May 14)

Parsons’s first book, the wonderful story collection Black Light, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and brimmed with world-weary wit, queer yearning, and Hempel-esque sentences so deftly crafted. Her first novel is just as much a marvel, following a horny housewife and young mother who desperately needs time away for and from herself. 

Cactus Country by Zoë Bossiere (May 21)

Like the landscape depicted within, Bossiere’s memoir about growing up genderfluid in a Tucson trailer park and navigating the challenges of identity in the American Southwest promises to be both raw and beautiful. Fairest author Meredith Talusan likens the book to This Boy’s Life, “an indelible portrait of American boyhood that is at once typical and extraordinary.”

Exhibit by R. O. Kwon (May 21)

A few months ago, novelist R.O. Kwon made waves when she read aloud an excerpt from her long-awaited follow-up to The Incendiaries at the Vulture Festival; what better enticement to read something than hearing the author herself warn her own parents against reading it? But if you’ve read The Incendiaries, then you don’t need any further enticement. Kwon’s prose is unlike any other, sensuous and sumptuous and yet razor-sharp. Here, she captures the quick–developing intimacy between a photographer named Jin and a ballerina, to whom Jin spills a family secret—a confession with unforeseen consequences. 

The Guncle Abroad by Steven Rowley (May 21)

Few authors possess the infectious mix of light- and heavy-heartedness that makes every Steven Rowley novel an experience; his gift is to make the reader laugh out loud one minute and clutch their chest the next. Following the success of The Celebrants (a Read with Jenna pick), Rowley returns to the world of the eponymous gay uncle of 2021’s The Guncle, this time sending sitcom star Patrick to Lake Como for his brother’s wedding. 

In Tongues by Thomas Grattan (May 21)

Grattan’s Pen/Hemingway-longlisted first novel, 2021’s The Recent East, was sublime, a book about family and the mundane magic and messiness of everyday life. His second follows a Midwesterner-turned-Brooklynite at the dawn of the new millennium who takes a job as a dog walker for the wealthy, a gig that places him in the orbit of an older couple.  

Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn (May 21)

In the new novel from LA Times Book Prize finalist, a “lightly” canceled mid-list author named Astrid attempts to resurrect her fledgling career when an influencer options her previous novel for TV. What seems like manna from heaven turns into a source of tension, assuaged only by a cocktail of Adderall, alcohol, and cigarettes—the Patricia Highsmith special—that also causes blackouts. On top of all that, Astrid just wants to love and be loved—mostly with Ivy, a grad student she meets on Zoom who’s studying lesbian pulp fiction form the 1950s. 

Shae by Mesha Maren (May 21)

Maren’s debut Sugar Run remains one of my favorite novels of the past five years. She is an astute and indispensable chronicler of Appalachian queerness. Her latest centers on two young women in West Virginia—one a teen mother and the other coming to terms with what it means to be trans in rural America. 

Trust and Safety by Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman (May 21)

Rosie is jonesing for a cottagecore life right out of a meticulously curated Instagram feed, a rural fantasy she hopes to turn into a reality when she and her husband purchase a Hudson Valley fixer-upper. When her husband loses his job, they have to rent out part of the property. Their new tenants? An attractive pair of Home Depot queers whose presence throws the house into disarray—even as they help repair it. 

Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg (May 28)

There’s something about road trip stories that feel inherently queer: the freedom and desire to be someone else and/or somewhere else, maybe, or the exhilaration of being part of the world while being apart from it. Eisenberg, the acclaimed author of The Third Rainbow Girl, delivers a debut novel that’s part The Price of Salt and part Just Kids, in which two friends journey across America in pursuit of art and love. 

The post 42 Queer Books You Need to Read in 2024 appeared first on Electric Literature.

My novel, River East, River West, is in part a social portrait of restless and suffocated youth in Shanghai. I’ve long been fascinated by the effect of place on adolescence, how a locale’s social and environmental factors exerts an influence on how young people behave or misbehave, how landscape informs crevices of society young people burrow into or the barriers they break out from. In Shanghai, this meant FamilyMarts and dark KTV rooms where teens could drink and frolic, all-night cybercafés and gargantuan malls, city parks teeming with feral cats, residential housing towers dense as concrete forests where supervising adults were too often absent, busy making money in distant cities.

