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October 24, 2023
The illustrations set both the scene and the tone in these thoughtful graphic novels and memoirs, plus a fascinating graphic biography.
Like many little boys, Darrin Bell wanted a water gun when he was 6 years old. Unlike the white boys in his neighborhood with slick black water guns, he received a bright green one, accompanied by “The Talk” from his mom. She explained that “the world is… different for you and your brother. White people won’t see you or treat you the way they do little white boys.” It’s The Talk that parents of Black children are all too familiar with in America.
Bell is a Pulitzer Prize winner known for his editorial cartoons and for being the first Black cartoonist to have his comic strips, Candorville and Ruby Park, nationally syndicated. The Talk, Bell’s striking debut graphic memoir, utilizes wit and emotional openness to chronicle the ways in which racism has shaped his life, from a police officer terrorizing a young Bell over his green water gun to protests in 2020 over the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
Most of the book is illustrated in shades of blue, with flashbacks that come on suddenly and disjointedly—like real memories do—in yellows reminiscent of sepia photographs. Flashes of red are often used during intense moments, and one particularly philosophical page uses a purple that only appears again during the climax. Hyperrealistic pop culture items placed throughout both unsettle the illustrations and ground the reader within the timeline of Bell’s life, from the early 1980s until present day. At the end, Bell even includes some of his most iconic editorial cartoons.
This book is heavy, both emotionally and physically. The size allows Bell to use graphic conventions unlike those he’s usually confined to in a four-panel newspaper comic strip, frequently doing full-page illustrations or removing the panels all together. But during several important conversations, including The Talk between Darrin and his mother, as well as The Talk he has with his own son, Bell returns to an even grid of panels that hearken back to his old format and emphasize how important each moment is.
The deeply honest conversation Bell is able to have with his son is especially compelling when presented in contrast with a much more limited conversation about racism he had with his father, shown through a flashback. Witnessing their generational growth filled me both with empathy for Bell’s father and with hope for what Bell’s radical truth-telling can bring.
On a quiet street in postwar Naples, two young girls embark on a complex friendship that will encompass decades of strife, jealousy, bitterness and fierce devotion. Since early childhood, Lenu and Lila have been each other’s protectors and confidantes. Lenu lives in fear of her domineering mother, while Lila is expected to put work and family first, with her education being a low priority.
Lenu worships the enigmatic Lila, believing her to be smarter, more beautiful and more interesting than herself. But Lila’s shifting moods are inscrutable, giving way to unpredictable bouts of anger, irritability and depression. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Lenu sticks by Lila’s side. As Lenu and Lila age, they are pulled in opposite directions—but they remain fixed points in each other’s orbits, for better or for worse.
Chiara Lagani and Mara Cerri’s adaptation of the first novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, My Brilliant Friend: The Graphic Novel, is a brief and impressionistic rendition of the original. Lagani’s spare text (through Ann Goldstein’s translation) provides broad vignettes of the novel’s pivotal moments while Cerri’s artwork brings to life the often grim setting of Lila and Lenu’s neighborhood.
Ferrante’s original is a dense book, spanning years of childhood and adolescence over more than 300 pages. Rather than cover each event in detail, the graphic novel pinpoints the most life altering events for Lenu and Lila. The artwork is the true star of this adaptation. Using pencil, charcoal and pastels on coarse, off-white paper, Cerri reflects the harsh reality of postwar Italy—its grit, its violence and its fear. The panels are large and without straight lines as Cerri alternates between aerial views and intimate, uncomfortable moments. Similarly, the color palettes range from hyper-pigmented to washed out. The materials used imbue the book with an aged appearance, as though Lenu herself had crafted it as a diary—Cerri often leaves original pencil sketches in place, and the reader can see exactly where the drawing was altered.
It’s difficult to say if My Brilliant Friend: The Graphic Novel can stand on its own; most of its readers will likely be those who have read the original, and it’s unclear whether there are plans to adapt the rest of Ferrante’s quartet. That said, it is a unique and evocative tribute to a modern classic.
