A remarkable exploration of storytelling, fame and the Nigerian American experience, acclaimed science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author surprises all the way to its brilliant ending.
A remarkable exploration of storytelling, fame and the Nigerian American experience, acclaimed science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author surprises all the way to its brilliant ending.
1943 and all that The British long have boasted that their island nation has not been invaded by a foreign power in nearly a thousand years, not since William the Conqueror’s little expedition in 1066. It’s a pretty boast, and it’s almost true. They tend to overlook that Germany invaded the Channel Islands, off the coast of France, in 1940 and occupied them throughout World War II.
The story of the occupation has been told before, most succinctly in Alan and Mary Wood’s Islands in Danger. But that was historical fact. Tim Binding now tells it in historical fiction in Lying with the Enemy (Carroll and Graf, $24, 0786706570), a novel set on Guernsey in 1943 that combines war story and whodunit to thumping great effect.
There are understandable reasons for shoving aside the inconvenient fact of occupation, because it brings in its train the embarrassing issues of capitulation and, especially, collaboration. The embarrassment was as true then as today. For what were they now? What identity did they possess? thinks Ned Luscombe, Guernsey’s unwilling police-inspector-by-default. England kept quiet about the Channel Islands as if she were punishing the islands for letting the side down. Collaboration is the subject of Lying with the Enemy (seemingly expressed in the possible double meaning of the title, though the British title was Island Madness). Are you a traitor, the story implicitly asks, if you work for the occupiers in order to support your family? Are you more of a traitor if you’re a businessman whose enterprise supplies the work? Are you a greater traitor still if you operate, or buy from, a black market when people are on near-starvation rations? The story asks these questions not because the author has the answers or even necessarily believes in the concept of treason but because the questions are always on the minds of the populace.
Conquerors and conquered manage to get on, sometimes swimmingly. Marjorie Hallivand, doyenne of Guernsey’s pre-war smart set, is exhilarated by the war and the German officers, especially Major Lentsch, the island’s commandant: They were of the same class, after all. Even those not of the island’s petty aristocracy, like Veronica Vaudin, find it advantageous to be pliant. What surprised these men, still dressed in their once-feared uniforms, was how quickly the women had embraced their way of life. The sharpest expression of the collaboration is the relationship of Guernsey women to the German men. War in an insular backwater apparently having inflamed both the island’s inhabitants and the author’s imagination, there is copulation on a wholesale scale, though its distribution as always, whether in war or peace is unequal. Luscombe and Lentsch, however, have equally shared the favors of Isobel van Dielen, though at different times. Isobel is the daughter of a wealthy, widowed contractor who is helping the Germans with a monstrous construction project being built by 16,000 slave laborers, known as foreigns, who toil in brutish conditions, ignored by the islanders. Luscombe and Lentsch are enemies in love and war, until Isobel turns up dead, her mouth and nose filled with cement. Her death and the search for her killer bring them gradually closer together, though Luscombe initially suspects that Lentsch had something to do with the murder. Here the novel’s tight construction tightens still further, as it screws itself up to rush down the multiplying dark avenues of a proper and highly satisfying murder mystery. Why has Isobel’s father disappeared? Did he kill her, as many islanders believe? Was the charming and cruel Captain Zepernick, who likes to romp au naturel through the Victor Hugo house with Veronica, involved in some way? Or was Isobel killed by one of the foreigns? The murderer and motive, revealed at the very end, are more banal than anything suggested by those possibilities. By that time we have learned of the fundamental decency of Lentsch and of the supposedly sluttish Veronica.
We also learn that much of this activity has been driven behind the scenes by a possible visit to the island by Hitler, to whom, throughout the story, the author refers in capitals He, Him, His like a deity. Germany was His after all, like the world is God’s, and who knows? maybe the future will wipe out the distinction.
But by that point in history such a consummation was not in the cards, however devoutly some Germans and some others wished it. Ah, war who the enemy, who the friend? Is collaboration treason? It depends.
Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.
1943 and all that The British long have boasted that their island nation has not been invaded by a foreign power in nearly a thousand years, not since William the Conqueror's little expedition in 1066. It's a pretty boast, and it's almost true. They tend…
GŸnter Grass, on receiving the news that he had been awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize of Literature and on being asked how he was going to celebrate the big event, answered humbly that he had a dentist’s appointment that day and was planning on keeping it. The reader encounters that same spirit in My Century. We do not hear fanfare and stories of epic proportion, but rather the humble narratives of many, all giving their take on the events big and small of the century. Grass gives us 100 stories, one for each year, and in most cases a different voice to tell that story. Grass’s narrators chat about the 1954 soccer world championship and the Berlin Love Parade. In 1947, they grumble about the lack of food and coal, in 1993, about the influx of asylum seekers into Germany. They describe eloquently the miraculous effects of the new currency introduced to West Germany in 1948, and the much-awaited arrival of real money in East Germany after the fall of the Wall. Grass’s Germans recall advances in technology: the first trans-Atlantic flight of the blimp, listening to their first radio show, the building of the Autobahn, their thoughts on first hearing about Dolly the cloned sheep. But Grass’s Germans do not remember much of German history between 1933 and 1945, and their eagerness to speak about celebrating the first Cologne carnival after WWII contrasts starkly with their silence regarding National Socialism and the Holocaust. Grass is not afraid to include these silences and to let memory and recognition bubble up only in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, slowly cracking the veneer of denial and normalcy that was endemic to a miraculously prosperous post-war Germany. Many of Grass’s stories are quite comical, and his humor is most poignant when he describes the political absurdities caused by German-German division.