This is a reading list about young people growing up too fast, too hard, too weird, too tenderly because they live in places where the setting is a driving force for complicated youths. Let these books take you around the globe, from working class towns of volcanic northern Tenerife to squatter apartments in Beijing, from a desolate eastern French town corroded by alcohol to the rooftops and cafés of Mexico City, from 1990s Burundi to the tundra of the Canadian arctic. In these stories of fevered hopes and bleak pessimism, absentee parents, epidemics of violence, the anonymity of buzzing metropolises, the wilderness remote towns, the suffocating provincialism, and racial and class tensions are all vivid setting traits to contribute to a kaleidoscopic collection of youth in flux—spanning continents, but all authentic portraits of hyper-particular settings.

Burundi: Small Country by Gaël Faye, translated by Sarah Ardizzone

“To live somewhere,” Faye writes, “is to melt carnally into the topography of a place.” In the musician’s debut novel, we meet 10 year-old Gaby, a French-Rwandan boy living in 1990s Bujumbura, Burundi, in a bougainvillea-filled cul-de-sac of the Kinanira neighborhood. He attends the French school, steals and gorges on the neighbor’s mangoes with his band of mostly mixed-race friends, picnics by the glittering lake with his family. Due to inflation, everyone in Bujumbura is a millionaire; democratic elections are on the horizon, neighborhood bars called cabarets brim with colorful opinions and artisanal liquor.

Gaby’s innocent childhood cracks open when his Rwandan mother and French father split up—on their last outing as a family, following a muddy forest trek and a visit to the palm oil factory where his father supervises a colonial enterprise, Gaby notes that the palm oil came to spoil the happiness of his childhood, mixing into the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. In neighboring Rwanda, ethnic tensions are coming to a boiling point, and Gaby’s visit to Kigali with his mother for an uncle’s wedding is full of chilling precursors of the genocide to come. Soon, the unthinkable happens, and Gaby’s once innocent band of boys—who’d smoked cigarettes at his 11th birthday party by a crocodile carcass, who’d picked idle fights over small neighborhood squabbles—are buying grenades off the black market and arming to guard the neighborhood as violence spills across the border. Years later, the cul-de-sac once teeming with great trees is now bare, barricaded with tall walled compounds and barbed wires. But the cabaret— the ubiquitous neighborhood bars where obscurity reigns and tongue are set loose, where the real country, this “small country where everyone knows everyone,”—still stands, and Gaby returns to see if he can still find memories of home and the ghosts who haunt him.

Spain: Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu, translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches

This novel’s original Spanish title is Panza de Burro, or “donkey’s belly,” a Canarian description of the low-lying cloud cover clinging to the volcanic landscape of northern Tenerife. The ten-year-old narrator and her best friend Idora live in a working class town where many of the adults’ livelihoods are tied to the resort economy of the island’s south. For the girls, the sea is a three hour walk away. They spend much of their languid, suffocating summer failing to get to it, settling instead for a made-believe “canal beach” with concrete slabs and a trickle of water littered with ubiquitous pine needles.

The town’s roads are steep (“a vertical neighborhood on a vertical mountain”), the houses multicolored and half finished, the minimarket a distributor of junk food and mean gossip. The narrator resents the holiday residences her mother needs to clean, from which she feels separated by “a barrier of clear clingfilm.” The girls eat and purge and gorge on berries and pears that make them shit endlessly, they grind their bodies on everything, including each other, they roam in the heat and volcanic haze. The clouds are always low, hovering right above their heads, their oppression a pressure cooker, presaging the boiling point towards which the novel is gathering force.

Afghanistan: 99 Nights in Logar by Jamil Jan Kochai

It is summer in Logar province, and an America-raised teen called Marwand is visiting his family’s village in rural eastern Afghanistan. This is a land of orchards and streams and mulberry trees, of curving roads leading to mazes of interconnected compounds, of courtyards covered with flower petals carried by the wind, of laborers and fields, of US army operations in the surrounding black mountains, “so that those of us down in the river valleys only ever heard the softest hum of gunfire, the gentlest tremble of stone.”

Kochai’s novel unfolds against this backdrop of “Ts” and “psychopathic white boys” and “robots in the sky” in 2005 Afghanistan, but the militarized elements make way for the centerpieces of familial lore, sumptuous feasts, and rowdy shenanigans as the children adventure around this landscape, searching for the escaped and much pestered family dog Budabash. In between, the cousins and friends succumb to mystery illnesses, crash weddings by hiding in burqas, and tell each other countless nesting doll-like stories.

