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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
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
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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.
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“Horrible things happen everywhere”: The Millions Interview with Craig Thompson
Habibi, Craig Thompson’s first graphic novel in eight years, is a sorrowful epic pipe dream of Muslim culture filtered through a Westernized lens. It tells the story of Dodola and Zam, two child slaves living in a vicious universe in which rape and murder are assumed facts of life. The details can be jarring. The soldiers in his fictional Arabian Nights-inspired kingdom of Wanatolia have daggers but no guns, while street vendors sell slaves in chains next to DVD stands. Still, one need change only one or two small facts of our history and his book could serve as a cousin to the non-fiction comics journalism of Joe Sacco.
Thompson spent a day on most pages of his book. Certain pages, the ones that include intricate Middle Eastern designs, took three days. The cartoonish surrealism of Thompson’s first book Good-bye, Chunky Rice and the simplified, stripped-down drawings in his account of first love in Blankets offered some solace against depictions of abuse and sexual frustration. But the exotic, overbearing detail of Habibi can disturb. The beauty of the book both attracts and alienates.
I met Thompson at the home of mutual friends, a Spanish couple, a writer and painter, in Iowa City on the morning of September 25. The hotels in town were overbooked thanks to a Saturday football game, so he had stayed there the night before. He met me at the door, wearing yesterday’s shirt, looking well-rested. We sat in a huge white room. Sunlight came in from long vertical windows hitting several paintings, including a few of recognizable spots in Iowa City. A cat came by occasionally to rub up against our legs. What follows is a pared-down version of our interview.
The Millions: Was there any moment as you were beginning this book when you sought permission to write it? You are a white person from a very Christian family in Wisconsin. Was there any voice in the back of your head saying, “You don’t get to write about black people or Arab people in the Muslim world”?
Craig Thompson: I didn’t worry about that specifically, partly because the two characters -- Dodola and Zam, an Arab girl and a black boy -- delivered themselves fully realized from my subconscious. So they already were characters that existed outside of me and they dictated a lot of the things they did. I trusted the Turkish writer Elif Shafak -- she wrote The Bastard of Istanbul -- who describes fiction as a way to live other lives and in other worlds. You don’t need to have those experiences directly. It’s almost a shamanistic journey where by tapping your own imagination you access these other roles. And I trusted that.
With all my work, I struggle with giving myself permission to do it. And that comes from coming from a very religious household and a very anti-art household.
I come from very lower-working-class roots, so it’s not like my parents wanted me to have a more high-powered career, like being a doctor. They actually wanted me to have a more modest career, like being an electrician, something that’s very practical. [They wanted me to do] something that serves society rather than [something that] serves oneself, which is their perception of art. Every day I struggle with allowing myself to be an artist. And I have to try to trust the instinct that hopefully art also helps other people and not just oneself.
TM: Do you graft a Christian ethos onto your art then?
CT: Well, for me the Christian ethos is not to judge other people. No human can judge another. I think I am true to that in my art. When you’re a writer, you’re not judging your characters. You can live a lot of different roles on paper without judgment.
TM: A lot of Orientalist art from the 19th century is aesthetically pleasing, but it’s all in service to an ideology that has caused an incredible amount of destruction in the world. How do you square that problem, especially in the current era when there are an enormous amount of issues with the way people regard Islam, the Muslim world and the Arab world?
CT: Well, that exactly is the intent [of the book], to bring up the correlations between the turn-of-the-19th-century Orientalism with the new brand of Orientalism that exists throughout the world, this new Islamophobia and this labeling of people as the other. I was also thinking not of Orientalism, [but of] the Arabian Nights as a genre, like cowboys-and-Indians. So cowboys-and-Indians is a sensationalized version of the history of the American West and doesn’t really reflect reality. So I wanted to work with the Arabian Nights genre in the same way and steal from all these tropes and not shy away from their inappropriateness.
There’s a very offensive Islamophobia that happens in the media, especially the conservative media. But then there’s also this overly-PC, liberal reaction to tiptoe around a lot of subjects which I think is its own form of insult, because the Muslims I know are very open-minded people and would rather engage in a dialogue.
I don’t know if I’m sidestepping the question, but the book all along was a mash-up of the sacred medium of holy books, like the Koran and the Bible, and the vulgar pulp medium of comic books. For me Orientalism is like a comic book, like superhero comics, with all the sexism built into it. Orientalism is eroticized and sensationalized and you could say the same for superheroes.
TM: You were drawing these very intricate decorations all by hand, and if you look closely you can see that. This part of the decoration [pointing to one part of a random page] is different from that one, even though they follow the same pattern. I imagine the labor that went into that was extremely intensive. By doing these patterns you were aping what an artisan from this other part of the world does. Was that your own personal way of getting into the mindset of the culture?
