Breath, Eyes, Memory

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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview

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With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them. —Sophia Stewart, editor October Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F] What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico. Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF] What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans  the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage. Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F] What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway. Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF] What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel. Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F] What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy. Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F] What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles. Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF] What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style. Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F] What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything. Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS The Great When by Alan Moore [F] What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it. Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF] What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians. Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF] What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy. Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F] What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English. Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F] What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family. Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF] What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences. Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F] What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers. Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF] What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence. Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF] What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy, Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F] What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel. Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF] What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion. Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F] What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut. Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF] What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath. Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F] What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language. Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF] What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare. Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF] What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet. Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF] What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way. Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF] What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening. Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF] What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description. Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF] What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager. Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F] What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy. Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF] What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem). Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F] What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village. Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF] What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee. Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF] What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance. Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF] What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years? Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB [millions_email] The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF] What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al. Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS Salvage by Dionne Brand  What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return. Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS Masquerade by Mike Fu [F] What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend. Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS November The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F] What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler. Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F] What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982. Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF] What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more. Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F] What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan. Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF] What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu. Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF] What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture. Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F] What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy. Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F] What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues. Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F] What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss. Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F] What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem. Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF] What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century. Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time. Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF] What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic. Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF] What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music. Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF] What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners. Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F] What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery. Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF] What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life. Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F] What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide. Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF] What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site. Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF Cher by Cher [NF] What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it. Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F] What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself. Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction.  —DF American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF] What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my! Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF] What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control. Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS December Rental House by Weike Wang [F] What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship. Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem. Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F] What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop. Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]  What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis. Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F] What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media. Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F] What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse. Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF] What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt. Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF] What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S. Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F] What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle. Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F] What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel. Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F] What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories. Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F] What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them. Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com. [millions_email]

Edwidge Danticat Depicts a New Haiti

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“Sometimes people know our most vulnerable places,” Edwidge Danticat says. “Because of that, we do things we know we shouldn’t do—things that have tragic outcomes. This is the kind of conflict that I’m drawn to: people asking very hard questions.” In Danticat’s new collection, Everything Inside, these questions may explore romantic infidelity, broken pacts, or the identity of a long-lost parent; sometimes, they involve the labyrinthine question of whether to return to Haiti—the country—from Little Haiti in Miami, where many of the stories take place. Danticat says that above all, she wished to “show all the layers” of the women in her new stories when they make their decisions—good, bad, and everything in between. And it is this core idea—women faced with choices at once mundane and magnitudinous—that perhaps best characterizes Everything Inside. Danticat’s earliest fiction was dense with blood and violence, steeped in Haiti’s past: the history of Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier’s tyrannical regimes and the horrific presence of the Tonton Macoutes, the Duvaliers’ legendarily brutal, murderous paramilitary force. In “Children of the Sea,” one of the stories from Krik? Krak!, the Macoutes’ excesses are described in excruciating detail: They make family members rape each other in front them, then murder them, acting with the impunity of their belief that vodou protects them. These earlier works subtly nod to Haiti’s other historic moments of violence, from the brutalities of the French during the slave trade to the bloodshed during the former slaves’ epochal takeover of Haiti in 1791, which made it, in 1804, the first free black republic in the Americas. But Haiti’s history is also one of astonishing rebellion and of ordinary people just trying to get by—facts often ignored by American media, which insists on painting Haiti as an epicenter of suffering. This is what Danticat’s fiction has sought to capture, too, through the tenderness and resilience of its characters. Rather than focusing solely on the ravages, she also shows Haiti’s beauty, geographically and culturally. Her work has always been quietly revolutionary in both its explicit depiction of tragedy and its examination of deep interpersonal relationships. Danticat’s newest collection takes this idea further, presenting Haitians, Americans, and Haitian-Americans who have varying degrees of distance from the Caribbean nation. Some of the characters have never experienced the horrors that Danticat’s earlier characters fled; many live in America. In these stories, Haiti’s enduring presence feels more ethereal—urgent in a different way for this new generation. Everything Inside, Danticat says, is “a personal milestone”—the result of trying something new. She wanted to create a story collection that was, inarguably, a collection of stories, rather than, as with The Dew Breaker or Claire of the Sea Light, a text that can be interpreted as a novel in fragments. The narratives in Everything Inside contain “echoes” of each other, she notes, and she points out that the tales, though nonlinear, span a year. Danticat says that she composed Krik? Krak! and Breath, Eyes, Memory in her twenties; this latest book comes as she turns 50, and so, she adds, it signals a turning point for her. Danticat says that these new characters may be thought of as the grandchildren of the characters in Krik? Krak!, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and The Dew Breaker. In those works, she notes, the protagonists were “brand-new, face-to-face with exile”: they cohabited with horror, unable to escape, for long, the terrors of Haiti’s dictatorial regimes. In Everything Inside, however, the characters include people born in America—they’re from a generation that knows of Haiti’s blood-drenched past but does not feel its weight to such an oceanic degree as the protagonists in her earliest books. These new characters “have a different relationship to Haiti,” she argues. “Most of the characters have been in America for a while. They’re sort of safer than their parents and grandparents were.” [millions_ad] Rather than facing Haiti’s gunmen and ghosts, this post–Krik? Krak! generation is navigating more quotidian concerns such as romantic breakups and sending kids to college. Danticat says that at the same time, they are “dealing with interpersonal exile”—separated from each other by heartbreak and painful secrets. These lacunae permeate Everything Inside. Exile, to be sure, has always defined Danticat’s work, in all of its protean, poignant forms—be it political, geographic, cultural, or existential. And though Everything Inside focuses perhaps most on interpersonal distances, Danticat’s American characters are still connected to Haiti, and so, she observes, they must face “the flip side of exile: whether or not to return.” When these characters do travel to Haiti, she notes, they don’t wish solely to see monuments to loss; they want to see “the pretty places,” too—“the multiplicity of Haiti and of their