By turns surrealist, absurdist, and deeply heartbreaking, the novel portrays a social landscape of intimate ties and bullet-ridden memories–including a tragedy that marks an eternal wound on the family’s beating heart. This secret is unveiled as layers of tales-within-tales rich with oral tradition are peeled back, culminating to a reveal so poetic and striking that it makes for a landmark chapter in contemporary American literature for its linguistic statement.

Mexico: The Spirit of Science Fiction by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer

To the delight of his cult followers (of which I am proudly one), Bolaño’s metaverse of poets coming-of-age in Mexico City appear in this early novel in his oeuvre as familiar echoes, doppelgangers, and kaleidoscopic fragments. Here, we loosely follow Jan and Remo, variants or alter egos of Arturo and Ulises of The Savage Detectives, perhaps, as they roam through 1980s Mexico City, surviving on milk and avocados, dwelling in rooftop tenement rooms, taking part time jobs at newspapers, writing rabid fan letters to writers they admire.

Reading the book can feel like tracing a map of the city: Bolaño writes of “the ghosts that appear behind trees and on cracked sidewalks in the old neighborhoods of Mexico City,” “the dens of San Juan de Letrán, the neighborhoods around Garibaldi where we sold Virgin of Guadalupe lamps on the installment plan, the chop shops of Peralvillo, the dusty rooms of Romero Rubio, the shady photography studios of Avenida Misterios, the hole-in-the-wall eateries behind Tepeyac that we reached by motorcycle as the sun was beginning to rise over the neighborhood…”

The literary youth in the novel drift in and out of the periphery of workshops, talks, magazines, interviews, they harbor crushes and zip around by motorcycle, they hunt for dusty science fiction tomes in foreign language libraries, they question the dark sides of the “artsy parties” taking over the city, they hallucinate of basilica as monsters, they love with unbridled idealism. The book is capped off by the standalone “Mexican Manifesto,” one of Bolaño’s most brilliant short stories (in my humble opinion), which centers entirely on the ecosystem of lust and exploitation inside a Mexico City bathhouse, and is in itself a masterclass in using place as a driving engine in fiction.

Canada: Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq

1970s, Nunavut, a small town of twelve hundred (human) souls in the Canadian high Arctic. It is a world of freeze and thaw, of sea ice and spring release ripe with smells of the life entrapped, fierce winds and 24-hour sunlight (“The sun is shining brightly overhead. The sun always brings life and mischief, serenity and visions. It’s two o’clock in the morning and I’ve shrugged off my curfew”).

Interspersed with poems and illustrations, this debut novel by Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq juxtaposes the narrator’s sensorial connection with her social and natural environment and ordinary teen preoccupations with the dark underbelly of sexual and substance abuse the town’s children witness and experience. There are butane highs, homes shaking with country music and parties best avoided, the creak of a door opening onto a dark room, unwanted touching, entering, rape. Nearby is the Arctic Ocean, and when it’s frozen over our narrator takes walks on the water. Her adolescent years follow rhythms of cold and thaws, of ever-present darkness and ever-present light; she goes to residential school, is kicked out, she takes up a job at the local grocery store. She grows breasts and kisses the butcher, she harbors crushes on Best Boy, but those are not who enter her in violation. She tells of classes she abhors and creatures she rides in spiritual communion. There are famines, storms, bodies growing within a body and born into the Northern Lights as the narrator navigates pregnancy. Tagaq, a Nunavut native, offers a tale imbued with both the most harrowing darkness and the most poetic ode to the destructive and magical forces in the human soul and the natural world.

China: Running Through Beijing by Xu Zechen, translated by Eric Abrahamsen

When Dunhuang gets out of jail, serving a stint for selling fake IDs, he is greeted by a classic Beijing sandstorm. The sky is “a blur of yellow dust behind which the sun glowed,” a “sandpaper sky.” This effect of dull sepia suffuses the novel’s landscape of city hustling, where livelihoods are often on the brink, but does nothing to diminish the novel’s frantic energy. Dunhuang has nowhere to sleep, so we follow him along Beijing’s Ring Roads and various fake good markets—Book City, Electronics City, the university gates where counterfeit masters and doctorates are for sale. He takes up with Xiaorong, a young woman selling fake DVDs with a penchant for arthouse films, and finds shelter for some time. When her boyfriend returns, Dunhuang takes the porno films she’s unwilling to sell and makes enough of a slim profit to rent first a bunk, then a concrete shack with a scholar tree in a dirt yard as his personal urinal.