It’s spring break in 2009. Childhood best friends Dani and Zoe are freshmen in college, and are finally spending a week in New York City like they’ve always dreamed. Accompanying Dani is her classmate Fiona, a cigarette-smoking, tragically hip art student whose uninhibited and self-possessed attitude attracts Zoe immediately.
Dani wants to do classic tourist things: eat pizza and see Coney Island, Times Square and the Statue of Liberty. But Fiona, who has been to New York many times, scoffs at the mere mention of tourism, instead suggesting they see “real” neighborhoods. Zoe, caught in the middle but unable to deny Fiona’s magnetic coolness, agrees. As the trio navigates a late-aughts New York with spotty cell service and tenuous personal connections, they will each have to reckon with something—whether it’s each other or something within themselves.
Roaming, cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s first graphic novel collaboration for an adult audience, is a slice-of-life story about growing up and growing apart, being on the cusp of adulthood and exploring an unfamiliar city. The characters and their experiences hit hard because of how incredibly real they feel; despite the intrinsic brevity of the format, Dani, Fiona and Zoe are fully fleshed out.
As a duo, the Tamakis possess a talent for crafting stories of immense substance out of small, zoomed-in moments. Because of their specificity, these micro-stories speak to a much broader macro-story: Almost everyone knows a Fiona, has been a Zoe or has become frustrated with the hesitance of the Dani in their life.
Jillian’s color palettes are typically spare and minimal, relying on thick black lines and one or two pastels—for This One Summer, a light, muted indigo; for Roaming, swaths of periwinkle, peach and white. The palette places a gauzy haze over the story’s heaviness, much like the function of memory itself.
Roaming is about young adults, new to being on their own and easy to see as naive. But the magic of the book is that it will speak to the 18-year-old in every reader—whether they’re just out of college or at retirement age. Some things, no matter how much time has passed, never change.
In 2016, New Yorker cartoonist Navied Mahdavian and his wife needed a change, so they packed up their lives and fled—with their dog—from San Francisco to a cabin in rural Idaho. Despite not knowing what wood best keeps houses warm in frigid winters or how to stop a car from freezing during snowstorms, Mahdavian couldn’t help but want his version of the millennial American dream: living off the land in a house you own while building a career as an artist.
Most of Mahdavian’s debut graphic memoir This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America takes place on the six acres around his family’s cabin. There, Mahdavian wanders with his dog, tends to the garden and learns the history of the land—both the stories maintained by his white neighbors and the deeper Indigenous history. Mahdavian’s minimalist illustrations convey how large and rural Idaho can be, and they make it hard not to fall in love with that sort of hopeful landscape. Swaths of blank pages are populated by only the horizon and the plants and animals Mahdavian loves. If Idaho were simply gooseberries and black-billed magpies, it would be impossible to leave.
As Mahdavian settles into his cabin and tries to revel in the slow day to day of his life, he begins to fall in love with the natural world around him, even as his gun-toting neighbors remind him that people like Mahdavian—who is Iranian American—are considered outsiders. Beneath the big blue sky, Mahdavian struggles with their small-minded thinking and wonders if this place he loves can become home–and what choosing to make this place home really means.
It’s the surrounding people that leave Mahdavian feeling disconnected from the land whose history he seeks to understand. Mahdavian’s candid anecdotes showcase neighbors who welcome him and help during crises—even while slinging racial slurs and perpetuating stereotypes. Despite the serious and occasionally threatening nature of these exchanges, Mahdavian’s humor and thoughtfulness honors the kindness contained in these strange relationships while refusing to gloss over the harm that such insular thinking can cause.
Both poetic and personal, This Country meditates beautifully on what it means to create a home in the pockets of America where not everybody is wanted, due to their race or other aspects of identity. This Country is a must for fans of graphic memoirs like Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, and it’s not one to miss for anybody interested in insightful explorations of America’s heartland.
