Cat Acree

FictionGraphic Novels & ComicsDebut Fiction

Babe in the Woods

Review by Cat Acree

Julie Heffernan is predominantly known as a self-portraitist. Her astounding large-scale oil paintings are baroque, surrealist, highly staged and detailed, and often feature a woman—herself, bare-breasted, surrounded by a riot of flora and fauna. She frequently toys with traditional representations of women in art, depicting herself in big headpieces and bigger skirts, and using titles like “Self-Portrait as Gorgeous Tumor” and “Self-Portrait as Tree House.”

Many of Heffernan’s self-portraits are reproduced in Babe in the Woods: Or, the Art of Getting Lost, her first graphic novel and a mesmeric work of autofiction. It is a loose retelling of how she became an artist, leaving a Catholic home where art didn’t exist and meeting people who helped her to discover the world of art history and her own fierce opinion and creative voice. A version of Heffernan recounts these events—often in the form of a one-sided conversation with her mother—while hiking deeper into the Appalachian Mountains with her infant child. We know from the outset that she’s getting herself lost, and as her mind whirls through her memories, examining traumas and questioning everything with a furious intensity, it is clear that she is making a dangerous, terrible choice. She is being a bad mother, and she says so.

Throughout Heffernan’s labyrinthine walk in the woods, we are treated to “revelations,” each centered on a work of classic art. Heffernan is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University, and here she delivers brief lessons on famous paintings such as “Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus” by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Wildens, which is accompanied by Heffernan’s revelation, “DON’T GIVE UP no matter WHAT!” as she shows how the painting uses two women’s naked bodies to create the shape of a pinwheel, whirling like blades in the center of the scene. The women are about to be raped, but they still have “ACTION! MOTION!! AGENCY!!!”

Much of the illustration for the novel was done in Microsoft Paint, which gives the book a sketchy, glitchy quality, completely in opposition to her oil paintings. Many scenes, as well as some reproductions of her self-portraits, are pixelated, the color appearing to malfunction and separate. Details become difficult to see, and the viewer is forced into the same frustrating brain-fuzziness as Heffernan’s character. 

The varying styles, the collapsing of clarity, the tremendous rage and continual turning-over of past traumas—all these elements combine in Babe in the Woods to illuminate the mysteries of the creative process. It is a staggering work of graphic literature, strange and enraged, carnal and emotional, encompassing the terrific force that keeps an artist moving forward. Reading it doesn’t feel like moving in a straight line, but rather a spiral, and as Heffernan writes, “a spiral always brings us back to a center, no matter how far we travel away from it.”

Julie Heffernan’s first graphic novel, Babe in the Woods, is a mesmeric work of autofiction loosely retelling how she became an artist while following a hike in the Appalachian Mountains with her infant child.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Two-Step Devil

Review by Cat Acree

Jamie Quatro cultivated a reputation as a provocateur with her two previous books, the story collection I Want to Show You More (2013) and her debut novel, Fire Sermon (2018). She complicates Southern Christian narratives through characters who hold faith in one fist and lust in the other, carrying out sins like adultery while maintaining deep relationships with the divine.

Quatro continues this inquiry with her second novel, Two-Step Devil, a narrative in three acts. The first introduces a 70-year-old man who calls himself the Prophet. Living alone in Alabama in 2014, the Prophet detests organized religion, but the inside of his cabin is covered with paintings of his visions from God. He is also taunted by a figure he calls the Two-Step Devil. One day, at a gas station, the Prophet sees a teenage girl, drugged and zip-tied, being shoved into the backseat of a car. 

After a bumbling rescue, the Prophet helps the girl, Michael, regain her health. Their time together is beautiful, a quiet kinship, but it can’t last. Michael must eventually move on to the next stage of her life, and she narrates the vulnerable second section as if she’s giving a hurried walking tour of Chattanooga, Tennessee, intercut with memories of her childhood sexual assaults and coercion into trafficking.

In the novel’s third section, Two-Step steps into the spotlight—quite literally, as the story is now structured as a play, with the Prophet wasting away upstage. The devil ecstatically monologues at the reader (“Greetings, fleshsacks!”) on the misconceptions in Christian narratives, and goes wildly off-script from scripture.

Two-Step Devil is a bold interrogation—even a condemnation—of rigid adherence to Christian rules, and it’s apparent that it is intended first and foremost to provoke. While it is rousing to see a Christian writer lay claim to their God in this way—challenging their religion to do better, and insisting upon critical thought amid ambivalence rather than blind faith—the story can be tedious and pretentious, as during the devil’s lectures, or gratuitously violent and unsettled, as in Michael’s section. Still, Quatro’s characters are beguiling, and Two-Step Devil is often tender, especially during the Prophet’s section. Quatro’s prose ranks among the best Southern writing: “When God looked down at the planet, he was seeing what people saw when they looked up: darkness, with a few brave lights trembling here and there. The darkness was evil and the lights were God’s children staking a claim.” 

Quatro excels at getting the hairs on your arms to stand on end, if not through narrative suspense, then through the radical nature of her narrative aim: taking on the South’s political obsession with following religious guidelines, its dogged insistence on dogmatic good versus evil, which is completely impotent when a person is caught in the throes of actual evil. Without question, Quatro is a pioneering writer for a new South, our patron saint of Southern discomfort.

Jamie Quatro is a pioneering writer for a new South—our patron saint of Southern discomfort—and her second novel, Two-Step Devil, is a tender and bold interrogation of rigid adherence to Christian rules.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Nathan Newman: A neighbor just like you

Interview by Cat Acree

Nathan Newman challenges readers to reckon with all the cruelties and joys of human interaction in their debut novel, How to Leave the House. Newman’s protagonist is a young man named Natwest, but he’s not the only central character: The novel intersperses Natwest’s interior narrative with the stories of the many people in his town whose daily lives butt up against his own.

