Below, you’ll find excerpt from Em by Kim Thúy, translated from the French by Sheila Fischman. Em is a love story of sorts, steeped in history, about those most impacted by violence. Written in Kim Thúy's trademark style, near to prose poetry, Em reveals her fascination with connection. In many ways, Em is perhaps Kim Thúy's most personal book, the one in which she trusts her readers enough to share with them not only the pervasive love she feels but also the rage and the horror at what she and so many other children of the Vietnam War had to live through.

The paperback edition of Em publishes on August 25, 2026.

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A genesis of truth

War, again. In every conflict zone, good steals in and edges its way right into the cracks of evil. Treason complements heroism, love flirts with abandonment. The enemies advance towards one another, all with the same goal: to triumph. In this shared exercise, what is human shows itself to be at once strong, mad, cowardly, great, crude, innocent, ignorant, devout, cruel, courageous . . . That is the reason for war. Again.

I’m going to tell you the truth, some true stories at least, but only partially, incompletely, more or less. Because it’s impossible for me to re-create the blue nuances in the sky just as Rob, the marine, was reading a letter from his lover, while at the same time the rebel, Vinh, was writing to his own love during a brief lull, a moment of deceptive calm. Was it a Mayan and azure blue, or a French and cerulean blue? When Private John discovered the list of insurgents hidden in a pot of manioc flour, how many kilos were there? Had the flour just been milled?

What was the temperature of the water when Monsieur Út was thrown into the well before being burned alive by Sergeant Peter’s flame-thrower? Did Monsieur Út weigh half as much as Peter, or two-thirds? Was it the itching of his mosquito bites that so unsettled Peter?

For nights at a time, I tried to imagine Travis’s walk, Hoa’s shyness, Nick’s fear, Tuân’s despair, the bullet wounds of some and the victories of others in the forest, in the city, in the rain, in the mud. Every night, to the rhythm of ice cubes dropping into their container in the freezer, my research assaulted me with the know-ledge that my imagination would never be able to grasp the whole reality. In one testimony, a soldier remembers seeing the enemy running full speed towards a tank, carrying on his shoulder an M67 rifle, 1.3 metres long and weighing seventeen kilos. Facing that soldier was a man ready to die in order to kill his enemies, ready to kill while dying, ready to let death triumph. How to imagine such selflessness, such unconditional commitment to a cause?

How to contemplate that a woman might carry her two small children into the jungle over hundreds of kilometres, tying the first to a branch in order to protect him from wild animals while she moved off with the second, tied him up in turn, and went back to the first child to repeat the journey with him? Yet this woman described her trek to me in her ninety-two-year-old combatant’s voice. Despite our six hours of conversation, there are still a thousand details I lack. I forgot to ask her where she got the ropes, and if her sons still bear marks on their bodies from being tied up. Who knows if these memories have not been erased to leave behind only one, the taste of wild tubers she chewed into mush to feed to her children? Who knows . . .

If your heart shudders on reading these stories of fore-seeable madness, unimagined love, or everyday heroism, know that the whole truth would very probably have provoked in you either respiratory failure or euphoria. In this book, truth is fragmented, incomplete, unfinished, in both time and space. Then is it still the truth? I’ll let you reply in a way that relates to your own story, your own truth. Meanwhile, I promise you in the words that follow a certain ordering of the emotions, along with feelings whose disarray cannot be denied.

Rubber

White gold flows from wounds inflicted on rubber trees. For centuries, the Maya, the Aztecs, the peoples of the Amazon, collected this liquid and used it to make shoes, waterproof fabric, and rubber balls. When European explorers discovered this material, they first used it to manufacture elastic that would hold up their garters. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the demand increased at the meteoric speed with which automobiles multiplied, transforming the landscape. The need then became so great and so demanding that synthetic latex, a material that meets seventy percent of our current needs, had to be produced. Despite all the efforts made in lab-oratories, only pure latex, whose name of caoutchouc in French means “the tears (caa) of the tree (ochu),” can withstand the acceleration, the pressure, and the thermal range imposed on airplane tires and the joints in a space shuttle. The more humanity succeeds in accelerating its rhythm, the more it requires a latex produced naturally, at the speed of Earth’s rotation around the sun, in accord with lunar eclipses.

Thanks to its elasticity, its resistance, and its impermeability, natural latex swathes our extremities like a second skin in order to protect us from the consequences of desire. During the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and the following year, the rate of infections contracted sexually by the troops grew from less than four percent to more than seventy-five percent, which later led, during the First World War, to the German government’s giving high priority to the production of condoms to protect its soldiers, even though there was a serious shortage of rubber.

Certainly, bullets kill, but so, perhaps, does desire.

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A novel of the emotional intricacies of trauma and exile, from the author of international bestselling Ru.

Emma-Jade and Louis are born into the havoc of the Vietnam War. Orphaned, saved and cared for by adults coping with the chaos of Saigon in free-fall, they become children of the Vietnamese diaspora. Em is not a romance in any usual sense of the word, but it is a word whose homonym — aimer, to love — resonates on every page, a book powered by love in the larger sense. A portrait of Vietnamese identity emerges that is wholly remarkable, honed in wartime violence that borders on genocide, and then by the ingenuity, sheer grit and intelligence of Vietnamese-Americans, Vietnamese-Canadians and other Vietnamese former refugees who go on to build some of the most powerful small business empires in the world.

Through the linked destinies of characters connected by birth and destiny, the novel zigzags between the rubber plantations of Indochina; daily life in Saigon during the war as people find ways to survive and help each other; Operation Babylift, which evacuated thousands of biracial orphans from Saigon in April 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War; and today’s global nail polish and nail salon industry, largely driven by former Vietnamese refugees—and everything in between. Here are human lives shaped both by unspeakable trauma and also the beautiful sacrifices of those who made sure at least some of these children survived.

“Nadia Terranova’s narrative style captivates us with its precision and sensitivity.” —Annie Ernaux

Below, you'll find an excerpt from Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. The novel follows Ida, a married woman in her late thirties, living in Milan and working at a radio station, who returns to Sicily to help her mother clean out Ida’s childhood home. Surrounded by the objects of her past, Ida is forced to deal with the trauma she experienced as a girl, twenty-three years earlier, when her father left one morning, never to return.

Beautifully translated by Ann Goldstein, who also translated Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, Farewell, Ghosts is a poetic and intimate novel about what it means to build one’s own identity while grappling with profound loss.

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Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.

One morning in the middle of September my mother called to tell me that in a few days work would begin on the roof of our house. She said it just like that: “our.” But for some time I’d had another house to take care of, in another city, a house rented by me and another person. The house I would have called ours no longer existed, that label had been removed when I left, and in the following years I had wiped it from my memory with thorough violence. Yes, I knew that the roof was falling down—it had begun to fall down when I was born, and had been crumbling, raining down in the form of dust and flaking plaster, for all the life I had lived there—but I wasn’t in any way responsible, we can’t be blamed for the things we don’t want to inherit and have already disowned. I wrote fake true stories for the radio that had had an unexpected popularity; I had a man, a job, another city, new evenings, and a different time.

