Stephenie Harrison

NonfictionNatureMemoir

When fiction felt out of reach, Amy Tan turned to birds

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

For renowned author Amy Tan, writing fiction has historically been a refuge, a space where she can step away from her life and let her imagination run wild. But in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, the bestselling author of books such as The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter’s Daughter found that fiction offered little relief from a divisive campaign that inspired “a great deal of overt racism, of the kind I had not really seen before,” Tan says. “It was as if people had now received permission to say what they thought. And it was so ugly.”

So, at the age of 64, Tan put down her pen and picked up a pencil and sketchpad, enrolling in a nature journaling course with a focus on drawing to try to get some perspective and clear her mind.

What Tan thought would be a “momentary diversion” soon morphed into something much greater: Rather than being consumed by the 24/7 news cycle, Tan found her attention held captive by her new hobby.

“I thought it would be something I would do occasionally. But being in nature, especially among birds, has become a major part of my life. It’s an obsession,” Tan confesses during a video call from her Sausalito, California, home, which features floor-to-ceiling windows. “I discovered that beauty—enormous magical beauty—is an antidote to hideous emotions from others.”

Because Tan does not drive, she decided to turn her own backyard into one that would attract birds by hanging feeders, providing fresh water and researching the best food (even storing live mealworms in her fridge). In 2017, she began drawing and writing about her wildlife visitors in private journal entries that she jokingly referred to as “The Backyard Bird Chronicles.” In these pages, Tan shared colorful musings on the rich avian activity and social dynamics she witnessed, each entry accompanied by lovingly rendered drawings.

“When you have a beginner’s mind, you’re open to everything. You’re open to asking questions.”

This was a project Tan undertook solely for herself, with no thought of sharing it with the public. However, when she showed some sketches to her long-standing editor, Daniel Halpern, he had other ideas. Despite her protestations that The Backyard Bird Chronicles was a mess, Halpern was adamant that it should be published, telling Tan that what she had created was “authentic.”

“I love that word because it’s something that applies to everything in life,” Tan admits. “And that is what the mess of my nature journal is: It’s absolutely authentic. It’s spontaneous. It’s not one of these things I’ve revised a hundred times as I do with my fiction.”

For a self-professed perfectionist, the thought of putting out something so candid and unpolished might have once been unthinkable. But Tan shares that her experience watching birds has taught her things more valuable than simply being able to distinguish an American tree sparrow from a juvenile white-crowned sparrow.

“As I get older, I’m very much more aware of the importance of experiencing as much as I can,” Tan explains. One of her primary takeaways from writing the book is to “remain the beginner,” she continues. “When you have a beginner’s mind, you’re open to everything. You’re open to asking questions. . . . So I can be like a child. . . . I can not feel like my ego is at stake, or like I’m considered an expert in this area. I’m not.

“That’s part of being in nature for everybody. Being in nature is about discovery. . . . You’re in a space that’s oftentimes not the space that you’re used to: You’re used to being indoors on a sofa watching a television. So you’re outside and you’re bound to see something new. You’re set up to discover.”

“There could be one bird the whole day, and I’d be happy.”

Tan may have been initially unsure of how The Backyard Bird Chronicles would be received, but her and Halpern’s gamble has paid off: The book is a number one New York Times bestseller and has topped the independent bookseller charts as well. When asked about the enthusiastic response to the book, Tan can’t conceal her grin. While she admits that she doesn’t normally have intentions for the response to her books and “writes them for [her] own reasons,” this book is different: “When I hear people saying that . . . they’re now looking at birds, and they’re so fascinated by birds, and it’s brought them joy? I’m thinking, ‘We’re going to be united in our talking about issues having to do with saving the birds!’ ”

Tan now serves on the board of American Bird Conservancy, but her aspirations for the book extend beyond expanding environmental awareness and preservation. Although she continues to experience racism directed at herself and people she loves, she hopes increasing appreciation for birds can help to cultivate a more compassionate and tolerant society.

“There are a little over 10,000 species [of birds] in the world—and they’re so amazing, they’re so different, so many of them are unusual in their shapes and plumage,” Tan gushes, the strap of the binoculars she wears as part of her daily uniform jerking in her enthusiasm. “And I love that people appreciate the differences. . . . There are people who are intolerant, and they only want to see the same thing. . . . What a desolate world [that] would be!”

Although Tan has no plans to stop chronicling her backyard birds any time soon, she admits that Halpern is eager for a new novel, and she’s finally back at work on the book that was derailed in 2016. She allows that writing fiction requires a focus that looking at birds does not, so to be heading into another election year is unfortunate timing. But eight years later, Tan knows exactly what to do to handle the stress: “There’s no pressure in the backyard,” she says, her eyes softening as her lips curl into a tender smile. “There could be one bird the whole day, and I’d be happy.”