CT: You’re nailing it exactly. I hate using the terms East and West because they are purely imaginative boundaries. But in the Western world, at least, art is placed on this pedestal. There’s so much ego tied up in the artistic process. In contemporary art, in fine arts, it’s more common for the artist to be more of an overseer, where they come up with the concept, but then they dictate all the actual labor to a bunch of unnamed assistants. And that’s always really offensive to me. We cartoonists in general have a more modest approach to our work where it’s just got to be us alone in our studio for hours and hours. You can’t fake comics really, or actually you probably could, but not in the old-fashioned alternative comics world. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, there’s all these artisans and craftsmen who work meticulously and have a lot more skill, but do it without the monetary reward and the egotistical reward. So I did want to pay tribute to those people. But even that sounds a little pretentious, because I was still just working with the very malleable form of ink on paper. I’m not carving wood or laying tile-work or doing something much more complex.
In a very small way I wanted to pay tribute to that and just be responsible for every single drop of ink on the paper. Throughout the book, people were pressuring me to get an intern to help me out. They could see that was wearing myself down a bit. But it was just really important in the end to make sure that every single line was my own. It was an act of defiance against the digital age where everyone is rubberstamping everything.
TM: You open each of your books with a major trauma that shadows the rest of the narratives.
CT: Well, it’s not a conscious thing, but it’s interesting what you say about how it shadows everything after. I think that’s similar to our own lives and the traumas we carry. To some degree, you’re always carrying that with you. Certainly you’re always carrying your inner child with you and the damages that happen to that child. And other people aren’t aware of it. Only you are. I like that you say that. That resonates with me.
TM: One of the issues I have with seeing major traumas in the opening pages of your books is that it’s impossible for me to, say, forgive your parents when I read Blankets for what they do early on, or to believe in any real good in the world of Habibi because of what I see in the opening pages.
CT: Well then how do you live in the reality of our world?
TM: I’m not very forgiving.
CT: (laughs) I was waiting at a bus stop once and I was assaulted by six drunken rednecks. Waiting at the bus stop with me was this retarded man and they didn’t hurt either of us badly, but they pushed him to the ground and kicked him a couple of times and spit on him. And of course after they left, this retarded man was bawling. And he came to sit with me on the bus. And he was just torn to pieces. “Why do people do this?” he said. I said, “Something like this could happen to anyone.” He’s like, “I don’t want to live in Portland anymore if something like this could happen.” And I was like, “This could happen anywhere. It’s just random that it happened in that location.” He was like, “Why would I want to live in this world anymore?” He was just saying it in this very pleading way. It was this really interesting dialogue I had with this mentally disabled man. And I was just trying to encourage him. “Yes, this could happen anywhere. Horrible things happen everywhere.” He was telling me what he was doing. He was going to see a friend. I said, “You’re going to see a friend. There’s good people in the world. That’s what you have to focus on.” At the end of our bus ride he was as happy as could be. He was really happy to make a connection on the bus. He was standing at the door of the bus, like “Bye friend!” He was really happy.
I think that’s a theme in my work. The world is a horrible place and humans do horrible things to each other and you have to work for positive energy and to carve out a place of safety and shelter within each other.
I open Blankets with a lot of negativity because I wanted to communicate to the reader why Christianity was so important to me as a child. It really was this shelter. I wasn’t really a happy child. I was an unhappy child and not comfortable in my skin and not comfortable in my environment so, like a lot of people, all my comfort and solace was in religion. Even at that tiny age.
TM: There is something about the world of Habibi that is unrelentingly vicious. In the world of Blankets you offer some moments of escapism, but I never felt there was a way to escape Habibi. I was thinking of Cormac McCarthy as I was reading Habibi. [I open a random page of Blankets]. I just pulled this up, but the mere fact that you can just walk in the snow and enjoy nature and have some kind of breathing space resonates in Blankets. I don’t know if you saw that difference as well.
CT: I love Cormac McCarthy. I think the essential philosophy to his work is the viciousness of human existence and that may be true of Michael Haneke too. I would acknowledge both of them as inspirations. But I’m more of a positive nihilist. I have a nihilistic view of humanity and a belief that humans will wipe each other out of existence. But that makes it even more important to labor in a positive way now. That energy continues on. I think life continues on whether or not the human species will. With Habibi, I was processing some major heartbreaks and I was processing health problems. I was processing a lot of frustrations with the art world or at least the comics industry.
TM: What were the health problems?
CT: Some of that is in Carnet De Voyage [Thompson’s account of his trip to Morocco and his European book tour for Blankets]. A very crippling hand pain, at the time. I had to take months off at a time where I couldn’t draw. So there was that sense of despair around: “Do I have to figure out a different career?” “Will I be able to draw for many more years of my life?” So there was a lot of anxiety caught up in what I was passionate about doing: drawing.
TM: I may be sounding like your parents now. But: You have hand pain. You suffered heartbreak. The industry that you’re in, like everything in publishing, is falling apart.
CT: “Unprofessional” might be a good word.
TM: But how does that lead to writing about child sex slaves?
CT: “Child slaves.” I think for a child those two terms feel synonymous. And there’s more slavery in the world now than ever before in human history. And capitalism and global trade are probably the main fuel for that. Wealth in the Western world only feeds off poverty and exploitation of people in other countries. So there’s processing that American guilt of being a participant in this imperialistic machine.