Newman’s novel is transgressive and disruptive, an unserious look at serious things—in particular, how isolated we can feel when deeply immersed in our own problems. Here, Newman gets the main character treatment and shares their thoughts on art, storytelling, their neighbors and criticism in the internet age.

 

What is most likely to get you to leave the house?

Friends, a party, a trip to the cinema, an aquatic-themed fetish night—really anything social that might rescue me from the little cocoon of my writing room.

Do you know your neighbors? Do they know you?

I live on an estate with a somewhat uneasy and pretty diverse alliance of council flat owners, tenants, students, gentrifiers, care-service users. It’s always cordial. There is an estate WhatsApp group and everyone is currently unified against the midnight to 5 a.m. roadworks happening on the main street beside us. Nothing brings British residents together more than a good moan about the council—so that’s solidarity of some kind.

How to Leave the House follows Natwest throughout one day. Even though it takes place in his small town, the day’s happenings feel much like those of a big city, with horrors and chaos and hilarity around every corner, and human interactions that are intimate, intense and brief. Do you see similarities between big-city stories and small-town tales? Is How to Leave the House occupying both spaces?

I wrote the novel while living in London, right after my last year of university in Warwick (which is a very small town indeed). The spirit of both spaces is probably embedded in the book. Of course there are more stories on one South London street than could occupy a century’s worth of fiction, but I don’t think living in a small town is any different—except that you’re more likely to know the person you’ve just bumped into. The two are inextricable anyway: The bulk of How to Leave the House was written during lockdown, when London emptied out, and for anyone on the street it might as well have been a small town.

“Maybe all these binaries about art and life are just two punchlines to the same joke.”

Many chapters could stand as short stories. My personal favorites are about a dentist, a woman who dances a jig on her brother’s grave, and an egg fight. Which are your favorites and why? Yes, you have to choose.

Possibly Lily’s chapter—the one told entirely via text messages, imageboard posts and anonymous internet confessionals—because beyond her main story, there is a puzzle implanted in the heart of the section that nobody has yet cracked! Otherwise, Dr. Richard Hung, the dentist who is also an artist, but the only thing he can seem to paint is mouths.

Natwest is the apparent main character of the story, yet all these chapters have their own main characters. Amid our current obsession with main character energy, and the constant pressure to romanticize and glamorize our lives, how do you approach storytelling? How do you tell stories when everyone is the main character?

There are so many different people on the street, and they are all main characters in their own worlds—that’s a universal human delusion, and not unique to this generation (but it’s undoubtedly been massively exacerbated by the internet). Writing with this in mind seemed pretty sensible. My novel is told from the perspective of 15-year-olds, 80-year-olds, 30-year-olds and 50-year-olds, jumping between different classes, genders, races and sexualities with a freedom that hopefully explodes, or at least formally adapts this obsession with main character energy. When you’ve been born into the internet, and this is how you are encouraged to process the world, the alternating chapters of How to Leave the House feel like the most interesting approach.

Early in the novel, an imam tells Natwest that “there are two types of people in this world. Charlie Chaplins and Buster Keatons.” Natwest is told that he wants to be a Keaton but must accept his fate as a Chaplin, and we return again and again to the motif of Keatons and Chaplins. What does it mean to be a Chaplin but to wish you were a Keaton?

I think the binary that Imam Mishaal projects onto Natwest is a little false, a reflection of his own internal struggle between the worldly and the spiritual, and his inability to synthesize the two. The novel is constantly setting up dualities like this—doubles, oppositions, contradictions—and each character chooses their own way of approaching them. Maybe the real point is that there is no difference between Chaplin or Keaton—to slightly paraphrase a line in the book: Chaplin/Keaton, McCartney/Lennon, Hegel/Kierkegaard—maybe all these binaries about art and life are just two punchlines to the same joke.

When Natwest encounters his former teacher Miss Pandey, she challenges him to rethink art in a particularly wonderful discussion. “What would happen if you treated every work of art as perfect, and then worked backwards?” she says. “If you presumed that every ‘blemish’ or ‘failing’ or ‘irregularity’ in tone or pacing or structure or payoff was intended by the artist?” She says that such a mentality allows the world to “open up.” Do you approach art from this mindset, and if so, how do you hold on to that openness?

It’s an aspiration, and I don’t always achieve it! I think it’s also me-the-author being defensive, because a novel structured like this one—especially with the ending it has—is pretty vulnerable to some very obvious criticisms in the “‘irregularity’ in tone or pacing or structure or payoff” department. But any criticism is a difficult line to walk. There is a difference, I think, between coming to an artwork with an open heart and mind, and consuming something without any discernment. The internet has encouraged us to consume without prejudice, flattening out once and for all any distinction between high and low culture. A tremendous libidinal liberation—and partly what this novel is about. But we need some way of reining it in and finding a middle ground. I think that’s what Miss Pandey is arguing for.

On your website, you have reviewed other authors’ websites. Is it not a conflict of interest to review Zadie Smith’s website, as she was your mentor at New York University?

I think every author hates making their own website, but it has to be done. It seemed like a fun inside joke to give some tongue-in-cheek reviews of other authors’ websites as a result. It’s not serious at all. That being said, it’s true that I attended NYU for a single semester over Zoom before dropping out. During that period I learned that Zadie is incredibly defensive when it comes to her website. After I gave it an 8/10 she launched a defamation suit, and we are now in a pretty fierce legal skirmish—fortunately it looks like I’m going to win.

I think her sales are plummeting as we speak.

Read our review of How to Leave the House.