Read our starred review of The Backyard Bird Chronicles.

Author photo of Amy Tan by Enmei Tan.

At 64, the acclaimed author of The Joy Luck Club discovered a passion for birding, which led to her latest bestseller, The Backyard Bird Chronicles.
NonfictionNatureMemoir

The Backyard Bird Chronicles

Review by Stephenie Harrison

It’s been over a decade since Amy Tan published her last novel, but there’s a good reason for that. In 2016, while hard at work on her next literary endeavor, Tan found her psyche and creative drive overwhelmed by the political turmoil consuming the country. When writing fiction failed to provide refuge, Tan sought it elsewhere: Making good on a long-held promise to learn to draw, she began taking nature journaling classes and found herself captivated by the birds she observed. Soon, the hobby turned into a full-on obsession, leading Tan to transform her backyard into an ideal sanctuary for local birds so she could document and sketch the fauna that visited her yard.

Written in her hallmark heartfelt and lively prose, The Backyard Bird Chronicles curates excerpts from Tan’s personal birding journals from 2017 to 2022, sharing anecdotes about her hunt for the perfect squirrel-proof seeds and feeders, the awe she felt sighting her first great horned owl, and the comedy of baby birds learning to feed. Each entry is complemented with Tan’s own drawings.

Tan’s childlike wonder at the birds she observes is contagious, but the book goes beyond a compendium of avian observations: You’ll also find introspection and rumination on universal questions about mortality, empathy, racism and our connection (and responsibility) to nature. Because her journals were written without any intention of publication, there is something truly exhilarating about the candor of Tan’s thoughts; her unguarded presence on the page sparkles with cleverness and compassion. It is the rare reader who will be immune to her unbridled enthusiasm and her message that sometimes life’s sweetest pleasures are its simplest.

The Backyard Bird Chronicles showcases a master novelist in a new light. These pages will be a buoyant balm to the soul for inquisitive readers.

Read our interview with Amy Tan about The Backyard Bird Chronicles.

There is something truly exhilarating about the candor of The Backyard Bird Chronicles, a curated collection of excerpts from novelist Amy Tan’s personal birding journals that sparkles with cleverness and compassion.
FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

I Made It Out of Clay

Review by Stephenie Harrison

In her debut novel for adults, I Made It Out of Clay, author and playwright Beth Kander delivers an imaginative and emotionally charged contemporary Jewish fairy tale that explores themes of grief, survival and self-discovery.

For the first time in her life, Eve Goodman isn’t looking forward to the impending holiday season. She’s mourning the recent loss of her father, worried about losing her job and—to add insult to injury—her younger sister’s Hanukkah-themed wedding is scheduled for Eve’s 40th birthday. A wedding to which terminally single Eve defiantly RSVP’d saying she’d be bringing a date. In short: Eve’s life is a giant mess.

Everything changes, however, when a disturbing incident reminds Eve of the old legends her bubbe used to share about golems, fierce protectors of Jewish people made from clay who will obey their creator’s every command. Following a drunken night out and a failed attempt at inviting her dreamy next-door neighbor to the wedding, Eve sculpts a golem of her very own. At first, it seems like Eve’s golem is the answer to her prayers, but she soon finds herself questioning whether she has created the perfect man—or the perfect monster.

Kander’s spirited writing is clever and funny, but despite the romantic elements, I Made It Out of Clay is darker and more complex than a Jewish Bridget Jones’s Diary with a fantastical twist. The focus is on Eve’s grief at her father’s loss and resulting estrangement from her family, and Kander does not shy away from depicting antisemitism. The result is a provocative, multifaceted narrative that, while entertaining and ultimately uplifting, also unsettles at times, but is all the better for it.

Though entertaining in the vein of Bridget Jones’s Diary, I Made It Out of Clay is darker and more complex, following a Jewish woman grieving the loss of her father who creates a golem when she can’t secure a date for her sister’s wedding.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

A Thousand Times Before

Review by Stephenie Harrison

Asha Thanki’s magical debut, A Thousand Times Before, is a mesmerizing multigenerational chronicle about a remarkable family of Indian women bound to one another by more than blood.

In present-day Brooklyn, Ayukta is ready to reveal to her wife, Nadya, why she has been so ambivalent about starting a family, a decision made difficult for Ayukta due to an extraordinary family heirloom: a tapestry embroidered with images of the women in her family spanning back generations. When a mother sews her daughter onto the tapestry, it unlocks the ability for the daughter to relive the memories of all the women depicted there. What’s more, each custodian of the tapestry is also granted the power to make their heart’s desires reality. 