ÊGrass’s magnitude as a writer lies in the way he combines an acute historical and political consciousness with great poetic sensitivity, and this ability of his is abundantly displayed in his latest work. My Century is a great book that stirs the senses, challenges the intellect, and reminds the reader that personal and political history are inextricably interwoven.
Katharina Altpeter-Jones is a Ph.
D. student in the German Studies Program at Duke University.
GŸnter Grass, on receiving the news that he had been awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize of Literature and on being asked how he was going to celebrate the big event, answered humbly that he had a dentist's appointment that day and was planning on keeping…
The Lucky Gourd Shop tells a modern, realistic tale of how three Korean siblings come to be adopted into an American family. The narrative voice of Joanna Catherine Scott and the intriguing structure of her novel combine in an irresistible concoction that crosses cultural and generational boundaries. Scott uses her acclaimed poet’s eye to enhance the rich imagery of Korea as she deliberately draws the reader into her lilting narrative.
The delicate issues of abandoned children and their birth parents are familiar ground for Scott, who has adopted three Korean children. The Lucky Gourd Shop has a lyrical counterpart in Scott’s award-winning collection of poems, Birth Mother. She has written about Southeast Asia as well in her collection of testimonials, Indochina’s Refugees: Oral Histories from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Structurally, The Lucky Gourd Shop is a story within a story. It begins in an American kitchen with a disappointing letter from Seoul inquiries about the children’s birth family have resulted in only a handful of skewed facts. Scott responds to the disappointment felt by the children and their foster mother by opening up the world of Seoul, Korea, and imagining their birth mother’s story. The reader is allowed to glimpse what the children will unfortunately never know about their parents and heritage.
Each adult character in the novel contributes somewhat to the children’s destiny, and Scott is careful to paint each parent in a sympathetic, yet realistic light. Mi Sook, their uneducated mother, is torn between her immediate responsibilities to her family and her long-term dream of financial security. Kun Soo, their laborer father, generates familial chaos through his need for sons and self-worth. Ultimately, the reader is forced to wonder how the children would react to the story of their parents if the beauty and sadness of the story could ever translate into forgiveness for being left behind. In The Lucky Gourd Shop, Scott has revealed herself as a compassionate foster-mother as well as a fresh and compelling author.
Amy Ryce writes from Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Lucky Gourd Shop tells a modern, realistic tale of how three Korean siblings come to be adopted into an American family. The narrative voice of Joanna Catherine Scott and the intriguing structure of her novel combine in an irresistible concoction that crosses cultural and…
For most readers of Nora, Nora, the title character will steal the show. A whiff of scandal accompanies Nora’s arrival in Lytton, a sleepy, rural Georgia town. She smokes, cusses, and wears a T-shirt that says, “Jesus is coming. Look busy.” It’s 1961 and Nora wants revolution. She wants it now. She tries to railroad Lytton with change, teaching Tropic of Cancer in a public high school barely ready for To Kill a Mockingbird. Nora’s seeming cynicism masks a more fundamental naivete. She believes that if she shows people the new horizons they hunger for, they will guard her secrets. That she is betrayed from almost every side is the novel’s central heartbreak.
Siddons has written a string of bestsellers, including Low Country and Outer Banks, whose titles reflect their Southern settings. The author’s finest achievement in her new book may be with the character Peyton, a 12-year-old girl hovering unwillingly on the brink of adulthood in an era when gender dictated more rigid roles than it does now. Siddons accurately captures the impulse that leads even the best-hearted adults to make children over in their own image.
One of the novel’s funniest and most painful episodes is Peyton’s trip to the beauty parlor, where tomboy Peyton is made over into a southern belle, complete with heavy makeup, under her aunt’s iron hand. The next day, Peyton gets transformed, yet again, into the image of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s by her nightclub hopping, feminist cousin Nora.
Nora, Nora effectively explores the extent to which people fail to change. The novel’s three principle characters are trapped not only in the mores of a small southern town, which the civil rights movement threatens to leave behind, but also in their own individual comfort zones. Even Peyton’s likable father, Frazier, a lawyer and advocate of integration, presses only so hard for badly needed reforms to Lytton’s school and class systems.
Change and transformation don’t come as easily to people in real life as they do in the movies, and Siddons shows us that reality.
Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.
For most readers of Nora, Nora, the title character will steal the show. A whiff of scandal accompanies Nora's arrival in Lytton, a sleepy, rural Georgia town. She smokes, cusses, and wears a T-shirt that says, "Jesus is coming. Look busy." It's 1961 and Nora…
Think about the way you feel after a delicious meal. Although you know there are dishes to wash and leftovers to put away and perhaps a long drive home or work in the morning, as you look around the table at the faces of the people you love, and for that one moment, your spirit feels full, safe, happy, loving and loved.
If that’s how you’d like to feel after your next read, the BookPage editors suggest one of these 2021 releases.
The latest novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Doerr is a vast undertaking, spanning centuries and incorporating multiple storylines. Amid this tangle of events, each character must face what feels like the end of their world, and it feels like a gift to the reader that Doerr’s response to each of these characters, even those who commit potentially unforgivable deeds, is mercy and hope and compassion. We have seen dark times before, and we’ll see them again—and maybe, if we trust in each other, it will all work out in the end.
If possible, this mystery is even better than the Osman’s charmer of a debut, The Thursday Murder Club. It’s a load of fun and an ode to how important the power of friendship is throughout one’s life but especially during the final stretch.