Debut novelist Nathan Newman harnesses main character energy in How to Leave the House, a novel that hops in and out of the heads of the many residents of a small town as a young man named Natwest breezes by them seeking a missing package.
FictionLiterary Fiction

How to Leave the House

Review by Cat Acree

Nathan Newman’s first novel, How to Leave the House, tracks a young man named Natwest in his quest to reclaim a missing package. Inside the package: a large sex toy. Along the way, various players in Natwest’s small town step forward to share apparent wisdom with the young man, in scenes that range from ludicrous to genuinely philosophical. Through these loosely connected narratives, readers encounter a bawdy tale of the unseriousness of existence and the impossibility of knowing our neighbors.

Some chapters relate Natwest’s interior narrative (often obnoxiously laden with literary and artistic references), while others inhabit the minds of other characters, including his dentist (obsessed with painting mouths), his former English teacher (recovered from cancer and looking for sex) and his mother (proud of her son and desperate to show it). There are comedic and entertaining stories, especially one involving an egg fight and one in which a woman dances on her brother’s grave. Others are upsetting and cruel, like the chapter narrated by Natwest’s self-loathing ex-boyfriend, and another about the provocative internet activities of a girl named Lily.

In one storyline, an imam named Mishaal struggles with his love for classic cinema. He is enraptured by closeups of Ingrid Bergman, tortured by them as if he were having an illicit affair. When the imam encounters Natwest, he lectures the young man on binaries: “If it’s not Chaplin or Keaton, it’s Spielberg or Scorsese. If it’s not Spielberg or Scorsese, it’s Truffaut or Godard.” He insists that Natwest embrace his inner Keaton and stop trying to be a Chaplin.

Natwest’s story, along with everyone else’s, is bisected, torn between conflicting desires. The characters’ fates are ambivalent, not only in that we don’t know how things will work out for them, but also because none of them know how they’d like their stories to turn out. “I believe that a happy ending is at least as realistic as an unhappy one,” the imam says. Natwest is horrified by that idea, as the young man insists that unhappiness is “real shit.”

How to Leave the House is fiction as friction, designed for discomfort. This is a novel of dichotomies that beg to be challenged, with psychological spaces that desperately need transparency but are inherently, tragically closed off to each other.

Read our Q&A with Nathan Newman about How to Leave the House.

Nathan Newman’s debut is a bawdy tale of the unseriousness of existence and the impossibility of knowing our neighbors, set in a small town over the course of 24 hours.
FictionPopular Fiction

Little Rot

Review by Cat Acree

Like any metropolis where the excessively wealthy think they’re untouchable, Nigeria’s most populated city, Lagos, has a reputation for corruption and a swollen wealth gap. Bestselling author Akwaeke Emezi’s sixth novel for adults, Little Rot, is set in a city called New Lagos, a very different place from the southeastern Nigerian village of The Death of Vivek Oji (2020). When the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s ravaged Igbo villages with lynchings and riots, the privileged urbanites of Lagos found life largely undisturbed. New Lagos shares this high-rise mentality—as if tinted windows are enough to keep one safe.

Little Rot begins with a breakup, as religious Aima leaves her longtime boyfriend, Kalu, because he won’t marry her. Aima seeks comfort in her friend Ijendu, who takes her out dancing, which leads to a night of queer pleasure and then a morning of anguish. Meanwhile, Kalu attends an exclusive underground sex party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, and stumbles upon a nauseating scene: a group of masked partygoers with an underage sex worker. In a rage, Kalu attacks one of the men, who turns out to be the kind of man who can and will enact his own retribution. Glamorous sex workers Ola and Souraya soon become members of this tangled mess as well.

As in their 2022 romance novel, You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty, Emezi writes a killer sex scene and is always willing to slip into the taboo corners of intimacy. But in Nigeria, queerness is illicit enough to get you killed, and this threat borders the whole narrative. Even in the gilded strata of New Lagos, there’s always someone more powerful than you, and everyone is touched by the hypocritical political power of Christianity, whether in the form of an evil pastor called “Daddy O,” Aima’s marriage obsession or the self-flagellation of queer characters.

Little Rot hurtles toward devastation, but even as you anticipate the horrors ahead, the escapist thriller-style pacing will keep you pushing on. Chapters rotate through this cast of beautiful people, who are all endangered and empowered by their entanglements. “You think you’ll never be a part of things you hate,” a woman says to Kalu at Ahmed’s party. “You think you’re protected somehow, like the rot won’t ever get to you. Then you wake up one day and you’re chest deep in it.”

These characters are plunged well past their chests, submerged in realities we might prefer to avoid. With their previous books, Emezi has been heralded for courting duality in stories that are described as unapologetic, visceral and radical. But if You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty tipped over into the light, Little Rot tumbles into shadow. For every arousal, there is violence; for every moment of love, there is ruin.

Akwaeke Emezi’s sixth novel for adults, Little Rot, hurtles toward devastation, but even as you anticipate the horrors ahead, the escapist thriller-style pacing will keep you pushing on.
FictionLiterary Fiction

All Fours

Review by Cat Acree

Menopause is profoundly misunderstood and misrepresented, in part because the generations who’ve been through it aren’t, generally speaking, inclined to talk publicly about it. Only in the last decade or two have people so openly discussed infertility and miscarriages. Perhaps we can hope that once this younger generation enters perimenopause, it will no longer feel like such a mystifying hormonal event horizon. But so far, there have been few works of contemporary fiction about menopause, and even fewer that are as erotic and funny as All Fours, the first novel from artist, filmmaker and author Miranda July in nearly a decade.

July’s protagonist is an unnamed artist with intentionally clear ties to July’s own identity, and the plot is described simply enough: The artist plans to drive across the country from Los Angeles to New York City, leaving her husband and child for several weeks. Instead, she stops at a motel a mere 30 minutes from her home. Beginning with an expensive and exquisite redesign of her motel room, followed by a charged relationship with a guy who works at Hertz, she sets out on a no-holds-barred pursuit of desire, selfhood, sex and liberation.