To convince Nadya of the truth behind her wild claims, Ayukta relates the stories of the women in her family as she herself has experienced them through the tapestry. She starts with her grandmother Amla in Karachi, before the Partition of India in 1947, continuing on to her mother Arni’s girlhood in Gujarat where she was involved in the 1974 student protests against the government. With each woman, Ayukta shares both the triumphs and the tragedies that the tapestry’s double-edged powers afforded them, all while grappling with her own dilemma of whether this inheritance is a burden or a blessing.

A Thousand Times Before is a riveting family saga as well as a tender examination of the indelible yet complicated bonds between mothers and daughters. Thanki transports readers through major moments in 20th-century Indian history, making them accessible and personal via her cast of charismatic characters, elegant prose and spellbinding storytelling. Despite the otherworldly elements woven into the narrative, the themes of love, grief and family that Thanki so thoughtfully develops easily ground the novel in reality, making for an emotionally charged and memorable reading experience.

A Thousand Times Before is a riveting magical family saga examining the indelible yet complicated bonds between mothers and daughters while transporting readers through major moments in 20th-century Indian history.
FictionHistorical FictionComing of Age

Marcela Fuentes: Fates and furies

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

In Malas, the legend of La Llorona (the Weeping Woman) ties together the stories of two women from different generations in a Texas border town. When the two meet in the ‘90s, their connection—including a shared love of Selena—threatens to surface buried town secrets.

Malas is your first novel. Can you tell us a bit about your writing process for the book? When did you start writing it and where did your inspiration come from?

Malas began as my attempt to write a fairy tale for a fairy tales course during my M.F.A. The first thing that came to me was a young and very pregnant Pilar being confronted by an elderly woman claiming to be her husband Jose Alfredo’s ‘real’ wife. I was in Iowa at the time, buried in snow, which made me vividly recall the other extreme—the merciless heat of a south Texas summer, and the dreamlike quality of those still, hot afternoons, perfect for the apparition of this old woman in the street. But though I set out to write a villain, I ended up digging into a lot of vulnerability. I wrote about 40 pages, the opening to the novel, and didn’t turn in my fairy tale after all because the story would not end. Probably six months later, another big chunk came to me, in the form of Gen-X teen Lulu running around at night, full of hurt and rage at her father. Looking back, I think my inspiration came from the style of storytelling I’d heard all my life, a family or local history that might pass for folklore.

This book brims with colorful descriptions and vivid imagery. Your description of the dusty border town of La Cienega was particularly captivating, lending Malas a very precise sense of place and cultural richness. Did you draw at all upon your hometown of Del Rio, Texas, when developing the setting for this book?

Certainly there’s a lot of Del Rio in my novel, but I also drew on other small border towns I’m familiar with, and Laredo, which is my mother’s hometown. I considered setting the novel in an actual place, but ultimately there was more freedom in a fictitious one. I wanted to respect the individual histories of those actual towns, while retaining an authentic sense of the complexity of these communities.

Read our starred review of Malas.

One surprising thing about Malas is that although it begins rooted in the supernatural, it evolves into a story that is more grounded in reality. Can you discuss how you approached that balance and made the choice to shift it over the course of the novel? 

I would say that there are different realities for different people. Pilar has a perspective that might be more susceptible to a belief in the supernatural, and to a certain extent Lulu’s father does too. One of the things I wanted to explore was this idea of reality being very much in the eye of the beholder, and also, the idea that overcoming generational trauma might sometimes be related to not accepting a fate-driven narrative. Another preoccupation in Malas was the idea of stories, romanticized or folkloric, taking the place of factual events, because people are prone to mythologizing, even family histories.

An intergenerational saga, Malas moves between different decades, from the 1940s to the 1990s. What was it about this time period that interested you?

I am very interested in the period before the Civil Rights Movement in Texas, the history for Mexicans and Tejanos, the strictures they dealt with, but also the strength and creativity of this community. Malas is a music novel too, and the 1950s is when Tejano, like many genres of music, began to be influenced by rock ’n’ roll, which very much started the trajectory that led to the “Tejano Boom” of the 1990s, and Selena’s unique sound. The history of Tejano music is the history of this place.

Lulu is an avid music fan and aspiring punk singer, and the book is peppered throughout with musical references, particularly to Tejano and norteño bands. If you were to create a soundtrack for readers to listen to while reading Malas, what songs would you include?

For sure, “Hey Baby, Que Paso” by The Texas Tornados, “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” by Selena, and so much Pedro Infante.

Listen to Marcela Fuentes’ full Malas Spotify playlist!

One powerful scene in the book occurs when Lulu’s father educates her about the various types of gritos in Mexican music and teaches her how to perform one. Could you tell us more about the importance of the grito?

