The Critic and Her Publics is a live interview series that asks the best and most prominent critics working today to perform criticism on the spot, on an object they’ve never seen before. It’s a glimpse into brilliant minds at work, performing their thinking, taking risks, and making spontaneous judgments, which are sometimes right and sometimes wrong. 

Subscribe to The Critic and Her Publics, available wherever you get your podcasts!

*

From the episode:

Merve Emre: A friend of mine described Andrea Long Chu’s approach to criticism as perfecting a rigorous negativity. We all know how deeply fun it can be to hate on something for long and intense periods of time, but as any good analyst or theorist of emotion might point out, there always exists a hard kernel of love in hate. It’s an abiding love for the sheer act of thinking that I always sense in Andrea’s work. She’s this year’s recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and the book critic at New York Magazine. Her book Females was published by Verso in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. I’m sure many of you have read her blockbuster reviews of books by Maggie Nelson, Ottessa Moshfegh, and most recently Zadie Smith, as well as her essays on Phantom of the Opera and—my favorite—on the children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit. I’m very happy to have her as our inaugural guest. Welcome, Andrea.

Andrea Long Chu: Thank you for having me.

For a full transcript and details of the piece Andrea responded to, head over to the New York Review of Books [link]

*

Andrea Long Chu is a Pulitzer Prize–winning essayist and critic at New York magazine. Her book Females: an extended annotation of a lost play by Valerie Solanas was published by Verso in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her writing has also appeared in n+1, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Bookforum, Boston Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4Columns, and Jewish Currents.

*

The Critic and Her Publics
Hosted by Merve Emre
Edited by Michele Moses
Music by Dani Lencioni
Art by Leanne Shapton
Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, and Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ The Bullet Swallower all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

*

Fiction

1. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
(Knopf)

10 Rave • 1 Postive

“A deliberately provocative title that suits its protagonist, an Iranian-American poet who is painfully conflicted, heartbreakingly vulnerable, and frequently impossible … Stuffed with ideas, gorgeous images, and a surprising amount of humor … The serious fiction lover’s favorite kind of book, offering plenty to think about and discuss, all of it couched in brilliantly rendered prose that’s a pleasure to read. Let’s hope that Kaveh Akbar’s impressive debut is the first of many novels to come.”

–Wendy Smith (The Boston Globe)

2. The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James
(Simon & Schuster)

4 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Elizabeth Gonzalez James on the “weird, wild literature” of her home state, here

“Mixes elements of western novels and magical realism to deliver a wildly entertaining story that spans generations and crosses borders in a riveting family saga … While great characterization and superb storytelling make this an enjoyable read, Gonzalez’s use of magical realism elements is what pushes this novel into must-read territory. The narrative reads like a western, but the magical elements enrich the story in unexpected ways.”

–Gabino Iglesias (The Boston Globe)

3. Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn
(MCD)

3 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Dead in Long Beach, California here

“Through the chorus, Blackburn brings us back to something inherently true about anyone experiencing this kind of loss: Our grief may seem singular, it may seem like it belongs solely to us, but that’s not exactly true. Grief is part of a larger system that connects us all to one another, and what we do with it, how we handle it, and what becomes of us after is not always fully in our control … It’s a masterful feat of storytelling for Blackburn to constantly make the reader feel as if Coral is coming full circle, only to remind us she can’t …

We’re left with a profound and surprising demonstration of how there’s no way to fully outrun or outmaneuver or out-strategize the pain of loss. Even when we truly believe we can, the despair and disrepair of the loss will bring us to our knees and turn us in on ourselves. And although the idea that we don’t move beyond grief, we only learn to live with it is common, Blackburn’s debut novel provides a new vision of just how true this is, making that truth feel brand new again.”

–Stef Rubino (Autostraddle)

**

Nonfiction 

1. The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

7 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Rebel’s Clinic here

“A biography of Fanon is also of necessity a biography of his legend, which sometimes deviates considerably from his person. His support for the Algerian struggle was unwavering, and he is often remembered as a militant who once lauded anti-colonial violence as ‘cleansing force.’ But as the critic and essayist Adam Shatz demonstrates in his nimble and engrossing new book, The Rebel’s Clinic, Fanon was never as one-dimensionally bellicose as he is often taken to be, not only by his enemies but by his allies and hagiographers … As Shatz shows in this exemplary work of public intellectualism, in which he does not sugarcoat or simplify, the ingenious doctor and impassioned activist was every bit as much a victim of empire as the patients he worked to heal.”

–Becca Rothfeld (The Washington Post)

2. The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky by Simon Shuster
(William Morrow & Company)

6 Rave • 1 Positive

“Shuster paints with great sympathy a complex picture of Mr. Zelensky and his transformation … Like many writers on a tight deadline, Mr. Shuster crafted a longer book than he otherwise might have. But The Showmansurpasses all similar efforts to date and is set to be the standard by which all other works on Mr. Zelensky and Ukraine’s wartime politics will be judged.”

–Bojan Pancevski (The Wall Street Journal)

3. Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs by Benjamin Herold
(Penguin Press)

3 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from Disillusioned here

“…presents a blistering indictment of how American suburbs were built on racism and unsustainable development ‘that functioned like a Ponzi scheme’ … Disillusioned excels in documenting the effects racial exclusion and intimidation had on suburban growth, and Herold offers eye-opening details like the fact that Compton, Calif., was once home to George Herbert Walker Bush and his young children. For readers like me, who previously only thought of Compton as a burning epicenter of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Herold reminds us that places don’t start out in disrepair. They’re shaped by forces that cause decay … As Herold jumps between cities and decades, it can be hard to keep track of the exact rulings in different cases regarding desegregation. But the patterns are clear and continuing, cementing the idea that equal rights and opportunity exist only in theory in this country, not in practice.”

–Vikas Turakhia (The Star Tribune)

This speech was written during a period when William Maxwell was discouraged over what he felt was a lack of public encouragement and he had thought that he might give up writing and just be an editor. In a journal he wrote,

I do not ever want to write again. I want checks to come in and requests for reprint and translation rights from every country under the sun….

The two subjects I have are both highly introspective and lacking in action—the man without confidence, the man who doubts his capacity to love. They are probably the same subject….

Who will I take as a model, as a clue to subject matter. Not Flaubert, because I don’t want it to be cold. Not Conrad, because it has to be not adventurous. The hero must be forty, and not trail along behind me. Wells, Joyce, Dostoievsky? It should have an action, and not begin with a character or a psychological difficulty….

The speech consists of notes that Maxwell had been keeping for a piece of writing and a companion text that he wrote almost entirely on the train to Massachusetts. The section of instructions—”Begin with the…”—are the part that was written beforehand. By the time the train had arrived, he had finished the speech and decided that he liked writing too much to give up.

–Alec Wilkinson

*

A speech delivered at Smith College on March 4, 1955.

One of the standard themes of Chinese painting is the spring festival on the river. I’m sure many of you have seen some version of it. There is one in the Metropolitan Museum. It has three themes woven together: the river, which comes down from the upper right, and the road along the river, and the people on the riverbanks.

As the scroll unwinds, there is, first, the early-morning mist on the rice fields and some boys who cannot go to the May Day festival because they have to watch their goats. Then there is a country house, and several people starting out for the city, and a farmer letting water into a field by means of a water wheel, and then more people and buildings—all kinds of people all going toward the city for the festival. And along the riverbank there are various entertainers—a magician, a female tightrope walker, several fortune-tellers, a phrenologist, a man selling spirit money, a man selling patent medicine, a storyteller.

I prefer to think that it is with this group—the shoddy entertainers earning their living by the riverbank on May Day—that Mr. Bellow, Mr. Gill, Miss Chase, on the platform, Mr. Ralph Ellison and Mrs. Kazin, in the audience, and I, properly speaking, belong. Writers—narrative writers—are people who perform tricks.

Before I came up here, I took various books down from the shelf and picked out some examples of the kind of thing I mean. Here is one:

“I have just returned this morning from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with….”

One of two things—there will be more neighbors turning up than the narrator expects, or else he will very much wish that they had. And the reader is caught; he cannot go away until he finds out which of his two guesses is correct. This is, of course, a trick.

Here is another: “None of them knew the color of the sky….” Why not? Because they are at sea, pulling at the oars in an open boat; and so are you.

Here is another trick: “Call me Ishmael….” A pair of eyes looking into your eyes. A face. A voice. You have entered into a personal relationship with a stranger, who will perhaps make demands on you, extraordinary personal demands; who will perhaps insist that you love him; who perhaps will love you in a way that is upsetting and uncomfortable.

Here is another trick: “Thirty or forty years ago, in one of those gray towns along the Burlington railroad, which are so much grayer today than they were then, there was a house well known from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.”

A door opens slowly in front of you, and you cannot see who is opening it but, like a sleepwalker, you have to go in. Another trick: “It was said that a new person had appeared on the seafront—a lady with a dog….”

The narrator appears to be, in some way, underprivileged, socially. She perhaps has an invalid father that she has to take care of, and so she cannot walk along the promenade as often as she would like. Perhaps she is not asked many places. And so she has not actually set eyes on this interesting new person that everyone is talking about. She is therefore all the more interested. And meanwhile, surprisingly, the reader cannot forget the lady, or the dog, or the seafront.

Here is another trick: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife….”

An attitude of mind, this time. A way of looking at people that is ironical, shrewd, faintly derisive, and that suggests that every other kind of writing is a trick (this is a special trick, in itself ) and that this book is going to be about life as it really is, not some fabrication of the author’s.

So far as I can see, there is no legitimate sleight of hand involved in practicing the arts of painting, sculpture, and music. They appear to have had their origin in religion, and they are fundamentally serious. In writing—in all writing but especially in narrative writing—you are continually being taken in. The reader, skeptical, experienced, with many demands on his time and many ways of enjoying his leisure, is asked to believe in people he knows don’t exist, to be present at scenes that never occurred, to be amused or moved or instructed just as he would be in real life, only the life exists in somebody else’s imagination.

If, as Mr. T. S. Eliot says, humankind cannot bear very much reality, then that would account for their turning to the charlatans operating along the riverbank—to the fortune-teller, the phrenologist, the man selling spirit money, the storyteller. Or there may be a different explanation; it may be that what humankind cannot bear directly it can bear indirectly, from a safe distance.

The writer has everything in common with the vaudeville magician except this: The writer must be taken in by his own tricks. Otherwise, the audience will begin to yawn and snicker. Having practiced more or less incessantly for five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years, knowing that the trunk has a false bottom and the opera hat a false top, with the white doves in a cage ready to be handed to him from the wings and his clothing full of unusual, deep pockets containing odd playing cards and colored scarves knotted together and not knotted together and the American flag, he must begin by pleasing himself.

His mouth must be the first mouth that drops open in surprise, in wonder, as (presto chango!) this character’s heartache is dragged squirming from his inside coat pocket, and that character’s future has become his past while he was not looking.

With his cuffs turned back, to show that there is no possibility of deception being practiced on the reader, the writer invokes a time: He offers the reader a wheat field on a hot day in July, and a flying machine, and a little boy with his hand in his father’s. He has been brought to the wheat field to see a flying machine go up. They stand, waiting, in a crowd of people. It is a time when you couldn’t be sure, as you can now, that a flying machine would go up.

Hot, tired, and uncomfortable, the little boy wishes they could go home. The wheat field is like an oven. The flying machine does not go up.

The writer will invoke a particular place: With a cardinal and a tourist home and a stretch of green grass and this and that, he will make Richmond, Virginia. He uses words to invoke his version of the Forest of Arden.

If he is a good novelist, you can lean against his trees; they will not give way. If he is a bad novelist, you probably shouldn’t. Ideally, you ought to be able to shake them until an apple falls on your head. (The apple of understanding.)

The novelist has tricks of detail. For example, there is Turgenev’s hunting dog, in A Sportsman’s Notebook. The sportsman, tired after a day’s shooting, has accepted a ride in a peasant’s cart, and is grateful for it. His dog is not. Aware of how foolish he must look as he is being lifted into the cart, the unhappy dog smiles to cover his embarrassment.