A character arc is typically shaped by an incendiary realization, but July’s artist experiences such revelations on a weekly, if not daily, basis. She holds a misconception, she unlearns it, she reframes and continues on. This process—truly, the cyclical experience of having a curious brain—allows the artist’s mind to feel like your own. It also structures All Fours like a classic quest narrative, as new emotional and sexual adventures open up after each sequence of self-discovery.

The cover of All Fours is an image of a cliff by Albert Bierstadt, a 19th-century German American painter who’s known for his lush Western landscapes. Bierstadt’s cliff is shadowed and steep, and from the valley below bursts a golden light so intense that it washes out the trees, the clouds and anything that might be in the distance. For many women, menopause is that cliff: dangerous, distant and a bit unreal. July’s protagonist hurtles toward that cliff inelegantly and imperfectly but, as much as she possibly can, honestly—and that commitment to honesty at the expense of normalcy is what makes this book queer. The cost of the “unconventional” life she seeks is significant; look at the conversations that must be had, the choices that must be made to disrupt the status quo in favor of living truthfully. Her unmasking and remaking are incendiary, but also, look how hard she holds on to what she loves most: her family, her connections, her spark.

Because there is no end to her quest (that’d be death, the real cliff), there can be no victory, but All Fours is undeniably victorious.

There have been few works of contemporary fiction about menopause, and even fewer that are as erotic and funny as All Fours, the first novel from artist, filmmaker and author Miranda July in nearly a decade.
FictionSatireLiterary Fiction

Jennifer Croft feeds the literary ecosystem

Interview by Cat Acree

It’s common practice among many publishers to leave translators’ bylines off book covers—an act of erasure that reinforces the widely held belief that original texts are sacred and thus superior to any translation. Jennifer Croft, who is best known for her translations of Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s books, is challenging readers and critics to rethink this flawed paradigm.

“Our contemporary notion of authority depends upon the existence—still—of a single trustworthy individual. In literature, this figure is the author, the inimitable person who chooses and disposes words,” Croft writes in “Superlichen,” an essay published in Orion Magazine in 2023. “In this mystical-commercial understanding of literature, translators are necessarily suspect. They adulterate the truth, making it impossible to trust. When translators are truly necessary, they’re ideally neither seen nor heard. That way we can tell ourselves that the Original has remained mostly unscathed on its journey into English.”

But books thrive in translation. They reach new readership, and in some cases, the quality of the original text can even improve. Croft, who won the International Booker Prize in 2018 for her translation of Tokarczuk’s Flights, urges readers to consider translation to be co-creation, a labor of interdependent individuals who are building a completely new work of art.

“The translator is the one who writes every single word of the book that you end up reading,” Croft says, speaking from her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on a late December morning—the kind of gray day that’s well suited to a discussion about her puckish, unnerving debut novel. “The writer is obviously the person who’s behind everything, which in a way, of course, is true. But I feel like people aren’t fully grasping the essentially, fundamentally collaborative nature, that [a translated work] is a co-authored book. So I really wanted to show that playing out in an exaggerated, humorous way.”

“What is a faithful translation? What is your duty to a text and a person and a vision and also a readership?”

The Extinction of Irena Rey, which earned Croft a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022, is the story of eight translators who are initially introduced not by name but by their languages of translation (English, Spanish, Serbian, etc.). It’s 2017, and they have convened at the idyllic home of (fictional) world-renowned Polish author Irena Rey. Her house resides at the edge of the Bialowieza Forest, a primeval wood spanning the border of Poland and Belarus. Over the course of the next several weeks, they will translate her presumed magnum opus, Grey Eminence.

Translators aren’t always in contact with an author while translating, but Irena prefers to be highly involved in the process. The translators are forbidden from translating other authors—except two Polish poets widely considered untranslatable—and they must follow Irena’s many house rules, which include no drinking, no eating meat and so on. It is full isolation, full adoration, full commitment to Irena’s genius. But suddenly, Irena vanishes, and the translators are left reeling.

Having lost their moral center, the translators move en masse from room to room, from forest to pub and back to Irena’s house, wondering if Irena’s dead and completely freaking out. It’s such an ominous, claustrophobic setup that the reader would be forgiven for not realizing at first just how funny it all is. There’s a lot of shrieking and kissing and running around with a frantic narrative pace that resembles an old episode of “Scooby-Doo.”

During the gang’s search for clues, they come across some postcards, which only serve to further confuse them. “Postcards are like translation,” Croft says. “There’s the inherent hybrid and potential for clashes between the one side that has the picture and the other side that has the message.” There’s also the potentially troubling political significance of the type of imagery that is selected to represent a place, which can be stereotypical or limiting, “and then it may end up forcing the place to become more like the postcard.”

Croft explains that when postcards were first introduced in the 1860s, they were a revolutionary innovation that allowed more people to send mail, which previously had been a luxury exclusive to the upper classes. “[But the elite] were horrified by the idea that the hired help would be able to read their words,” she says. “I love looking at old postcards, because sometimes you can sense there’s a code happening or a private reference that you just cannot possibly understand.”

The implications of obscured, divided or layered interpretations run rampant in Croft’s novel, which opens with a preface titled “Warning: A Note from the Translator.” We learn that the book is a work of autofiction by Spanish (whose real name is Emi), subsequently translated by English (real name Alexis). Alexis’ translator’s note is dismissive, even derisive, and her footnotes are deliciously scathing. As a translator, she’s doing the unthinkable: sharing her true feelings about the book and even illuminating choices made in the translation process. (For example, when Emi refers to her own “pubis,” Alexis adds the footnote, “Here I have preserved her ridiculous word.”) Their feud renders the story’s perspective so canted, so untrustworthy, that we have no idea which version of events to believe.