A grito is a vocal eruption of emotion—joy, grief, rage, love, pride—and sometimes the sound of rebellion. In music, it’s a cathartic yelling, amping up the emotion. And, as Lulu says in the novel, it’s a war cry. There’s a highly mythologized account of the “grito de Dolores” the cry of a priest to call his congregation to arms on the eve of Mexican Independence. The scene in the book is an important moment between Lulu and her father because music is one thing that remains a bond between them. Fraught as their relationship is, the heartbreaking thing is they actually love each other very deeply and they are quite similar personalities. I wanted this to be a moment of that love, a bit of closeness and vulnerability for both of them. He’s handing down a heritage to her, and it is a heritage of rebellion, though he doesn’t realize she wants to use it to rebel against him.

Throughout the book, we observe Lulu grappling with the transition between girlhood and womanhood, something that is also symbolized by her impending quinceañera. What did you find the most challenging about telling the story of a protagonist who is navigating this particularly complicated time in one’s life?

The most challenging part was going to that emotionally vulnerable place and trying to forget my adult consciousness, placing myself in the headspace of an angry, hurt kid. I kept having to remind myself that a 14-year-old can morph from child to adult, even moment to moment. Lulu’s a smart girl, overconfident in her abilities and toughness. Her feelings, much as she disavows them, are ardent and immediate and she doesn’t have the maturity or the parental guidance to process them.

“[F]ind your writer friends. You’ll keep each other writing no matter what life throws at you.”

With your debut novel under your belt, can you tell us what you’ll be working on next?

I’m finishing a linked story collection called My Heart Has More Rooms Than a Whorehouse. It follows the members of an extended Latinx family and explores the pressure points of familial obligations and the complexities of love. A young boy from the barrio settles a wager his dead father made with a rich man. A sister tries to make sense of her brother’s career as a bull rider. A group of kids search for the bogeyman haunting their grandmother’s house. A suburban wife aches to understand her volatile husband. The people in these stories navigate the web of family allegiances while trying to find breathing space for themselves.

You are a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and now teach Creative Writing at Texas Christian University. What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve received and now give to your students?

The best piece of advice I got was that my writing community, writer friends, were the best thing I’d get from my M.F.A. I have a group of writer friends. I trust their eyes on my work, as they trust mine on theirs. I tell my students the same thing: find your writer friends. You’ll keep each other writing no matter what life throws at you.

Rebellious women face a family curse in Marcela Fuentes’ debut novel Malas, infused with folklore and Tejano culture.
FictionHistorical FictionComing of Age

Malas

Review by Stephenie Harrison

The legend of La Llorona (the Weeping Woman) has endured for centuries in Latinx culture, with roots tracing back to 1500s Mexico. A malevolent spirit who drowned her children after discovering her husband’s infidelity, La Llorona now roams the Earth cursing all who encounter her with lifelong misfortune and unhappiness. With her debut novel, Malas, Marcela Fuentes puts her own electrifying spin on this tale, updating it for the 21st century into a fiery family epic teeming with rage and revenge.

Set in the dusty border town of La Cienega, Texas, Malas follows two social outcasts separated by decades yet bound together in a surprising way. In 1951, Pilar Aguirre, mother to a young son and expecting her second child, is cursed by a crone who claims to be married to Pilar’s husband. The discord sown by this encounter ricochets through the subsequent weeks, months and years, rending relationships and ruining lives. Forty years later, another mysterious old woman appears in town, this time causing an uproar at the funeral of Lulu Muñoz’s grandmother. Headstrong and seeking to annoy her domineering father, 14-year-old Lulu strikes up a clandestine relationship with the stranger; as friendship blossoms and their connection deepens, the devastating way in which the two are linked gradually comes to light, dredging up old secrets that threaten to throw La Cienega into chaos once again.

Readers will devour Malas. Fuentes’ propulsive plotting; rich and precise depiction of Tejano culture; complex characters; and thoughtful exploration of female anger, grief and intergenerational trauma combine to form a fully immersive reading experience that—for all its specificity—will be compelling and meaningful to readers of all backgrounds. Brimming with brio, Fuentes’ deliciously defiant debut breathes new life into classic lore and heralds the arrival of a bold new literary powerhouse.

“[O]vercoming generational trauma might sometimes be related to not accepting a fate-driven narrative.” Read our Q&A with Marcela Fuentes about Malas.

With her debut novel, Malas, Marcela Fuentes puts her own electrifying spin on the legend of La Llorona (the Weeping Woman), turning it into a fiery family epic teeming with rage, revenge and revolution.
FictionPopular Fiction

The Twilight Garden

Review by Stephenie Harrison

A maxim popularized by the Robert Frost poem “Mending Wall” counsels that “good fences make good neighbors.” However, in Sara Nisha Adams’ sophomore novel, The Twilight Garden, nothing could be further from the truth.