I’ve always wanted to do a book about sexual trauma. In Blankets, I talk briefly about being molested as a child, but that’s almost insignificant [compared] to some people who were very close to me as a young kid who were raped. Before I knew any positive form of sexuality, I knew rape. Growing up -- and I grew up in a small town -– I assumed that every woman was raped. And that was my social circle. And ironically, once I moved away and lived in bigger cities, that proportion got watered down so it wasn’t like everyone I knew was raped. But everyone has either been raped or abused or had some spiritual abuse imposed on them through religious dogma or just had a natural clumsy awakening into sexuality.
TM: I know you were going for something that bordered on magic realism. But looking at the landscape of this book, I don’t think you have to change too much to make it something that could take place in our world as we know it. Here we have a boat in the middle of the desert. How did you walk that line where if you changed one millimeter of a percentage of the laws of physics you could imagine those things existing?
CT: That’s a good question. I think I saw this after I had written this into the book. There’s these photos of the Aral Sea after a big drought and there’s all these fishing boats stranded in desert, basically. That’s a very realistic little detail. The things that I chose to exclude were guns and television sets. I didn’t want people in slums all hanging out around television sets the way they would in reality. So in a way I took away things that to me were boring to draw or more mundane or things I just wasn’t interested in.
TM: Star Wars.
CT: Star Wars? You must have read this in another interview then.
TM: No, because I was thinking of it as I was reading it. The boat looked like the Jabba the Hut skiff that was in the middle of the desert. And then there’s the sand guys with the masks…
CT: Yes, the Tusken Raiders.
TM: Did you do that and think, “Oh man, I just cribbed from George Lucas, who cribbed from other people”? Or did you pay tribute to him consciously?
CT: I can’t recall. I do know that I was thinking of the book in a Star Wars-y way. And I’ve described it this way in interviews that it doesn’t take place in any specific geography or time like Star Wars, which supposedly took place long long ago in a galaxy far far away.
That was always disrupting to me as a child that this futuristic-looking world actually happened “long long ago.” And also that he was filming all these things in North Africa and his other-planet landscape was all drawing from the influence of North Africa. In Carnet I talk about going to Morocco and seeing everybody in Jawa costumes. And I was really using a lot of those hooded djellabas in Habibi so I was thinking this is basically Star Wars. I’m not meticulously researching any place. I wouldn’t want to. I wouldn’t want to get caught up in the real details, the historical, heavily researched details, because there was this emotional core, this very heavy relationship that I wanted to focus on. And so the rest of it was collage. It was taking elements from different places and cultures, which is also Star Wars, I suppose.
TM: Given the history of racism in comics, when you sat down and drew these characters, were you thinking: “No that doesn’t look quite right, no I can’t do that”?
CT: I don’t think I worried about it much. I feel like Zam is drawn very realistically for cartoon-y style. Whereas other characters, like Hyacinth in the harem, is a weird caricature of certain guy. And I just embraced that. I don’t think of it in an ethnic way. I just think of it as a cartoonish caricature to make him that strange lunkish build. And there’re a lot of characters where a cartoonishness is built into their design. I feel Dodola and Zam are definitely the most beautiful characters in the book. I want the reader to be attracted to them.
In the rape scene, originally, I had a much more grotesque character. And I didn’t like how it felt sensationalized. So that character ended up looking more and more attractive. At a certain point, he was almost a pretty boy. And that’s when I added the element of these aviator glasses. Because I felt like it put up some distance from him and obviously he is a monstrous character. But if you were to remove those glasses he would almost look like a classic Aryan pretty boy.
TM: There isn’t a panel in your book that doesn’t seek out some form of aesthetic pleasure. Why do you depict something like this [pointing to the rape scene in book] in a way to make it beautiful? People hate Schindler’s List, among other reasons, because the black-and-white is so gorgeous.
CT: I tend towards the sentimental. So there are times where I try deliberately to pull back and have an unbiased camera angle. I don’t know if I’m necessarily trying not to make it beautiful. As I said in depicting the rapist, in earlier drafts he was more monstrous. Even the way things were framed was a little more horrific. Finally, I found that it was more powerful to use that Hitchcock-ian method of just “less is more.” The camera is still in there. But there’s just more formalistic structure to it. Coldness isn’t the word. But I’m trying to create some emotional distance in depicting these things. I want the reader to have their own emotional reaction and not impose an emotional response on them through the drawing style.
TM: You haven’t worked with color in any of your four books. Is there anything about color that turns you off?
CT: No, I wouldn’t say it turns me off. For me, cartooning is a cursive shorthand for a bigger drawing or a painting. And I still adhere to those principles. I want the drawings to have a hand-written quality. For me, color is just an added layer of process that in some ways actually creates some distance from the reader. And I love it when artists work in watercolor, in a really organic medium like that. There’s a little bit of laziness in me where my books would take even longer to get out if I was also coloring them. And I wouldn’t want to hand off the responsibility to someone else because of that obsessive-ness of wanting every line to be my own. Also I recognize some of the actual printing mechanics and expenses of adding color as an element. Chris Ware, of course, is a master of color in comics. He talks about comics as typography. I think of comics as calligraphy. And for me the purest form of that is just the ink on the paper. It’s just the artist’s brush or nib.
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