Biographies can intrigue and educate with subject matter alone, but some of the most interesting give both the story of a life and the reason behind the author’s fascination. Washington’s Gay General: The Legends and Loves of Baron von Steuben tells the story of the titular war general, who rose from Prussian obscurity in the 1700s to become a once legendary yet now forgotten leader, and why Eisner Award-winning author Josh Trujillo found his life so interesting.
Ambitious and idealistic, Baron von Steuben quickly rose through the ranks of the Prussian Army through a combination of genius, white lies and good old flirting. However, relationships with Prussian royalty and a reputation as a leader in the army weren’t enough to keep him safe from charges of impropriety, and von Steuben found himself fleeing his home country.
After arriving in America, Benjamin Franklin recruited him to help the Americans organize their untrained rebel army. With the help of young men, some of whom were his lovers, von Steuben shared Prussian army techniques with George Washington, eventually writing the Blue Book guide that laid the foundation for training American soldiers. Yet because of his romantic partners and his immigrant status, it was always a challenge for von Steuben to form a legacy that would be remembered.
Thoughts from Trujillo (and, occasionally, illustrator Levi Hastings) stitch together the gaps in the available information on von Steuben’s life by weaving in compelling modern conversations on queer identity and queer history. They don’t shy away from darkness: The book discusses the fact that von Steuben enslaved people and highlights how his relative wealth and status protected him from what poorer, less powerful queer folk faced.
Hastings ditches the more colorful artwork found in his children’s books in favor of a classy triad color scheme of black, white and blue–quietly patriotic, much like von Steuben himself. The most beautiful piece of art comes at the very end of the book: a single-page spread of von Steuben’s beloved hound, curled up asleep in a bed made of von Steuben’s coat and hat.
Washington’s Gay General examines the same questions of ideology and legacy that permeate the Broadway show Hamilton, and fans of the production will certainly find much to enjoy. For those who are less interested in early American history and simply want to connect with their queer roots, Washington’s Gay General offers an accessible introduction to the life of Baron von Steuben and, through him, the queer people throughout history who have been hiding in plain sight.
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Tan Twan Eng’s third novel, which was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, is set in the early 1920s, when the British writer William Somerset Maugham and his secretary (and lover) Gerald Haxton visit the coastal province of Penang, Malaysia, as the guests of Lesley and Robert Hamlyn.
Part of Penang’s European elite, Lesley and Robert live a comfortable, privileged life although their marriage is no longer as intimate as it once was and Lesley suspects Robert of having an affair. Over the course of his visit, Lesley shares her concerns with “Willie” and mentions that she was once close to the revolutionary leader Sun Yat Sen, who spent time fundraising in Penang. Lesley was also a friend of Ethel Proudlock, whose murder trial in Kuala Lumpur sent shock waves through the British expat population. These details provided the seeds for several of Maugham’s future works, most notably “The Letter,” the final story in his 1926 collection The Casuarina Tree.
The House of Doors alternates between Lesley’s and Willie’s perspectives as Lesley unburdens herself to Willie, disclosing her fears of her husband’s infidelity and her involvement in Sun’s movement. Willie draws inspiration for his stories from Lesley and other locals, while hoping to dig himself out of a financial hole and worrying that Gerald will leave him now that money is flowing less freely.
Tan’s choice to tell the story from the view of the colonizing class highlights his characters’ limitations and blind spots. Many of the characters are living double lives; Willie hides his homosexuality, and Lesley too keeps an intimate relationship secret. Perhaps this is why, for a novel about desire and revolutionary politics, the tone of The House of Doors is surprisingly cool: The moral complexities of a colonial society are hidden behind a veneer of restraint and manners. Tan’s eye for detail and understated storytelling bring a subtle edge to this thoughtfully written, atypical historical novel that searches for the emotional truth behind the facts.
Author Matt Wallace excels at depicting realistic family scenarios, complex moral dilemmas, and good-hearted, but flawed, adults.