In a small neighborhood in northern London sits a neglected community garden that spans two homes. A peculiar feature of these two houses is that their deeds state that the garden must be shared and no fence can be built between them. Alas, apart from the garden, the only thing the warring residents of these homes have in common is a deep antipathy towards one another. Tired of the way his neighbor Bernice swans around as though she owns his home in addition to her own, Winston decides to engage in a literal turf war: Nudged along by mysterious photos that depict the garden as it was decades earlier, he vows to rehabilitate it and leave his mark on their shared space. Winston soon gains an unexpected helper in Bernice’s young son and eventually Bernice herself deigns to get her hands dirty and gets involved in the garden, too. As the erstwhile enemies learn to work together, their garden becomes a place where something more beautiful than flowers—friendship—blooms.

With The Twilight Garden, Adams revisits the thematic bedrock of her beloved debut novel, The Reading List, exploring the power of a shared interest as a catalyst for connection. Alongside Winston and Bernice’s story in 2018, Adams interweaves the history of another set of neighbors and the communal garden’s origins in the 1970s, cultivating a rich community of characters who burrow their way under your skin and tug at your heartstrings. This story uplifts and acts as a balm to the soul, reminding the reader that family is not just something we are born into but also something we can grow with others. This is a perfect choice for fans of languidly paced, relaxing reads and rewards those who are patient enough to see its storylines and characters fully blossom.

The author of The Reading List returns with another tale exploring the power of a shared interest as a catalyst for connection—this time, a neglected community garden.
FictionGothic FictionComing of Age

The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years

Review by Stephenie Harrison

Perhaps the most commonly touted piece of advice for writers is to write what you know. It’s clear that Shubnum Khan has taken this counsel to heart with this dazzling novel (her first published in the U.S.), spinning a magical and richly atmospheric gothic coming-of-age tale set in Durban, South Africa, the same city the author herself calls home.

In a piece for the literary journal Portside Review, Khan described her hometown as “a place where people leave.” Slow and stuck in time, the coastal city is somewhere to go when one wants to forget and be forgotten in turn. Durban is the perfect backdrop for Akbar Manzil, the gothic mansion at the heart of The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years. Once a palace of wonders and luxury for an extremely wealthy family, Akbar Manzil is now a moribund manse haphazardly converted into apartments and home to a ragtag group of misfit tenants. Amongst the complex’s denizens are teenager Sana and her widowed father, newly arrived and looking to start fresh after a terrible loss. Whereas the other residents drift through the grounds blind and incurious to their home’s quirks and mysteries, Sana resists the soporific effects of the estate and delves into abandoned corridors and locked rooms, determined to shine a light upon the shadows, secrets and spirits that lurk within. But Sana’s relentless pursuit of the past is not without consequence. Her discovery of a star-crossed romance that took place many years earlier agitates a grieving djinn and threatens to throw the lives of Akbar Manzil’s present-day residents into chaos.

Cinematic in scope and rendered in redolent prose, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is a deeply immersive and inventive exploration of the many facets of love, loneliness and grief. Khan’s descriptions of Durban ground the story despite its fantastical elements, making the novel all the more compelling. Fueled by its vivid details, bewitching setting and a colorful cast of characters (including the house Akbar Manzil itself), this engrossing read acts as a potent reminder that the past does not merely hold the power to hurt us, but also to heal us.

Fueled by its vivid details and colorful cast of characters, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is a richly atmospheric gothic coming-of-age tale set in Durban, South Africa.
FictionHistorical Fiction

We Must Not Think of Ourselves

Review by Stephenie Harrison

In the summer of 2019, bestselling author Lauren Grodstein (A Friend of the Family) visited the Oneg Shabbat Archive in Poland, which houses diary entries and records documenting Jewish life under German occupation during World War II. As she read testimonies and reflected upon her own family’s departure from Poland, Grodstein found inspiration for her next novel, a stirring work of historical fiction that takes readers into the Nazis’ largest ghetto.

We Must Not Think of Ourselves tells the story of Adam Paskow, who is recruited by the Oneg Shabbat just months after being relocated to a shared apartment in Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto. Emanuel Ringelblum, the group’s leader, explains to Adam that his assignment is to record “all the details, even if they seem insignificant. I don’t want you to decide what’s significant. . . . Our task is to pay attention. To listen to the stories.”