There is the shop of the live fish, toward the beginning of Malraux’s Man’s Fate. A conspirator goes late at night to a street of pet shops in Shanghai and knocks on the door of a dealer in live fish. They are both involved in a plot to assassinate someone. The only light in the shop is a candle; the fish are asleep in phosphorescent bowls. As the hour that the assassination will be attempted is mentioned, the water on the surface of the bowls begins to stir feebly. The carp, awakened by the sound of voices, begin to swim round and round, and my hair stands on end.

These tricks of detail are not important; they have nothing to do with the plot or the idea of either piece of writing. They are merely exercises in literary virtuosity, but nevertheless in themselves so wonderful that to overlook them is to miss half the pleasure of the performance.

There is also a more general sleight of hand—tricks that involve the whole work, tricks of construction. Nothing that happens in Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris, none of the characters, is, for me, as interesting as the way in which the whole thing is put together. From that all the best effects, the real beauty of the book, derive.

And finally there are the tricks that involve the projection of human character. In the last book that I have read, Ann Birstein’s novel, The Troublemaker, there is a girl named Rhoda, who would in some places, at certain periods of the world’s history, be considered beautiful, but who is too large to be regarded as beautiful right now. It is time for her to be courted, to be loved—high time, in fact. And she has a suitor, a young man who stops in to see her on his way to the movies alone.

There is also a fatality about the timing of these visits; he always comes just when she has washed her hair. She is presented to the reader with a bath towel around her wet head, her hair in pins, in her kimono, sitting on the couch in the living room, silent, while her parents make conversation with the suitor. All her hopes of appearing to advantage lie shattered on the carpet at her feet. She is inconsolable but dignified, a figure of supportable pathos. In the midst of feeling sorry for her you burst out laughing. The laughter is not unkind.

These forms of prestidigitation, these surprises, may not any of them be what makes a novel great, but unless it has some of them, I do not care whether a novel is great or not; I cannot read it.

It would help if you would give what I am now about to read to you only half your attention. It doesn’t require any more than that, and if you listen only now and then, you will see better what I am driving at.

Begin with breakfast and the tipping problem.

Begin with the stealing of the marmalade dish and the breakfast tray still there.

The marmalade dish, shaped like a shell, is put on the cabin class breakfast tray by mistake, this once. It belongs in first class.

Begin with the gate between first and second class.

Begin with the obliging steward unlocking the gate for them.

The gate, and finding their friends who are traveling first class, on the glassed-in deck.

The gate leads to the stealing of the marmalade dish.

If you begin with the breakfast tray, then—no, begin with the gate and finding their friends.

And their friends’ little boy, who had talked to Bernard Baruch and asked Robert Sherwood for his autograph.

The couple in cabin class have first-class accommodations for the return voyage, which the girl thinks they are going to exchange, and the man secretly hopes they will not be able to.

But they have no proper clothes. They cannot dress for dinner if they do return first class.

Their friend traveling first class on the way over has brought only one evening dress, which she has to wear night after night.

Her husband tried to get cabin-class accommodations and couldn’t.

This is a lie, perhaps.

They can afford the luxury of traveling first class but disapprove of it.

They prefer to live more modestly than they need to.

They refuse to let themselves enjoy, let alone be swept off their feet by, the splendor and space.

But they are pleased that their little boy, aged nine, has struck up a friendship with Bernard Baruch and Robert Sherwood.

They were afraid he would be bored on the voyage.

Also, they themselves would never have dared approach either of these eminent figures, and are amazed that they have begotten a child with courage.

The girl is aware that her husband has a love of luxury and is enjoying the splendor and space they haven’t paid for. On their way back to the barrier, they encounter Ber-

nard Baruch.

His smile comes to rest on them, like the beam from a lighthouse, and then after a few seconds passes on.

They discover that they are not the only ones who have been exploring.

Their table companions have all found the gate.

When the steward unlocked the gate for the man and the girl, he let loose a flood.

The entire cabin class has spread out in both directions, into tourist as well as first class.

Begin with the stealing of the marmalade dish.

The man is ashamed of his conscientiousness but worried about the stewardess.

Will she have to pay for the missing marmalade dish?

How many people? Three English, two Americans cabin class. Three Americans first class.

Then the morning on deck.

The breakfast tray still there, accusing them, before they go up to lunch.

The Orkney Islands in the afternoon.

The movie, which is shown to cabin class in the afternoon, to first class in the evening.

The breakfast tray still in the corridor outside their cabin when they go to join their friends in first class in the bar before dinner.

With her tongue loosened by liquor, the girl confesses her crime.

They go down to the cabin after dinner, and the tray is gone.

In the evening the coast of France, lights, a lighthouse.

The boat as immorality.

The three sets of people.

Begin in the late afternoon with the sighting of the English islands.

Begin with the stealing of the marmalade dish.

No, begin with the gate.

Then the stealing of the marmalade dish.

Then the luncheon table with the discovery that other passengers have been exploring and found the gate between first and second class.

Then the tray accusing them. What do they feel about stealing?

When has the man stolen something he wanted as badly as the girl wanted that marmalade dish for an ashtray?

From his mother’s purse, when he was six years old. The stewardess looks like his mother.

Ergo, he is uneasy.

They call on their friends in first class one more time, to say goodbye, and as they go back to second class, the girl sees, as clearly as if she had been present, that some time during the day her husband has managed to slip away from her and meet the stewardess and pay for the marmalade dish she stole.

And that is why the breakfast tray disappeared.

He will not allow himself, even on shipboard, the splendor and space of an immoral act.

He had to go behind her back and do the proper thing.

A writer struggling—unsuccessfully, as it turned out; the story was never written—to change a pitcher of water into a pitcher of wine.

In The Listener for January 27th, 1955, there is a brief but wonderfully accurate description of a similar attempt carried off successfully:

Yesterday morning I was in despair. You know that bloody book which Dadie and Leonard extort, drop by drop from my breast? Fiction, or some title to that effect. I couldn’t screw a word from me; and at last dropped my head in my hands, dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando, a Biography. No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. I wrote rapidly till twelve….

It is safe to assume on that wonderful (for us as well as her) morning, the writer took out this word and put in that and paused only long enough to admire the effect; she took on that morning or others like it—the very words out of this character’s mouth in order to give them, unscrupulously, to that character; she annulled marriages and brought dead people back to life when she felt the inconvenience of having to do without them. She cut out the whole last part of the scene she had been working on so happily and feverishly for most of the morning because she saw suddenly that it went past the real effect into something that was just writing.

Just writing is when the novelist’s hand is not quicker than the reader’s eye. She persuaded, she struggled with, she beguiled this or that character that she had made up out of whole cloth (or almost) to speak his mind, to open his heart. Day after day, she wrote till twelve, employing tricks no magician had ever achieved before, and using admirably many that they had, until, after some sixty pages, something quite serious happened.

Orlando changed sex—that is, she exchanged the mind of a man for the mind of a woman; this trick was only partly successful—and what had started out as a novel became a brilliant, slaphappy essay. It would have been a great pity—it would have been a real loss if this particular book had never been written; even so, it is disappointing. I am in no position to say what happened, but it seems probable from the writer’s diary—fortunately, she kept one—that there were too many interruptions; too many friends invited themselves and their husbands and dogs and children for the weekend.

Though the writer may from time to time entertain paranoiac suspicions about critics and book reviewers, about his publisher, and even about the reading public, the truth is that he has no enemy but interruption. The man from Porlock has put an end to more masterpieces than the Turks—was it the Turks?—did when they set fire to the library at Alexandria. Also, odd as it may seem, every writer has a man from Porlock inside him who gladly and gratefully connives to bring about these interruptions.

If the writer’s attention wanders for a second or two, his characters stand and wait politely for it to return to them. If it doesn’t return fairly soon, their feelings are hurt and they refuse to say what is on their minds or in their hearts. They may even turn and go away, without explaining or leaving a farewell note or a forwarding address where they can be reached.

But let us suppose that owing to one happy circumstance and another, including the writer’s wife, he has a good morning; he has been deeply attentive to the performers and the performance. Suppose that—because this is common practice, I believe—he begins by making a few changes here and there, because what is behind him, all the scenes that come before the scene he is now working on, must be perfect, before he can tackle what lies ahead.

(This is the most dangerous of all the tricks in the repertoire, and probably it would be wiser if he omitted it from his performance: it is the illusion of illusions, and all a dream. And tomorrow morning, with a clearer head, making a fresh start, he will change back the changes, with one small insert that makes all the difference.)

But to continue: Since this is very close work, watch-mender’s work, really, this attentiveness, requiring a magnifying glass screwed to his eye and resulting in poor posture, there will probably be, somewhere at the back of his mind, a useful corrective vision, something childlike and simple that represents the task as a whole. He will perhaps see the material of his short story as a pond, into which a stone is tossed, sending out a circular ripple; and then a second stone is tossed into the pond, sending out a second circular ripple that is inside the first and that ultimately overtakes it; and then a third stone; and a fourth; and so on.

Or he will see himself crossing a long level plain, chapter after chapter, toward the mountains on the horizon. If there were no mountains, there would be no novel; but they are still a long way away—those scenes of excitement, of the utmost drama, so strange, so sad, that will write themselves; and meanwhile, all the knowledge, all the art, all the imagination at his command will be needed to cover this day’s march on perfectly level ground.

As a result of too long and too intense concentration, the novelist sooner or later begins to act peculiarly. During the genesis of his book, particularly, he talks to himself in the street; he smiles knowingly at animals and birds; he offers Adam the apple, for Eve, and with a half involuntary movement of his right arm imitates the writhing of the snake that nobody knows about yet. He spends the greater part of the days of his creation in his bathrobe and slippers, unshaven, his hair uncombed, drinking water to clear his brain, and hardly distinguishable from an inmate in an asylum.

Like many such unfortunate people, he has delusions of grandeur. With the cherubim sitting row on row among the constellations, the seraphim in the more expensive seats in the primum mobile, waiting, ready, willing to be astonished, to be taken in, the novelist, still in his bathrobe and slippers, with his cuffs rolled back, says Let there be (after who knows how much practice beforehand)….Let there be (and is just as delighted as the angels and the reader and everybody else when there actually is) Light.

Not always, of course. Sometimes it doesn’t work. But say that it does work. Then there is light, the greater light to rule the daytime of the novel, and the lesser light to rule the night scenes, breakfast and dinner, one day, and the gathering together of now this and now that group of characters to make a lively scene, grass, trees, apple trees in bloom, adequate provision for sea monsters if they turn up in a figure of speech, birds, cattle, and creeping things, and finally and especially man—male and female, Anna and Count Vronsky, Emma and Mr. Knightly.

There is not only all this, there are certain aesthetic effects that haven’t been arrived at accidentally; the universe of the novel is beautiful, if it is beautiful, by virtue of the novelist’s intention that it should be.

Say that the performance is successful; say that he has reached the place where an old, old woman, who was once strong and active and handsome, grows frail and weak, grows smaller and smaller, grows partly senile, and toward the end cannot get up out of bed and even refuses to go on feeding herself, and finally, well cared for, still in her own house with her own things around her, dies, and on a cold day in January the funeral service is read over her casket, and she is buried….Then what? Well, perhaps the relatives, returning to the old home after the funeral, or going to the lawyer’s office, for the reading of the will.

In dying, the old woman took something with her, and therefore the performance has, temporarily at least, come to a standstill. Partly out of fatigue, perhaps, partly out of uncertainty about what happens next, the novelist suddenly finds it impossible to believe in the illusions that have so completely held his attention up till now. Suddenly it won’t do. It might work out for some other novel but not this one.

Defeated for the moment, unarmed, restless, he goes outdoors in his bathrobe, discovers that the morning is more beautiful than he had any idea—full spring, with the real apple trees just coming into bloom, and the sky the color of the blue that you find in the sky of the West Indies, and the neighbors’ dogs enjoying themselves, and the neighbor’s little boy having to be fished out of the brook, and the grass needing cutting—he goes outside thinking that a brief turn in the shrubbery will clear his mind and set him off on a new track.