Undercover police lurk everywhere, everyone is scamming everyone, and when Dunhuang’s new bike is instantly stolen, he takes up running across the city to make DVD deliveries. In between, he gets drunk on cheap beer and hot pot, he fights his buddies and steals their love interests—but at the end of the day, when someone needs a bailout from jail, Dunhuang is here to borrow money and help his friends. Xu captures the frenetic energy of early 2000s Beijing and the fortune-seekers occupying its lower ranks with touching compassion and rattling optimism—the protagonists are survivors fighting for each day in the big city, offering each other glimmers of mercy in what’s often been characterized as a merciless city. A breathless, profoundly engaging portrait of the hustling outsiders of China’s capital, this novel has been called a landmark of the “jing piao” or “drifting in Beijing” genre—an artful anthropological portrait easily read in one sitting.

France: And Their Children After Them by Nicolas Mathieu, translated by William Rodarmor

A lake, a heatwave, a town in France’s Great East region where teenagers Anthony and his cousin are chasing any stimulation that comes their way. At home, the adults are getting hammered at yet another ordinary apéro. The river valley, one close to the Luxembourg border, has drifted into a post-industrial torpor as its mines and factories become ruin; in the teens’ city, an enormous furnace that was once the city’s beating heart has become a monument of rust.

Mathieu, who grew up in this eastern region, writes of lake water “dense as oil,” of beaches called The Dump or the American Beach, where a local variant of mythologized, evil “rednecks” live. Back home, fathers broken by years of driving forklifts are getting angry and drunk over flavored apéricube cheese, railing against the nearby housing projects and the immigrants moving in—“families grew that way, on great slabs of anger over depths of accumulated pain that, lubricated by pastis, could suddenly erupt in the middle of a party.” Racial tensions and frustrated masculinity brew towards menace as the teens steal canoes and Yamaha bikes, or any modes of transport they can get their hands on to move through the desperate valley and seek a shot with the girls they lust after.

Over the course of four summers leaping along the 1990s, Mathieu’s tale follows new feuds and old rancors, long-harbored crushes and dissipating dreams amidst adolescent ennui and rage that curdles into resignation: the characters are constantly confronting their inability to escape their hometown and their affection and ultimate ease here—a sense of unshakable belonging in their forsaken valley.

The post 7 Novels Across the World About Turbulent Coming of Age appeared first on Electric Literature.

My last novel Little Threats, leaned on memory as a thematic device and I didn’t quite grasp the importance of that to me at the time. Fiction is like that. When the subject ended up in my new novel, Sleeping With Friends, I was finally able to write about my own mother’s coma, but through the novel’s character, Mia. She’s a Connecticut housewife who may or may not have had an accident.

There are countless moving stories of memory loss. It’s a universal possibility, either through illness, or aging. But the books I’ve collected here do something different. For example: a drug that can curate memories and allow you to experience someone else’s. Someone hiring out a whole cast to act out and recreate what might be his only memory. An amnesiac detective trying to solve his own tormented past.

All these novels begin with the idea that memory loss could be something more than the act of forgetting. Each of these books take a risk, and offer something original, strange, and fantastic.

Remainder by Tom McCarthy

If, like me, you were browsing bookstores every weekend in the late-aughts, no doubt you spotted this book featured it in your local Staff Picks section—and for good reason. Remainder may be equal parts fever dream and intellectual exercise, but there’s more to it than that.

A man is severely injured in a mysterious accident and receives an enormous sum in legal compensation. He has no idea what to do with it. He winds up having a moment of déjà vu, what could be a dream, or maybe an actual memory, and decides to entirely recreate it—right down to the cracks in the wall and the smell of liver frying in a pan down the hall. But this involves buying an apartment building, and hiring actors to live there, practicing for this one significant scene. There’s intense foreboding as he descends further into his obsession: trying to recreate something that may or may not have ever been real. (And yes, McCarthy’s novel came out before the film Synecdoche, New York.)

Fledgling by Octavia Butler

This dystopian novel, which was Butler’s last, is really about the dividing line between one life and another. Shori is recovering from injuries in a cave and doesn’t know anything about herself. She turns out to appear like a ten-year-old though she is much older. She immediately instinctively hunts and eats an animal, but ordinary things, like rain, need to be remembered. “I was recognizing things now, at least by category—bushes, rocks, mud….”