My mother said that she had had to deal with every problem by herself; she was tired now and the house was a burden to her. Redoing the roof, which was flat and tiled and functioned also as a terrace, would be her last act of generosity—because certainly she couldn’t put the house on the market with all that damage—before buying a smaller and more solid place. She said that a contractor would repair the holes caused by bad weather, poor insulation, and the neighbors’ old renovations, while in our house—she repeated: our—under the roof, under the feet and labor of the workmen, she and I would sift through furniture, utensils, and books to begin to empty it: she didn’t want me to be able to reproach her one day for giving away my things, and so I had to return and choose what to let go.

I thought it would be easy, because, apart from a red iron box kept at the bottom of a drawer, I didn’t care about anything.

I packed a suitcase with a few clothes and some underwear, and bought a train ticket on the Internet for the next day: I would look out the window for the long stretch of sea beside the Calabrian railroad all the way to Villa San Giovanni; from there I would take the ferry to Messina, bringing my mother the help she’d asked for.

That night I dreamed I was drowning.

My husband’s foot, propped against my ankle, warmed the bed, and at some point I began to move from the warmth under the sheet into the water.

I was walking as if I knew where to go, and the water cooled ankles, calves, knees, and then thighs, hips, belly, breast, and shoulders, and then chin and mouth, until I tried to speak and immediately disappeared, swallowed up by a wave. A moment before, I was walking; a moment after, I was drowning. My sight didn’t dim, and my strength didn’t evaporate, only this thing happened: I entered the sea and in an instant my body no longer existed.

I woke and sat up. In a whisper, I called to Pietro, my husband, not because I needed him but because I didn’t want to keep from him the fact that I was dying. It seemed important, dying, and I wanted him to witness it. My arms and armpits were sweaty, sweat dripped across my forehead and shoulders, he grabbed me by one elbow and, with an effort, opened his eyes and sat up next to me. There was nothing we could say to each other that would console me, and I felt unable to share either the burden or the fear of my dream.

Once, more than ten years before, when we’d been together only a few months, I reproached him for having so little interest in my nightmares; when I was a child my paternal grandmother urged me to tell them—if you don’t tell them you won’t be free of them, she said—and now that she was gone, if he didn’t ask I couldn’t tell, and wouldn’t be free of anything. So at night when I woke suddenly, and in the morning before going to work, Pietro had begun to ask how I was: Tell me what you dreamed, he insisted and insisted, and I tried to answer, but it didn’t work. Things never work when they’re transported from one era to another, they’re fine where they are, and there’s always a reason that memories should remain memories and not come to disturb the present. I had been wrong to tell him about my grandmother: in her big bed with its scent of fine old sheets, the account flowed naturally, whereas opening myself to him was an effort. It was the same that night, too, neither of us had a desire for words; it was an agreement we’d made long ago, as long ago as the times when we responded to fear with desire, to nightmares with sex.

I grabbed the plastic water bottle from the night table and took long swallows. My husband touched my back with the sort of love we had then, a weary love, made up of hands that, never too intimate, caressed the stomach around the belly button, desperate hands that gripped the edge of a T-shirt, the elastic of underpants, a love that seldom became something else and pushed beyond, spinning in circles of static affection and splitting in two by itself, withdrawing after a brief illusion and letting us return to being two very separate entities. I drank and swallowed and Pietro took my arm, I lay down, and he lay down, too, I turned onto one side and he turned first toward me, spoonlike, and then onto his opposite side, and finally we rubbed against each other, back to back, to rock ourselves and try to go to sleep again. Struggling to follow me, even sleepily, was his way of loving me, the way people can still love each other after ten years. At a certain point our bodies had stopped functioning together, stopped fitting together in sleep and the waking that precedes it; we had become shields for one another.

Sex is a language, and many words had been uttered between Pietro and me in the early days of our relationship, when I was running away from Sicily and from a family that was maimed and full of silences, and he welcomed me in Rome, becoming companion, parent, brother. So, along with the city, I found a new self, and he was there, always there, and that availability was moving. In those first months we took off our clothes as soon as we could and after having desired each other to exhaustion we were happy, even though one detail might have warned us that it wouldn’t last: we never made love twice, the first time satisfied us, and immediately we began to separate and get dressed. Everything we sought we managed to give each other in a minimum time that never expanded, after which we reestablished our singularity, the separateness that had also been our rule of attraction. But soon—too soon for a romance that claimed to be the romance of a lifetime—that separateness became an enemy. The body stopped being the place of communication. The sweetness was poured out in daily rituals, in dialogues and kindnesses, and even if we fought during the day we never really hurt each other: we lived each in the shadow of the other, each watching over the other with a care I’d never known; after desire ended we had developed a ritual for giving each other pleasure anyway, then, after a time, that exchange, too, became unusable, like an old dictionary.

The fault, I knew, was mine. It must have been I who closed myself off first, unaccustomed as I was to openness, to sharing.

But to Pietro, and only to him, I had told the story of my father and he hadn’t raised questions, he had accepted the anomaly. We had known each other for three weeks and neither of us was much over twenty, when on our first real date he showed up with a package: inside was a blue skater’s T-shirt and a diary with a hard cover. At that moment I saw in him the man I was waiting for. He didn’t know that as a girl I had skated for long hours, he didn’t know that I had written a lot about myself in various diaries hidden in drawers. And yet he knew.

So I confessed to him that my father had disappeared when I was thirteen. Not died, just disappeared into nothing, I continued, waiting for the question I feared: Didn’t you and your mother do anything to keep him?

But Pietro never asked that question. He asked nothing, listening attentively to the few sentences I was willing to concede: my father, a high school teacher, had left the house one morning and hadn’t returned. And then he changed the subject. He said that the work I was looking for at a secondary school would be wrong for me: the lives of others, of students, parents, and colleagues, would overwhelm me, and I would soon find myself enslaved and unhappy. He didn’t say that lives don’t repeat and that it didn’t make sense to follow my father’s, to become a teacher like him: he had put the emphasis on something else. The crowding in classrooms and halls wouldn’t give me any respite; I should write, instead, and put into my stories the pain that couldn’t go elsewhere.

Until that moment Pietro and I had always met on happy occasions, and thus I discovered that my eyes exposed that pain, and I was convinced that his capacity to read it was outside the ordinary. On that conviction I had based our life. Day by day I relied on him, his seriousness was a rock and, like all rocks, had walls that could be difficult, hostile, to climb. Sometimes I said to myself that I wouldn’t know how to make an appointment with the dentist by myself and wouldn’t pay bills or taxes if I didn’t know that I would put the receipts in the folders he had organized for the apartment we rented. Being together every day, making every decision together, knowing by heart the smell, the sex, the character of the other: that was marriage. The rest was a stormy, unknown sea, and there was no point in crossing it.

I felt my husband rubbing against my back for five, ten minutes and then he fell asleep again, while I stayed curled up toward the wall, hoping not to have to confront the water again; the night hid weapons for my defense, but I had already used them up. I was becoming invisible again, while if I drowned, if I died, I would have wanted Pietro to see me.

The counterpart of the darkest fear is an unexpected lightness: I wanted to make love as if we could devour each other, as in the early days. I turned and began to caress him impetuously, but from him came a sound that interrupted the rhythm of his breathing, while his body contracted defensively. We could touch each other and cradle each other, but the possibility of making love made us retreat like terrified animals: it would mean having not more intimacy but less, losing that little physical closeness that with difficulty we had gained. We knew each other too well to challenge our reticence to see each other naked, a view that allowed neither of us to let go, not because we didn’t find the body of the other beautiful or attractive but because we would no longer know what to say or how to say it, now that that unused dictionary was sleeping between us.