But it doesn’t. He comes in poorer than before, and ready to give not only this morning’s work but the whole thing up as a bad job, ill advised, too slight. The book that was going to live, to be read after he is dead and gone, will not even be written, let alone published. It was an illusion.

So it was. So it is. But fortunately we don’t need to go into all that because, just as he was about to give up and go put his trousers on, he has thought of something. He has had another idea. It might even be more accurate to say another idea has him. Something so simple and brief that you might hear it from the person sitting next to you on a train; something that would take a paragraph to tell in a letter….Where is her diamond ring? What has happened to her furs?

Mistrust and suspicion are followed by brutal disclosures. The disclosure of who kept after her until she changed her will and then who, finding out about this, got her to make a new will, eight months before she died.

The letters back and forth between the relatives hint at undisclosed revelations, at things that cannot be put in a letter. But if they cannot be put in a letter, how else can they be disclosed safely? Not at all, perhaps. Perhaps they can never be disclosed. There is no reason to suspect the old woman’s housekeeper. On the other hand, if it was not a member of the family who walked off with certain unspecified things without waiting to find out which of the rightful heirs wanted what, surely it could have been put in a letter.

Unless, of course, the novelist does not yet know the answer himself. Eventually, of course, he is going to have to let the cat—this cat and all sorts of other cats—out of the bag. If he does not know, at this point, it means that a blessing has descended on him, and the characters have taken things in their own hands. From now on, he is out of it, a recorder simply of what happens, whose business is with the innocent as well as with the guilty. There are other pressures than greed. Jealousy alone can turn one sister against the other, and both against the man who is universally loved and admired, and who used, when they were little girls, to walk up and down with one of them on each of his size-12 shoes.

Things that everybody knows but nobody has ever come right out and said will be said now. Ancient grievances will be aired. Everybody’s character, including that of the dead woman, is going to suffer damage from too much handling. The terrible damaging facts of that earlier will must all come out. The family, as a family, is done for, done to death by what turns out in the end to be a surprisingly little amount of money, considering how much love was sacrificed to it.

And their loss, if the novelist really is a novelist, will be our gain.

For it turns out that this old woman—eighty-three she was, with a bad heart, dreadful blood pressure, a caricature of herself, alone and lonely—knew what would happen and didn’t care; didn’t try to stop it; saw that it had begun under her nose while she was still conscious; saw that she was the victim of the doctor who kept her alive long after her will to live had gone; saw the threads of will, of consciousness, slip through her fingers; let them go; gathered them in again; left instructions that she knew would not be followed; tried to make provisions when it was all but too late; and then delayed some more, while she remembered, in snatches, old deprivations, an unwise early marriage, the absence of children; and slept; and woke to remember more—this old woman, who woke on her last day cheerful, fully conscious, ready for whatever came (it turned out to be her sponge bath)—who was somehow a symbol (though this is better left unsaid), an example, an instance, a proof of something, and whose last words were—But I mustn’t spoil the story for you.

At twelve o’clock, the novelist, looking green from fatigue (also from not having shaved), emerges from his narrative dream at last with something in his hand he wants somebody to listen to. His wife will have to stop what she is doing and think of a card, any card; or be sawed in half again and again until the act is letter-perfect. She alone knows when he is, and when he is not, writing like himself. This is an illusion, sustained by love, and this she also knows but keeps to herself.

It would only upset him if he were told. If he has no wife, he may even go to bed that night without ever having shaved, brushed his teeth, or put his trousers on. And if he is invited out, he will destroy the dinner party by getting up and putting on his hat and coat at quarter of ten, causing the other guests to signal to one another, and the hostess to make a mental note never to ask him again. In any case, literary prestidigitation is tiring and requires lots of sleep.

And when the writer is in bed with the light out, he tosses. Far from dropping off to sleep and trusting to the fact that he did get home and into bed by ten o’clock after all, he thinks of something, and the light beside his bed goes on long enough for him to write down five words that may or may not mean a great deal to him in the morning. The light may go on and off several times before his steady breathing indicates that he is asleep.

And while he is asleep he may dream—he may dream that he had a dream in which the whole meaning of what he is trying to do in the novel is brilliantly revealed to him. Just so the dog asleep on the hearthrug dreams; you can see, by the faint jerking movement of his four legs, that he is after a rabbit.

The novelist’s rabbit is the truth—about life, about human character, about himself and therefore by extension, it is to be hoped, about other people. He is convinced that this is all knowable, can be described, can be recorded, by a person sufficiently dedicated to describing and recording, can be caught in a net of narration.

He is encouraged by the example of other writers—Turgenev, say, with his particular trick of spreading out his arms like a great bird and taking off, leaving the earth and soaring high above the final scenes; or D. H. Lawrence, with his marvelous ability to make people who are only words on a page actually reach out with their hands and love one another; or Virginia Woolf, with her delight in fireworks, in a pig’s skull with a scarf wrapped around it; or E. M. Forster, with his fastidious preference for what a good many very nice people wish were not so.

But what, seriously, was accomplished by these writers or can the abstract dummy novelist I have been describing hope to accomplish? Not life, of course; not the real thing; not children and roses; but only a facsimile that is called literature. To achieve this facsimile the writer has, more or less, to renounce his birthright to reality, and few people have a better idea of what it is—of its rewards and satisfactions, or of what to do with a whole long day.

What’s in it for him? The hope of immortality? The chances are not good enough to interest a sensible person. Money? Well, money is not money any more. Fame? For the young, who are in danger always of being ignored, of being overlooked at the party, perhaps, but no one over the age of forty who is in his right mind would want to be famous. It would interfere with his work, with his family life.

Why then should the successful manipulation of illusions be everything to a writer? Why does he bother to make up stories and novels? If you ask him, you will probably get any number of answers, none of them straightforward. You might as well ask a sailor why it is that he has chosen to spend his life at sea.

______________________________

Excerpted from The Writer as Illusionist: Uncollected & Unpublished Work by William Maxwell. Copyright © 1955 by William Maxwell. Introduction Copyright © 2024 by Alec Wilkinson. Excerpted with the permission of Godine.

Mean girls make everything better, at least when it comes to storytelling. Without them, there’d be no conflict, no plot, no grit. And only in the last two decades or so have female characters been increasingly free to be awful, which is its own kind of liberation.

With the release of the new Mean Girls musical movie, the original Mean Girls celebrating its twentieth anniversary in April, and my new book about Mean Girls’ history and legacy, So Fetch, out now, it’s the perfect time to consider why we love spiky heroines like Cady Heron and genuinely terrifying villains like Regina George.

The following books about “mean girls,” from the Cadys who can’t help being attracted to the apex predator lifestyle, to the Reginas who rule by manipulation and fear, show us the inescapable power dynamics of living in any social system. Everyone can relate: reality stars, powerful professionals, publishing assistants, nineteenth-century socialites, MFA candidates, moms, and anyone trying to survive in Hollywood.

Here are some of the best books about “mean girls,” from classics to modern tales, fiction and non.

*

Mona Awad, Bunny

Samantha Heather Mackey is a loner attending an elite MFA program on scholarship, but finds herself surrounded by wealthy girls with a cult-like devotion to calling each other “Bunny.” But everything changes when she finds herself mysteriously invited to the Bunnies’ infamous “Smut Salon,” and soon she’s leaving behind her friend Ava to join what turns out to be a social circle with a dark vortex.

Mean Girls meets Heathers meets cutthroat academia: What’s not to love?

Andrea Bartz, The Herd

There’s no better setting in which to examine mean-girl dynamics than a chic all-female coworking space (a la the once-powerful Wing). In The Herd, workspace CEO Eleanor Walsh, the quintessential girlboss, vanishes on the night she’s scheduled to give a high-profile press conference. The subsequent investigation exposes secrets and lies among the friends who have helped her to get where she is—and ridden her coattails.

The twists to come reveal the ways young professional women are taught to see each other as rivals, and the ways they struggle desperately to keep up perfect appearances, even, especially, among “friends.”

Anna Bogutskaya, Unlikeable Female Characters

Regina George herself is cited as her own genre of “unlikeable” female character in this nonfiction exploration of, as the subtitle says, “the women pop culture wants you to hate.” Bogutskaya traces the evolution of major characters from good girls to true anti-heroines, and ultimately celebrates the liberating effects of such characters, which give women permission to be their bitchiest, messiest selves.

Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl

This gripping supernatural thriller, since adapted into a Hulu series, tells the story of young publishing assistant Nella, who’s thrilled when the company she works for, Wagner Books, finally hires another young Black woman, Hazel. But their quick friendship begins to falter as Hazel becomes the new office star at the expense of Nella—maybe intentionally, maybe not.

And then some really strange stuff starts going on, indicating that whatever is happening goes far beyond their Nella and Hazel’s Cady/Regina dynamic.

Caroline Kepnes, Providence

Kepnes is known for the engrossing You series (and its maniacally compelling murderer-narrator Joe Goldberg), but here she weaves sci-fi elements into her tale of Jon and Chloe, will-they-won’t-they best friends who seem destined for a rom com ending…until he’s kidnapped by their H.P.-Lovecraft-obsessed substitute teacher. While mourning Jon’s disappearance, Chloe enters classic mean girls territory, hoping to crack the cool-kid crowd now that she’s set adrift.

Things take many weird turns from there, but at its core, Providence s about the eternal human longing for friendship and fitting in, especially during the young-adult years.

Leah Konen, Keep Your Friends Close

Mom friends aren’t immune from mean girls tendencies. In Konen’s forthcoming thriller (out February 20), newly divorced Mary is desperate for connection as she mourns her marriage and fights a custody battle, so she’s thrilled to meet Willa, a charismatic fellow mom at a Brooklyn park. After Mary reveals a secret about her ex to her new friend, Willa disappears from her life…only to reappear months later when Mary relocates to upstate New York.

Stranger still, Willa is now calling herself Annie and has an entirely new family. And then Mary’s ex suddenly turns up dead. Via this twisty murder mystery, Keep Your Friends Close tackles everything from mom cliques to mom-friend ghosting, and one scene even directly evokes the Mean Girls cafeteria.

Jessica Knoll, The Favorite Sister and The Luckiest Girl Alive

Knoll is a surefire bestseller for a reason. Her women are remarkably, unapologetically complicated, and her success only proves how eager female readers are to see themselves, at their barbed best and worst, reflected in their books. In The Favorite Sister, Knoll tackles reality TV tropes and sisterhood at their gnarliest, and in her debut, The Luckiest Girl Alive, she combines mean-girl high school politics with school shootings and the pressure to make good as a wife and mother for an incendiary commentary on modern womanhood.

Knoll knows how to make a mean girl human, and how to make a mean-girl experience meaningful.

Kirthana Ramisetti, Advika and the Hollywood Wives

Ramisetti’s novel is an Alice in Wonderland-like journey into the vertigo-inducing world of high-rolling Hollywood. Aspiring screenwriter Advika Srinivasan is working as a bartender at the Oscars afterparty when she’s suddenly whisked to the upper echelons of showbiz power via a flirtation with legendary director Julian Zelding, which quickly progresses to courtship and marriage.

Just one month after their wedding, though, Julian’s first wife, famous actress Evie Lockhart, dies and stipulates in her will that her ex’s “latest child bride” is to receive $1 million of her fortune and a mysterious film reel, but only if Advika divorces him. What appears at first to be a case of a Regina wreaking havoc from beyond the grave becomes an empowering tale of female solidarity as Advika begins to investigate her new husband’s past through his three ex-wives.

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Want to go more classic to get your mean girls fix? Wharton’s 1905 novel follows Lily Bart, a beautiful socialite struggling to maintain her place in wealthy New York circles of the Gilded Age. She lives with her aunt and longs for lawyer Lawrence Selden, but feels she must pursue someone wealthier to improve her situation; she lost her parents at age twenty, and has gambling debts but no inheritance.

Things heat up when she discovers that Lawrence used to be romantically involved with mean girl Bertha Dorset, and many North Shore High-like machinations follow from there.