So Adam begins to conduct interviews with his flatmates as well as with children from the English class he teaches. Acting as something of a Greek chorus, these voices vacillate between the mundane, the macabre and occasional moments of joy, demonstrating how the community doggedly clings to any semblance of normalcy. We come to see that, for Adam and all the Jews stripped of their rights and freedoms, it is an act of resistance to simply persist in the business of daily living and continue to enjoy simple pleasures wherever they may be found.

Adam also transcribes his own life story, musing not only on his increasingly bleak present reality but also his life before the war, when he worked at a prestigious school and was happily married until his wife’s tragic death. Though he believes the great love of his life is behind him, we witness Adam slowly form a romantic connection with Sala, a married mother with whom he now shares cramped living quarters. Their mutual attachment transforms their time in the ghetto into something more than survival.

As its plot advances, We Must Not Think of Ourselves is most concerned with exploring the internal lives of its characters and giving faces to the people who lived in the Warsaw Ghetto. By keeping the novel’s scope intimate and personal, Grodstein lets readers experience Adam and his compatriots’ loss and resilience in a visceral, rather than intellectual, way. Emotionally charged and meticulously researched, We Must Not Think of Ourselves pays homage to the Oneg Shabbat’s goal of honoring the Jewish people by bearing witness to the entirety of their experience. This is a compelling and compassionate tribute that will resonate deeply with readers.

Emotionally charged and meticulously researched, We Must Not Think of Ourselves pays homage to the Oneg Shabbat’s goal of honoring the Jewish people by bearing witness to the entirety of their experience.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily Saga

Connection across borders and generations

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

The Liberators explores themes of intergenerational trauma, reconciliation and forgiveness, both at an individual level and at a national one. These are topics you also delved into in your memoir, The Magical Language of Others. How do you view the two books in relation to one another?

Thank you for bringing to light the connection between The Liberators and The Magical Language of Others. There is a spider’s web hanging between the books that one can pass through without ever breaking the line. Just as the memoir makes the novel possible, the novel seems to offer new perspectives to the memoir—to deepen the conversation of human history, a lineage of atrocity and reparation. In The Liberators, Robert says, “Sometimes your past smiles at you. Other times your past points a gun at you.”

You recently worked as a writer on the television adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. For most authors, writing is a fairly solitary experience, so what was it like for you to be in a writers’ room where you were part of a team? Was there anything you learned during that process that you brought to writing The Liberators?

The notion of table setting, from my doctoral work, became a part of the writers room. Table setting is a way to hold many opposing ideas at once: You can set the table with your ideas but you cannot take off another person’s setting. So one may sit across from another with whom they disagree, with a willingness to watch what the settings would do on their own. This willingness is rooted in not what one has set on the table but what could be discovered. Extending the table, we extend ourselves—and together we can reckon with even the things we cannot change. This way of holding opposing ideas became a part of The Liberators.

“Through different perspectives across culture, geography and generations, I hope to continue investigating our collected memory as a braid of our humanity.”

You have translated other poets’ poems from Korean into English, but so far, your own works have only been published in English. How does your translation work inform your writing process? 

The Liberators will be my first work to be translated from English to Korean, and I won’t be translating it myself. Alongside readers, I will experience the sentences take on another shape and sound. Translation bridges histories between languages, nations and cultures. Translators like Don Mee Choi, Anton Hur and Sora Kim-Russell use translation to create pathways toward unsettled truths about imperialism and colonialism and militarism. In a way, my work as a writer wouldn’t be possible without me first understanding my work as a translator.

One interesting feature of The Liberators is that it is told through myriad perspectives over the course of nearly 40 years. What made you choose a multi-narrator approach?

Elizabeth Rosner writes in Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, “We are all responsible to continue unraveling and at the same time underscoring this tenacious human lineage of destruction and restoration.” Nona Fern&aacutendez’s novel The Twilight Zone is another book that collects the memories of perpetrators and victims, of prisoners and liberators. Through different perspectives across culture, geography and generations, I hope to continue investigating our collected memory as a braid of our humanity.

Food plays an important part in The Liberators. One dish in particular, mulnaengmyeon (cold noodles in chilled broth) is at the center of an especially moving passage. Are there any other food moments in the novel that stand out for you?

After reading my novel, my advisor Shawn Wong at the University of Washington, gave me such a compliment by asking where he could have mulnaengmyeon. Food crosses boundaries and borders—real and imaginary. A moment I love is when Insuk, upon meeting her daughter-in-law, feeds her constantly. Insuk changes in such a way that her heart takes on the shape of a spoon.

“I asked how . . . we recognize the dead, and how the dead recognize us. This is the place from which the book began to take shape.”

In addition to the personal storylines, historical events act as catalysts and propel the narrative. What kind of research did you do when it came to plotting the book and how did you approach balancing the historical with the fictional?