The Space Between Here & Now is an intriguing mix of fantasy and realism that lures readers in with the promise of magic and keeps
We sometimes forget that the descent in Dante’s Divine Comedy is a journey toward God. Jesmyn Ward’s portrayal of slavery is the profound manifestation of
The Future is a daring, sexy, thrilling novel that may be the most wryly funny book about the end of civilization you’ll ever read.
Hannah Morrissey’s small-town murder mystery When I’m Dead is nigh-on impossible to put down.
Longtime New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chaste’s I Must Be Dreaming is an uproarious, touching and zany ride.
The Dictionary People—which chronicles the unsung heroes who contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary—is sheer delight.
Michael Gross’ delightful cultural history of WASPs illuminates the odd corners of the lives of our nation’s elite—and American history itself.
Alexis Hall’s new rom-com might have a zany setup—a guy fakes amnesia!—but its authentic emotion will win readers’ hearts.
Beautiful and expertly executed, The Reformatory is a horror masterpiece that derives its power from both the magical and the mundane.
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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 Fernández’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.
Métis author Michelle Porter weaves a beguiling and intricate story out of sparse, interlocking poetic fragments in her fiction debut. Her expertise as a poet and writer of nonfiction is on full display in this genre-blending book, which is deeply rooted in Métis storytelling, matrilineal knowledge and spirituality. It feels more like a collection of stories told by elders gathered around a fire or in a kitchen than a traditional novel. This unique structure creates a surprising momentum, effortlessly drawing readers into many meandering plots.
The story follows several generations of Métis women as they face turning points in their lives. Geneviéve (Gee), in her 80s, has checked herself into rehab for drinking. Gee’s 20-something great-granddaughter Carter, adopted by a white family, meets her grandmother Lucie for the first time when she requests Carter’s assistance in her decision to die by suicide. Carter’s estranged birth mother Allie attempts reconciliation, often through texts. Meanwhile, Gee’s sister Velma has recently died and is trying to make peace with her life from the spirit realm.
However, these women and their complex relationships are not the novel’s sole focus. It also charts the life of a young bison, Dee, whose herd’s ancestral territory is now crisscrossed with fences that force bison to adjust to human constraints. Dee’s chapters are some of the most poignant in the book—she longs for freedom and adventure even as she learns that her survival is bound up with that of her herd.
Chapters from the perspectives of bison grandmothers, Gee’s dogs and the grassland itself add to a rich mix of human and nonhuman voices. In contrast to Carter’s wry and resigned narration, Dee’s voice bursts with unconstrained joy and heartache. Gee is constantly cracking jokes, her sister in the spirit world speaks with a melancholy longing, and the texts from Carter’s mother are clipped and full of simmering regret and pain.
A Grandmother Begins the Story is a beautiful meditation on the interconnectedness of spirit, land and family. It’s about what gets passed down from mothers to daughters and what doesn’t. It’s about the stories that persist through generations—sometimes hidden, but always present—and what happens when those stories break open into new shapes.
After receiving widespread acclaim for the autobiographical Linea Nigra: An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes, Mexican writer Jazmina Barrera delivers a dreamy yet compelling exploration of female friendship and coming of age in her fiction debut.
In Cross-Stitch, Mila finds her world shattered when she gets word that a childhood friend, Citlali, has drowned in the sea in Senegal. Few details are available about this shocking news, leading Mila to wonder if the death was an accident or suicide. As she organizes Citlali’s memorial service, Mila begins to sift through memories of Citlali and their mutual friend Dalia, whom she hasn’t seen for years. Sewing has long been central to Mila’s life—in fact, she’s just published a book about embroidery—and the three girls often sewed together. Now Mila muses, “I haven’t worked out how to sew and think about Citlali without pricking my fingers.”