______________________________

So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (and Why We’re Still So Obsessed with It) by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong is available via Dey Street Books.

Brandi Wells’ unnamed protagonist sweeps, mops, wipes down, and disinfects an office while its daytime workers sleep. “I know them all,” The Cleaner tells us. “I’ve seen the grossest things about them, their half-eaten and molding snacks, their vaguely sexual doodles.” Wells gives us the depressing realities of The Cleaner’s invisible labor, beginning with shit smears on toilet seats to abandoned sandwiches in desk drawers. In its starred review, Publishers Weekly states, “Rarely has cubicle culture been depicted in such griminess or with such glee.”

Because of the nature of her work and her schedule, The Cleaner is only apparent if she fails to clean something well—and, as fastidious as she is, she never fails. At one point she describes how she takes her time between window scrubbings so the new clarity will be a “shock.” “Once everyone notices how clean it is, they’ll realize I exist,” she tells us. “They’ll be so embarrassed they hadn’t thought of me before.”

Throughout her shift, The Cleaner digs through employees’ desks to figure out who they are (Mr. Buff uses protein powder, Yarn Guy is a knitter), and to determine who deserves help—or punishment. At one point, The Cleaner throws away a self-help book in the desk of The Intern. By its description, the book sounds awful (“a man on the cover, pointing accusingly at the reader”). So, at first, one might think, “Good! Expel whatever misogynist crap that might lie between those covers!” That is, until The Cleaner explains her reasoning: if she leaves the book, more people will start to read and heed self-help texts, take dubious supplements, go full woo-woo, and “That kind of atmosphere isn’t conducive to productivity.” She doesn’t exploit her proximity to these people through their stuff—and emails and search histories—for fun or to stick a thumb in the eye of capitalist hacks.

Instead, The Cleaner’s efforts are to keep the place humming like a well-oiled machine. Her mind, access, and inconspicuousness are her sharpest tools. “It’s not a crime to care about other people,” The Cleaner tells her one coworker, a security guard named L. L., slapdash in her approach to her job, isn’t convinced. “‘It very nearly is,’ she says. ‘The way you do it.’”

What might feel like a monotonous story about a monotonous job—a person comes and cleans, has one coworker, briefly talks to the delivery person—Wells manages to give us a page-turner plot with biting, grander implications. Here we have a person who has arguably gone whole hog on the enterprise of her career and its capitalistic value. When one’s job is their sole purpose—arguably one of America’s loudest directives—the potential threats toward life’s meaning are rampant.

When The Cleaner realizes the CEO of the company is engaging in nefarious acts that risk the health of the company, the stakes are undeniably higher for her than anyone else. While she does much to control her environment, fantasizing about the narratives she shapes through her exploits, the reality is that The Cleaner remains invisible to those she feels she knows best. The dark commentary Wells builds regarding capitalism and work is undeniable.

Wells tells us of their to-read pile, “Because of migraines, I do so much of my reading via audiobooks. I considered sending you a photo of those—most of them are new releases. But I still can’t help myself in a bookstore, love to carefully pick through their catalogue, and also peruse their staff picks. I love seeing what booksellers recommend.”

Lisa Tuttle, A Nest of Nightmares
This is the first short story collection by the fantasy and horror writer Lisa Tuttle. Tuttle famously refused the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1982 because another author had disseminated his story to Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America members and Tuttle found the “campaigning” distasteful.

In an interview in the defunct Fantastic Metropolis, Tuttle was asked of about her genre of choice. She explains, “I’m attracted to the intellectual aspect of SF—I like fiction which deals straight-forwardly with ideas, fiction which is intellectually stimulating and questioning. I like the idea of SF as ‘thought-experiment’—although mostly in a social and personal sense. I like trying to figure out what it would FEEL like to be immortal, for example, or to live in a society with dramatically different values and ideals than our own.”

George Eliot, Romola
The historical novel by Eliot is set in Renaissance Florence, just after Christopher Columbus has left Spain. There is a blind scholar, his titular daughter, an estranged brother who is a Dominican friar, a shipwreck, enslavement of adopted fathers—the works. Eliot apparently spent a year and a half researching for the book. She often went to Florence in order to capture the story. While she received £7,000, the book apparently didn’t sell well. This despite the fact that Eliot herself said of writing Romola that she did “swear by every sentence as having been written with my best blood, such as it is, and with the most ardent care for veracity of which my nature is capable.”

Kristen Ringman, I Stole You: Stories from the Fae
In its review of I Stole You, Publishers Weekly states, “Ringman (Makara) has woven her recollections of personal experiences with ‘fae creatures’ into these 14 lyrical, disturbing first-person tales, all told to victims by vampiric shape-shifting beings drawn from various mythological traditions. Ringman, who is Deaf, postulates telepathic fae-to-human connections as well as signed communication with emotional overtones that no auditory vibrations can match… Ringman successfully brings readers a few steps out of everyday reality.”

Julie Otsuka, The Swimmers
Otsuka’s novel introduces us to a group of people who know one another through their routine of swimming. The NPR review of The Swimmers explains, “When the pool is shut down for safety reasons, the collective daily rhythm of the swimmers’ lives abruptly stops. One swimmer is particularly affected by this rupture in the pattern of the everyday: her name is Alice, ‘a retired lab technician now in the early stages of dementia.’ We’re told that, ‘even though [Alice] may not remember the combination to her locker or where she put her towel, the moment she slips into the water she knows what to do.’ Untethered from the practice of those repetitive daily laps, Alice’s mind floats free. The Swimmers is a slim brilliant novel about the value and beauty of mundane routines that shape our days and identities; or, maybe it’s a novel about the cracks that, inevitably, will one day appear to undermine our own bodies and minds.”

Maru Ayase (trans. Haydn Trowell), The Forest Brims Over
The first of Ayase’s works to be translated into English, The Forest Brims Over fights the usual gender tropes in myth and storytelling when Nowatari Rui turns herself into a forest to avoid her husband using her as inspiration for his novels. As the jacket copy states, “With her privacy and identity continually stripped away, [Rui] has come to be seen by society first and foremost as the inspiration for her husband’s art. When a decade’s worth of frustrations reaches its boiling point, Rui consumes a bowl of seeds, and buds and roots begin to sprout all over her body. Instead of taking her to a hospital, her husband keeps her in an aquaterrarium, set to compose a new novel based on this unsettling experience. But Rui breaks away from her husband by growing into a forest—and in time, she takes over the entire city.”

Noor Hindi, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow.
Hindi’s poem “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,” made rounds when it was first published in Poetry in late 2020 and is understandably being posted on social media again and again since Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. “I want to be like those poets who care about the moon,” she writes. “Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.” The intensity of this poem seems to be the general tone of the forceful collection. Viet Thanh Nguyen says of Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow., “Noor Hindi wields her poetry with passion and righteous anger in this powerful, striking collection that touches the heart and the head, the body and the mind.”

Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy
Becky Spratford in her starred review of Khaw’s book in Library Journal, states, “What if the Little Mermaid laid eggs and her hatched children’s hunger laid waste to her prince’s land? Khaw’s (Breakable Things) latest novella tackles this question with a brutally visceral but seductive opening sequence.” Spratford’s verdict? “With this brilliantly constructed tale that consciously takes on a well-known story and violently breaks it open to reveal a heartfelt core, Khaw cements their status as a must-read author. For fans of sinister, thought-provoking, horrific retellings of Western classics by authors of marginalized identity like Helen Oyeyemi and Ahmed Saadawi.”

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
Cha was an artist and author whose book, Dictee, while receiving only tepid responses upon its publication in 1982, resurfaced in the 1990s and had continues to have an enormous impact on writers, readers everywhere. In her book Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong writes extensively about Dictee. She states, “Although it’s classified as an autobiography, Dictee is more a bricolage of memoir, poetry, essay, diagrams, and photography.”

In 2022, the New York Times published an obituary for Cha as part of its “Overlooked No More” series. In it, Dan Salzstein writes of Dictee, “Through chapters named after the Greek muses, the book jumps from one protagonist to another: Cha herself; Joan of Arc; the early 20th-century Korean freedom fighter Yu Gwan-sun, who, at 17, was tortured and killed; and, perhaps most poignantly, Cha’s mother, who hovers over the book like a protective spirit. Through her, Cha explores a traumatic era of Korea’s history, including a decades-long Japanese occupation, a war that divided the country, a series of dictators and an ensuing diaspora, of which the Cha family was a part.”

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Born in 1960, Jeanette Winterson was adopted by a couple in England. By her own description, her parents were working class, with a father who was a factory worker and her mother a home maker. “There were only six books in the house, including the Bible and Cruden’s Complete Concordance to the Old and New Testaments,” Winterson’s site states. “Strangely, one of the other books was Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and it was this that started her life quest of reading and writing.”

Winterson’s parents were raising her to be a Pentecostal missionary, and, by the age of six, she was writing sermons and preaching. Ten years later, Winterson came out as gay and left home. She worked at a “lunatic asylum” to make ends meet, before going to Oxford and studying English Literature. By 23, she had written Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical novel about her young life.

Cleo Qian, LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO
Qian’s debut short story collection has received a heap of praise, including being longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence. In an interview with A. Cerisse Cohen in BOMB, Qian explains, “I wrote these stories from 2016 to 2022. In my own life, I was experimenting and testing out new identities all the time. I thought a lot about subject matter. There are many people who find literary fiction insular and narrow. I think part of the writer’s duty, in addition to being good at your craft, is to live and think broadly. Otherwise, who are you writing for?… My stories are often about characters who feel disembodied, which I also feel. I didn’t realize that until I started doing yoga and the other physical activities I mentioned. We’re glued to our phones. I write and read a lot, which is also all in my head. I have friends who are cerebral and intellectual and so fun to talk to, but we’re not very connected to our bodies. That’s unnatural. We should all be more in touch with our bodies.”

Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads
Gregory E. Rutledge, in his review of Hopkinson’s book, writes, “The Salt Roads features three mortal protagonists—Mer the Ashanti-born, Santa Dominque-enslaved healer, Jeanne Duval, the mulatta lover of Charles Baudelaire, and Thais, a sex slave of ancient Alexandria, Egypt—who are bound by the bitterness of life and the salutary potential of the meandering, salty flows of the earth, which a fourth immortal protagonists represents.

Just as former Black fantasy author Charles R. Saunders recognized in Butler a true raconteur in 1984 (Bell 91), the label easily applies to Hopkinson, who manages some powerful storytelling here. What author wouldn’t when she expertly excavates the ancient Roman empire located in Alexandria, Egypt, and the Holy Land of Jerusalem, walks readers through Napoleon’s empire in France and the West Indian French colonies, and includes a fist fight, of sorts, between two West African deities of fire and water?”

James Tiptree, Jr., Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
For the uninitiated, James Tiptree, Jr. was in fact Alice Bradley Sheldon, a woman who invented the name based on a marmalade brand after years of unsuccessful attempts at publishing with versions of her own name. “A male name seemed like good camouflage,” she said. “I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.” This is because Sheldon had a wild life—she eloped, had to drop out of unmarried-women-only Sarah Lawrence College, took classes at Berkeley and made art, divorced, joined US Air Force and was promoted to major, met second husband in Paris, joined the CIA, finished college, got a doctorate. Whew! Her pseudonym successfully kept her anonymous for about a decade.

John Self writes in The Guardian, “Tiptree’s status as one of [science fiction’s] leading practitioners is justified, as is the critical cliche that each story contains enough to fill a novel. That’s not unqualified praise: Tiptree’s techniques of defamiliarization through jargon… and dropping us in medias res means the reader has to remake the world with every new story. But in the darkness of space no one can see you scratch your head and given that most of the stories require two readings to be properly absorbed and appreciated—and they merit that attention.”