Social constructs are at first unknown—since Shori has no memory—even as she wanders naked through a burned-out town where she wonders if she had in fact lived before. It’s this confusion at the world around her that fascinates me. And of course, Butler being Butler, she then builds everything back up so that we see it with fresh eyes.

The Shimmering State by Meredith Westgate

A photographer named Lucien finds himself at the Center, a California rehab where patients are given an experimental drug called Memoroxin (or Mem). It was developed for use among dementia suffers but is also the hip recreational drug of Hollywood because of its addictive voyeurism and ability to curate memories. It’s very Don DeLillo–esque—a very risky esque to try—but Westgate pulls off what could be a high-concept trick, making her own authentic comment on how we live and process in the moment, and after.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

Originally published in 1994 but translated and named a best book of 2020 during the pandemic, The Memory Police’s easiest comparison is Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet it sings with more poetry than Orwell’s plainspeak. As objects and concepts seem to disappear, only some of an island’s residents are able to remember them. “Transparent things, fragrant things . . . fluttery ones, bright ones . . . wonderful things you can’t possibly imagine,” the character’s mother tells him, showing him things she has hidden away that everyone else has forgotten. Ogawa tackles an impossible idea so skillfully, he makes us want to believe it.

Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey

With delicate prose, Emma Healey is able to keep us grounded while also achieving a dreamlike effect. The mystery here is very meta: Maud, a woman living with Alzheimer’s, is trying to solve a missing persons case—her best friend who’s suddenly not at home, as well as her own sister who vanished 70 years ago. What is real, and what is imagined? What has been forgotten? And what does it mean when our concerns are dismissed by others?

In the Woods by Tana French

Gripping from the first word, Tana French has become known as a mystery maven for a reason. In this first book of her Dublin Murder Squad series, we begin by being taken into the narrator’s confidence about what he cannot trust of memory. We’re then launched into a precise police-report style recounting of a crime from 1984 of missing children in the woods near Knocknaree. It turns out our detective, Rob Ryan, is actually one of the victims—the one left alive. Trauma has taken his memories of that event. Rob now works as an investigator, so this is a double-case narrative. A 12-year-old girl has gone missing from the same woods, and he has to solve it—while also combing through his own traumatic past.

The Chimes by Anna Smaill

Amnesia through music… New Zealander author Anna Smaill is onto more than just a terrifying earworm here. In a fictional, primitive London, there’s an instrument called the Carillon—which enforces tinnitus, brainwashing its listeners until they can no longer remember. This happens ritually twice daily. Simon has traveled in from the country after his mother’s death, and befriends Lucien—the two teenagers roaming the city. Simon is on a mission to find out the meaning of what his mother told him on her deathbed.

Adjacentland by Rabindranath Maharaj

Adjacentland is an ahead-of-its-time novel which steers into eerie territory with its focus on creativity and AI. Our narrator awakes in a compound, where he comes to believe that he was once a comic book writer who warned that the reliance on artificial intelligence would make the imagination obsolete and subversive. As he searches for sketches, notes, and clues he may have left for himself before his memory loss, both he and the reader learn of Adjacentland, a primitive land of misfits and outsiders. It is only in Adjacentland that the imagination has survived. “Today is a new day but yesterday was the same day,” reads one of his foretelling sketches.

The post 8 Novels About Memory Loss appeared first on Electric Literature.

Memoirs, unlike, say, biographies, do not plod along at the pace of daily life. Their authors distill events, excising superfluous details and controlling the flow of information to create structure. True crime works in a similar way, except that its authors are mining the lived experience of others for material. (Notable exceptions are beautiful true crime memoirs like The Fact of a Body or Memorial Drive.) 

True crime—in its modern iteration anyway—is entertainment predicated on the suffering of others. Despite its name, it is interested in story over truth. It cannot afford to get bogged down in messiness, frustration, and randomness. Fine. Fair enough. I enjoy a tight and twisty narrative as much as the next person. But what are the implications of this kind of storytelling on the survivors of these events? On their communities? On the allocation of material resources (police, media attention, money)? What are the implications for those who consume violence and fear?