Mila and Citlali had a middle school teacher who pointed out “that the words ‘text’ and ‘textile’ had the same root: the Latin texere, to weave, braid, or compose.” Throughout Cross-Stitch, Barrera weaves, braids and composes the story of the trio’s friendship into a plot so convincing and emotionally intelligent that readers may mistake it for a memoir, while seamlessly incorporating intriguing tidbits about the history of embroidery. The notes cover topics ranging from embroidery in ancient Egypt to a recent global campaign using crochet to raise awareness of the destruction of coral reefs due to climate change. Barrera’s prose is insightful and precise, and MacSweeney’s translation conveys a natural, conversational rhythm.
Barrera aptly writes: “While techniques for healing wounds have evolved over the centuries, a needle and thread are still commonly used. Something in the tissues, in the weaves . . . may offer answers to how other wounds can be healed.” As Mila desperately tries to make sense of both their shared history and Citlali’s loss, Cross-Stitch draws readers into the many strands uniting Mila, Dalia and Citlali.
Even well-loved, familiar poems can be mysterious. What if you could ask a poet to walk you through the why of one of their poems: why it matters, why they chose to share it, what’s at stake? Erin Belieu and Carl Phillips do just that in their delightful anthology, Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most. Including a remarkable and diverse array of contemporary poets, Phillips and Belieu assemble a collection of singular poems, each selected by its poet and accompanied by an explication of how it came to be written, illuminating the choices that make each poem sing. With poems by Danez Smith, Victoria Chang, Ada Limon, Jorie Graham, Ocean Vuong, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ilya Kaminsky and many more, there is something to appeal both to novice explorers of poetry and to writers and students hoping to deepen their appreciation for others’ work.
The anthology is full of gems. It was a welcome gift to reencounter poems I knew in fresh contexts, and it was equally enjoyable to explore poems and poets new to me and discover what I might read next. If someone you know is looking for some guidance in reading poetry, or seeking a deeper understanding of the poetic process, Personal Best would make an engaging, thoughtful gift.
Poems of faith and doubt, wounds and wonder: The moments collected in Kazim Ali’s Sukun: New and Selected Poems are surprising and approachable. Ali moves between subjects—from prayers, fairy tales and myths to baggage claims, yoga classes, boats and rain—with an honest, searching voice. Equally engaging is the formal range of the poems. From sonnets to prose poems, from open-ended lines that propel you forward to tightly compacted end-stopped lines, the form and content come together. Mundane details are made surprising in new combinations: “a black and white film” in which “the water glows white.” Part of the wonder comes from Ali grounding these details with a sense of place, setting them against large scale images of the natural world.
“There’s an old line of Robert Frost’s—that a poem ‘begins in delight and ends in wisdom.'”
In “Exit Strategy”—part of the triptych that opens the book—Ali writes “Here’s the hardest geography quiz I’ve ever taken: / How does one carry oneself from mountain to lake to desert / without leaving anything behind?” This collection reveals the answer, taking us through real and metaphorical landscapes as the speakers gather images, moments and ideas, letting each build on the last, collaging something wholly new.
In the first poem of Jane Hirshfield’s The Asking: New and Selected Poems, she begins: “ My life, / you were a door I was given / to walk through.” This beautiful opening is the door we readers walk through to discover and rediscover this retrospective collection of Hirshfield’s poetry. Throughout, her attention to and celebration of minute details brings readers into a space of awareness that continues even after our eyes leave the page.
The new poems that open the book examine our fractured planet and imagine better possibilities. Next, beginning with 1982’s Alaya, we move through 50 years of Hirschfield’s work, observing the ways that our planet and the interrogation of our relationship with it have evolved. Hirshfield writes in awe of the world, of science and of imagination, and she threads these ideas together with a specificity and power of observation that demands our attention. She notices the nuance of the world; so must we. There’s an old line of Robert Frost’s—that a poem “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” Hirshfield’s The Asking moves through both together, compelling the reader to wisdom and delight at interlocking, interconnected turns.