I also withdrew, onto my other side, and again turned my back to him. I took his hand and put it on mine near my belly button, brooding with my eyes open. I thought I was grateful to him for that advice ten years earlier. In my fake true stories I put part of my pain and the water that overflowed from the past, and I hoped that writing would be enough to save me, but then came a murmur, a disruptive voice suggesting that gratitude wasn’t enough to keep a marriage from drowning.

So in the insomnia that had no end, between my sweat, Pietro’s regular breathing, and fear of a shipwreck, I waited for a dawn that would never arrive. But everything arrives, sooner or later, destroying the people we were or think we are: at the first light of the sun I got up silently, kissed him on the lips, and went to the station, leaving him asleep.

Through the end of August, take 25% off translated books by women authors! Please note that all forthcoming books are available for preorder at 10% off, while all currently available books are 25% off.

Created by Meytal Radzinski in 2014 to highlight the literary contributions of women writers and translators, Women in Translation Month has since grown into a global event celebrated each August throughout the English-speaking world.
 
Browse our collections to discover books by women in translation from all over the globe, now up to 25% off list price, featuring authors like Annie Ernaux, Neige Sinno, Jacqueline Harpman, Clyo Mendoza, Kim Thúy, Guadalupe Nettel, Nadia Terranova, Ulrike Meinhof, Olga Tokarczuk, Marjane Satrapi, Assia Djebar, and more. 

Click here to explore our Women in Translation collections for children, tweens, and teens.

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Books for Children, Tweens, and Teens 

Novelist and critic Gary Indiana, born July 16, 1950, discusses the work of novelist and critic Renata Adler. The below essay is excerpted from Indiana’s 2022 collection Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984–2021, published by Seven Stories Press.

 

PEAK ATTITUDE: The Novels of Renata Adler
by Gary Indiana

 

Renata Adler’s newly reissued novels, Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983), consist of anecdotes, vignettes, jokes, aphorisms, epigrammatic asides, and longer passages of prose—eclectic inventories of consciousness. Their immediate effect is that of a flea market in Samarqand or Ouagadougou, where the items on display (vintage clothes, military decorations, photo albums, broken appliances) are fractionally different enough, in style and provenance, from their cousins at the local swap meet to look like artifacts of an alternate universe. Adler’s eye and ear for the peculiar are unmatched in American letters.

Adler herself is regarded as peculiar in literary circles; her reluctance to publish anything is almost as legendary as Fran Lebowitz’s writing block. At a more prolific time, Adler wrote often, mainly for the New Yorker, reporting with great perspicacity on civil rights marches in the South, the ’60s student movement, Biafra. For slightly over a year in the late ’60s, she was the daily film reviewer for the New York Times, a job no one else has filled quite as memorably since. (“Even if your idea of a good time,” began her first review, “is to watch a lot of middle-aged Germans, some of them very fat, all reddening, grimacing, perspiring, and falling over Elke Sommer, I think you ought to skip The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz.”) Since then, Adler’s work has appeared with diminishing frequency, though almost always with seismic reverberation.

Her 1980 review, in the New York Review of Books, of When the Lights Go Down, a collection of film reviews by Pauline Kael, is still being written about, albeit for the wrong reason—i.e., that it was “mean.” In the Kael review, as in, among other things, her pieces on Watergate, the Starr Report, Monica Lewinsky’s biography, and the “institutional carpet bombing” she received from the New York Times in reaction to four lines about Watergate judge John Sirica in Gone, her book about the New Yorker, Adler has diagnosed systemic maladies that the media hue and cry over transient symptoms—the Jayson Blair affair, for example—have effectively masked from public view. In Kael’s case, a debased use of language spreading into every area of public discourse. With respect to the Times, the abuse of institutional power to stifle dissent. In such matters, Adler has taken the high road, according to her lights, and suffered the opprobrium of doing so, at a time when the high road is scarcely visible to many people, in large part because of the problems Adler has written about.

Adler’s fiction has received less contentious reception than her essays, although an excerpt of Pitch Dark, deemed by a narrow band of cognoscenti to be “about” real people, prompted the go-sip columnist Liz Smith to issue her only known work of literary criticism. The two novels range over many subjects treated in her nonfiction, but the difference, I think, is this: the equivocal, insecure, self-doubting cogitations of Adler’s first-person narrators are instantly disarming in ways that Adler, speaking with relentless logic as herself, in polemical mode, is not. No one else has a dog in a fight against yourself, and despite countless minor casualties in Adler’s two novels, the main event in both of them is “I” versus “I.” The writer-narrator of Speedboat, Jen Fain, travels a lot, for work and fun. Sometimes she reports for a newspaper, or teaches at a city college. Her friends are lawyers, doctors, other writers, judges, politicians, socialites. She encounters many other sorts of people too. At least as often as she speaks of “I,” she relates stories about “we”—meaning her generation, the one that went to college during the second Eisenhower administration. How their childhoods were, what school was like, what they expected to happen next, and how they are faring so far: “Dispersed as we all are, though, what we seem to have entirely in common is a time, a quality of meaning no harm, and a sense that among highly urban and ambitious people we are trying to lead some semblance of decent lives.”

These stories convey a class solidarity that has less to do with money than with education and an interest in politics and culture, a fair degree of social polish (often observed in the breach), and ethical scruples that preclude certain forms of success and facilitate others—in the legal field, medicine, publishing, scholarship, science. Also a fair degree of patriotism, faith in incremental progress, and the durability of democratic institutions. Of this cohort’s influence on the state of things, Speedboat keeps a running score. “We may win this year. We may lose it all. It is not going as well as we thought.”

Various riffs present themselves as witty examples of Hobson’s choice, or coercive inanity, or misapplied wisdom. Often, Adler records nuances outside the perceptual range of any other recent American novelist:

We were talking about No, No, Nanette. I said I thought there was such a thing as an Angry Bravo—that those audiences who stand, and cheer, and roar, and seem altogether beside themselves at what they would instantly agree is at best an unimportant thing, are not really cheering No, No, Nanette. They are booing Hair. Or whatever else it is on stage that they hate and that seems to triumph. So they stand and roar. Every bravo is not so much a Yes to the frail occasion they have come to make a stand at, as a No, goddam it to everything else, a bravo of rage. And with that, they become, for what it’s worth, a constituency that is political.

Jen Fain ruminates on everyday ephemera: allegedly bulletproof taxi partitions, for example, or the enigma of the “self-addressed envelope,” or bizarre form letters. In company, she is drawn as if by hypnosis to the flaw, and, implicitly, the void. Attuned to the wrong word, the malapropism, the gauche remark, the fatuous rejoinder, she finds something wildly skewed, insensible, ominous, untenable, intolerable, or at least a little off in nearly every situation. Hilarious in description, this something is essentially monstrous. Whether it is a symptom of a world gone mad, or evidence of herself cracking up, is another question she ponders in her spare time. Her tendency to paranoia and the giggles is extreme.