My novel, Rabbit Hole, follows a young woman named Teddy whose long-missing sister, Angie, has developed a true crime “fandom.” After their father, who was suspected—on the internet—of involvement in Angie’s disappearance dies by suicide, Teddy starts to engage in the online communities obsessed with her family. Even as Teddy fears the menacing internet rubberneckers who see her as a character in their conspiracy theories, she can’t resist their seductive pull.

The seven novels in this list are interested in various “dark sides” of true crime. Some of them offer correctives to famous true crime narratives, while others investigate the effect of the public’s attention on families, journalists, and victims themselves.

The Comfort of Monsters by Willa Richards

When Dee McBride goes missing in Milwaukee during the “Dahmer summer” of 1991, her disappearance is largely ignored. Media and police resources are instead devoted to obsessing over the details the man Richards refers to only as “the serial killer.” The Comfort of Monsters is a pitch-black book about familial loss, grief, and lurid public interest in grizzly tragedies. Richards explores the way that families and even entire communities can become victimized by tabloid interest in sensational crimes. If you love true crime, you may actually hate this book. The brilliance of Richards’s novel is her refusal to allow the narrative to mimic the fake and tidy structure of a true crime story. Instead, it hems closely to real life and honestly depicts the festering wounds that come with not knowing.  

Penance by Eliza Clark

In a small coastal town, a sixteen-year-old girl is immolated by three of her classmates. Ten years later, the definitive account of the event is penned by a journalist who has spoken to everyone involved and heavily researched the crime. Still a critical question remains: how much of the story is true? Eliza Clark, more than anyone on this list, is explicitly interested in the impulses that drive true crime consumption and the ethics of the genre.

Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin

When Claire’s sister Alison goes missing on a Caribbean vacation and turns up dead in a nearby cay, two resort employees are arrested. They are quickly released, but by then the story has already exploded into a tabloid obsession that will haunt Claire for years to come. When she runs into one of the accused men years later, as an adult, Claire must reckon with the unsolved questions at the heart of her sister’s case and the way the crime (and its surrounding hoopla) affected so many others. Schaitkin riffs on a Natalee Holloway-esque disappearance in this novel, which interrogates true crime’s perennial interest in missing white women and the implications that such interest can have on multiple communities.

True Story by Kate Reed Petty

This book is one of my favorite reads of the last few years. A wildly inventive, formally playful look at the fallout from a high school sexual assault, True Story is interested in the role of memory and the way a single, monolithic story can become the dominant narrative around a crime. Alex, the victim at the center of the story, must ultimately defend herself not only against her possible assailants (and the community that rallied to protect the young athletes) but against her friend, Haley, an aspiring filmmaker keen on flattening and commodifying her story.

More Than You’ll Ever Know by Katie Gutierrez

We’ve all heard of men with multiple families, but what about a woman leading such a double life? For true crime blogger Cassie Bowman, the story of Lore Rivera—and the dramatic way her marriages ended in the arrest of one husband for the murder of another—is too good to pass up. But as Bowman digs into Rivera’s life, often at the expense of her own personal relationships, she uncovers a story more complex and more human than she bargained for.

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

The title of Jessica Knoll’s latest comes from something a judge said to Ted Bundy during a sentencing: “you’re a bright young man.” In this novel, Knoll seeks to correct the true crime narrative that has warped Ted Bundy, transforming him from an arrogant, not-actually-all-that-bright murderer into a mythical, larger-than-life charisma machine. By focusing on the sorority sisters who would become Bundy’s final victims, Knoll offers a corrective and perhaps a new focus for avid true crime fans: the bright young women who suffered at Bundy’s hands.

Missing White Woman by Kellye Garrett

I’m showing off a little by including this book, since I was lucky enough to read an advanced copy. It doesn’t come out until April, but you can pre-order it now, and you should. The title comes from the late journalist Gwen Ifill, who is quoted in the epigraph: “I call it missing white woman search syndrome. If there is a missing white woman, you’re going to cover that every day.” Garrett cleverly explores this phenomenon in a book that is itself a twisty page-turner. When Bree wakes up on the final day of a romantic getaway to discover a dead woman in the foyer of the Airbnb her boyfriend rented, she knows she is in trouble. Add that to the fact that her boyfriend is nowhere to be found, and the dead woman is a Gabby Petito-type—someone the entire internet has been looking for. A tense, smart thriller that captures the madness of social media and addresses the intersection of true crime and race.

The post 7 Books on the Dark Side of True Crime appeared first on Electric Literature.