The first lines of the novel came out of my doctoral research in trauma across Korean American literature, history and film. At the same time, I was completing my memoir and the script for “Pachinko.” In the translator’s note to South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s collection, Autobiography of Death, translator Don Mee Choi defines autobiography as “an autotestimony and autoceremony that reenacts trauma and narrates our historical death—how we have died and how we remain living within the structure of death.” I asked how, beyond research and writing, we recognize the dead, and how the dead recognize us. This is the place from which the book began to take shape.

You recently completed your PhD in English Literature with a focus on Korean American literature, history and film. Can you recommend some books by Korean and Korean American authors that our readers may not be familiar with but should consider checking out? 

Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, The Future of Silence: Fiction by Korean Women translated by Ju-Chan Fulton and Bruce Fulton, Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim translated by Janet Hong, Memories of My Ghost Brother by Heinz Insu Fenkl, DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi, How I Became a North Korean by Krys Lee, Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon translated by Don Mee Choi, Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung translated by Anton Hur, I Hear Your Voice by Young-ha Kim translated by Krys Lee, and many works without whom neither this novel nor I myself could have existed.

Readers might be surprised to discover that in the last year you have set yourself a goal of writing 1000 love letters to strangers. Tell us how this project came about and what it means to you.

In 2016, I was heartbroken over my work and decided to give up writing. But I put out a call online: I would write 1000 love letters to strangers. The next day I found [I had received] requests from all over the world. For me, what I longed for through words was human connection. By some magic, I was able to complete a poetry book and memoir, and now I’m so grateful to share this novel.

With a PhD completed, a new novel out and 400 love letters to go, what will you do next?

It feels impossible to show the full extent of my gratitude to those who have helped me along the way—my teachers and colleagues: Susan E. Davis, Greg McClure, Greg November, Don Mee Choi, Shawn Wong, Paul Lisicky, Krys Lee, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Matthew Salesses, Tayari Jones, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Crystal Hana Kim, Emily Jungmin Yoon, David Krolikoski, Joseph Han, Ed Park, Jimin Han, Jang Wook Huh, Esther Ra, Elizabeth Rosner, Brian Reed, Timothy Donnelly, Eamon Grennan, Mark Strand and so many more. A part of that gratitude I hope to show by helping others who may feel the weight of loss and may need the reminder that, no matter what, you must not give up hope, because the sun shines on every wreckage and every place on earth, on everyone and on you.

Read our starred review of The Liberators.

E.J. Koh wields language in many ways: She has written memoir, poetry and TV scripts, as well as translating others’ poetry. Now, in her debut novel, The Liberators, Koh digs into the tensions between language, memory and history as she follows one family from the military dictatorship of 1980s South Korea to the conflicts of their Korean American community in 2000s California.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily Saga

The Liberators

Review by Stephenie Harrison

In 2020, E.J. Koh’s memoir, The Magical Language of Others, rocked readers with its excavation of Koh’s astonishing family history rendered in heart-shattering prose. A tribute to her family, to her Korean roots and to language itself, Koh’s memoir was acclaimed for its tender yet fierce writing, as well as its compassionate and candid exploration of generational trauma, forgiveness, reconciliation and resilience. In her debut novel, The Liberators, Koh revisits these themes through the lens of fiction, unfurling a stirring family odyssey against the backdrop of nearly 40 years of Korean history.

Beginning in the 1980s, The Liberators loosely centers on Insuk and Sungho, a young couple who fall in love and marry in Daejeon, South Korea, but soon flee to the United States in pursuit of a fresh start away from the violence and instability of the military dictatorship. However, even in California, echoes of the conflict between North and South Korea continue to reverberate, deepening fractures in their growing family and in their community. Through the perspectives of numerous narrators—from prison guards to revolutionaries, North Korean defectors and the family dog—we witness the family navigating hardships and happiness over the course of decades, inching closer to a future in which the wounds and sorrows that both isolate and unite them can be healed.

Koh has crafted an intriguing novel of contrasts and complements. It is a deeply intimate family story, interlaced with high-level philosophical discussions of Korean history, politics and identity. At times, the story brims with tragedy and risks tumbling readers into a pit of despair, yet a shimmering undercurrent of hope always remains to offer a reprieve. It is violent and tender, wistful and hopeful, built from small moments and yet sweeping.

In such an ambitious book, it is Koh’s writing—a symphony of vivid imagery and emotion—that binds all the disparate elements together into something that will burrow deep into readers’ hearts and minds. A brave exploration of the complexities of the human experience and the impossible task of making peace with the past, The Liberators is another resounding triumph for Koh that is sure to win her new fans, particularly those who prefer introspective novels in which the writing and ideas pack just as much punch as the plot.

Read our interview with E.J. Koh on The Liberators.