All Souls, the posthumously published final volume of poems by Saskia Hamilton, conveys a richness of stories in beautifully captured vignettes. As Hamilton writes, “Why retell the stories of those before us? They already spoke them, or held their tongues—fell silent. . . . To say something sincerely yet inauthentically is the danger.” In this work, she avoids that danger, telling each poem in a way that is searingly authentic and resolved.
Hamilton takes bits of history and image, of story and sensory experience, and weaves them together to express something new. The poems organize around the painful, impossible moment when a mother must leave her young son. This devastation circles through the collection, asking the reader what is remembered, retold, forgotten. Remarkable shifts occur between seemingly fragmented moments—between the lyric and narrative, past and present. As you continue to read, the disparate images connect and begin to speak.
Traveling through Major Jackson’s Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002-2023 opens a new window to his work. The poems are vibrant and engaging, examining life in America, racial injustice, and the ways that humans and nature intertwine and connect. The poetic influences and legacies that echo through the poems are clear, and there’s a rich sense of community and conversation.
From the fresh images of Jackson’s latest work, like “My mouth puckered whenever lemon-colored / arches appeared five stories above the city / like golden gates to an unforeseen heaven,” we travel into the past to excerpts from Leaving Saturn (2002) before moving forward through the 21 years in between. In addition to the subjects and questions that complicate as they recur, Jackson’s voice and sense of form are impressive. Each line is carefully chosen; each stanza break opens up something new. Selections from Jackson’s The Absurd Man (2020) prove to be particularly compelling as a bookend to the opening section of new poems, titled “Lovesick.” To see Jackson’s recent poems surround and grow out of the earlier ones is a joy.
To read Jesmyn Ward is to be carried by her epic, transformative language to the dark heart of the American South and, once there, to be surprised by the stark beauty of the region’s people. Let Us Descend, the Mississippi author’s fourth novel, brings Ward’s intimate knowledge of place to the pre-Civil War South, where her captivating narrator, teenage girl Annis, is enslaved. A two-time National Book Award winner (2011’s Salvage the Bones and 2017’s Sing, Unburied, Sing), Ward writes in the traditions of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison—but this story is unmistakably her own.
The journey begins at a North Carolina rice plantation owned by the enslaver who fathered Annis through rape. In a shady clearing in the woods, Annis’ mother teaches her to fight, yet their relationship is one of intense tenderness. When the enslaver sells Annis’ mother, our heroine is left grief-wracked. Before long, she too is sold downriver on a harrowing march to the slave markets of New Orleans. In North Carolina, she eavesdropped on her white half-sisters’ lessons about Dante’s Divine Comedy. Now, Annis recognizes her own descent through the circles of hell.
Let Us Descend is infused with the supernatural. Spirits approach Annis on her journey, offering protection and oblivion. Astute and intuitive, Annis steels herself against temptation, grounding herself in memories of her mother. The theme of mothering extends to the care Annis offers to and receives from the girls and women around her, which allows the characters to maintain their dignity and assert their humanity. These interactions are a balm not only to Annis but also to the reader. Ward constantly reminds us that oppressed people retain “soft parts” that the evils of slavery can never truly touch.
Though Annis seldom speaks and her dialogue often consists of single, short sentences, her thoughts sing with Ward’s signature lyricism. Ward’s choices of first-person point of view and present tense anchor us in Annis’ imagination. The narrator pictures her mother’s eyes “shriveled to pale raisins”; the ropes that bind her are “abrasive as a cat’s tongue on my open wrists”; a dying man is “a tunneling worm, shifting the earth above him.” These vivid observations and poetic interpretations express her resistance against bondage, her abiding understanding of beauty and her will to survive.
We sometimes forget that the descent in Dante’s Divine Comedy is a journey toward God. Ward’s reimagining of slavery is the profound manifestation of that possibility.