“What we do enriches the cultural ecosystem, the linguistic ecosystem. The original text doesn’t even really matter that much.”

Even without quarreling co-authors, autofiction as a genre is a thorny bramble between memoir and fiction, memory and embellishment. The genre is particularly popular with French- and Spanish-language readers. Croft’s first book, Homesick, is a work of autofiction that she wrote in Argentine Spanish while living in Argentina, and it was only sold to an English-language publisher under the condition that it be published as a memoir, presumably because American readers aren’t as comfortable with the gray areas between truth and fiction.

“[Homesick] was kind of inspired by my childhood but [is] definitely not a factual account,” Croft says. “I think that frustration of always talking about what is true and what is not probably fed into the writing of [Irena Rey]. I think also I may have rebelled and made it even more outlandish. Obviously I’ve never fought a duel in a forest.”

The duel is only one of the many ludicrous outcomes of the translators’ search for Irena. It’s also, importantly, between two women: Emi and Alexis. “I actually wrote my PhD dissertation about duels in 20th-century fiction. I was so frustrated that I couldn’t find a single example of a women’s duel, or even a duel between a man and a woman,” Croft says. “A classic dueling premise is to fight over an ethical question. In this case, English and Spanish are fighting—well, at least Spanish believes that they’re fighting over the nature of truth, essentially. What is a faithful translation? What is your duty to a text and a person and a vision and also a readership? How do you truthfully or faithfully convey a sacred message to the world?”

The duel occurs in the Bialowieza Forest, which serves as a classic source of menace and myth. Forests exist in fiction to haunt us, and this one feeds off a history of violence, with corpses from World War II providing nutrients for a fungal network that subsequently feeds the trees and understory, which then feed the deer that feed the Polish villagers, and so on. In fact, the original title for the novel was Amadou, the name of a fungus that parasitically infects trees, serving as an essential decomposer in the forest, and which can also be used as both tinder and fabric.

“Obviously I’m an advocate for translation, and I love translators,” Croft says. “But I also wanted to think about the potentially darker side of translation in a lot of different ways, which goes hand-in-hand with thinking about the power of the translator.” However translation alters the original, or even betrays it, “what we do [as translators] enriches the cultural ecosystem, the linguistic ecosystem. The original text doesn’t even really matter that much. What matters is this potentially really lovely afterlife that [a work] can have, and all of the echoes and reverberations that it can have throughout that ecosystem.”

The concept of a literary afterlife opens us to seeing books as living, changeable works of art, in which language can die and be reborn in translation. Certainly by the end of The Extinction of Irena Rey, the structures that uphold notions like artistic celebrity and all-powerful genius have rotted through and collapsed, and from the remains, something new grows.

Read our starred review of The Extinction of Irena Rey.

Jennifer Croft author photo © Nathan Jeffers.

With her mischievous debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft draws readers deep into a gnarled forest in which eight translators search desperately for their beloved, vanished author.
FictionSatireLiterary Fiction

The Extinction of Irena Rey

Review by Cat Acree

Far too often, translators’ bylines go missing on book covers and in reviews. The author is seen as the one true artist, whose translators exist in service to them. Jennifer Croft, the International Booker Prize-winning translator of Polish author Olga Tokarczuk (and many other authors), has become a leading advocate for changing this perception, encouraging readers to view translated books as acts of co-creation rather than pale shadows of their original text. In her satirical debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, Croft serves up all the controversial, inherently political questions posed by translation, and warps them into a ghoulishly funny tale.

As the book begins, the eight translators of world-renowned Polish author Irena Rey have arrived at the author’s home at the edge of the Bialowieza Forest, a primeval, endangered wood that sprawls across the border of Poland and Belarus. All the translators are initially referred to by their languages of translation (English, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, etc.), and the narrator of these events is Spanish, who insists that the translators are wholly devoted to the author and her original text. “Irena’s works were eternal,” Spanish says, “but our translations were no more enduring than socks.” As they prepare to translate Irena’s new novel, Grey Eminence, they cocoon themselves in her world, fully isolated and committed to her unusual rules. But Irena’s behavior is bizarre. She’s reluctant to give them the manuscript, and after a couple of days, she vanishes. The translators are left scrambling to figure out where she went, and over the course of “seven toxic, harrowing, oddly arousing, extremely fruitful weeks,” they race from one clue to the next, terrified and paranoid, getting more and more lost in the proverbial woods.

Croft’s novel employs a beguiling structure that serves to undermine any sense of truth we might try to reap from Spanish’s version of events. Spanish’s book is not a memoir but a work of autofiction, and it has been translated by English, who has illuminated the book with a vicious preface and copious footnotes, often mocking Spanish and offering a peep show of (some of) the changes made in translation. The reader is left to wonder which writer, if any, can be trusted.

Through this trippy mix of high concept and high tension, Croft takes a real chunk out of the convention of deifying the author as an all-powerful genius to whom translators must be beholden. Reading The Extinction of Irena Rey is like encountering a mischievous forest spirit, full of riddles and gloriously disorienting, then somehow getting back out of the woods alive.

Read our interview with Jennifer Croft on The Extinction of Irena Rey.

In her satirical debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft serves up all the controversial, inherently political questions posed by translation and warps them into a ghoulishly funny tale.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Martyr!

Review by Cat Acree

Cyrus Shams is, in his own words, “another death-obsessed Iranian man,” fixated on death—but more than that, on martyrdom. He needs his death to matter, for the act of his dying to have a purpose.