I don’t think much of writers in whom nothing is at risk. It is possible, though, to be too literal-minded about this question. In a magazine, under the heading “$1,000 for First-Person Articles,” for example: “An article for this series must be a true, hitherto unpublished narrative of an unusual personal experience. It may be dramatic, inspirational, or humorous, but it must have, in the opinion of the editors, a quality of narrative interest comparable to ‘How I Lost My Eye’ ( June ’72) and ‘Attacked by a Killer Shark’ (April ’72). Contributions must be typewritten, preferably double-spaced . . .” I particularly like where the stress, the italics, goes.

Speedboat reveals at every turn bewildering forks in the route ahead, confusions between literal and figurative, a widespread misapprehension of scale and scope, a general loss of equilibrium; in the episodes of daily life, nothing presents itself in the form of a single entendre. Seduction and threat are indistinguishable; reciprocal incomprehension begins to look like the salient feature of social existence. A friend’s idea of a little surprise before dinner turns out to be five hours of Parsifal. The incipient horror of it all is diffused throughout by framing each occurrence as a funny thing that happened on the way to somewhere else—exactly where, though, is never indicated.

Jen shuffles life’s imponderables in a vain search for cause and effect, an elusive organizing principle that is surely somewhere, some secret raison d’être, just really any kind of explanation. Reality’s failure to make sense promotes feelings of panic that oblige her to draw her own conclusions, invariably in the form of nervous jokes.

The second rat, of course, may have been the first rat farther uptown, in which case I am either being followed or the rat keeps the same rounds and hours I do. I think sanity, however, is the most profound moral option of our time. Two rats, then.

She writes directly to the reader, in sections of a single line, a paragraph, a page. The epigraph quotes Evelyn Waugh; many of this novel’s bit players would be at home in A Handful of Dust, or Scoop. Speedboat is very funny, in an archly reserved way. It is so diverted by eccentric data that Jen is scarcely more present as a character than the odd people she runs across, or the men she is involved with at different periods, who are practically spectral. She is there on the page; she tells us things about herself, about the world. Still, we wonder who she is, and so does she.

The staccato brevity of Adler’s contes keeps them at the constant temperature of a well-turned after-dinner recitative at a table in Elaine’s, with what that implies of a coterie sensibility, gamesmanship, and emotional cool. The conspicuous limitation of this novel is that it looks like something written for the New Yorker, by the New Yorker. But Adler accomplishes something reachier simply by adhering to the New Yorker’s notions of decorous writing with a kind of defeating fanaticism. From a certain abstracted angle, Speedboat evokes an antic American version of a Robbe-Grillet novel—not quite Le Voyeur as a musical, but still—its narrator a mental camera, incidents pared to the bone, sinews hidden in negative space.

The “missing page,” what we sense behind what’s shown, is a deferred awareness of death coming—not now, not yet, but sooner or later, none of this is going to last forever; not a shadow narrative, exactly, but a steady inference between the lines, in the white space where everything evaporates. I do not mean to suggest a prevailing spirit of morbidity, but rather a tropistic avoidance of it that becomes ominous. In the end, this assemblage of anecdotal evidence that appears to build a case, and regales us so implacably with sinister ironies, arrives at no conclusions, but opts for an agnostic optimism that could easily travel south.

Pitch Dark is murky—not in a turgid sense, but clouded, rather, by troubled reflections, ambivalence, regrets. The weather of Pitch Dark is colder. Secondary figures are fraught with shadowed histories. Incidents and asides illustrate a hapless, estranging condition of things: a bitter libel case, a dying raccoon, solitary escape to charmless islands, The Blue Angel, “how I both was and failed to be a citizen of my time.” A central episode in Ireland resembles a parody of gothic horror. Kate Ennis is an older version of Jen Fein, acquainted with disappointment and less innervated by amusing minutiae. She too writes. And travels, though more to flee her life than for any sort of fun. She often addresses one particular reader, a man she has left, or is leaving, or who is leaving, or has left, her. Her stories are longish and less sanguine in contrast with the ones in Speedboat.

Comparing Gertrude Stein and Thomas Wolfe, she writes, “She went on and on, too, of course, but only in a state of tension: drawn to the sentimental rhythm and the sentimental substance, but mocking and concealing it, reining it back.” This could suitably describe the precarious balance Kate Ennis maintains between observant detachment and a nervous breakdown. The central matter obscured by Kate’s tales—of Penelope sleeping with all the suitors, of hate mail received since high school from Rosalie Kamarski, the story of the dragon of the passport office, the one about the Chinese hypnotist, and so on—the long love affair ending, ended, or maybe not, seeps into narrative cracks, sounds a medley of stuttering refrains. (“Look here, you know. I loved you.” “You are, you know, you were the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life.”) The faits divers in Pitch Dark frequently end on these plangent, mournful notes of heartbreak. One wishes they were less plangent, and less frequent, since they don’t always work, though scenes depicting Kate and her lover, Jake—at night, for instance, after leaving a party, with Jake’s wife also in the car—are brilliant.

Late that night, on the road back, he said, “Honey, right there in that heavy snowstorm, I saw two deer.” There was a silence. I thought, he calls her honey. I could not imagine what his wife thought, or why she said nothing, or why the silence seemed so long and deep. His words were clearly not addressed to me. He had already told me about the deer. He has never called me anything but Kate. Then it dawned on me. He had told his wife, too, and forgotten that he’d told her. She must have thought he was telling me for the first time, and that, whatever honey has come to mean between them, he now calls me that. I could be wrong, of course. She may not even have been listening, or maybe she never answers at that hour. There we both were, though, together in our silence.

For Kate, everything has started to make too much sense, and to point all in one direction. The comparatively blithe era of Speedboat has segued into twilight time, decline and fall.

But from the highest public matters to the smallest private acts, the mugger, the embezzler, the burglar, the perjurer, tax chiseler, killer, gang enforcer, the plumber, party chairman, salesman, curator, car or TV repairman, officials of the union, officials of the corporation, the archbishop, the numbers runner, the delinquent, the police; from the alley to the statehouse, behind the darkened window or the desk; this is the age of crime. And recently, I think the truth is this, over a period of days and nights some weeks ago, I became part of it.

Adler’s novels employ time like a keyboard, playable in either direction, and proceed unfettered by plot, qualities they share with Robert Walser’s stories and feuilletons, Burroughs’s cut-ups, and Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights. They follow associative patterns we’re not given a key to, conceivably akin to the synonymies expounded in Speedboat:

“So for these purposes, digitalis, adamantine, apple orchard, gonorrhea, labyrinthine, motherfucker, flights of fancy, Duffy’s Tavern, Halley’s Comet, birthday present, xenophobic are all synonyms,” the great professor said. “Synonyms in terms of meter, that is.”

“I see.”

“And words that rhyme,” he said, “are synonyms, in terms of rhyme, with all the words they rhyme with. Cat, gnat, flat. Fang, sang, sprang, you see.”

“Yes.”

“So that in the study of poetics, we have. Rhyme synonyms. And meter synonyms. I leave aside pure synonyms of meaning. There are not really very many. And there are other factors, of course.”

“Of course.”