Ye Chun’s ambitious first novel, Straw Dogs of the Universe presents a concise dramatization of the history of early Chinese immigration to the American West. Many of us know the outlines of this era, which began with the importation of Chinese labor for the construction of the transcontinental railroad and ended with the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first law to restrict immigration to the U.S. based on race or ethnicity. Using a relatively small number of characters, Chun personalizes both the fear and despair that pervaded the lives of so many of these immigrants, and the fortitude, hope and love that they cultivated anyway.
The central quest of the novel is for Sixiang to find her father, Guifeng, whom she has never met. Sixiang is 10 years old when her village in Guangdong, China, is destroyed by a flood and subsequent famine. She holds faith in her ability to survive even after her mother, for food and money, trades her to a trafficker who transports her to “Gold Mountain,” a Chinese name for the western U.S. in the period during and after the California Gold Rush. Too young for prostitution, she is sold as a house servant, then taken in by missionaries. After escaping the mission and sheltering with a man who had known her father while working on the railroad, Sixiang begins the journey that takes her into the Sierra near Truckee, California.
In alternate chapters, we learn about the life of Sixiang’s father, Guifeng. Tantalized by his own father’s dream of Gold Mountain, he leaves home and contracts with a railroad building team. On his first and only day in San Francisco, he sees a woman from his village he had loved from afar as a boy, Feiyan, who has been enslaved as a prostitute. Although he is sent the following day to a work site in the Sierra, he continues to obsess over Feiyan, eventually returning to help her escape and later starting a second family with her. But his new life falters when he becomes addicted to opium.
At each juncture of her story, Chun examines both large-scale injustices—Chinese people murdered and their white killers released—and smaller humiliations—a temporary employer finds Sixiang’s name too hard to say and instead calls her “Cindy.” The novel culminates with the expulsion of Chinese immigrants from Truckee, once the second largest Chinatown in the US. It is a time of shock and terror, but for this novel’s protagonists, also a time of adaptation and endurance.
In 2016, Naomi Alderman’s novel The Power, a radical vision of what could happen if women became the physically dominant sex, offered transformative ideas about gender and supremacy. Now, Alderman offers readers a plausible world-to-come in The Future, a daring, sexy, thrilling novel that may be the most wryly funny book about the end of civilization you’ll ever read.
As a teenager, Martha Einkorn left her father’s back-to-nature cult on the Northwest coast to become the personal assistant to a powerful social media entrepreneur. Lai Zhen survived the destruction of Hong Kong and a year in a refugee camp to become a survivalist influencer. When these two women meet, the attraction is immediate, but their romance is put on hold as news reports stream in of an impending apocalypse.
The Future is awash with tech billionaires, preppers and an anxious population easily swayed by algorithms. It follows executives Lenk Sketlish, founder of the social network Fantail; Zimri Nommik, who runs the largest online retailer Anvil; and Ellen Bywater, who heads Medlar, a leading PC company. These powerful techies have spared no expense to create safe havens for themselves and are ready to leave the rest of the world to face destruction.
The billionaires’ plan is thwarted by a band of rebels led by Martha and Zhen, including Ellen’s nonbinary child Badger Bywater and Zimri’s soon-to-be kicked to the curb wife Selah Nommik, who also happens to be a genius coder. With their combined expertise and shared conviction of bettering our world rather than manipulating it for their own ends, this group may just save civilization after all.
That Alderman keeps the plot moving forward despite constant shifts in perspective and time is a testament to her creative skills as a writer and a game developer. The novel never slides into parody, despite the three rather clever parallels to some of our real-life billionaires and tech leaders. Clearly, Alderman cares deeply about our future and believes that we already have the skills in place to course-correct. By the end of the novel, you might too.
There is a particular, fascinating branch of historical fiction devoted to probing the inner depths of individuals so legendary and strange that they border on myths. Such tales can take on all the verisimilitude and tactile detail of more straightforward historical fiction, while also saying something new about the time period depicted and the strange pathways through which we discover the human condition. A.K. Blakemore proves that she is exactly the kind of great storyteller required to pull that off in this tale about one of Revolutionary France’s most puzzling and frightening figures.