Cyrus’ family inheritance is one of pointless death. His mother died when her plane was shot down by American forces over the Persian Gulf; she was traveling to visit her brother, a man decimated by his experiences fighting in the Iran-Iraq War. Cyrus’ father died soon after Cyrus left for college. Uneasily sober after years of chasing addiction, Cyrus decides to write a book on martyrs. To help himself get started, he seeks out an artist in New York City, an older Iranian woman named Orkideh, who, in a Marina Abramovic-style performance, has made herself publicly accessible while she dies of cancer by spending the end of her life in the Brooklyn Museum.

Over several days, Cyrus and Orkideh speak on death, art, nation, victimhood, gratitude and family. In between scenes of their easy connection, we read poems from Cyrus’ book and witness flashbacks to Cyrus’ mother’s, father’s and uncle’s stories. There are also chapters recounting supernatural conversations from Cyrus’ dreams, between his mother and Lisa Simpson, Orkideh and the American president of 2017, his father and the poet Rumi, and an imaginary brother and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Martyr! has a certain loudness, between the echo of a weighted Iranian history, the roar of Cyrus’ broken family legacy and his intense internal warfare. Even the book’s title can be taken as a shout, its exclamation point signifying an accusation or revelation. That which quiets the noise is simple enough, delivered in sublime prose from Iranian American poet and debut novelist Kaveh Akbar: “Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it,” he writes late in the novel. Akbar has previously published two collections of poetry (Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Pilgrim Bell), and his writing makes just enough time for beauty while never languishing.

Throughout Martyr!, language is a saving grace, if imperfectly so. “I get frustrated this way so often,” Cyrus’ mother says in a flashback. “A photograph can say ‘This is what it was.’ Language can only say ‘This is what it was like.'” Similarly, although a novel cannot capture what life is, its truths and inventions can powerfully gesture toward what life is like: full of both pain and pleasure, with death inevitable, and love a choice.

Kaveh Akbar’s writing makes just enough time for beauty while never languishing: “Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it,” he writes in Martyr!, his debut novel.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

You Dreamed of Empires

Review by Cat Acree

It was Hernán Cortés who made the ludicrous claim that Moctezuma voluntarily surrendered sovereignty of the Aztec empire to the Spanish conquistadores. Cortés’ narrative is not easily believed, especially considering that he quotes Moctezuma as referencing the Christian Bible, but certainly there are those who believe that the Aztec people, either out of naiveté or superstition, could have been duped into a bad bargain.

Mexican writer Alvaro Enrigue’s agile modernist novel You Dreamed of Empires offers a reimagined encounter between Cortés and Moctezuma, with far more political machination at work than superstition. It all kicks off with the Spaniard trying to hug the Aztec emperor on first greeting—a bad move considering Moctezuma’s impulsivity and comfort with executions. Although the moment somehow doesn’t end in blood, readers know that the ultimate outcome will undoubtedly be disaster.

Over the course of one day in November 1519, conquistadores bumble around the labyrinthine city of Mehxicoh-Tenoxtitlan. Their horses, lost in Moctezuma’s palace, are a novelty to their hosts but unfortunately decimate the emperor’s collection of exotic fruits. Meanwhile, Moctezuma languishes in his room, treating his depression with hallucinogenic mushrooms and cacti, while his sister (and wife) Atotoxtli tries to figure out how to save the kingdom. “If there’s anything Spaniards and Mexicans have always agreed upon,” Enrigue writes, “it’s that nobody is less qualified to govern than the government itself.”

Readers of Enrigue’s 2016 novel Sudden Death have already encountered his way of dealing with lopsided accounts of Latin American history. In both books, there are translator characters deliberately mistranslating, effortless comparisons to the Roman empire, plenty of feathered capes and a porous fourth wall. On several occasions, Enrigue yanks us out of the story to look at events from our 21st-century vantage point, such as when Moctezuma is admiring the sound of withered fingers swaying in the breeze “to the beat of some music he couldn’t place,” and we learn that it’s the 1973 song “Monolith” by T. Rex. And as beautifully written as the novel is, especially in its descriptions of the metropolis of Tenoxtitlan, You Dreamed of Empires is also bone-dry funny: “In Mexico, authority has always flowed from the smack of a flip-flop.”

When history is retold in such an irreverent, unprecious manner, there are no winners—except the reader.

You Dreamed of Empires offers a reimagined encounter between Cortés and Moctezuma. When history is retold in such an irreverent, unprecious manner, there are no winners—except the reader.
NonfictionScience

Entangled Life: The Illustrated Edition

Review by Cat Acree

After decades of being a largely underserved area of scientific study, fungi are finally having their moment. The phenomenon feels not unlike the overnight appearance of a mushroom; all it took were the right conditions for the right fruiting body. The conditions: a reading public amid COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020, aching for connection. The fruiting body: British biologist Merlin Sheldrake, author of Entangled Life, who showed us just how interconnected we really are.

Gently, affectionately and in the loveliest prose, Sheldrake invited us to discover the unfathomable fungal networks that run throughout our soil, binding and building our whole world. Illuminated with sweet illustrations drawn by Collin Elder in ink from an ink cap mushroom, Entangled Life felt like a classic naturalist’s journal. Except for these drawings and a slim centerfold of photographs, readers were left to imagine the worlds that Sheldrake described. With Entangled Life: The Illustrated Edition, the bestselling, award-winning book transforms into a visual spectacle that contains 100-odd full-color otherworldly images of mushrooms, lichens, mycelium and more.

Mushrooms poke up in jaunty angles like whimsical umbrellas, some neon-bright and avant-garde, others gooey and grotesque. Delicate mycelial networks appear like white lace stretched across great caverns of rotting wood. Globular spores shine like blown glass. There are more intense colors and complex structures than can possibly be described, even in Sheldrake’s gorgeous language, which has been significantly abridged by the author for this edition. The section on psilocybin is particularly well illustrated, featuring photographs of Maria Sabina, the Mazatec curandera who led sacred mushroom ceremonies in Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca, in the early 1900s.