Jen Fain and Kate Ennis are children of the kind of liberal Jewish family where the Dow Jones Averages are toasted on the father’s birthday. Products of genteel country life and first-rate universities, they entered adulthood expecting the world to be a certain way. Not necessarily their shucked oyster, but at times, at least, a place that would yield something to reason and recognize worthy behavior. Coming of age in the 1950s, setting out for the city in the ’60s, they encountered instead a culture of irony spreading everywhere like kudzu, choking off the oxygen supply, and epidemic dissonance dissolving every solid value. From Pitch Dark:

We watched The Newlywed Game. The moderator had just asked the contestant, a young wife from Virginia, What is your husband’s least favorite rodent? “His least favorite rodent,” she replied, drawling serenely and without hesitation. “Oh, I think that would have to be the saxophone.”

And from Speedboat:

They were saying “Make peace, not war,” and so, the Commander of the Ohio State National Guard testified in the course of the Kent State trials, he threw a rock at them.

A perception of important things becoming lost to history figures in the literature of every era. In Sentimental Education, Flaubert describes a moral and emotional aphasia produced by the Revolution of 1848; the First World War, in Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity, erases an entire code of sentiments particular to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Adler is a cartographer of surface disturbances d’avant-guerre, like Musil in The Man Without Qualities, observing the slow fade of values and ideals associated with liberal Republicanism. One tension in Adler’s novels arises from their narrators’ desire to stay engaged with the world as it worsens, and the evident futility of trying to do so with the tools at hand—training in logic, reflectiveness, criticality, kindness, good manners, and basic morals being clearly inadequate to a criminal era that begins with the Kennedy assassination and the Kitty Genovese story, and runs rampantly on to this day.

That the narrators of Adler’s novels are versions of Renata

Adler by Renata Adler is hardly a question, and barely remarkable, except that Adler’s other writing and what is publicly known about her make these seem even less fictitious than most novels.

It should be added that even if she had named these women Renata Adler, the novels, and Renata Adler, would still be works of fiction; diverse works such as Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Aldo Busi’s Sodomies in Eleven Point, and Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin, among many others in which the narrator or protagonist shares the name of the author, are salutary reminders of why we have fiction. The imagination needs a safe harbor, insured against any documentary form of reality; our lives consist of many things besides facts. In fiction I may incarnate, even in my own name, someone who is not me, a person I might be if I were not constrained by the exigencies of my existence, who has other qualities, different habits of thought, a different sexuality, less money, more money, someone else’s problems, a fondness for other things. Or, the fictional “I” can coincide with myself at every point, but live in a different country, behave differently toward other people, only know people I invent for him, etc.

No current literary label appealingly describes the kind of narratives Speedboat and Pitch Dark are. I doubt that any is needed. Their formal design, of self-contained pieces separated by a line space and periodic chapter breaks, is hardly sui generis, having been used in many different kinds of writing for over a hundred years, in collections of aphorisms, feuilletons, philosophical treatises, compendia like Humphrey Jennings’s Pandaemonium and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, as well as seed catalogues, political pamphlets, and cookbooks, and works of fiction as diverse as Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

The kind of thought debris you find on the internet describes novels in this form as “experimental,” which is predictive of a certain off-putting difficulty and self-indulgent esoterica. Often, too, it is declared by a gatekeeping sort of criticism that anything that deviates far from a nineteenth-century template is “not a novel.” It seems late in the day for such parsing. But in fact, classifications that formerly reflected a delight in all literary forms and the intellectual pleasure of differentiating them—Mary McCarthy’s essays “Novel, Tale, Romance” and “The Fact in Fiction” come to mind—now serve as filtering screens for the literary market, which is currently dominated by aesthetic conservatism of a depressingly conformist ilk: middle-class marriage saved, or ruined, or attacked by vampires.

Adler’s novels concede the necessity of making fiction quicker, more terse, descriptively less elaborate than the traditional thing called a novel, not so much in deference to shrunken attention spans, but as the most plausible way of rendering the distracted, fragmentary quality of contemporary consciousness. Their reportorially even tone is quite distinct from the distorting lyricism found in most novels of sensibility; omitting much of what we expect in first-person narratives, Adler gets at the overfull yet depleted condition we find ourselves in now, peripatetic and restless, ever more deprived of the time and mental space to reflect on what we are really doing, or who we really are. They describe what it’s like to be living now, during this span of time, in our particular country and our particular world. This is what the best novels have always done, and with any luck will continue to do.

(2013)

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Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984–2021
Gary Indiana

The novelist, cultural critic, and indie icon serves up sometimes bitchy, always generous, erudite, and joyful assessments from the last thirty-five years of cutting edge film, art, and literature.

“One of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche.” —The Guardian

Introduction by Christian Lorentzen

Whether he’s describing Tracy Emin or Warhol, the films of Barbet Schroeder (“Schroeder is well aware that life is not a narrative; that we impose form on the movements of chance, contingency, and impulse....”) or the installations of Barbara Kruger (“Kruger compresses the telling exchanges of lived experience that betray how skewed our lives are…”), Indiana is never just describing. His writing is refreshing, erudite, joyful.

Indiana champions shining examples of literary and artistic merit regardless of whether the individual artist or writer is famous; asserts a standard of care and tradition that has nothing to do with the ivory tower establishment; is unafraid to deliver the coup de grâce when someone needs to say the emperor has no clothes; speaks in the same breath—in the same discerning, insolent, eloquent way—about high art and pop culture. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it’s also political, plus it’s a riot of fun on the page.

Here is Gary Indiana on Euro Disney resort park in Marne-la-Valée outside of Paris:

John Berger compares the art of Disney to that of Francis Bacon. He says that the same essential horror lurks in both, and that it springs from the viewer’s imagining: There is nothing else. Even as a child, I understood how unbearable it would be to be trapped inside a cartoon frame.

Isle McElroy’s afterword to the 2025 edition of Orlanda: A Novel by Jacqueline Harpman, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz. Now available from Seven Stories Press.

Afterword by Isle McElroy

The restless, demoralized quality of life under fascism was ingrained in Jacqueline Harpman from an early age. Harpman was born in Belgium in 1929, but her family fled to Morocco to escape the Nazis at the beginning of World War II and did not return to Belgium until after the war. Escape is a common theme in her fiction—at least, in those books of hers translated into English by Ros Schwartz. The impact of both the dictatorship that spurred her exile and the rupture of her leaving home at such a young age is apparent in one of her most popular books, I Who Have Never Known Men. The novel follows a group of thirty-nine women who wake up imprisoned in a bunker, with no memory of why they’re being held captive; they are kept alive by a crew of male guards who sporadically deliver them meals. When the women eventually escape, they find the outside world mystifying and desolate, full of similar bunkers where prisoners have died in captivity. I Who Have Never Known Men is a bleak tale about the unique threats of imprisonment and freedom, a novel in conversation with other feminist dystopian works, like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Before writing this slim novel about living through a misogynistic dystopia, however, Harpman published the quieter, more fantastical novel Orlanda. Unlike I Who Have Never Known Men, where imprisonment and escape are literal actions undertaken by characters, Orlanda approaches those topics from a metaphorical—and at times a metaphysical—angle in order to explore the psychological impact of misogyny and repression on women.