ancestry.” Of course, political exile still appears; in one story, a xenophobic Caribbean minister expresses Trump-like anti-immigrant rhetoric. But generally, these are tales of a different exile, tales of emotional severance and reconnection. Some of Danticat’s protagonists are women who have been wronged, deceived, or dismissed, often by men—though sometimes, it is other women who wrong them. (The latter cases, she says, were “important” to show; her women are not blameless but are morally complex.) In one narrative, a woman encounters a married man whom she fell in love with before the 2010 Haitian earthquake, when he lost his family and disappeared from her life; their feelings are complicated, as she realizes that he both is and isn’t the man she once pined for. In another, a girl who doesn’t know her father learns that he is dying and must decide whether to ignore him or go see him. With powerful grace, Danticat captures the moment when the woman sees her father’s dead body; they are worlds apart yet linked by a quiet intimacy. And this remarkable, moving tenderness is perhaps the collection’s most persistent theme. Women find moments of special nearness to other women and to men. In one scene, a woman touches her tattoo to that of her roommate, both tattoos signifying their emotional growth. In an extraordinary moment from another story, a woman, her friend, and her husband lie together in bed in the shadows, holding each other, touching, kissing, losing, at some sense, the knowledge of whose body is whose—a moment of unabashed love, irrespective of gender or body, all the more salient because the protagonist’s husband leaves her afterward for the friend. These stories contain layers of betrayal and secrecy, but their characters find ways to commiserate, forgive, or at least attempt to understand the ones who have hurt them. It’s important, Danticat says, that Everything Inside not be read purely as a text of a particular cultural moment—partly because she considers books to be “always behind the cultural moment”—but rather as something as much of the present as the past and future. She decries what she identifies as the day-to-day grotesquerie of the American political present. Obliquely, her book, with its focus on transnational figures who have family in Haiti and America, critiques both the closed-border sentiments of the Trump administration and governmental corruption in Haiti. Her characters “are in the middle” of all this, she says, just “trying to keep it together” in a volatile world. But in the end, Danticat says, this is a collection about people and the complex interactions and decisions they share. Its tenderness feels striking in a hectic 2019. In the end, we are left with these characters’ brutal, banal, and beautiful moments, like a wide night luminous, every so often, with firefly stars. This piece was produced in partnership with Publishers Weekly and also appeared on publishersweekly.com. [millions_email]

But We Are Here: Reading Edwidge Danticat in the Age of #MeToo

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On April 16, 2018, Junot Díaz came forward in a daring New Yorker piece sharing his story as a survivor of childhood sexual assault. Fast-forward to May 4—Díaz appears once more in newspapers, this time in the New York Times, as the subject of accusations of sexual misconduct (“The Writer Zinzi Clemmons Accuses Junot Díaz of Forcibly Kissing Her”). Clemmons was quickly supported by Carmen Maria Machado and Monica Byrne, both of whom gave accounts of being subject to disproportionate aggression from Díaz. This came on the same day as the Swedish Academy’s announcement that no Nobel Prize in Literature would be awarded this year, “in view of the currently diminished Academy and the reduced public confidence in the Academy.” This followed the disgrace of Jean-Claude Arnault, husband of Academy member Katarina Frostenson; Arnault faces allegations of sexual assault from 18 women as well as an investigation over the leak of the names of seven Nobel literature laureates. Three days later, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman resigned following a #MeToo exposé as four women, including Michelle Manning Barish and Tanya Selvaratnam, revealed accounts of physical and emotional abuse at his hands. The #MeToo movement has become a formidable force following the fall of media mogul and serial abuser Harvey Weinstein—and subsequent revelations of misconduct surrounding R. Kelly, Aziz Ansari, and James Franco, just to name a few. The movement became so widespread that the Time “Person of the Year” was named “The Silence Breakers.” The seeds of #MeToo were planted more than 10 years ago with the work of activist Tarana Burke (whose thoughtful reflections can be found here). Burke’s original campaign offered survivors of sexual violence, mainly women of color, an avenue to ask for help with the neutral, short signal of “Me Too.” Her work is predicated on the statistically proven greater likelihood of women of color becoming victims of domestic violence and/or sexual assault. Violence against women, understood as a tool for continued control and subjugation, occurs at higher rates in poor and immigrant communities. Undocumented immigrants, poor women of color and trans women also disproportionately underreport sexual violence, meaning that many continue to suffer in silence. #MeToo is thus crucially not just an Anglo-American, white phenomenon, and it is spreading around the world. Women in China, for example, are beginning to use the hashtag (cleverly dodging censors with the homophone #MiTu, meaning “rice bunny”), chiming in with women from Finland, Spain, Vietnam, and more. Where there is patriarchy and where male power has been institutionally ratified, #MeToo will naturally (and rightfully) put down roots. The literary community is no exception and must contend with its own ability to provide responses. How can writers speak for those just learning to tell their stories? Can we? Should we? Can any writer with the privilege of success, class, whiteness, or maleness even ethically tackle the complexities of contemporary gender politics? Here’s where Edwidge Danticat steps in. A remarkably prolific author, Danticat is particularly dexterous with genre, stepping in and out of the parameters of novel, short story, testimonial, and biography throughout her oeuvre. Her most recent publication, The Art of Death (Graywolf Press, July 2017), was nominated for the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and is impressive in demonstrating her wide reading as well as talent for deeply introspective prose as she reflects on her mother’s death. Raised in Haiti before moving to Brooklyn, N.Y., at the age of 12, Danticat’s works have been doing the work of #MeToo for over a decade longer than the movement has existed. In particular, her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, revolves around the stories of women who have suffered the trauma of sexual violation. Sophie Caco, the narrator of the story, is sexually abused by her mother within