As BookPage reviewer Kelly Blewett put it, “These Precious Days reinforces what many longtime fans like best about Ann Patchett: her levelheaded appraisal of what is good in the world.” Indeed, this essay collection overflows with goodness: good writing, good stories, good people. (One essay is literally about a priest whose work with unhoused people in his community caused Patchett to label him a “living saint.”) This is a companionable book, full of warmhearted reflections on how to love what we love—books, dogs, family—a little better.
Today’s young readers are so lucky to have a writer like Renée Watson creating books for them, and Love Is a Revolution is a perfect example of why. This YA novel is a master class in characterization, from its grounded yet swoony central couple, to the family and friends who surround them, to Harlem itself, which Watson evokes vividly. Her respect for and belief in the power of young people comes through on every page, but what sets Watson apart are her words. Watson is a poet who writes novels, and that means every few pages, you will encounter a sentence so beautifully phrased that your eyes will brim with tears and your heart will be quietly filled.
A sweet and lighthearted rom-com that will appeal to readers who prefer stories that focus more on character than conflict, Very Sincerely Yours centers on the epistolary relationship between Teddy, a young woman who feels somewhat adrift in life, and Everett, the beloved host of a local children’s show. Both characters are lovingly and carefully drawn by Winfrey, who also creates a cozy, friendship-filled environment around her central pair.
On the one hand, reading Goodbye, Again feels like sharing a warm cup of tea with author and illustrator Jonny Sun. On the other hand, your pal Jonny might be a little depressed, or at least deeply introspective, and so your time together, while enriching, might make you cry. They’re good tears though—an overflow of feeling understood, of relief after hearing from someone else who feels as lonely, burnt out and hopeful as you do. Each short essay touches on an aspect of modern life that makes true connection, with yourself and others, harder. Together, they form a kaleidoscopic declaration that it’s worth the effort to nurture yourself and see what grows.
In her author’s note, Mary Lee Donovan writes that this deceptively simple picture book is her “love song to our shared humanity.” In multilingual rhyming couplets, A Hundred Thousand Welcomes offers a benediction for the sacredness of gathering together. Lines such as “The door is wide open— / come in from the storm. / We’ll shelter in peace, / break bread where it’s warm” have a plainspoken power, and Lian Cho’s friendly, colorful illustrations capture the joy of greetings and the happiness to be found around a shared table.
During the last months of Congressman John Lewis’ life, he put pen to paper to collect some parting thoughts after 80 years of remarkable activism and service. Carry On captures Lewis’ memories of growing up as the son of a sharecropper in Alabama, shopping for comic books at the flea market, joining the Freedom Riders movement and more. Interspersed are snippets of advice for the next generation who will carry on the justice work Lewis and others began during the civil rights movement. After his death in 2020, Lewis’ last book reads as an even more precious labor of love, laced through with the congressman’s trademark wisdom, patience, determination and hope.
The type of book that the word heartwarming was made for, Chambers’ sci-fi novella follows a monk who is literally devoted to small comforts as they brew tea, explore the wild edges of the world and try to offer solace and warmth wherever they can. There are some heady philosophical themes at play, but just enough to engage and not overwhelm your brain as you happily sink into this small, perfectly wrought gem of a story.
“Two lost souls find each other and the way forward” is a story I will read as if it’s the first time every time. In Dayna Lorentz’ middle grade novel Of a Feather, the lost souls are a young girl named Reenie who’s been sent to live with an aunt she’s never met and a 6-month-old owl named Rufus who has also found himself alone and unprotected in the wide, wild world. Watching these two slowly drop their defenses and open themselves up to healing, love and hope has tremendous appeal and power: It reminds us that no one is ever truly so lost that they cannot be found.
—Stephanie Appell, Associate Editor
If you’d like your next read to leave you feeling uplifted and filled with love, we recommend picking up one of these books.
In his second novel, The Lost Legends of New Jersey, Frederick Reiken chronicles four years in the life of teenager Anthony Rubin. A Jewish hockey star from the New Jersey suburbs, Anthony navigates the uneven terrain of adolescence while his world bends around him: his physician father has an affair with a family friend; his mother escapes marital problems by fleeing to Florida; and Anthony begins a relationship with Juliette Dimiglio, the next-door-neighbor whose mother committed suicide in her garage.
Set in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the novel drops casual references to the era and setting throughout, such as Rush concerts at the Meadowlands or summers at the Jersey shore; such mentions help construct a palpable sense of place and time. Reiken peoples his narrative with the expected cast of characters (wealthy Jewish suburbanites, working class Italian-Americans) as well as a few surprises. Anthony’s erstwhile friend Jay Berkowitz takes Juliette on an after-hours tour of the West Orange zoo. Their conversation stretches from the usual teenage banter to meditations on love and family, at times almost cryptic in their responses. But the scene rings with a sweet satisfaction as these two lonely, mismatched kids commune and connect for a few hours. Much of the novel concentrates on Anthony’s careful negotiations with those around him (hockey coaches, older girlfriends, parents) and how these relationships shape his growth into a confident young man.
Reiken takes chances with his narrative style. Although the novel focuses on Anthony and is told mostly through his voice, multiple narrators crop up, alternating between first- and third-person. Anthony remains remarkably stoic for a teen whose personal life dashes from one crisis to another, perhaps a bit too stoic; sometimes he seems like a grown man instead of a high school student. When he speaks, it is often in a calm, reflective voice almost devoid of emotion. This wouldn’t be reason for pause, except that Reiken takes great efforts to place Anthony in a milieu associated with roiling adolescent angst. But these qualms aside, Anthony emerges as a memorable character, one that ends up finding a center in the storm raging around him.
Michael Paulson teaches English at Penn State University.