Orlanda, winner of the 1996 Prix Médicis, makes no attempt to hide its debt to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Harpman’s novel opens with a thirty-five-year-old literature professor, Aline Berger, rereading Orlando at a train-station café in Paris in preparation for a seminar she teaches. But Harpman is not writing an ode to Woolf. Rather, Aline is only rereading Orlando out of an obligation to teach the book in her seminar. She would rather crack open the sci-fi novel she has tucked in her bag. Harpman is both indebted to Woolf and attempting to move beyond the celebrated author—she’s writing nearly seventy years after Woolf first published Orlando—for she understands that what served as a challenge to gender norms in 1928 won’t work in 1996. Though Harpman wrote Orlanda in the midst of feminism’s third wave, the book is relatively quiet on some of the era’s primary concerns, like sexual harassment and workplace equality. Instead, Harpman focuses her attention on the psychological impact of gender discrimination and misogyny.

In Orlanda, Aline is bored with her life. Unmarried, she lives with a man out of inertia and convenience; she long ago stopped finding him handsome. She believes herself happy but is severely depressed. This has Betty Friedan written all over it. Harpman, a psychotherapist, brilliantly reimagines this kind of late-century ennui through psychological means. Aline is depressed in large part because she’s been repressing her inner spirit since she was twelve. That spirit—whom Harpman names Orlanda—represents Aline’s masculine counterpart. He is aggressive, confident, and unbelievably horny. Prior to Aline’s train ride, Orlanda gains corporeality when he spies an attractive, young rock journalist named Lucien Lefrène and then wills himself out of Aline’s body and into Lucien’s. 235

Here is where Harpman makes her separation from Woolf most apparent. Whereas, in Orlando, Woolf sought to chart the duality within a single person, in Orlanda, Harpman instead wishes to show why that duality struggles to exist. Set free from Aline, Orlanda experiences a kind of freedom he didn’t know existed when he was entwined with his previous host. Harpman’s interest in the themes of imprisonment and escape are made manifest through the character of Orlanda, and in this way, the book lays the groundwork for these theme’s more literal expression in I Who Have Never Known Men. Orlanda is direct in treating his previous existence, Aline’s repressed masculine energy, as a form of imprisonment. On his own, he achieves an authentic self, pursuing desires that Aline never even considered.

But for Harpman, the erotic charge of the book is less about the union of bodies than it is about the discovery of desire. And the pursuit of desire is tantamount to the pursuit of freedom. What stands out in these passages is not what Orlanda is up to but how Harpman details the scenes. She evokes Orlanda’s escapades with a cheeky, self-conscious modesty that feigns respect for Woolf. Her modesty feels especially curious to a reader in 2025. It occasionally reads like an unnecessary performance—were people really so prudish in the ’90s?—but through it, Harpman calls attention to the way characters perform their roles in the text: Aline as a professor and girlfriend, Orlanda as a toxic boyfriend. The most explicit performance is, unsurprisingly, how these two main characters express their genders. At times, Harpman’s views on gender does capitulate to a frustrating gender essentialism that sees something inherently sexual and free in Orlanda and something demure and sacrificing in Aline. But, this kind of essentialism is necessary to the body-swap trope.

Though Orlanda is not technically a body-swap novel, it borrows from the moralizing impulse traditionally expected of body-swap stories. These stories commonly act as empathy parables, where characters are forced to reckon with how the other half lives. From Mark Twain’s 1881 novel, The Prince and the Pauper, to the 2003 film adaptation of Freaky Friday (loosely based on Mary Rodgers’s 1972 children’s book), body-swap stories force characters to gain a deeper understanding of people whose lives are far distant from their own. Freaky Friday, for instance, forces a mother and daughter to empathize with each other’s plights; when these stories force characters to swap genders, it often results in reductive narratives where men finally see how hard life is for women.

Unsurprisingly, this genre of story is also ideal fodder for erotic writing—a great deal of trans erotica centers on body swaps, including many of the texts I read before coming out. Body-swap stories tend to pick a side—they’re either erotic or chaste—but Harpman slyly situates her novel between the moralizing and the erotic. Orlanda is excited by his new body because Aline would be excited by his body. I’m reminded of Andrea Long Chu’s essay “On Liking Women” where she argues for the simple urgency of longing for femininity as an important part of transitioning. Does Orlanda’s excitement in Lucien’s body make him trans? No, it doesn’t. But it leaves space for an erotic understanding of the self that feels very modern, a sexualized self-love that has become increasingly popular on social media.

Impressively, Harpman not only pins her book between the erotic and the empathetic— she also complicates her characters’ expectations of empathy. Orlanda discovers a great deal about Lucien; this does not, however, lead him to care more deeply for Lucien, as one might expect from a character in a body-swap story. Similarly, as Aline grows closer to Orlanda, she comes to resent the dynamic expression of herself. There is something cunning and malevolent about how the novel proceeds. Harpman does not moralize about understanding the other. Rather, Aline takes advantage of Lucien’s otherness to deepen her relationship with the parts of herself that are antisocial and cruel. By the end of the novel, she accepts those parts of herself she once worked so hard to reject.

Though Orlanda does not, like I Who Have Never Known Men, directly address the global creep toward fascism and dystopia, it accomplishes something more nuanced and, at times, more compelling: the difficult question of how to deal with the problem of being a person. It is a novel of freedom and transformation that refuses to moralize. It is honest in its portrait of envy and desire, in tracing the unsettling addiction a person can have to themself, an arc that feels like a literalization of our contemporary obsession with our social media selves. This is the genius of Harpman’s work: she deftly makes literal the abstractions that shape our lives. What would it look like to give space to the parts of ourselves we’ve been repressing? Her answer—which feels especially radical in an era of personal growth and hyper-psychologizing—is something of a cautionary tale. The problem is not that you might not like what you find. Rather, you might like it a little too much, you might continue embracing that self, to the detriment of the life you were already living.

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ISLE McELROY’s debut novel, The Atmospherians, was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Their second novel, People Collide, was named a best book of 2023 by Vulture, NPR, Vogue and was a New York Times Critics’ Pick. Their third novel, Satellite, will be published by Viking in 2027. Other writing appears in The New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Vulture, The Cut, The Atlantic, Esquire, and elsewhere.

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From the author of I Who Have Never Known Men and We Were Forbidden, Orlanda is a groundbreaking, exquisitely funny novel about a woman whose subconscious mind splinters and finds itself in the body of a young man.

Now in paperback with a new afterword by Isle McElroy for the 30th anniversary of its original publication.

One afternoon in a café across the Gare du Nord train station in Paris, Aline Berger, a literature professor, struggles to re-read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, when an odd feeling comes over her. Suddenly, part of her consciousness splits off and finds itself in the body of an attractive young man named Lucien Lèfrene, who works as a rock journalist. In this newfound body, Aline’s splintered mind names themselves Orlanda in homage to Virginia Woolf as a woman who has now become a man.

Orlanda begins to follow Aline. And when the two meet again in Belgium, Aline subconsciously sheds her prim tendencies for a more assertive presence, as she begins to understand that Orlanda was born from her own psyche. Orlanda is the assertive, confident, and amorous person, who loves men unabashedly, that Aline has always aspired to be but could never become. The more time the two spend together, the less time they can stand to be apart.

Jacqueline Harpman’s lyrical novel is a stunning, remarkably comedic portrait of a woman who is forced to confront every part of her soul and embrace herself fully.