the tradition of “testing,” where daughters are penetrated to verify that their hymens are intact, and therefore their virginity too. Raised by her Tante Atie after her mother, Martine, flees Haiti, Sophie only learns later that Martine was raped by a Tonton Macoute, one of François Duvalier’s army. This results in Sophie’s birth and Martine’s lifelong nightmares and psychosis. Martine’s fears add to her socially inherited paranoia over Sophie’s virginity, leading to the testing and the accompanying story of the Haitian “Marassas.” Martine narrates: They were the same person, duplicated in two. They looked the same, talked the same, walked the same. The love between a mother and daughter is deeper than the sea. You would leave me for an old man who you didn’t know the year before. You and I we could be like Marassas. Ironically, however, Sophie mirrors Martine in another way; they both become victims of sexual violence through the socially sanctioned abuses of power of the Tonton Macoutes as well as the patriarchal cult of virginity. Plagued by nightmares and delusions of the voice of her rapist speaking to her from her fetus, Martine eventually kills herself by stabbing her stomach 17 times. It is crucial in Breath, Eyes, Memory that Sophie and Martine are “twinned,” as it is only through Sophie that Martine’s story is told. Sophie as a foil for Martine demonstrates that for every woman who has been able to overcome her trauma, there are others who are unable—whose present remains overwhelmed by their past, obstructing any meaningful catharsis. Only in death does Martine triumph, as she is dressed by Sophie in bright red, “too loud a color for a burial.” Martine thus “would look like a Jezebel, hot-blooded Erzulie who feared no men, but rather made them her slaves, raped them, and killed them” (emphasis author’s). The metaphor for Martine as Erzulie, a Vodou goddess with different forms, combines within Martine a myriad of female characters. Earlier in the text, Martine is compared to the maternal Erzulie Dantor, “the healer of all women and the desire of all men.” At the end of the text, however, the “hot-blooded Erzulie” is a manifestation of the flirty and sensual Erzulie Freda. The binary of the Madonna-whore is thus challenged within the Erzulie figure, while victims of sexual assault are underscored as not necessarily one or the other. Danticat’s writing also captures the complexity of abuses of power that have plagued the #MeToo movement as detractors respond to the flood of testimonies in varied ways. Notably, the New York Times published an opinion piece defending Aziz Ansari’s actions, claiming he could not have been expected to know Grace’s (not her real name) discomfort and that “The insidious attempt by some women to criminalize awkward, gross and entitled sex takes women back to the days of smelling salts and fainting couches.” More recently, director Roman Polanski (of The Pianist fame) sued the Oscars academy following his expulsion after sexual assault revelations against him, calling the #MeToo movement “mass hysteria.” Earlier in May, Chitra Ramaswamy questioned how to respond to Junot Díaz being both a victim and perpetrator of sexual assault and misconduct. This writer suggests Danticat’s The Dew Breaker (2004) as a launchpad for discussion. The Dew Breaker features nine stories, three of which revolve around “the Dew Breaker” (translated from chouket laroze, a colloquialism for “torturer” in Haitian Creole), three that concern Haitian men he rents a basement apartment to (“Seven,” “Monkey Tails,” “Night Talkers”), and three affiliated to this network (“The Bridal Seamstress,” “Water Child,” “Funeral Singer”). The Dew Breaker’s life in Brooklyn and Florida remains plagued by insecurity over the revelation of his past, while the family members of his victims continue to agonize over the deaths or traumas he is responsible for. To consider Danticat’s themes of guilt, responsibility, and concealment is to reflect on consent and power outside the legal system and to demand better from men. Rather than indulging female weakness or encouraging female delicacy, men are to be held accountable for their past mistakes while coming to terms with the violence they are capable of, the violence that has long been enabled by a patriarchal society, just as the Dew Breaker himself was authorized by Duvalier’s dictatorship. The Dew Breaker demonstrates that victims are far from weak, rather that complicity with systems of power has long-term consequences for abusers and victims alike, as well as their families. Power and its use do not produce a binary of good and evil, but instead a web of concealment, shame, guilt, anger, and trauma. The use of the short story cycle and anachronistic form is particularly potent in connecting narratively independent pieces in a thematic consideration of the consequences of violence, from both the perspective of the abuser and the victims. Like many of the stories of #MeToo, the story of the Dew Breaker is not straightforward, and Danticat avoids a prescriptivist approach to the revelation of his crimes. What is more important, however, is the beginning of a larger conversation over who holds power, the conditioning of men toward violence, and the ability of victims (like “the seamstress,” for example) to resist or to tell their stories. As the first book in Danticat’s career that shifts toward an extended interrogation of paternal relationships, The Dew Breaker is a particularly useful text in raising questions of gendered power as well as the extent to which abusers are and remain culpable for their actions. As a female African-Haitian-American writer (as Danticat refers to herself in her essay “AHA!”), Danticat also descends from a rich tradition of black women’s writing as well as Haitian political writing. Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, for example, (in Martin Munro’s Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, 2010) identifies Danticat’s work as addressing similar themes to black women’s writing in America (think Phillis Wheatley, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker), such as female relationships, motherhood, and political resistance. Female testimony combats the erasure of women’s histories. In The Farming of Bones (1998), for example, narrator Amabelle Desir tells the story of the 1937 Parsley Massacre, where Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the murders of thousands of Haitians and Haitian Dominicans. Amabelle’s story places women in the historical narrative, reminding readers that women were there and providing a testimony (if fictional) to the lives lost. On the other hand, Danticat descends also from a Francophone Haitian literary tradition and names amongst her inspirations Frankétienne and Marxist Jacques Roumain, as well as novelist-journalist Dany Laferrière. In particular, The Dew Breaker makes a reference in its title to Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew), published in 1944. Haitian literature is inseparable from its political history, which has