Many images are on an almost incomprehensibly small scale, with electron microscopy revealing fungi living inside a root or dust seeds binding with mycorrhizal fungus. The simultaneous grandness and tininess of mycology overwhelms; by the end of the book, microscopy of spores starts to resemble mushrooms on a rotting log, the scales bleeding together in a riot of colors and textures.

The message of Entangled Life is to be open to new ways of thinking—to be a little less focused on orienting ourselves, and more willing to see the world anew. This is the gift that Sheldrake continues to give us: He reveals fungal life as both more familiar and more abstract than we imagine, and encourages us into the space between the known and the as-yet unknown.

Read our interview with Merlin Sheldrake.

British biologist Merlin Sheldrake shows us just how interconnected we really are with these otherworldly images of mushrooms, lichens, mycelium and more.
NonfictionScience

Glimpse visions of fungal life in this gift book for mushroom fans

Interview by Cat Acree

Your first book, Entangled Life, became such a success upon its publication in the spring of 2020. It was both a product of and a contributor to a new global phenomenon: our fascination with fungi. You’ve said that the book’s reception came as a surprise, but here you are now, transforming it into an illustrated gift edition, filled with stunning macrophotography of lichen and mushrooms, and microphotography of spores and nematodes. What does it mean to you, to present your book in this new format?

So much of fungal life takes place out of the reach of our unaided senses that it can be hard to find a way into their worlds; we need all the help we can get and sometimes words can only get us so far. To come closer to fungi we have to look at them. Indeed, much of our modern scientific understanding of fungi—and life in general—has been transformed by microscopes that enhance our ability to see, rendering the invisible visible. My own understanding of fungi, like those of many of my colleagues, has similarly been transformed by the many hours I’ve spent looking at fungi, often gazing down a microscope. The illustrated edition of Entangled Life is a way to invite readers into some of these astonishing visual worlds and celebrate the remarkable artist-researchers who have painstakingly captured these images. I think it is a beautiful book to hold and explore.

How did you go about abridging the text? Did the imagery guide you in any way, or was it the other way around?

It was a challenge! When writing, I often found myself imagining the book’s themes and stories as cords that I could splice, braid and weave. I soon realized that abridging the text meant more than just cutting words and sections; I had to make sure that I had suitably re-woven the threads. Sometimes I was guided by the imagery, and sometimes I had to let the text tell me how it wanted to flow. I had anticipated that this would be a frustrating process, but in fact it turned out to be satisfying, and I’m happy with the outcome.

Speaking of this new widespread appreciation for fungi, what do you think it’s all about? We can certainly look back to Michael Pollan’s 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind, and the 2019 film Fantastic Fungi, and we can make assumptions about how 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic led people toward yeasty hobbies like brewing and baking, and toward greater desire for mycelium-like closeness. Or perhaps it’s been driven by a desperate hope that fungus will save the world by eating all our plastics and all our problems. What do you believe has most captured our attention about fungi, and why now?

I think there are a few reasons. The first is quite simple: We know more about fungi than we used to thanks to the development of technologies—like DNA sequencing—and decades of brilliant work by mycologists all over the world. The more we have learned, the more we have been able to appreciate the vital roles that fungi play in Earth’s systems.

“These are remarkable depictions of symbiosis in action: You can see the fungi clasping the algal cells. It’s so intimate.”

Second, as environmental emergencies have worsened, a growing awareness of the interconnectivity of all life forms has permeated public consciousness. This has coincided with the rise of network science and network models, now used to make sense of everything from human social lives to biochemistry. Fungi are interconnected organisms—most live their lives as networks and form literal connections between organisms—and so make powerful poster organisms for both ecological and network thinking.

Third, I think the growing interest in psychedelics has also played a part. Much of the recent wave of research into psychedelics has taken place with psilocybin, found in “magic” mushrooms, and I think the astonishing and puzzling effects of this compound have helped awaken curiosity to fungi more generally.

Fourth, as you suggest, people have been captivated by the many ways we might partner with fungi to help us to adapt to life on a damaged planet. Ongoing environmental devastation has brought about renewed interest in the fungal world, and radical mycological possibilities abound, from fungal medicines to fungal foods, to new building materials and more.

So much of your discussion of fungi is about relationships and challenging the definition of the individual–which is another reason we might assume your book has reached so many readers. (Imagine if human social media could provide the level of connection of the mycorrhizal “wood wide web”!) Yet this illustrated edition features fungi portraiture, with close-ups of individual fruiting bodies in their best light. I wonder, when looking at these photographs, do you see an individual?

No, I don’t. Mushrooms are loosely analogous to a plant’s fruit. When I see an apple, I see a representative of an apple tree with tangling branches growing upwards, and tangling roots growing into the soil. Likewise, when I see a mushroom, I see a representative of a sprawling fungal network, itself potentially linked up to one or more plants. We are only ever looking at part of the picture.

Some of the book’s images feel more abstract to the untrained eye. If you know what you’re looking at, an image may inform and illuminate; to the layperson, the same imagery can confound. Which images have been most illuminating to you, and which have been most challenging?

One of the things I was trying to do in this book was to play with scale, moving from images of comparatively large subjects like mushrooms and humans to microscopic subjects like spores and mycelial networks. I’ve found an interesting effect arises when one shuttles between scales: The familiar can become unfamiliar, as if we’re looking at something for the first time. A familiar looking mushroom might suddenly look strange, and a microscope image of a mycelial network might feel like a vast landscape or a dense forest in which one could get lost. In this way I’ve found that many of the images that are most bewildering are also the most beautiful.