GETTING FREE OF THE MASTER NARRATIVE
BY A. NAOMI PAIK

Along with my elementary-school classmates growing up in Lubbock, Texas, I learned about the 1836 Battle of the Alamo. At a fort in Texas, which was then part of Mexico, American settlers sought freedom from Mexican oppression. They fought to the death inside the fort, leaving no man standing. (As children, we did not ask how the story was known, if no one had lived to tell it.) We watched the John Wayne film that showed the white cowboys as heroes and the Mexican characters as evil. Now, years later, I think that the adults in the school never considered how this narrative might strike the many Mexican American students and teachers. 

Some of them, I can guess, felt the way I did as an Asian American high-school student when my US-history teacher told our class that Japanese Americans were jailed in prison camps during World War II for their own safety, with their support. I entered high school with more than seven hundred students in my grade, but fewer than three hundred and fifty of us remained when I graduated. Did that fact have something to do with what we were taught? Our education was rooted in what Ronald Takaki called the “Master Narrative.” 

It was not until college that I learned a fuller history of the Alamo. Mexico invited white American settlers into Texas to help take over the territory from Indigenous nations who had long lived in these lands. But when the Mexican state abolished slavery, those white settlers revolted, refusing to give up their human “property.” The Battle of the Alamo and the war for Texan independence was a revolt to preserve slavery. 

It has been decades since I attended school in Texas. It seems the education offered there continues to selectively edit history by the unspoken rules of the Master Narrative. As a college professor, I now use excerpts from Texas history textbooks to teach about how language, including the passive voice, can be used to reinforce those rules. Take this short passage: “Some slaves reported that their masters treated them kindly. To protect their investment, some slaveholders provided adequate food and clothing for their slaves. However, severe treatment was very common. Whippings, brandings, and, even worse, torture were all part of American slavery.” 

What do you notice about this passage? “Masters” and “slaveholders” are identified as acting humanely, with kindness and charity, but they disappear when the passage shifts to the passive voice to describe the violence of slavery. Who treated severely? Who whipped, beat, and tortured? And who was on the receiving end of this brutality? The same textbook called enslaved people taken from the shores of Africa “workers” who “immigrated” to the United States. 

I believe that you, the young person reading this book, deserve better. I trust that you can handle the truth. You’re smarter and stronger than we might think! I know that you can face and learn from the hard parts of our history and use that knowledge to create a better present and future. My belief in you is what motivated me to become a scholar and teacher in the first place. My students continue to drive me to study, discover, and tell the truth, even in those times when the truth is rewarded with punishment. My students, and you, make me brave.

The work of Ronald Takaki, the author of this book, helped make my own work possible. Takaki was part of a generation of scholars who helped build ethnic studies, a field of inquiry born out of social movements that confronted structural racism, the laws and practices built into government and other institutions that keep racial and ethnic inequality alive. Ethnic studies arose as people worked to create a more just and equitable world for everyone. On campuses like the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State, students, faculty, campus workers, and community members came together to demand education that they could use to serve their communities. Together, they went on strike, shut down campuses, and created their own shared spaces of learning. 

These organizers and activists understood that education and knowledge are tools of power. Like enslaved people who taught themselves to read in secret, and Indigenous people who held to their languages and traditions even when the government used force to erase them, these activists demanded an education that would empower them to make positive change against oppressive systems.

Their opponents who ran those systems understood the power of education and knowledge, too. Blocking education is a way of blocking power. In response to campus protests in the 1960s, politicians took funds away from public higher education to prevent the growth of an educated working class. Making students take on huge amounts of debt not only puts education out of reach for many but also inspires resentment against educated people. But it is an educated population that creates the foundation for a robust democracy. 

This book comes out of this legacy of knowledge, power, resistance against oppression, and building a better world together. It is an effort toward achieving a US democracy like the one expressed in documents like the Declaration of Independence, which states “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This vision of US democracy is still in a state of becoming. It is yet to be realized. 

As the early decades of the twenty-first century show, our democracy is fragile. All of us must fight for and defend it. Part of that democratic work is understanding US history in all its complexity— the successes and failures, the parts that make us proud and the parts that make us want to do better. Defending democracy requires getting real about why and how we have strayed from core US principles and learning how, as our nation moves forward, we can respond differently to similar challenges. 

The history offered in this book offers many examples of people working together to change the country! One of them was James G. Thompson, a Black soldier who returned from fighting in World War II to fight for equality at home. He and others never stopped believing in US principles, even when they had every reason to do so. As Thompson powerfully stated: “Though these questions often permeate my mind, I love America and am willing to die for the America I know will someday become a reality.” I hope this history inspires and moves you to bring the United States closer to its ideals, to help make it a place defined by equality, liberty, and justice for all. 

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A. NAOMI PAIK is an associate professor of Criminology, Law, & Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She published Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (UNC Press, 2016; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017). Her book Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020, University of California Press), examines the long-developing criminalization of foreign-born people in the United. Her research and teaching interests include comparative ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration. https://naomipaik.com/ 

Celebrate the life of Ernesto "Che" Guevara with up to 50% off all of his books.

ERNESTO GUEVARA DE LA SERNA was born in Rosario, Argentina, on June 14, 1928. While studying for a medical degree in Buenos Aires, he took a trip with his friend Alberto Granado on an old Norton motorcycle through all of Latin America, the basis for The Motorcycle Diaries. During his travels he witnessed the Bolivian revolution in 1953; and, in Guatemala in 1954, the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz by US-backed forces. Forced to leave Guatemala, he went to Mexico City, where he linked up with exiled Cuban revolutionaries and met Fidel Castro in 1955. Che joined their expedition to Cuba, where the revolutionary war began in the Sierra Maestra mountains. At first Che was the troop doctor, and later became Rebel Army commander in July 1957.  Following the rebels’ victory on January 1, 1959, he was a key leader of the new revolutionary government and also of the political organization that in 1965 became the Communist Party of Cuba. He was killed in Bolivia on October 9, 1967.

“I am the person I am not because of the nice things I did, but because of the mistakes I made, the slaps I got…So do not be scared to rebel if someone oppresses you. I am a rebellious woman and I am proud!”
—Marjane Satrapi, Mills College Commencement Speech (2014)

Beloved Iranian and French graphic novelist, film director, and children's book author MARJANE SATRAPI (1969–2026) was born in Rasht, Iran, raised in Tehran, and spent her adulthood in France. Her highly acclaimed autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis (2004) sold millions of copies and was translated into over 100 languages. Detailing her youth marked by the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, and her immigration to Europe, Persepolis was ranked second by the New York Times in a list of best books from the last three decades, and its film adaptation was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Satrapi’s other comic strips include Embroideries (2005) and Chicken with Plums (2006), which won the prize for Best Album at the 2004 Angoulême Comics Festival. In the 2024 anthology Woman, Life, Freedom, Satrapi wrote of the Iranian protest movement: “When history guides us, nightmares cease to haunt us. We can see all roads converging to lead us toward a promising dawn.”

 

 

June marks Stonewall Rememberance Month, aka Pride Month, a celebration of LGBTQIA+ liberation and all that has been won and all that is still left to fight for. While we're delighted to celebrate throughout June, we want to encourage everyone to read, and champion, literature by queer writers throughout the year — not just during Pride Month. That said, now's a great time to stock up.