Our basket of brilliant reviews this week includes Sarah Cypher on Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, Menachem Kaiser on József Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium, Becca Rothfeld on Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic, and Daniel Felsenthal on Robert Glück’s About Ed.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

*

“Shame-ridden Shams is the sun around which Martyr! moves. The writing evokes shades of Denis Johnson—in the gutted, elegiac quality of Train Dreams but also flashes of the hapless antihero of ‘Emergency.’ It is sumptuous with metaphors, at their best when animating Cyrus’s childhood … With a kaleidoscope of perspectives that illuminate almost 40 years of history, the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq War and dreamlike scenes outside of time, the novel is obsessed with how ‘meaningless’ individual suffering can become legible ‘at the level of empire,’ asking what turns a death into a martyrdom. With its scope, intense interest in the limits of language and self-aware narrative strategy, Martyr! has both focus and heft. Yet it is also unpretentiously veined with the language of sacred and poetic texts, and is studded with new poetry from Akbar writing as Cyrus …

In the hands of a lesser writer with an agenda, this material could be esoteric and tedious, but Akbar’s narrative maintains a glorious sense of whimsy: In one chapter, the ghost of Cyrus’s mother speaks with Lisa Simpson; later, a Trumpian buffoon attempts to complete a gory transaction for the Mona Lisa in a mall … Sensual, oneiric and wonderfully strange, Akbar intuits the mind’s talent for distilling meaning from the surreal. His fiction taps his expertise in conjuring an experiential purity—through metaphor and with humor that lands. He invites the reader to embrace the kind of queer sense-making that finds no answers yet rests, as Cyrus says, with, ‘All I know is I’m fascinated.’”

–Sarah Cypher on Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! (The Washington Post)

“The details are so precise that any critical distance collapses—nothing’s expected, nothing’s dulled by cliché. It is as immediate a confrontation of the horrors of the camps as I’ve ever encountered. It’s also a subtle if startling meditation on what it is to attempt to confront those horrors with words. What Debreczeni experiences is so cartoonishly cruel that it defies not description but moral comprehension. ‘Horror is always kitsch,’ he writes after an ad hoc execution, ‘even when it’s real’ …

The book’s final third—in which Debreczeni has been assigned to the “cold crematorium,” a place where inmates too sick to work are left to die—is especially staggering…Debreczeni has preserved a panoptic depiction of hell, at once personal, communal and atmospheric. Occasionally shifting tenses or even assuming omniscience, he floats among the nearly dead and the newly dead, crafting a kind of in-progress collective obituary, sketching the human beings they once were, the human lives they once had, as their corpses are carried out and flung into a lime pit … The finest examples of Holocaust literature—and Cold Crematorium is so fine it transcends its category—aren’t merely bulwarks against obscurity; they do more than allow us to never forget. They offer a glimpse, one that is unyielding and unsoftened by sentimentality, one that is brutally, unbearably close.”

–Menachem Kaiser on József Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium: Reporting From the Land of Auschwitz (The New York Times Book Review)

“A biography of the psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary Frantz Fanon is, inevitably, a biography of the world he fought to change. Fanon would no doubt have approved: As a pioneer of ‘social therapy,’ an approach that classified personal pathologies as political symptoms, he understood better than anyone that individuals are unintelligible in isolation. The maladies he treated as the director of a mental hospital in colonial Algeria, where he worked on the eve of the country’s fight for independence in the 1950s, were to him inextricable from the deadliest illness of all: the epidemic of French imperialism.

A biography of Fanon is also of necessity a biography of his legend, which sometimes deviates considerably from his person. His support for the Algerian struggle was unwavering, and he is often remembered as a militant who once lauded anti-colonial violence as ‘cleansing force.’ But as the critic and essayist Adam Shatz demonstrates in his nimble and engrossing new book, The Rebel’s Clinic, Fanon was never as one-dimensionally bellicose as he is often taken to be, not only by his enemies but by his allies and hagiographers … As Shatz shows in this exemplary work of public intellectualism, in which he does not sugarcoat or simplify, the ingenious doctor and impassioned activist was every bit as much a victim of empire as the patients he worked to heal.”

–Becca Rothfeld on Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (The Washington Post)

“The United States has a long and troubled history of manipulating psychology to control Black Americans, quell resistance, rationalize unpaid labor and justify cruelty. At the depths of chattel slavery, white physicians argued that Black people were immune to mental illness, kept emotionally healthy by the kindness of their enslavers and the fresh air and exercise provided by working in the fields. As growing numbers of enslaved people attempted to escape, this itself was classified as a mental illness, ‘drapetomania.’ Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a Southern ‘expert’ in Negro medicine, prescribed one of the cures as ‘whipping the devil out of them.’ In the decades following the prohibition of slavery, the United States found another way to use psychology to control Black Americans—and squeeze out more free labor. As detailed in the journalist Antonia Hylton’s fascinating Madness, the ‘feeble-minded’ Blacks were rounded up and placed in asylums where they were put to work as indentured servants …

Madness, though ostensibly the story of Crownsville, is really about the continued lack of understanding, treatment and care of the mental health of a people, Black people, who need it most. Near the end of her book, Hylton invokes the 2023 story of Jordan Neely. In visible distress and screaming that he was hungry, he was thrown to the floor of the New York subway by a former Marine who locked him in a chokehold and killed him. ‘I thought of Maynard when The New York Post labeled Jordan Neely “unhinged” and a “vagrant” and wrote about him as though he had been the villain in the story of his own public killing,’ Hylton notes. Though both Foster and Neely were in need of treatment, care, support and kindness, she adds, they ‘were met with almost anything but.’”

–Linda Villarosa on Antonia Hylton’s Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum (The New York Times Book Review)

“Glück is a self-professed slow writer, but he was also delayed by the burden of his book’s content—the subject was his first real boyfriend, and he had to sift through the intricacies of mourning and mortality…Time enabled him to create something uncommon and powerful. About Ed is a literary monument that harnesses memoir’s emotional honesty while indulging fiction’s stylistic latitude … The book’s subject is not only Ed but also his generation of gay men, many of whom lost their lives to AIDS. In Glück’s hands, memorializing becomes a defiant celebration of sex. Few writers have approached this task with his shameless feeling—Glück is one of the best around at portraying the mysteries of the flesh, and in About Ed, as in his previous novels, his amatory writing is magnificently precise …

The New Narrative encourages active self-questioning on the page, and Glück operates beautifully in this tradition, reconsidering and amending his recollections from the vantage of age. About Ed revisits the past through moments that he can neither forget nor firmly grasp … The parts of Ed that are barred to Bob are the core of the book’s sadness and mystery. Glück often slips into poetic spacing when integrating Ed’s prose, reminding us of the contrivance of appropriation. We’re always aware of the author’s hand, assembling and editing Ed’s words, and thus of the hard limits of our ability to inhabit and connect with Ed directly. The book makes us question whether human beings in general resist the complete soul-merging that Bob seeks through romantic sex and appropriative writing.”

–Daniel Felsenthal on Robert Glück’s About Ed (The New Yorker)

Novelist Ed Park joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss the role of alternate histories and counternarratives in popular culture, public record, and the general consciousness, via his new novel, Same Bed Different Dreams. Park talks about depicting and reimagining well known events and eras, including the Japanese occupation of Korea between 1910-1945; Korean resistance to that occupation in the form of the Korean Provisional Government; the post-World War II division of Korea into North and South, which became sovereign nations in 1948; and the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to until 1953. He reflects on writing about more recent history, as well as his hometown of Buffalo, New York. The conversation suggests that positive alternate timelines, like the one Park creates, invite readers to learn more about actual events, whereas a more pernicious spin on the past may edit for the benefit of a particular group. Park reads from the novel.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

*
From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan: Same Bed Different Dreams begins in a speculative future in which a writer ends up reading a manuscript by another, who is an older man known as Echo. That manuscript is an alternative history of Korea, that is kind of an interesting echo, and that manuscript itself appears within your book. And that manuscript is called Same Bed Different Dreams: Being a True Account of the Korean Provisional Government. Since today we’re talking about alternative histories, we’re going to focus first on this part of your book. So of course, that true account is true and also not, and as one of your characters notes, Americans know almost nothing about Korea, despite U.S. involvement with important parts of Korean history. 

I thought that for the benefit of our listeners, we would just start with some basic events. So you write about and reference the Japanese occupation of Korea between 1910 and 1945; Korean resistance to that occupation in the form of the Korean Provisional Government; the post-WWII division of Korea into the north, administered by the Soviet Union, and the South, administered by the U.S.; the North and South becoming sovereign nations in 1948; and the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953. And going past that there are other incidents as well. Why did you decide to start with a period right before the occupation and the rest of the colonial era?

Ed Park: I started writing the novel, and one of the narrators was Korean American and had some of my biographical background. And, I’m essentially a comic novelist—or at least I think of myself as one—but as I wrote, I realized I was getting into something that’s both very important to me, and something that didn’t appear at all in Personal Days. Personal Days was kind of a dark office comedy. There’s a very small reference to ethnicity at, like, two points in the book. Part of that was because I had a very clear idea what that book was going to be, and it was going to be about the office. 

I almost streamlined it to focus on the comic aspects. And with Same Bed, which took about nine years to write, just the fact that this was kind of an Ed Park-like narrator, that should have made it easy for me in some ways, but then I realized people don’t really know about the history of modern Korea. People will have heard of the Korean War, but I bet you most Americans don’t know when that was – it’s called “The Forgotten War,” it’s commonly labeled that here – and why should they? I feel like even I, somebody who, you know, my parents came in the late 60s, I was born in Buffalo. It’s hard to get that information. You can say the education system should be better or whatever, but it’s a very complicated history. 

I’m interested in lots of periods of Korean history, but I didn’t want to do like a Charlie Kaufman adaptation and start at the beginning of all Korean history, but I thought giving a clear sense of Korea before it became a colony, and leading up to the Korean War, and then of course, it extends beyond by a couple of decades. This is mainly because I realized that it would place the narrator and some of the other characters more firmly in the reader’s mind in a historical sense. What are they? How is it that there are Korean people in America? What’s he doing in Buffalo? 

This is something, as a kid, sometimes I would think like, what am I doing? Why am I here? I mean, I love Buffalo in many ways, but especially in the 70s and 80s, you kind of stand out.  Every other generation in my family was in Korea, speaking Korean, and here I am speaking English. And I understand some Korean but it’s fading. 

I’ll say one more thing, which is that a lot of what I know about Korea isn’t through books or through pop culture, it comes from my parents. My dad would tell me about his early life. He’s old enough that when he first went to school he had to learn Japanese. The school was conducted in Japanese. He’s old enough that he knew the chaos post WWII leading up to the Korean War. And he’s old enough to have been in these very harrowing moments during the Korean War. In a way, it’s helped me understand the characters better and the situation, and also, my parents and myself, I suppose.

Whitney Terrell: So the Korean Provisional Government (KPG) began by resisting Japanese occupation, and a version of it plays a significant role in your book. Can you just talk to us about the actual KPG? 

EP: For various reasons, Japan wants Korea, and they annex it in 1905, and it becomes a full-fledged colony in 1910. 1919 is when the last real king of Korea dies, and there’s going to be a mass display of mourning. But what happens instead is the Koreans organize all across the peninsula—remember, it’s not North and South yet, it’s all one country—and they form a peaceful protest, and there’s a declaration of independence. That’s in March of 1919. Just a little bit after that, the Korean Provisional Government forms, and the headquarters is in Shanghai, China. So a lot of these members are in exile. They choose as their president a man named Sigmund Rhee, who is already in the U.S. at this point. He’s mostly living in Hawaii, but he’s kind of been all over. He’s one of the major historical figures in the book. He’s elected in exile, and they don’t really have any power. 

It’s a figurehead government, and they just want to publicize what’s happening, and that Korea is its own nation, its own people. I believe I first read about them in this modern Korean history class that I took in grad school. This is like in the early to mid-90s. I got a lot out of that class. But somehow that idea fascinated me, and the word “provisional” fascinated me—that adjective is so full of possibility. As a fiction writer, I just thought it would be fun to play with, and it took me 30 years to follow up. 

But my KPG is based in that original reality. What I do in the book is imagine it lasting beyond 1948, and also rounding up people who were not at all part of the KPG. Sigmund Rhee was definitely part of it and some of the other figures, but a lot of them, even the Korean ones, I just shoehorn them in. When I realized the KPG was going to be in this book, it gave me a tremendous amount of freedom and inspiration to talk about these different people who have fascinated me for a while.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Mikayla Vo. Photograph of Ed Park by Sylvia Plachy.