In his second novel, The Lost Legends of New Jersey, Frederick Reiken chronicles four years in the life of teenager Anthony Rubin. A Jewish hockey star from the New Jersey suburbs, Anthony navigates the uneven terrain of adolescence while his world bends around him: his…
With his new novel, E. Lynn Harris tries to add something fresh to his usual formula of lies, double-dealing, betrayal, and bisexuality. His fans needn’t worry, for he does not forsake the trademark storytelling approach that has earned him a large readership and best-selling status. The difference in this book comes not from some major change in plot or locale, but in his witty, often hilarious exploration of the femme fatale, Yancey Harrington Braxton, who like the male lead, John "Basil" Henderson, is well known to readers of Harris’s previous work. At a particularly troubling crossroads in his life, Basil meets Yancey and believes her love will chase away the demons of his bisexual past, aborted football career, and painful childhood. Yancey is everything he’s ever wanted in a woman: beautiful, accomplished, and ambitious. Now working as a promising sports agent, Basil thinks marrying Yancey, a Broadway actress and Hollywood hopeful, would be the perfect complement to his successful life and the most effective antidote to remedy his sometimes feverish need to seek out male companionship. Confronting his sexual ambiguity with his therapist, Basil fails to consider the difference in the couple’s view of love and family until it’s almost too late. He wants kids but she does not. And that’s only one of several key sticking points preventing total harmony between the pair as Yancey ruthlessly chases film and TV roles with a scorched earth campaign of deception, half-truths, and dogged persistence. Her verbal slugfests sprinkled throughout the book are utterly campy, over-the-top, and almost classic in their bitchiness.
Using his cagey instincts as a storyteller, Harris succeeds in keeping the central story of the mismatched couple going full-speed by adding the complications of their past loves into their rapidly unraveling romance. He delivers his riotous cautionary tale in his customary short, punchy chapters. If there is a drawback here, it is that Basil seems so good a guy that he’s almost saintly, and the reader can’t help but pull for his conniving fiance to get hers before the marriage vows are exchanged. On the other hand, Yancey provides the most sinister surprises when she schemes to win back her first love, Derrick Wayne Lewis, her sweetheart from her college days, while planning to use stolen session confessions to extort some much needed cash from her hubby-to-be shortly after their wedding. It’s a diabolically wicked case of "get the loot and run." Whenever Yancey appears on the page, she immediately involves herself in some of the most outlandish stunts, whether it’s passing a bogus check to a community center for HIV and drug addicted babies, party crashing in a scandalous low-cut dress, or a wacky shouting match with her befuddled agent over an imagined opportunity to land one of the coveted female leads in the HBO hit show, Sex and the City. By book’s end, every score is settled, every question answered, but not without a great deal of zany mayhem, soul searching, and theatrical standoffs. Harris shows more emotional depth and versatility in this book than any of his other works, giving his readers a rich comic parable full of laughter and insights.
Robert Fleming is a journalist in New York.
With his new novel, E. Lynn Harris tries to add something fresh to his usual formula of lies, double-dealing, betrayal, and bisexuality. His fans needn't worry, for he does not forsake the trademark storytelling approach that has earned him a large readership and best-selling status.…
James Kugel regards the Bible as sacred scripture; he does not particularly like to write about prayers, psalms, or prophetic speeches as poems. But when asked to prepare a selection of biblical poems for publication, Kugel a noted scholar and poet, author of the highly praised book The Bible as It Was, and former poetry editor of Harper’s magazine agreed to do so. The result is The Great Poems of the Bible. This exceptional volume gives us not only what the title promises, but much more.
In addition to his own translations and commentary on the poems, Kugel provides historical background and religious insights that introduce us to Judaism. He says that his goal throughout has been to try to concentrate on what might be called the spiritual reality addressed by different biblical texts. He also attempts to create in English the same impression that the biblical text would have made on the ears of its first audience. Those are difficult objectives to achieve, but the author succeeds admirably.
One of the fascinating subjects Kugel explores is the nature of the prophet. He points out that prophecy did not mean simply predicting the future, and writes, Nor is it a poetry of social protest, crafted to persuade listeners of the worthiness of this or that cause, although it addresses issues of social injustice and out-and-out politics. In the end, the prophet is someone who has been called, summoned, to carry a message from God. He also notes, It is striking that, after a certain point in Israeli history, prophecy seems to have become a steady, reliable presence; the Ôprophet in your midst’ was someone whom you could count on to be there, like any other public figure. There are wonderfully readable discussions of the character of God and of biblical wisdom. Kugel writes, though different parts of the Bible were written down in different periods and social settings and political circumstances, the idea that God is fundamentally good, that He cares for humanity and upholds what is right, seems everywhere to be maintained. But doesn’t that go without saying? Perhaps not . . . Would it not have been more reasonable for Israel’s prophets and sages to conclude that God is quite inscrutable? Kugel’s discussion of the 23rd Psalm, which includes both the King James version and his own translation, is beautifully done. The author points out that the psalm is almost unique in that it neither offers thanksgiving nor celebrates God’s grandeur. It is just about ordinary daily life, a psalm about you and me. This book deserves a wide readership, especially among those interested in religion, monotheism, Judaism, and literature.
James Kugel regards the Bible as sacred scripture; he does not particularly like to write about prayers, psalms, or prophetic speeches as poems. But when asked to prepare a selection of biblical poems for publication, Kugel a noted scholar and poet, author of the highly…
With the summer’s heat still upon us, wouldn’t it be nice to take a break and read about someplace cool and inviting? After a five-year absence from the bookstore shelves, beloved Scottish author Rosamunde Pilcher offers her readers a refreshing respite with her latest offering, Winter Solstice.