Celebrate queer, trans, and otherwise LGBTQIA+ writers all year long with some of our favorite works of radical queer literature. Pick up a new book for yourself, or for someone else, and don't forget to tell your friends how much you love them.

We're pleased to share a short interview with Seven Stories author Alex DiFrancesco, whose newest book asks, how do you tell the story of being human in an unfeeling world? A linked collection of speculative short fiction, The Grief Shop follows Gemma, a woman navigating surreal jobs in a near-future dystopia, wherein a cataclysmic event has rendered the population unable to feel emotions "organically."

Gemma must wrestle with the void of indifference. At her many jobs—a grief-infused coffee shop, a boxing gym for pain therapy, a graveyard, etc.—she encounters a range of eccentrics struggling to survive in a world where grief, ecstasy, suffering, and joy are commodities for some to purchase and for others to exploit. Gemma’s path is one of glimmering possibilities, ones with feelings she may not understand or accept.

Along with The Grief Shop, Alex DiFrancesco is the author of the dystopian novel All City, the story collection Transmutation, and the memoir Breaking the Curse. They are the winner of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2022, and their novel All City was the first awards finalist by a transgender author for the Ohioana Book Awards in its eighty-year history. They served as an assistant editor for Sundress Publications in Tennessee, and edited LGBTQIA+ non-fiction for Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Their work has appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, Pacific Standard, Eater, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among others. DiFrancesco lives in Philadelphia.

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The stories in The Grief Shop take place in the wake of a global tragedy, which only accelerated an all-consuming nihilism that your characters then grapple with. This is a world that feels both vaguely removed and, in many ways, innately parallel to our own. I’m wondering how you see The Grief Shop in regards to its elements of realism versus its more dystopian aspects? Did you struggle with how and when to balance familiarity with discombobulation? 

I started writing The Grief Shop in 2022, shortly after the COVID-19 lockdown. I wanted to make it a direct reaction to that tragedy, but as I kept writing, tragedies kept accumulating in the world around me. Rising fascism. The genocide in Palestine. The war in Ukraine. The climate. Eventually, it became clear that "the tragedy" had to be a blank in the book because it was important for me for readers to be able to plug in their biggest tragedy from all the many, many choices. Like any of my dystopian work, this novel is firmly based in reality, with just a little "what if-ing" and peeking down the corridor of what could possibly come. I use my imagination from the platform of the elements of reality that are most inspiring.

Your previous novels, Transmutation and All City, heavily featured both transgender and gender-queer characters. In contrast, transness isn’t an explicit focal point in The Grief Shop. Did this change how you approached writing The Grief Shop and its characters? Are there ways that you interpret The Grief Shop as a queer or queer-adjacent narrative?

The main character, Gemma, is a queer character, though it's not really a focal point of the book. When I was writing All City (which I started writing 13 years ago), there was a dearth of trans and genderqueer characters in literature, and it was important for me to portray them in climate change fiction. That novel also has a sort of "guns blazing" approach to queerness and radical politics. I think my need to be so explicit about such things is still there, just in a different form.

In the story “The Bad Neo-Dadaist,” we’re introduced to a group of artists who solely create nonsensical art pieces using modern culture. Xander, a recurring character throughout The Grief Shop, refers to the content of their art as “Replications, AI shit, nonsensical memes…” Can you say a little bit about how you came up with the idea for the Neo-Dadaists? What role do you see them playing alongside your other characters?

The original Dadaist movement was a reaction to World War I and its atrocities. Dadaism was pretty nonsensical, though firmly based in leftist politics and anti-war sentiments. So, the inspiration for the "Neo-Dadaists" in the book (I put this in quotes because there was an actual Neo-Dadaist movement in the '50s and '60s) was all the nonsense and none of the politics, or hope for a better future, or sincere lampooning of capitalism, or anything that mattered. Just nonsense devoid of meaning. In this world where meaning is something some people, like Gemma, are searching for, the Neo-Dadaists are rejecting it entirely. Except, of course, the Neo-Dadaist Ezra, who finds meaning in everything.

Despite the pervasive numbness Gemma experiences, she’s still beholden to the basic biological necessities of her body. At the end of “Tragedy’s Prophet,” Gemma has a muted emotional reaction to the death of her mother, and instead only feels a “a little gnawing hunger starting to grow in my body” which, she notes, is her sign to go and make dinner. It feels to me like The Grief Shop is partially an exploration into what happens when our mental processes become severed from our physical ones. Was this something you set out to explore when writing the book? What do you feel is important about Gemma’s, and the other The Grief Shop characters, physical and mental divide?

Yes, this was something I consciously set out to explore. At one point in the book, some characters are wondering what they have left to motivate them — morals, ethics, biological drives? And Xander notes that eating and fucking are things that people will always want to do, even if life seems meaningless.

Connie Converse plays a large role in the ending of The Grief Shop; did you originally plan to include Converse in the book when you began writing? What impact has she, and her music, had on your own life?

Connie Converse is a folk musician who's probably best known for vanishing without a trace. I've always loved her music and her legend, but there was something more that motivated me to include her. It has to do with hero-worship of artists, who are, at the end of the day, just humans who happen to make good art. I think this line of thought arose for me because I spend a lot of time reading Nick Cave's Red Hand Files newsletter, where he responds to fan questions. Sometimes his answers are beautiful, and sometimes they're just atrocious, and it really made me think a lot about what an "art hero" is. So Connie Converse, in the book, is Ezra's art hero, and one who can really do no wrong since she ejected herself from the public eye long ago and had been missing ever since. But what Ezra discovers is similar to what I discovered from reading Nick Cave's newsletter — artists are just kinda average people, with opinions and thoughts you may or may not agree with, not people to put on a pedestal and idolize. They can't save us. They're not built to be heroes. They're just people who happen to make art. And you can find whatever meaning you need to in them and their work, but the fact remains that they're just people who make art, not anyone who can save us.

Are there any books in the Seven Stories backlist that you were thinking of while writing The Grief Shop? Or are there any writers whose work you drew from throughout the writing process? 

Some of my favorite SSP backlist books are Chavisa Woods's Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country, Luis Negron's Mundo Cruel, and Youseff Rakah's The Crocodiles. I don't know that they were a direct inspiration for this book, but they're books that have stayed with me since I first read them, and which I come back to in my mind often, so I suppose they probably affect my aesthetics, if nothing else!

Do you have any thoughts or hopes for how readers, whether old or new, might respond to the book? 

I'm always hoping that at least one feral weirdo will see themselves in my work and realize there is a place for their work out there, too. 

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From the author of Transmutation comes a linked collection of speculative short fiction that follows a woman navigating surreal jobs in a near-future dystopia, in which people have become completely numb to their emotions following a cataclysmic event.

How do you tell the story of being human in an unfeeling world?

After an unnamed tragedy renders humanity numb, Gemma must wrestle with the void of indifference. She works a series of jobs—at a grief-infused coffee shop, a boxing gym for pain therapy, a graveyard, and more—and encounters a range of eccentric characters struggling to survive in a world where grief, ecstasy, suffering, and joy are commodities for some to purchase and for others to exploit. Gemma’s path is one of glimmering possibilities, ones with feelings she may not understand or accept.

The Grief Shop is a remarkable meditation on what it is to be—even when the very characteristics that make us human have been stripped away.