The Liberators is another resounding triumph for E.J. Koh: a brave exploration of the complexities of the human experience and the impossible task of making peace with the past.
FictionPopular Fiction

Maame

Review by Stephenie Harrison

Shakespeare’s Juliet famously pondered, “What’s in a name?” and although she may have concluded that names fail to reflect any intrinsic qualities of a person, the protagonist of Jessica George’s compassionate debut novel, Maame, knows better. Dubbed “Maame” by her mother as a baby, Madeline Wright has struggled with the weight of her nickname her entire life. The seemingly innocuous five-letter Twi word is heavy with multiple meanings: “the responsible one,” “the mother,” “the woman.”

Now in her 20s, Maddie believes that her life in London has well and truly stalled. In order to keep her family afloat, she works as a personal assistant, performing soul-crushing drudge work in offices where she is often the only Black person. When she’s not at work, she cares for her father, who has Parkinson’s disease, because her mother spends most of the year back in Ghana, only checking in to ask for money or hound Maddie about when she plans on getting married. Maddie’s older brother is never around and rarely takes her calls. So at the tender age of 25, Maddie has never had sex, still lives at home and finds herself wondering if her mother’s pet name was meant as a term of endearment or a curse.

Maame audiobook cover
Also in BookPage: Read our starred review of the audiobook, narrated by Heather Agyepong.

When her mother unexpectedly returns to England, Maddie takes the chance to stretch her wings, fly the nest and reinvent herself. With plenty of growing pains along the way, Maddie navigates flat-sharing, new friendships, online dating and sex, racism, career changes and grief. Slowly, she transforms from a sheltered girl who had adulthood prematurely thrust upon her into a woman of her own making. 

Masterfully balancing comedy, tragedy and tenderness, Maame is a nuanced and powerful coming-of-age story. George candidly captures the false starts, heartbreak and awkwardness of early adulthood with empathy and a necessary dose of humor. Maddie easily joins the highest ranks of memorable and lovable “hot mess” characters. Like Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones, Candice Carty-Williams’ Queenie Jenkins and Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant before her, Maddie is a good reminder that through all of life’s hardships, we can be the authors of our own happy endings, and it is never too late to become who you might have been. 

Like Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones, Candice Carty-Williams’ Queenie Jenkins and Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant, Maddie is a good reminder that we can be the authors of our own happy endings, and it is never too late to become who you might have been.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Unfortunates

Review by Stephenie Harrison

An exhilarating work of experimental metafiction, The Unfortunates is a novel masquerading as a senior thesis (complete with footnotes) meant to unmask the injustices, microaggressions, hypocrisy and racism experienced by nonwhite students at an unnamed upper-tier college in the Midwest.

Sahara Kesandu Nwadike, the protagonist of J K Chukwu’s brazen and bold debut novel, is a living, breathing poster girl for the “sophomore slump.” Already exhausted following her first year of college, Sahara decides to jump ahead to her senior thesis and begins to document the reality of being Black on campus. A troubling number of Black students (dubbed “the Unfortunates” by their Black peers that remain) have disappeared, dropped out or died. Grappling with a “D” of her own—depression—Sahara secretly aspires to join the ranks of the Unfortunates before the academic year is done, frequently fantasizing about how she’ll end her suffering and finally silence the voice in her head that has been with her since childhood. The voice, which Sahara has nicknamed LP, short for “Life Partner,” insists that she is not good enough, a message that’s reinforced by the majority of her peers, professors and family. She’s not smart enough, not straight enough, not rich enough, not skinny enough, not Nigerian enough.

But even if Sahara really is useless, she feels she cannot end her life without doing one thing that truly matters. So she writes about the mental toll of being at the university and skewers the performative allyship, the racial inequalities in health care access and treatment, and the white supremacy tacitly condoned by the university. She bares her soul and shares all the things no one else wants to hear. Finally, her own voice—her rage—will be heard.

The Unfortunates is an electrifying read that’s meant to disrupt and disturb; as a result, it can be deeply uncomfortable and disheartening. Yet despite the novel’s sobering subject matter, it is not devoid of hope or humor. Much to her credit, Chukwu punctuates Sahara’s despair with witty turns of phrase and wordplay to keep readers from spiraling into an existential crisis of their own.

While refusing to gloss over the bitter realities of the Black experience in modern America, Chukwu has written a tale about how those who “[live] in a school—no, state—no, country that hates—no, kills—no, destroys, so much of us” are still able to survive. The Unfortunates is a powerful call to arms by a promising young writer who is not afraid to take risks, and for that we are very fortunate indeed.

The Unfortunates is a powerful call to arms by a promising young writer who is not afraid to take risks, and for that we are very fortunate indeed.

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