Pilcher’s delightful tale is set amongst her favorite places London, Hampshire, and Cornwall, England, and the great highlands of Scotland. Her story, which begins as fall turns to winter, follows the lives of five distinctly different people and their search for happiness.
The main character, who binds the entire story together, is Elfrida Phipps, a gently eccentric former actress who has retired to live out her life in a comfortable fashion. When her dear friend Oscar Blundell loses his wife and daughter to a tragic car accident, Elfrida steps in to help Oscar get on with his life. Oscar owns half of an old estate house in Scotland, and it is here that he and Elfrida start their lives anew. As they settle in to a life of quiet contemplation, their plans for a solitary Christmas are interrupted when Elfrida’s cousin, Carrie Sutton, comes to visit along with her young niece, Lucy. It seems Carrie is quietly recovering from the heartbreak of a failed love affair with a married man, and Lucy’s self-centered mother and grandmother have abandoned the teenager during the holidays. The house party becomes even livelier with the arrival of Sam Howard, a handsome textile-company executive who has unexpectedly come to buy the estate house.
While each character is plagued with loneliness and regret, it seems as if fate has united them in the dilapidated old house. And it is in this house, on the shortest day of the year, that these five people will find each other, and ultimately find happiness for themselves. As in her previous bestsellers, The Shell Seekers, September and Coming Home, Winter Solstice is filled with the grace, warmth, and sentiment Pilcher’s legions of fans have come to expect from her books. But it also delivers an extraordinary tale of tragedy and intrigue, with a powerful testament of love’s healing ways that will undoubtedly draw a whole new audience to this remarkable novel. Winter Solstice was well worth the five-year wait.
Sharon Galligar Chance is the senior book reviewer for the Times Record News in Wichita Falls, Texas.
With the summer's heat still upon us, wouldn't it be nice to take a break and read about someplace cool and inviting? After a five-year absence from the bookstore shelves, beloved Scottish author Rosamunde Pilcher offers her readers a refreshing respite with her latest offering,…
The uber-talented Olga Acevedo, the titular heroine of Olga Dies Dreaming, grew up in a working-class Nuyorican family (New Yorkers of Puerto Rican descent) full of strivers and revolutionaries. But as an adult, she makes her living as a wedding planner, catering to New York City’s elite and fiercely chasing the American dream. Through Olga’s story, first-time novelist Xochitl Gonzalez brilliantly calls into question what that dream really means.
Gonzalez is the Brooklynite daughter of militant activists from the 1970s Chicano Power movement: her mother Nuyorican, her father Mexican American. After many years as an event planner and entrepreneur, Gonzalez’s journey to transform her own story into Olga’s fictional tale led her to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was honored as an Iowa Arts Fellow and won the Michener-Copernicus Prize in Fiction. She was also the winner of the 2019 Disquiet Literary Prize in Nonfiction. We reached out to Gonzalez to unpack the ideas behind her striking debut.
This is a complex book with many intriguing layers. What are its origins? When I first started writing—writing creatively as art, versus commerce like marketing materials—I was intimidated by fiction. So I went to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference with an essay about being abandoned by my activist mother as a kid so she could go out and “save the world.” People really responded to the themes but basically told me it was a book.
I had no interest in writing a memoir. But in time, I found the courage to write some fiction and had scratched out some stories about upwardly mobile Latinas—mainly Puerto Rican—living in a very different Brooklyn than the one they had grown up in.
I had for years been extremely frustrated by the situation in Puerto Rico, that the U.S. has a colony in contemporary times. It was just a news story that never could break through, not even after Hurricane Maria. One day while commuting, I was reading the book The Battle for Paradise by Naomi Klein, which is about disaster capitalism, and listening to Alynda Segarra’s album Navigator. I realized that if I borrowed just enough biography from myself, I could weave a pretty entertaining, hopefully beautiful story that would personalize both one version of a contemporary Latinx experience as well as the real-world emotions and experiences of gentrification, colonialism and resilience. I ran out of the train to get a napkin to scratch the ideas out.
“It was like I had to get this story out before Brooklyn changed even more, somehow.”
You sold the manuscript for Olga Dies Dreaming to Flatiron in a 10-way auction and made a TV deal with Hulu before its release. First of all, congratulations! That can look like overnight success, but I understand that the real story is more complex. Can you tell us about your journey as a writer and path to publication? I will try to be concise! The long story is that I went to college—Brown University, after having attended a big Brooklyn public school that I adored and thrived in—thinking that I would do creative writing. But when I got there, my freshman roommate was such a rock star in this arena. I was so intimidated that I thought it was a sign to find my own lane. (I was 18 and didn’t drive, what did I know of multilane highways?) But I always wanted to write, and so later as a wedding planner, I started a blog that became kind of popular and led to freelance writing opportunities around etiquette and weddings and the like.
Eventually, though, someone thought I should try a memoir about my life and back then—this was probably 10 years ago or more—I was more open to that. So I put together a proposal and it—ironically—landed with the agent who is now my agent today (Mollie Glick). She loved the writing but ultimately passed because “it was a very dark book about a wedding planner.”
I put writing to the side completely for another five or six years while I was hustling to get my business back together after the Great Recession and pivot to more than weddings, and just managing life and family more generally. Then I turned 40 and the last of my grandparents who had raised me passed away, and I suddenly just felt like life was short. Writing was the one constant, nagging thing I felt I’d always needed to try and do. The thing is, owning a small business, especially one that focuses on customer service like my event-planning business, well, it’s a hustle. It doesn’t leave a lot of creative space.