long identified itself with leftist resistance dating from the 1804 Revolution where Haiti became the first black republic, the only to be formed from a successful slave revolt. Threads, therefore, of the right of individuals to become self-fulfilled and self-determined have long characterized Haitian literature. The combination of Haitian and black women’s writing traditions within Danticat’s oeuvre thus generates a body of work interested in the rights of women, writing in the spirit of universal egalitarianism, and resisting dominant political structures including violent dictatorships and patriarchy. This political imperative has remained consistent and unwavering, combining the personal with grand political narratives and seeing both as necessarily co-existent. Danticat’s 1996 essay “We Are Ugly, but We Are Here,” for instance, details the continued resistance of Haitian women from the time of Spanish colonialism dating from the murder of Taino Queen Anacaona, who chose to die rather than become a concubine to the invaders. The figure of Anacaona simultaneously resists colonial exploitation and sexual violence, while predating the destruction of the Taino community and the formation of the African diaspora through slavery in Haiti. The “daughters” of Anacaona, bearing the same spirit of resistance and female solidarity, exist throughout Danticat’s work, creating matrilineal communities of women holding each other up through the oral tradition of storytelling, as seen in the short story collection Krik? Krak! (1996). Formed of nine short stories, the collection as a whole connects the lives of “Women Like Us” (the title of the epilogue), as the protagonists of all nine stories are revealed to be connected. A daughter visits her mother who has been imprisoned for being a witch in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven”; a mother-daughter pair attend the funeral of “boat-people” in “Caroline’s Wedding”; the story of Célianne, victim of rape and one of the drowned, is told in “Children of the Sea.” The lives of women are revealed to be linked and brought together by shared tradition and narrative, while the text acts as testimony for their lives, putting their stories on the page just as #MeToo has done for women. As Nick Nesbitt astutely comments, “Such a politics of solidarity would erase distinctions of the personal and political that have historically allowed for various forms of injustice to continue unabated in the ‘private’ sphere.” Danticat’s writing proves that discussions of politics, Haitian dictatorships, and the formation of the Haitian diaspora are ultimately only rendered complete when private, individual lives are also considered. Regardless of what you think of the movement or how uncomfortable female confession makes you, #MeToo is not going away anytime soon. To quote Danticat from “We Are Ugly”: “The daughters of Anacaona. We have stumbled, but have not fallen. We are ill-favored, but we still endure. Every once in a while, we must scream this as far as the wind can carry our voices: We are ugly, but we are here! And here to stay.” To read Danticat is to confront the same issues that the #MeToo movement does—issues of gender politics, female solidarity and resistance as well as the construction of male roles in patriarchal societies. As #MeToo goes global, we need to think about the stories of women around the world—and the works of Edwidge Danticat are as good a place as ever to begin. Image: Flickr/editrrix

A Year in Reading: Jacqueline Woodson

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2016 was a strange year in so many ways.  We were at once confused and hopeful about the coming elections, I was traveling way too much -- first because of the National Book Award for my memoir Brown Girl Dreaming and then for my novel Another Brooklyn.  I was talking about writing more than I was writing and that was making me cranky.  I was away from my family and that was making THEM cranky. Then we were planning our trip abroad and gut renovation so we were all scattered and crazed.  Reading became a balm for all of us.  In the days I was home, time was spent reading to my eight-year-old.  He had turned a corner as a reader and listener so we moved from the younger graphics -- mainly his favorite book of all time: The Crock Ate My Homework -- to deeper books like Jason Reynolds’s As Brave As You and later, Ghost, both of which are so brilliantly written that I often tried to move bedtime up a bit to get back to our nightly readings.  At the same time, my daughter was grumbling her way through the (still assigned!) Lord of the Flies, (poor child, I felt her pain!) and finding comfort in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik Krak.  Krik Krak for my daughter, was the Danticat gateway.  She went on to devour Brother, I’m Dying, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and Untwine.  I was more than thrilled to see these books stacked beside her bed and, in the morning, one or the other of them brought down to the breakfast table.  Losing a teenager to Danticat is not really losing a teenager.  The child that re-emerged was a bit deeper, a bit kinder.  Then there was my partner -- a doctor by day and a reader by night.  The stack of books grew high beside her bed, got hauled up to the library, only to be replaced by a new stack.  The book she loved the most was Carolina De Robertis's The God’s Of Tango. It came with us to France this summer and got passed around our extended family.  Not one of the people who opened that book didn’t love it.  I’d have to say The Gods of Tango is on the list of amazing books written in my lifetime. I would love to spend the rest of this commentary telling anyone who wants to listen about The Gods of Tango but I won’t.  Just read it. Or listen to it on audio. Or do both.  The same of anything Ann Patchett puts a pen to.  Commonwealth – Wow!!  State of Wonder -- Jeez -- how did she do that?!  Bel Canto -- What…?! Audio was big for me this year.  Spending so much time on planes and trains, the words of other writers were healing, reminding me of why I write.  So I plowed through Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Kaitlyn Greenidge’s We Love You, Charlie Freeman, Naomi Jackson’s The Star Side of Bird Hill, Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs, Brit Bennett’s The Mothers and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. Here’s the truth about me -- while my partner will read a book she doesn’t really like until the last word, I will not finish a book I don’t love to the bone. Life is too short. There are far too many good books out there. I’m looking forward to finishing more of the ones I love. More from A Year in Reading 2016 Do you love Year in Reading and the amazing books and arts content that The Millions produces year round? We are asking readers for support to ensure that The Millions can stay vibrant for years to come. Please click here to learn about several simple ways you can support The Millions now. Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005