*

Ed Park

Same Bed Different Dreams • Personal Days • Weird Menace

Others:

Charlie Kaufman • Philip Roth • Richard E. Kim • Jack London on Korea • Thomas Pynchon • BTS

I don’t think it is a coincidence or an exaggeration to say that down through time and certainly over the past century women writers, such as Rachel Carson, have produced an overwhelming number of change-making stories told through narrative, more perhaps than men. Women who wanted to be journalists during the time that London, Sinclair, Hemingway, Orwell, and others were publishing and enjoying attention and praise always had two missions in mind.

There was the story they wanted to write that might create change, and an even more challenging mission: to penetrate the white male journalist fortress that was dead-set against offering them opportunities to write their stories, because they were women.

Until very recently, women journalists were not considered worthy of writing serious stories. Even in the 1960s, as Wolfe and Talese were beginning to pioneer their new journalism, it was not new enough to include women. Gail Sheehy’s book Passages, about the predicable crises people experience as they age, published in 1977, was on the New York Times best-seller list for three consecutive years, and the Library of Congress named it one of the ten most influential books of our time. Writing in The Cut a few years before she died in 2020, Sheehy remembered the struggle and the challenge for women journalists in 1960s and 1970s: the atmosphere of forced division, the lack of acknowledgement of the work they produced, where they were positioned in the newsroom.

“When I was a news chick at the New York Herald Tribune,” she wrote, “sequestered in the flamingo pink Women’s Department (as were all the paper’s female journalists in the ‘60s), the male reporters I might encounter in the elevator looked straight through me, probably assuming I was somebody’s stenographer.”

One specific elevator ride, however, led to an opportunity to write, after she asked the tall sandy-haired reporter: “Mr. Wolfe, what’s it like, writing for Clay Felker?” Felker was the editor of New York and later became the editor of Esquire and later yet of the Village Voice. Wolfe, to his credit, encouraged her to find out from the source—Felker himself.

“I crossed the DMZ into the City Room, all bobbing heads of white men with crew cuts (except for Bad Boy [Jimmy] Breslin and his tangle of black curls) and tapped on the door of the editor-in-chief. Clay Felker’s booming voice came back: ‘Where did you come from? The estrogen zone?’”

Even ten years later, in the New Journalism anthology of the twenty writers selected as the best new journalists of the era, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, only two women were included: Joan Didion and Barbara Goldsmith, who wrote may books in her long career, including the classic best seller Little Gloria…Happy at Last, about Gloria Vanderbilt’s difficult coming of age, which became both a movie and a TV series.

But long before Sheehy was confined to the “estrogen zone,” women journalists were persona non grata in newsrooms, not included on mastheads and not legitimately acknowledged in bylines. But women managed, through force of will and ingenuity, to do good in the world or for the world by hiding who they were, often assuming a male identity—or disguising themselves as someone else. And not only were they writing narrative, employing the techniques of fiction writers, as Wolfe had described, but daringly and courageously involving themselves in their stories, diving into unknown territory in situations that men could not or would not confront. And they worked really hard at it because they were, in many cases, not wanted and certainly not appreciated as women. But they not only made history; they changed history. And in order to do that, they often changed their names.

*

There are three statues at the Pittsburgh International Airport, through which I mostly travel from home to wherever and back. Two are heroic examples of the city’s history. First, George Washington, the father of our country, who initiated the French and Indian War near Pittsburgh and helped built Fort Necessity and Fort Duquesne; second, the famed Pittsburgh Steelers running back Franco Harris, making his incredible immaculate reception in a divisional playoff game against the Oakland Raiders. If you are a Pittsburgher or an NFL fan, you will know the exact details of this improbable catch he made and the thirty seconds that followed, leading the Steelers to their first of four Super Bowl victories. If you’ve never heard of the immaculate reception, you ought to look it up, unless you want to be perceived as a fool while visiting the town.

The third statue is quite a contrast to George and Franco and somewhat of a surprise and maybe a bit misleading: A young woman, twenty-four years old, with short brown hair, wearing a neat, tailored plaid coat and black leather gloves, with a small woolen hat on the back of her head. She is carrying at her side a small leather satchel. She was a journalist who early in her career worked as a reporter for two local newspapers, but achieved greatness after she left Pittsburgh in 1887 to work for the New York World.

Her name, when she began her journalistic career in Pittsburgh, was Elizabeth Jane Cochrane. But by the time she left the area where she had grown up, she was known as Nellie Bly. It was a name chosen by her editor, taken from a Stephen Foster song. So, a man was able to name her and forge her identity. Women were not allowed to write under their own names at that time, because—according to their publishers and editors—being weak and helpless, they would be much too vulnerable to the wrath of the men who were subjects of the undercover stories they wrote.

Bly—or Cochrane—became famous worldwide by circling the globe in a record-breaking seventy-two days, leaving the fictional character Phileas Fogg, the protagonist in Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days, published in 1873, in the dust. The statue in Pittsburgh depicts her outfit on the day of her departure, on November 14, 1889. The satchel she carried, the size of a small toaster oven, held everything she needed for those seventy-two days of journeying by ship, train, and horseback, including her writing materials and a small flask with a drinking cup. Bly had confronted a great deal of resistance when she proposed her around-the-world plan to her editor, who told her, “No one but a man can do this,” to which she replied: “Very well, start the man, and I’ll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him.”

She won the assignment and the race against Fogg. Her editor was well aware that Bly could do anything she set her mind to, not despite the fact that she was a woman, but because of it.

For her first big story for the New York World the previous year she exposed the horrific living conditions of the patients of what was then known as an “insane asylum” on Blackwell’s Island, now Roosevelt Island, in New York. Her plan was to get herself committed to Blackwell’s by convincing officials that she was insane, a performance that might have earned an Academy Award if she had been making a movie.

In preparation, Bly rented a room in a tenement boarding house, the Temporary Home for Females, on Second Avenue in the East Village in New York. In her room, she practiced how to look and act insane, as she would later describe in the first ten articles for the World: “I flew to the mirror and examined my face. I remembered all I had read of the doings of crazy people, how first of all they have staring eyes, and so I opened mine as wide as possible and stared unblinkingly at my own reflection…I read snatches of improbable and impossible ghost stories, so that when the dawn came to chase away the night, I felt that I was in a fit mood for my mission.”

When she was satisfied that she was well-prepared to prove herself insane, she had momentary second thoughts. “Who could tell but that the strain of playing crazy and being shut up with a crowd of mad people, might turn my own brain, and I would never get back. But not once did I think of shirking my mission. Calmly, outwardly at least, I went out to my crazy business.”

Her story, the first in a ten-part series, begins that way—from acting out in the boarding house to being taken by police to the Essex Market Police Courtroom and acting out again so that a sympathetic Judge Duffy allowed her to move one more step forward—to be admitted to Bellevue Hospital’s “pavilion for the insane.” And then finally, after another day of examination and acting out, sent where she wanted to be all along, Blackwell’s—the focus of her stories about the city’s treatment of the mentally ill—where she was immediately undressed and prepared for confinement. She wrote:

The water was ice-cold, and a crazy woman began to scrub me. I can find no other word that will express it but scrubbing. From a small tin pan, she took some soft soap and rubbed it all over me, even all over my face and my pretty hair. I was at last past seeing or speaking, although I had begged that my hair be left untouched. Rub, rub, rub, went the old woman, chattering to herself. My teeth chattered and my limbs were goose-fleshed and blue with cold. Suddenly I got, one after the other, three buckets of water over my head—ice-cold water, too—into my eyes, my years, my nose and my mouth. I think I experienced some of the sensations of a drowning person as they dragged me, gasping, shivering and quaking, from the tub. For once I did look insane…They put me, dripping wet, into a short canton flannel slip, labeled across the extreme end in large black letters, “Lunatic Asylum, B.I., H. 6.” The letters meant Blackwell’s Island, Hall 6.

Nellie Bly’s “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” capturing her experiences at Blackwell’s Island, immediately made a difference, as she wrote in the introduction to her series: “I am happy to be able to state as a result of my visit to the asylum and the exposures consequent thereon, that the City of New York has appropriated $1,000,000 more per annum than ever before for the care of the insane. So, I have at least the satisfaction of knowing that the poor unfortunates will be the better cared for because of my work.” Like Rachel Carson, a fellow Pittsburgher, her mission forced change. Although not enough change to allow women to write as women under their own given names.

Picture a scene two years after Bly’s sensational exposé: A helpless young girl in old tattered clothes staggers and stumbles across a busy street in San Francisco’s Mission District and suddenly faints in front of a moving carriage, which nearly runs her down. The police are called to move her out of the street, but when she resists, they club her with wooden batons, throw her on the hard floor of a horse-drawn buggy, and transport her to the emergency room of a nearby hospital. The staff at the hospital, men and women both, are dismissive and annoying, and pepper her with lewd and insulting remarks. She is treated coldly and quickly, no real examination provided, medicated with a concoction of mustard and hot water to precipitate vomiting—and soon thereafter released.

Two weeks later, the San Francisco Examiner, owned by William Randolph Hearst, published a five-part series of stories capturing and documenting the brutal and insensitive treatment of women in hospital emergency rooms. Like Bly’s work, this dramatic account of treatment led to the establishment of a well-trained ambulance service in the city—for men and women. Later, this writer—identified as Annie Laurie—was to become the first woman journalist to cover a prize fight. Later still, disguised as a boy, she was the first reporter on the scene to cover the horrific Galveston hurricane of 1900 in Texas.

And then in July 1888, Nell Nelson, a young schoolteacher in Chicago, wearing a brown veil and a tattered coat, began taking a number of jobs in factories, stitching coats, shoe linings, and shirts at the Excelsior Underwear Company for eighty cents a dozen. It was hard work, to say the least—a lack of ventilation, poor lighting—and it was bloody hot. And as it turned out, the first dozen shirts she sewed were free—at least to her employer. For, she learned: Rent for the sewing machine she was using was fifty cents. And the thread for the shirts she sewed? An additional charge of thirty-five cents. But if that wasn’t bad enough, Nelson and her fellow employees were insulted and berated. And not just at Excelsior; it was no different wherever she went. Her series of stories ran for nineteen straight weeks, doubling circulation for the Chicago Times. And then there was Eva Gay, who, in disguise, infiltrated an industrial laundry to document the unhealthy conditions for the women who labored there.

These writers made an impact; they changed lives because of their personal narratives, but despite their bylines, few readers knew who they really were. But as Kim Todd wrote, the names these women used, their bylines, “were often fake. Stunt reporters relied on pseudonyms, which offered protection as they waded deep into unladylike territory to poke sticks at powerful men. Annie Laurie was really Winifred Sweet; Gay was Eva Valesh; Marks was Eleanor Stackhouse…. ‘Many of the brightest women frequently disguise their identity, not under one nom de plume, but under half a dozen,’ wrote a male editor for the trade publication The Journalist in 1889. ‘This renders anything like a solid reputation almost impossible.’”

All of these boundary-breaking reporters were forced into a similar identity deception. And the treatment of some of these stories, as serious as they were, was often trivialized with inappropriate illustrations of billowing skirts and wild wind-whipped hair, depicting the helplessness of the “opposite” sex. Even the ways in which women writers were referred to and labeled were often demeaning. Laurie, Bly, and their ilk were treated as novelty writers, performing tricks to get access to their stories. In fact, they were called as a group, as Todd reports, the “stunt girls.”

There was another label, which as most ironic, especially since it wasn’t actually the “stunt” that captivated readers and motivated political and social action, but the voices, observations, and feelings—the deep-seated personal observations of the writers and the descriptions of the characters they captured. When the stories were especially poignant, critics and colleagues referred to the women who wrote these stories as the “sob sisters.”