So the first thing I did was sell my part of the business and get a nine-to-five job. Then I applied and went toBread Loaf—for nonfiction—which really immersed me in community and craft, which was so important. It was so helpful to refine who I could be as a writer that I decided to pursue my MFA. I applied to only NYC programs except for—encouraged by my Bread Loaf friends—Iowa. I never thought I would get in, but I started Olga Dies Dreaming almost the same day that I found out that I did.
I was terrified to leave my whole life and my rent-stabilized apartment and pretty great job, to be honest. But I believed in this book and understood the rarity of this opportunity and the blessing, in that moment, that being single was. It was emotionally hard, but not logistically hard. I was able to literally put every waking hour that I wasn’t at work into the novel. Eventually I gave up exercising because I was so obsessed, but before that happened, I ended up reconnecting with Mollie at an exercise class. We had a mutual friend there, and she told Mollie about me and Iowa and the Disquiet Prize, and I shared the first 100 pages of Olga with her. So I was fortunate in that by the time I arrived at Iowa, I had drafted about half the novel and had an amazing agent who saw the possibility of what this was going to become—but who also stayed out of it until it was done.
And honestly, at 42—which is the age I turned when I started the program—two academic years doesn’t feel long. I had the fortune of Sam Chang offering a novel workshop, so I just put my nose down and worked around the clock. I was barely eating or sleeping, to be honest. I don’t know what made it feel so urgent. It was more than just the time at grad school, it was like I had to get this story out before Brooklyn changed even more, somehow.
From the start, the reader gets to see, in a kind of humorous way, the fighting spirit and rage brewing in Olga. This makes her such a complex and original character, especially because she’s a woman. At one point she even calls herself a “terrible person.” Do you think of Olga that way, or is she judging herself too harshly? First, thank you for saying that about her. I don’t think of Olga as a terrible person, but I think there are massive moments when she feels this way—when she feels that she isn’t succeeding with her family because her time is so devoted to her economic pursuits, but her ambitions in that arena leave her feeling emotionally empty. She has some peccadilloes, but really, she is not terrible; she is lonely. Her upward mobility has left her, as the saying goes in Spanish, “Ni de aquí, ni de allá.” [Neither from here nor from there.] I felt this was an experience I personally had, and one that I think is reflective of many Latinx women, women of color and any person who has tried to “excel.”
Something else that sets Olga apart is that she seems to live by her own rules. When she cuts corners in her business, she sees it as equalizing: the little guy scoring one over the exploitative uber-wealthy. But she’s also loyal and can be generous. She has high expectations of her congressman brother, Prieto, and she struggles when he is not as compassionate as she’d like. How would you describe Olga’s moral compass? I would say she is very Old Brooklyn. Loyalty, spreading love—that’s more than a Biggie lyric. (There’s a reason he’s our borough representative, even posthumously.) It’s really how people who are from here so often are. Do you need money to eat? Is there something that’s not that hard for me to do that will make a huge impact on your day? Tell me, and I’ll try and do it. She grew up with that value system.
I also think, despite the place that it is now, the Brooklyn she was raised in was a place of underdogs. Taxis wouldn’t even come here. So it’s ingrained in her to always help the underdog.
There’s some bits of her that maybe are spiteful. Tiny acts of revenge. But the Robin Hood gestures that we see, that’s her strange way of reconciling her parents’ values with her own perceived discarding of them. When she “levels the field” in these tiny ways, it’s her version of not being completely disconnected from her parents’ values about money and class.
Growing up, rules were suggestions, to be honest. The most important thing was not that you live by any black-and-white code but that you were doing the “right thing,” and I think what we see is that “right” for Olga depends on evening out the balance of power.
“I haven’t seen this larger history in fiction in a minute and felt it important to my community that it was correct.”
Because of what Olga and Prieto do for a living and the circles in which they operate, there are lots of fun details about luxury weddings and the lifestyles and excesses of New York’s elite. As a former wedding planner yourself, did you approach these parts as an insider writing a comedy of manners, or did you step back to unpack it all, more in the tradition of true crime? Ha. Probably more a comedy of manners, though it’s truly a bit of a mix. I know a lot of people in politics, and while I took a number of liberties, that area was a bit more tactical in my thinking. But the weddings were definitely in the spirit of a comedy of manners. Mainly, it was so important for me to show how these two characters have to have vast fields of knowledge and cultural fluency to move throughout the world, and also the toll and exhaustion of slipping in and out.
Olga’s mother, Blanca, is a fascinating, destabilizing character. Her absence from her children’s lives (in combination with her husband’s addiction) was devastating for Olga and Prieto. But Blanca’s mission is righteous, and some of the difficult, harsh things she tells her children are important and true. What did you want people to take away from Blanca and the choices she makes? Sort of, exactly that. None of us are purely bad or purely good, and that is the most starkly true with Blanca. She made choices, and they are the extreme choices of a woman who thinks in absolutes. In many ways this is how truly revolutionary thinkers need to be; we just don’t see them in intimate settings too much, such as in letters to their children.
But the main point I wanted to make with Blanca is that even when she’s wrong, she’s always also a little bit right. Motherhood is so, so fascinating. That bond, that knowing. Her actions beyond her insights are what’s problematic, but her ability to know—that felt very real to me and also important to show.
This is beyond your question, but this is a mirror of how Olga and Prieto feel about Puerto Rico itself: It’s a place they only sort of know, and yet it cuts through to something bigger than familiarity.
Listen to an audiobook excerpt from Macmillan Audiobooks. Read by Almarie Guerra, Armando Riesco & Inés del Castillo.