The Glutton is the story of Tarare, a young man who became a legend across France in the late 18th century for his seemingly bottomless appetite. Long a fixation for those interested in medical oddities, Tarare’s life is both dark folklore and a documented case of a man who could, and would, eat just about anything. Using contemporary medical accounts of Tarare’s life and condition as a guide, Blakemore picks up this odd man’s story and attempts to chart his journey to gluttony from his impoverished childhood to his days as a street performer to, finally, his death in a hospital bed, overseen by nuns who were both horrified and fascinated by his plight.
Right away, Blakemore walks a fine, brilliant narrative line, establishing Tarare’s infamy in his lifetime, then moving forward with a story that’s simultaneously sympathetic to the character and unflinching in its depiction of how far he’s willing to go in an attempt to sate himself. Though he comes into the world as a sweet, curious boy, he will eventually devour refuse, rotting flesh, and even living flesh. What forces transform Tarare, and what do they say about the society into which he was born?
Blakemore examines these questions while drawing readers deep into the entertaining, propulsive story at the book’s core. The great gift of this novel is that Blakemore somehow never loses sight of the warm, thrumming humanity that is Tarare. He’s a man, he’s a monster, he’s a frightened boy and he’s a living myth. All of these aspects live through Blakemore’s lyrical, sweeping prose, making The Glutton a stunning, mesmeric novel of uncommon power.
In Naoise Dolan’s addictive, rubbernecking disaster story about love, engaged 20-something Dubliners wrestle with intimacy and commitment as their wedding day approaches.
Oxford-educated Luke’s most striking characteristic is his obvious ambivalence. His fiancée Celine’s most singular trait, apart from being a dedicated, almost single-minded, internationally recognized concert pianist, is her willful denial in the face of Luke’s transgressions. Even Luke marvels that she puts up with him: “You’d think Celine would have seen my early diffidence as a warning. Whatever about the unanswered texts, me literally saying ‘I don’t want a relationship’ is, perhaps, a red flag. But Celine has never met sheet music she couldn’t crack.”
This dynamic is maddening at first. But, like reality television, relational trainwrecks are compelling. The first sign of trouble is that Luke and Celine’s engagement begins, excruciatingly, with what feels like a shrug rather than a decision. Discussing their hypothetical relationship limits, Luke confesses, “if I thought we’d never get married. Or that level of commitment. If I knew that wasn’t going to happen, then . . . .” When Celine attempts to offer reassurance by suggesting that she “probably” wants to be with him forever, as if staring down a dare, Luke asks the question.
Though The Happy Couple will inevitably be compared to Sally Rooney’s Normal People, its wry voice and cleverly executed Rashomon-like structure, revisiting pivotal events and foundational cracks in Celine and Luke’s relationship from their perspectives as well as those of their closest friends and family, make it a standout. Bit by bit, in lean, ironic prose that packs powerful insight, Dolan reveals the humanity and vulnerability of all parties involved, including brilliant sections from the perspectives of Luke’s best man and former boyfriend Archie, and Celine’s sister Phoebe.
We don’t see what Luke is thinking for a long time, and he’s easy to hate when he’s merely reflected in other people’s emotional wreckage. When, after 100 pages, he finally comes into focus, his sensitivity and depth of feeling are shocking. The closer we look, the more human these characters become, and the more it hurts to see Celine and Luke stumble away from each other. Dolan’s challenging and well-crafted rewriting of the marriage plot has much to reveal about love and perspective.
Holiday preparations flood our hearts with the warmth of Christmases past—or the echoes of family dinners best forgotten. Wherever your memories lie, two debut works of Christmas fiction are sure to lighten your spirits.
Journalist Megan Angelo has written extensively about pop culture, motherhood, womanhood, TV and film for the New York Times, Glamour, Elle and more. Her debut novel, Followers, is a perfect intersection of her passions that delivers a curious tale of three influencers and their followers, from 2015 to 2051.