As we learn in the section on lichens, the creation of the word symbiosis completely transformed the field of ecology as well as our overall understanding of the way the world works. It was a shift away from the hypercompetitive notion of “red in tooth and claw” evolution, instead acknowledging the complexities of relationships in the natural world. Have any of the images in this book dramatically shaken up your field the way this word did? 

So many of these images represent key concepts and perspectives, but some of my favorites are the images of lichens captured and created by Toby Spribille and Arseniy Belosokhov. These are remarkable depictions of symbiosis in action: You can see the fungi clasping the algal cells. It’s so intimate. I’ve never seen such good images of lichens.

In the opposite case to symbiosis, sometimes words fall short, like when using the word brain to describe the signals sent through a mycelial network. There are also pitfalls in relying too heavily on metaphors, as symbols don’t always translate from one person to the next. And sometimes, the answer to a question is still just “we don’t know,” such as the question of what psilocybin teaches us about the human mind. How do you reconcile the unknown with your scientific pursuit to know?

Much of the practice of the sciences involves choosing how to relate to the unknown. Fungi make questions of our categories, and thinking about them makes the world look different. It was my growing delight in their power to do so that led me to write this book in the first place. I have tried to find ways to enjoy the ambiguities and mysteries that fungi present, but it’s not always easy to be comfortable in the space created by open questions. Then again, when you answer a question, it ceases to be a question. I’ve learned to enjoy the exhilaration of unanswered questions and the way that they pull one forward into deeper inquiry.

“There are so many ways to be a fungus, just as there are so many ways to be an animal. . . . A great white shark might be scary. But the fact that the shark is scary wouldn’t necessarily make you scared of all other animals.”

Two of your own images are included in the book. What brings you the most joy or pride about them?

I love the way that they depict the remarkable intimacy of the physical relationship between plant and fungus. Of course, the images have additional layers of meaning for me: They are representations not only of the fungi living in the roots of a plant, but of the rest of the plant and its web of relationships within a tropical forest in which I spent a lot of time.

Although this illustrated edition has so many incredible images, it’s impossible to rely wholly on vision when it comes to fungi. Our eyes and cameras can only perceive so much. I wonder if this required imagination is why, even in a mushroom-loving cultural moment, some people still fear fungus and its unknowns. What would you say to those whose imagination turns to fear?

Fear of fungi runs deep in some cultures, whether because of poisonous mushrooms, the threat of fungal pathogens or the fact that so many fungi are decomposers and therefore associated with death and decay. In reality, fungi are a kingdom of life, as broad and busy a category as animals or plants. There are so many ways to be a fungus, just as there are so many ways to be an animal. A particular fungal pathogen might be scary, just as a great white shark might be scary. But the fact that the shark is scary wouldn’t necessarily make you scared of all other animals. Faced with fear about fungi, I would turn my mind to their many essential life-giving properties and the many ways human existence is unimaginable without them. No plants could exist without fungi, for example, nor would bread, alcohol, soy sauce or any number of lifesaving fungal medicines.

What is your advice for all amateurs crouching over a patch of forest, hoping for their own encounter with a mushroom or lichen?

One of the most important things is to sit and let one’s eyes adjust. It often takes a while for fungi to jump out at you. Sitting quietly, with a softer focus, can be a helpful way to tune in.

The only way your readership hasn’t been able to experience your book’s content is by taste and smell, so I must ask, is a fermentation guide in your future?

Not currently, although my brother Cosmo and I have recently released a line of live, fermented hot sauce!

Read our review of Entangled Life: The Illustrated Edition.

Merlin Sheldrake has transformed his bestseller, Entangled Life, into a photography book with an abridged text. The psychedelic and disorienting imagery it contains stars mushrooms and lichens, spores and gills, a glorious unseen world now in Technicolor.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The MANIAC

Review by Cat Acree

In his sublime 2021 novel, When We Cease to Understand the World, Chilean author Benjamin Labatut depicted the breakthroughs of real scientists and mathematicians as divine revelations and Greek tragedies. If When We Cease to Understand the World felt like the searing flash of a hydrogen bomb, The MANIAC is more of a measured descent into years of research and invention, with little sense of what’s to come beyond a pervasive, unnameable dread.

The novel is divided into three sections, the first of which is most similar to Labatut’s earlier work. “Paul, or The Discovery of the Irrational” tells the heartbreaking story of Jewish Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest’s succumbing to hopelessness amid the rise of Nazism, and his subsequent murder-suicide of himself and his son. The scene leading up to Ehrenfest’s final acts describes him moving like an automaton, a desperate machine that can do nothing but forfeit the game.

The second section is composed of a chorus of embittered, fearful and resigned voices, each sharing their impressions and memories of Hungarian genius Jancsi (Johnny) von Neumann, the inventor of game theory and a toxic proto-tech bro obsessed with finding “a mathematical basis for reality.” The final section recounts a contemporary John Henry-style battle against the machine, as Lee Sedol, a South Korean master of the game Go, faces down the artificial intelligence program AlphaGo. There is no dialogue in the novel, only quotations, and much of the narrative is told in summary—even the Go tournament is more analytical than propulsive.

Although The MANIAC is a sort of biographical fiction, its subject, artificial intelligence, is neither human nor much beyond its infancy. Labatut uses the language of parenting, birth, gods and creators, but this is no Frankenstein, and there’s no way to know what this baby will become. Von Neumann suggests that it could be our own new god, and indeed, as the lines of logic, gameplay and consciousness blur at the novel’s end, Sedol’s finale is nearly reverent.

For readers who come with curiosity and skepticism—the very mindset that has brought about our most disruptive evolutions in tech—Labatut’s book will provoke and inform, leaving us no more sure-footed in our nascent age of AI but certainly more aware.

If Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World felt like the searing flash of a hydrogen bomb, The MANIAC is more of a measured descent, permeated by a pervasive, unnameable dread.

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