Puerto Rico’s plight, both past and neocolonial present, plays a big role in the story. Tell us about your approach to this element. Did you undertake additional research? I did. My day job when I started this book was at Hunter College, so I would jet uptown from the main campus to CENTRO, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, and research Maria data, the Young Lords, eco-pollution in Latinx communities and waves of activism. Some stuff was ingrained in me; my parents were activists, and I don’t remember not knowing about sterilization on the island or the Nuyorican poets, to be honest. Fania and that era of salsa and the cultural history of freestyle are things I dork out on anyway.
But generally speaking, I spent lots of time on colonial history and the history of activism in the diaspora. I spent tons of time watching Maria footage, researching HIV and AIDS in the 1990s—another era I lived through but wanted to refresh. I talked to Puerto Ricans who had been on the island and were displaced because of Maria—that was important. But I tried not to get bogged down in it, writ large. I tried to absorb it, forget it and then go back and write, because it all needed to come from character and story, not messaging. I just wanted to be sure I got it all correct, because I haven’t seen this larger history in fiction in a minute and felt it important to my community that it was correct.
The title, Olga Dies Dreaming, is particularly striking. Can you tell us about how it came to you and its significance? I sought a politically relevant name for the protagonist, and I settled on Olga Viscal Garriga, who was an activist for Puerto Rican independence who was born in Brooklyn. That felt right. Very, very right. In the earliest phase of the book, which would have been a million pages long, I wanted to write more of Blanca and Johnny’s story, and so I did lots of deep dives into the Young Lords and the Nuyorican poets. As I was writing, I was inspired by Alynda Segarra’s album and kept listening to it on repeat. In her song “Pa’lante,” she samples audio of the Pedro Pietri poem “Puerto Rican Obituary,” where he chronicles the dangers of assimilation and losing culture through the lives of four Puerto Ricans in New York: Juan, Miguel, Olga, Manuel. They lose their way by getting caught up in a mainland American notion of success. The characters repeatedly die, dreaming. Olga dies dreaming of a five-dollar raise, of real jewelry, of hitting the lottery. And that felt very right, too. But more than anything, it felt like the right title because it connected this moment—and Puerto Ricans and diasporic people—to our intensely long lineage of using art to speak truth to power.
Was it hard to find a balance between the personal and the political in telling this story? How did you approach that challenge? Yes and no. I wanted to write a book for my people. I mean that in a few contexts, but to direct it back to the question, when I saw Donald Trump throw paper towels at people in Puerto Rico after Maria, that was not political. That was personal. When I see the city council vote on an 80-story high-rise of multimillion-dollar apartments that only creates 150 school seats and blocks out a community garden, that doesn’t feel like a political story to me. It hurts me in my soul. As an artist, one goal was to try and put that on a page: that for many populations, the political is personal. But technically, my approach was to make these characters feel so real so that their pains are your pains.
“My approach was to make these characters feel so real so that their pains are your pains.”
There are many complex characters in this book with different perspectives on progress, power and effective strategies for change. But Dick, the libertarian capitalist paramour, is more obviously flawed than most. What was the inspiration for him? My strange life and professional experiences have given me the opportunity to have access to a wide variety of people—many of them people of power who are well-intentioned, in their own ways of thinking. Not stereotypical “bad people.” With Dick, I wanted to show how someone relatively self-centered, with theoretical justification for their self-interest, can cause great harm by simply existing, even if they never overtly seek to cause great harm. He can be seen, in many ways, as the U.S.’s stance and effect on Puerto Rico itself.
Olga’s family has an ancestral history of enslavement, and they and the people in their Brooklyn neighborhood are specifically referred to as Black and Brown. The text pays attention to color as well as culture, social class and ethnicity, and getting those details right is vital to the story. Olga is “pretty and fair,” her and Prieto’s father is “brown-skinned,” Reggie is Black, and Matteo is a biracial Black Jewish man with “lightly freckled café-con-leche skin.” Does the casting of the Hulu series adaptation reflect the vision you had when you were writing? Hollywood has a tendency to whitewash or flatten those layers in the movement to screen. How do you mitigate that? This is such a thoughtful question. Everyone, from my co-executive producer Alfonso Gomez-Rejon to our partners at 20th Television and Hulu, understood the importance of reflecting our community and illustrating the dynamics of colorism—and the intersectional ripples—that exist in Caribbean Latinx families and communities. And I never felt pressure to flatten roles at all. Olga’s privilege as a white-passable Latina is part of her experience and what has shaped her character itself and in relation to, say, her cousin Mabel. Both characters are successful and beautiful, but the messaging that they get about it—in school, at home—is different. It was exciting to see Aubrey Plaza and Jessica Pimentel in those roles.
There is a line of dialogue in the pilot where a DJ interviewing Reggie says, “I forget you’re Puerto Rican.” And that needed to feel plausible. That is a giant part of Reggie, too, that he gets boxed into one identity for so long, when in reality it’s much more complex, his Afro-Latinidad. On set, I spoke with Laz Alonso, who plays the role, about how moving and exciting it was for him to get to be his full self—a Puerto Rican version (he is Cubano)—but how rarely he gets roles where he can be who he is, an Afro-Latino.
And with Matteo, yes, it was important that he be plausibly racially ambiguous. We were very fortunate in that Jesse Williams, who plays him, is biracial (though not Jewish) with a lot of lived experience around Puerto Ricans and being mistaken for one. So that was a fortunate coincidence that he got to bring that to the role. But mainly we were extremely pointed in this, using this chance to see our spectrum of bodies and complexions and hair types that make Puerto Rican people so beautiful and that reflect our full history and story.