The personalization, the confessional aspects of these stories, would, nearly a century later, become a flashpoint of the creative nonfiction debate and movement, when writers like James Wolcott demeaned them in Vanity Fair, characterizing their emotional honesty and intensity as “navel gazing.” But at the time, the confessional aspects of their work weren’t seen as worth debating—or criticizing. This whining and wailing about the ills of the world, the man’s world, was to be expected coming from women. Journalists generally did not take the “girls” seriously. They were simply a means to the end. They used a woman to get a story that would not be possible for a man to get, a story that would sell papers and advertising and attract attention and praise—perhaps until Ida Tarbell.

Ida Tarbell, an investigative journalist and lecturer, became as famous and as influential as Upton Sinclair and others of what Theodore Roosevelt had labeled as the “muckraking” crowd. The History of the Standard Oil Company by Tarbell was first published as a nineteen-part series in McClure’s Magazine and then in 1904 as a two-volume book. As one critic described her reporting, Tarbell “fed the antitrust frenzy by verifying what many had suspected for years: the pattern of deceit, secrecy and unregulated concentration of power that characterized Gilded Age business practice with its ‘commercial Machiavellianism.’” Tarbell was prolific, to say the least, and most enjoyed digging deep into her subjects for long periods of time, as in her series of articles for McClure’s about the life of Napoleon and an eye-opening twenty-part series on Abraham Lincoln to which she dedicated four years of her life.

Tarbell’s success and celebrity were due, not so much to the impact and drama of her prose, but more so to her dogged dedication to truth and accuracy and to uncovering heretofore undiscovered information and sources that led to deeper and richer stories. Liza Mundy, writing in the Atlantic, observed that “a half century before the New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell went to the waterfront to write about clammers and fishermen, before John McPhee started hanging out with greengrocers, Tarbell was visiting out-of-the-way sectors and practicing immersive journalism…. Today,” Mundy concluded, “Robert Caro is lionized for his exhaustive gumshoe method, but Tarbell was there before him, reading pamphlets and the opinion columns of local papers. ‘There is nothing about which everything has been done and said’ became her core insight.”

Even after Tarbell and the work of the stunt girls had produced such serious and game-changing work, it remained a struggle for women to be considered equals in the journalistic world. Even when they succeeded, broke through the barriers, their work was often discounted or ignored. As it was for Martha Gellhorn, who was on the scene in Madrid in the heat of the Spanish Civil War.

Here’s the opening of a dispatch from Madrid filed by Gellhorn in July 1937, which appeared in Collier’s magazine:

At first the shells went over: you could hear the thud as they left the Fascists’ guns, a sort of groaning cough; then you heard them fluttering toward you. As they came closer the sound went faster and straighter and sharper and then, very fast, you heard the great booming noise when they hit.

But now, for I don’t know how long—because time didn’t mean much—they had been hitting on the street in front of the hotel, and on the corner, and to the left in the side street. When the shells hit that close, it was a different sound. The shells whistled toward you—it was as if they whirled at you—faster than you could imagine speed, and, spinning that way, they whined: the whine rose higher and quicker and was a close scream—and then they hit and it was like granite thunder. There wasn’t anything to do, or anywhere to go: you could only wait. But waiting alone in a room that got dustier as the powdered cobblestones of the street floated into it was pretty bad.

I went downstairs into the lobby, practicing on the way how to breathe. You couldn’t help breathing strangely, just taking the air into your throat and not being able to inhale it.

Later, despite her accomplishments, Gellhorn had to fight or trick her way into reporting on World War II. Women journalists could not be trusted to report the news accurately, or so it was believed, and they were much too vulnerable to be let loose in a war zone like their male colleagues. But Gellhorn ignored the warnings and the arbitrary rules excluding women. She was one of the very few correspondents to make it ashore during the D-Day invasion, male or female. She did this by hiding in a bathroom of a hospital ship to be part of the landing, and once ashore disguised herself as an orderly, carrying a stretcher. She was discovered on the beach a few days later while conducting interviews with the soldiers who had safely landed, and she was stripped of her press credentials. She was not, however, deterred. A year later she was part of the first wave of reporters at the Dachau concentration camp when it was liberated.

I think it is really terrific every time I pass through the Pittsburgh airport that Nellie Bly has been so deservedly honored, side by side with Franco and George, but I do wonder if travelers really understand the significance of her statue and what it should mean to them and the world—not only the amazing trip around the world in seventy-two days, but the beginning of the liberation of women from a bastion of white men who had demeaned and disregarded them simply because of their gender. This liberation, would, however, not be quick or easy.

__________________________________

From The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne’er-Do-Wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction by Lee Gutkind. Copyright © 2024. Published by Yale University Press. Reproduced by permission.

In Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season, she describes relocating to Sonoma County from San Francisco in 2017, just as the drought-driven wildfire seasons began to accelerate. The turbulence of the years since the pandemic and the out-of-control California wildfires started changed her life, and inspired and shaped her new memoir.

“When the pandemic started, I was working on a novel,” she explains. “Cut to three years later and I’ve just published a memoir. A lot has happened! The Last Fire Season takes place in 2020, which as we all know was also the first year of the pandemic. The events in the book arguably began in 2017, when I moved from the city to the woods during a different horrific wildfire season. At that time, I also began experiencing the health crisis that has accompanied me ever since, in the form of chronic pain, which also plays a role in the book. So 2020 wasn’t my first wildfire experience, but it was a turning point for me in my awareness of fire as a permanent presence in my life, and of the wildfire crisis as one that is linked to others.

“Unfortunately,” she adds, “the years since 2020 have continued to be excellent case examples of what’s often called polycrisis. With the memoir, I’m interested in finding a way to portray life amid all these shifting baselines while also exploring the context—whether historical, ecological, or personal.” Our email conversation took place within miles of each other, in Sonoma County. The fact that I, too, had experienced the chaos of Northern California wildfires coming in the night, with no warning, no option but to run, shortly after relocating from an urban environment (Brooklyn) brought with it an appreciation of how well she captures these intense, nearly indescribable moments. The Last Fire Season is both heart-stoppingly dramatic and profoundly rooted in an understanding of where we fit in the natural world.

*

Jane Ciabattari: How did you decide to structure the book by months, from August through October, according to the dramatic turns of the fire season of 2020 in California?

Manjula Martin: There’s a note I wrote myself at one point in the drafting process that I tacked up above my desk. It says “just write what happened.” The book weaves together a few different threads—the fire crisis, my own bodily pain, and the larger polycrisis of this moment in time. So from the beginning I knew I needed a simple, straightforward structure. A chronological timeline is a classic for a reason!

In addition to following the months of that fire season, each section of the book is inspired by the qualities of a different natural element, with Fire as a constant thread or presence. This concept could easily get a bit precious, so I don’t call a lot of overt attention to it on the page, but it was an important part of my writing process. You’ll see it show up in things like chapter names, and the little icons at the start of each section (which are actually images from element-inspired tattoos that I have, thanks to the book’s graphic designer!).

JC: One chilling aspect of your fire season chronology is how close fire comes. You describe driving in the Sierra “with spotty cell reception over an unpopulated mountain some part of which was already on fire,” with a towering cloud of pyrocumulus smoke visible out the window, to the summit of some 8,300 feet, and coming down the other side safely. A suspenseful trip to read about! And the helicopter rescue of a group of tourists at the reservoir near where you had hiked the day before, “three hundred vacationers…corralled toward by lake by flames on all sides.” (The Creek Fire “surged through 20,000 acres within the span of a day.”) How did you describe the experience from inside the fire? Did you take notes at the time? How did your fire narrative evolve?

MM: Yeah, during those weeks there was such a sense that fire was following me everywhere I went. Yet, interestingly, I didn’t encounter fire face-to-face until I formed a direct relationship with it while learning about prescribed fire, later in the narrative.

In the scene you mention, I actually took a video with my phone, with Miles Davis audible on the car stereo and everything. That moment felt so strangely beautiful and terrible at the same time, I knew I’d later want to prove to myself it happened. Of course, it turned out I didn’t need the video, because it was imprinted permanently in my amygdala! When it came to fire scenes I wasn’t personally present for, I started with my own memory of hearing about them, and then went to research—local news, social media, interviews, and similar reporting sources.

One challenge I encountered in writing the book was portraying fire itself. In the first chapter, I write about how wildfire is always described using these monstrous, ravenous verbs, and so throughout the book I play with different ways of portraying fire, using vocabulary that evolves and changes as my understanding of fire changes throughout the story. This is where you’ll see the elements show up too—in the way fire is embodied, sometimes moving like water, sometimes acting ethereal, and so on.

JC: You have another story you set out to tell after you relocated from San Francisco to rural Sonoma County—the story of how your garden and the forest around it had become your “companion in damage and renewal.” How did you figure a way to weave that into your ongoing fire season narrative? Or vice versa?

MM: I knew I wanted to include the story of my body in the story of the fires, in part because they happened simultaneously (“write what happened”!) but also because these crises are intrinsically connected. Like the rest of the natural world, women’s bodies have historically been idealized as both fonts of fertility and objects of purity, ripe for possession—with harmful and lasting results. Both these stories involve site-specific injuries caused by larger, systemic harms. In the case of the land on which I live, the harms are the result of colonization, extraction, and an exploitative relationship with nature.

In the case of my body, the systems at play include a for-profit healthcare industry and a sociopolitical system obsessed with controlling women’s reproductive health. The interweaving of these two storylines in the book actually came very naturally once I realized that the place where they connected for me—physically as well as metaphorically—was in my garden. So the scenes in the garden became the key to interlacing all this stuff. I think I figured this all out somewhere in the third draft!

JC: How did you research the parts of your story based on Native American use of fire focused on the overall health of the ecosystem (including “prescribed fire,” sometimes referred to as “good fire”) and on renewing important cultural and survival resources?

MM: In my research I read widely, of course, but I think the ideal way to learn about fire is to have relationships with living people who are out there every day putting fire on the land. Traditional ecological knowledge, including that of fire, has been violently suppressed since colonization. As a result, the archives of institutions (many of which were colonialist institutions from inception) aren’t always going to show you the whole story.

So if I was able to interview a person or go visit a place, instead of quote a study, I tried to do so. Some of the awesome Indigenous fire practitioners I had the pleasure of learning from included the staff of TERA—Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance, in Lake County—and a fire expert named Margo Robbins, who is cofounder and president of the Cultural Fire Management Council, based in the Yurok nation in Northern California.

JC: How did you come up with the concept of “future memories,” in which you jump ahead into another moment? For instance, you describe standing in your yard with Sasha Berleman, a fire scientist, wildland firefighter and nonprofit director, looking at wildflowers that have grown in a cleared area. She asks for seeds to sprinkle in burn areas, and says, “Good fire changes fear into action.” All of this is a future moment inserted into the ongoing narrative.

MM: I could talk endlessly about memoir structure choices! But for the sake of brevity, I’ll say that from the beginning I knew I’d place the main narrative in what I’m calling a hard past-tense. (There is probably a better grammar word for this but I do not know it.) That choice was necessary for me to gain distance from the book’s events, which were ongoing in my life, enough so that I could successfully write about them.

So the “past memory” scenes—which are told in the present tense, as are other memories—began as a bit of a formal trick. I needed a way to work in the research and interviews that I conducted after the events of the main storyline. For me, with memoir, these kinds of decisions about the book’s formal structure all serve a purpose: they remind me to question my own perception of time, history, what is and isn’t fixed, and who—and what language—decides that.

JC: How have your attitudes toward fire changed in the course of these years of experiencing and writing about California’s wildfires?

MM: Drastically. The more I learn about fire; the more I see and interact with fire; the more I understand the histories that brought fire to play its current role in the landscape and my life—the less afraid I feel.

JC: How has being in nature, fostering beauty through gardening—“linking” your body more closely to the body of this place” where you lived, served as a healing process?

MM: I think the healing I’ve found in gardening is in the ways gardening makes space for ambivalence. In many ways this book is trying to push against binaries—fire is bad or good, nature is innocent or ravaged, etc. That includes the idea of being “healed by nature,” as well as the concept of being “damaged” at all. My body is all of those things, all the time. It’s also a damn miracle. And that is something I am learning directly from the land. Gardening allows me to inhabit pain and pleasure, powerlessness and control, joy and grief, life and death, care and violence—all of it.

JC: What was the most difficult aspect of writing this memoir?

MM: Living through the events of the book, then immediately signing up to live through the events of the book over and over, in my head, for the next few years, was in retrospect perhaps not a super healthy thing to do! I’m partly joking, but the writing process was more difficult than I anticipated—psychologically because I was still living through it, and physically because of my chronic health issues.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

MM: Everyone says you’re supposed to start your next book before your current book comes out, so you’ll have something to obsess about that is within your control, and also, you know, a career. But I’m not sure when one is supposed to do that. In some ways it feels like I just finished final edits! Last week I did finally have time to clean out my little writing lair for the first time since finishing the memoir, and I put up a big sheet of butcher paper and began mapping a new novel.

The new novel is (roughly) a multi-decade narrative about two sisters who take very different, sometimes surprising, paths in life. It’s about women’s relationships, solitude, and the subversive potential of art during the rise of fascism. So, not at all timely, haha!

__________________________________

The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History by Manjula Martin is available from Pantheon Books, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

As the end of January creeps nearer and—depending where you are—the weeks of wintry weather may be keeping you in, you may be finding yourself in search of something bright, warm, and charming to peer at. A well-lit fireplace, perhaps, or the ineffable swirls of steam from a cup as hot water alchemizes into air. No matter your preferences, you’ll find it better with a book by your side, and what better than something brand-new, its contours unknown, its memories with you yet to be made. Below, you’ll find a whopping twenty-six new ones out today to consider.

There’s a poignant novel from acclaimed poet Kaveh Akbar, Calvino-esque literary fables from C.D. Rose, an expansive Jamaican-Canadian queer debut novel from Christina Cooke; a collection of poems by Keith Taylor that breathe life into the everyday; powerful reflections on the Holocaust, including a never-before-published firsthand account from survivor József Debreczeni and a critique of historical shortsightedness about the Holocaust’s atrocities in a provocative new book by Dan Stone; a new biography of the revolutionary writer Frantz Fanon; a blunt revelation of racism in the medical field; Crystal Hefner’s memoir of escaping from the shadow of Playboy; and much, much more.

No matter what you’re in the mood for, I hope you’ll find somewhere warm and cozy to curl up with one of these. It’ll be worth it.

*

Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
(Knopf)

“Kaveh Akbar is a radiant soul, a poet so agile and largehearted it comes as no surprise that his first leap into fiction is elegant, dizzying, playful. Martyr! is the best novel you’ll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness for people longed for but forever unknown, the way art as eruption of life gazes back into death, and the ecstasy that sometimes arrives—like grace—when we find ourselves teetering on the knife-edge of despair.”
–Lauren Groff

Yvette Christiansë, Unconfessed
(Other Press)

“Christiansë’s novel isn’t just a stunningly intimate, heart-wrenching history of slave life in Africa. Her protagonist’s furious yearning for freedom (‘Wishes are sometimes just stories that have nowhere to go’) becomes a haunting meditation on love, loss and the stories we choose to tell in order to survive. Gorgeous and tragic, Unconfessed ultimately reveals a confession almost too terrible to bear and impossible to forget.”
–People

C.D. Rose, Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea
(Melville House)

“A book [of literary fables] that belongs on the same shelf as Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and several works by Zoran Zivkovic, Stanislaw Lem and David Markson.”
–The Washington Post

Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
(FSG)

“[A] perceptive biography….Elucidating the ideas and figures that animated Fanon’s thinking…the nuanced narrative skillfully illuminates how the disparate threads of Fanon’s life fit together….Shatz also provides discerning commentary on Fanon’s two masterworks….A striking appraisal of a towering thinker.”
–Publishers Weekly

Dan Stone, The Holocaust: An Unfinished Story
(Mariner)

“A holocaust history for our times, passionate as well as scholarly, and written with a sharp eye to the growing threat of the radical right in the present. Stone is not afraid to question the verities that have become attached to this most catastrophic epoch of modern history, and he challenges readers to confront its scope and enormity anew.”
–Jane Caplan

József Debreczeni, Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz (trans. Paul Olchváry)
(St. Martin’s Press)

“Devastating in the simplicity of its language, Debreczeni’s book is of immense eyewitness historical value and one of the greatest pieces of lost Holocaust literature from behind the newly descending Iron Curtain.”
–Stephen L. Ossad

Keith Taylor, All the Time You Want: Selected Poems 1977 – 2017
(Dzanc Books)

“Publication of Keith Taylor’s All the Time You Want is an important event. Everyone who has been listening for years to this essential poetic voice has reason to rejoice anew. Taylor’s arguments in favor of the ordinary communal life…introduce us to a deep and quiet understanding of how life works….And in his poems about the natural world, he has created a space one enters gladl….Reading this book is like opening a door outward into a realm whose refreshment we find we are badly in need of.”
–Richard Tillinghast

Alexander Sammartino, Last Acts
(Scribner)

“What a taut, energetic, tender, and wholly original debut novel Alexander Sammartino has written. He knows something deep about the dark heart of America that somehow doesn’t stop him from writing about it with genuine, goofy love. Somewhere, Denis Johnson and Saul Bellow are smiling because their lineage—that of honest, highwire, virtuosic writing that summons up the world with all its charms and hazards, has found a worthy heir.”
–George Saunders

Christina Cooke, Broughtupsy
(Catapult)

“After her younger brother dies of sickle cell anemia, Akúa returns home to her native Jamaica with his ashes in hopes of reconnecting with their estranged older sister, discovering both love and violence along the way. Christina Cooke’s Broughtupsy is a searing, touching, and often funny meditation on family fault lines drawn by migration, homophobia, cultural difference, and sibling order, from a talented new writer among us.”
–Emily Raboteau

Laurie Frankel, Family Family
(Holt)

“Frankel’s back! Without giving away too much of her dizzying plot, which is supercharged with cliffhanger chapter endings and parallel reveals, the novel is dedicated to the premise that not every adoption story is one of trauma—along the way we will enjoy many fine young characters (Kevin Wilson fans who haven’t yet tried Frankel should) and classic Frankelisms….Full of warmth, humor, and sound advice.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Lee Gutkind, The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne’er-Do-Wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction
(Yale University Press)

“he Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting offers an insightful overview of the recent history of creative nonfiction and the struggles that early practitioners faced in legitimizing the genre. This is a must-read for all writers.”
–Jennifer Anderson

Jacqueline Alnes, The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour
(Melville House)

“Like an episode of Maintenance Phase meets the essay collection The Empathy Exams, The Fruit Cure brings both rigorous reporting and fearless self-examination to bear on questions far beyond health, athletics, wellness, and food. What Alnes is interested in here is nothing less than the mysterious relationship between our thinking minds and our physical selves and the essential joyful horror that is having a human body.”
–Emma Copley Eisenberg

Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In
(St. Martin’s Press)

“A perceptive personal meditation on the late 1990s and early 2000s pop culture that shaped her childhood….Kennedy provides memoir by way of cultural commentary, cleverly using her hybrid approach to highlight the ways in which trends and media popular during one’s formative years profoundly influence one’s identity. Told with wit and candor, this will strike a chord with Gen Yers.”
–Publishers Weekly

Balsam Karam, The Singularity
(Feminist Press)

“The Singularity by Balsam Karam is a novel about loss and longing–a mother who misses her child, children who miss their mother, and all of those who miss their country as they try to feel the new earth in their new land. A deeply moving work of fiction from a true voice of Scandinavia.”
–Shahrnush Parsipur,

Daisy Goodwin, Diva
(St. Martin’s Press)

“Daisy Goodwin’s richly imagined world makes Diva an irresistible page-turner. Blending high drama with an artist’s eye for detail, Goodwin breathes life into [Maria Callas,] one of the greatest and most tragic stars of the twentieth century. Whether you’re an opera aficionado or simply love an epic tale of love and ambition, Diva is a pure delight.”
–Amanda Foreman

Crystal Hefner, Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself
(Grand Central Publishing)

“[Hefner’s] frank memoir scratches some of the glitter off Playboy’s notorious legacy of sexual freedom, luxury, and excess. An illuminating tell-all.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Zachary Pace, I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays about the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am
(Two Dollar Radio)

“Zachary Pace’s I Sing to Use the Waiting is an exhilarating mix, part memoir, part examination of queer identity, part investigation into corporate heteronormativity and the internalized homophobia it produces in children and others who are still growing into who they are–and so much more, all of it approached via the lenses of the singers (and their lives) whom Pace encountered at pivotal moments in their own growing up….[A] beautifully provocative, smart, and tender book indeed.”
–Carl Phillips

Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters
(Scribner)

“Fluke is the intellectual equivalent of a slap across the face….Klaas’s beautifully written application of chaos theory to human experience won’t just shift your paradigm, it’ll detonate it.”
–Jonathan Gottschall

Benjamin Herold, Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs
(Penguin Press)

“Disillusioned breaks open the quiet racial injustice eating away at the heart of American suburbs. Shattering the myth of upward class mobility through meritocracy, Disillusioned shows us how white supremacy disenfranchises POCs even as they fulfill the requirements of the American suburban middle class dream—and how even…the intended beneficiaries of that dream…are starting to wonder if it’s a dream they can still afford to believe in. A necessary read for everyone in an American suburb today.”
–Michael Eric Dyson

Brian Allen Carter, Bad Foundations
(Clash Books)

“Bad Foundations by Brian Allen Carr is a raw and ferocious journey into the heart of the working class. It bleeds desperation and devours hope. Brian Carr is a blue-collar Raymond Carver, a Midwest Philip Roth who opens the pulsating wound that is the myth of the American Dream.”
–S. A. Cosby

Tanja Maljartschuk, Forgottenness (trans. Zenia Tompkins)
(Liveright)

“It’s no coincidence that time and memory are the big topic today, feeding off the anxieties of the world. [The Ukrainian writer] Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel is about the giant blue whale of time swallowing everything living on its way. What she is interested in is not even disappearance but tracelessness. Both personal and political, this book rages against time and oblivion as all true literature does.”
–Georgi Gospodinov

Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum
(Legacy Lit)

“Antonia Hylton expertly weaves together a moving personal narrative, in-depth reporting, and illuminating archival research to produce a book that left me breathless. Madness is a haunting and revelatory examination of the way that America’s history of racism is deeply entangled in our mental health system. A profoundly important book that helps us make sense of an underexamined aspect of our country’s history.”
–Clint Smith

Uché Blackstock, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine
(Viking)

“Uché Blackstock has made something abundantly clear: If you want to understand a society, look at its hospitals. Dr. Blackstock, one of the most insightful and impactful public voices in medicine, shares her remarkable personal story and her profound insight regarding race, gender, and health inequality….However, this book is so much more than a compelling memoir….Armed with concrete steps for addressing inequality, readers will be inspired to become better stewards of our communities and society.”
–Imani Perry

Jenn M. Jackson, Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism
(Random House)

“In their enlightening new book, Black Women Taught Us, Jenn M. Jackson celebrates the iconic Black feminists who built a movement, and also shares their own personal story of growing and learning with these brilliant canonical thinkers. It is intimate and essential reading, a beautiful bridge connecting ancestral and contemporary Black women activists.”
–Deesha Philyaw

David Reynolds, Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him
(Basic Books)

“Who inspired Churchill as he rose to the pinnacle of power? And how did he himself seek to mold how history would view him? No one is better placed to address these deceptively simple questions than David Reynolds, and he succeeds splendidly in this magnificent book. A fresh and captivating study of the nature and crux of political leadership.”
–Fredrik Logevall

Simon Shuster, The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky
(William Morrow)

“Shuster’s book is a narrative tour de force that takes us deep behind the scenes of the Ukrainian president’s bunker during the tensest days of Russia’s war against Ukraine. An astonishingly intimate portrayal of the former comedian turned wartime leader battling to save his nation–and Europe–that nevertheless keeps a doggedly honest and critical balance. This is the Zelensky book we’ve been waiting for.”
–Catherine Belton