Can you talk about your creative influences? Were there specific authors or literary forebears you looked to as you developed the story? Yes! I spent a lot of time rereading books before I started. I was very taken with Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem and The Sellout by Paul Beatty. These books have a love of community, and Lethem that heart, and Beatty that razor wit, and I took a lot from both of these novels. I reread The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao because of history and diaspora and language. I reread One Hundred Years of Solitude, because it’s a religion to me, but also for scale and scope and to not be afraid of being big, and The World According to Garp for how to talk about complicated, flawed people. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and The Bonfire of the Vanities for inspiration on capturing New York and its multitudes. And finally, The House on Mango Street because I wanted to remember who the girl was that Olga would have been when she gets the letter from her mother that changes the trajectory of her life.
With her roots in Puerto Rico and heart in Brooklyn, the heroine of Xochitl Gonzalez’s vibrant and raw debut novel finds that politics and family are hopelessly intertwined.
A fairy tale for mature audiences Don’t be deceived by a quick glance at The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. This may appear to be just another charming children’s book, but a clever subtlety and thought-provoking story lurk within. Growing up, I laughed at the same jokes my parents did when watching television shows like Rocky and Bullwinkle or, later, The Simpsons. As an adult, I understood why they were laughing, and the jokes became much funnier. In other words, while children will enjoy The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, only adults will fully appreciate it. Short-story writer George Saunders and illustrator Lane Smith (The Stinky Cheese Man) have created a beautiful mix of story and art. Their tale is set in Frip, a fictional seaside town plagued by persistent gappers pests who crawl from the ocean at night to suck on sheep. The story examines how the town’s three families deal with this unique challenge. For the most part, they handle it by forcing their children to work all day plucking gappers, though it’s really not that simple. Right below the surface are issues like parental responsibility, abandonment, and the absence of a social safety net, to name a few examples. As you turn the pages, you’ll discover the real magic of the book: characters that make you smile, because you know someone exactly like these fascinating residents of Frip.
Andrew Lis
A fairy tale for mature audiences Don't be deceived by a quick glance at The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. This may appear to be just another charming children's book, but a clever subtlety and thought-provoking story lurk within. Growing up, I laughed at the…
For Americans who’ve traveled to Paris, the name Shakespeare and Company will ring a bell; it’s the famed English-language bookstore founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919, a bookstore that’s intimately linked to Lost Generation writers such as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In The Paris Bookseller, novelist Kerri Maher tells the story of how Shakespeare and Company came to be.
Soon after returning to Paris, where she lived with her family as a teen, American Sylvia meets Parisian Adrienne Monnier, who runs a bookshop on the Left Bank. Sylvia is drawn to the cultured, literary Adrienne, and as their connection deepens, Sylvia decides to take on the mantle of bookseller, too: She’ll open the first English-language bookstore in Paris. And thus Shakespeare and Company is born.
The Paris Bookseller follows Sylvia from her bookshop’s first days to the end of the 1930s, as war approaches. Sprinkled throughout are Sylvia’s and Adrienne’s regular encounters, mostly at Shakespeare and Company, but also at dinners, parties and café gatherings with those literary luminaries—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Gertrude Stein and others.
Sylvia’s friendship with James Joyce is at the heart of the novel. James, lauded but struggling, can’t find a publisher for his latest work, Ulysses, as American and British publishers are too prudish to take on the modernist novel and its graphic passages. Out of friendship, Sylvia volunteers to publish Ulysses, a quest that turns epic as James misses deadlines, rewrites already typeset pages and demands much, sometimes too much, of Sylvia and other literary friends.
Amid Shakespeare and Company’s ups and downs—thriving in the 1920s, when American tourists begin to visit the shop in the hopes of glimpsing famous writers, and then struggling through the Depression—Sylvia and Adrienne create a loving partnership in a time when queer relationships were far less accepted, even in Paris. Background characters are occasionally placed a bit too far into the background, but this is Sylvia’s story, and Maher has stayed true to her. With its insider’s view of the literary expat world of 1920s Paris, The Paris Bookseller will appeal to fans of Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife.
With its insider’s view of the literary expat world of 1920s Paris, The Paris Bookseller will appeal to fans of Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife.
Fourteen years has been far too long to wait for another collection of novellas and short stories from Stephen Donaldson, who first came to our attention with his startling and epic anti-hero trilogies about Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. With Reave the Just and Other Tales, Donaldson proves once again that he is the quintessential fantasist and the true successor and heir to J.
R.
R. Tolkien. In this volume of eight tales, three of which have never before been published, Donaldson seems to be expunging some demons from his personal life (check his comments in the introduction), but does so in a strange and wondrous manner.
As we have come to expect in Donaldson stories, the design and plots are flavored with an Eastern philosophical, mystical bent, usually communicated with liberal amounts of gore, sex, and violence. Though it sounds contradictory, Donaldson, with the wisdom and style of a Zen master, succeeds in dazzling us on both intellectual and gut-wrenching levels, simultaneously.
Donaldson’s writing is particularly outstanding in developing the mythic dimensions of various cultural perceptions and their role in personal morality; this is best demonstrated in the story The Woman Who Loved Pigs. In The Djinn Who Watches over the Accursed, we view the perspective of both the victim whom a mage caught in flagrante delicto and the djinn the mage called down an adventure story that illustrates Ghandian principles of non-violent resistance. In Reave the Just, similar themes dominate as a brutal and sadistic bully encounters the force of an ideal embodied in a national hero, who understands personal honor in a tale of love, magic, lust, greed and deadly sins. This tale is a first cousin to the classic Princess Bride.
Don’t miss this truly outstanding book.
Larry Woods is an avid reader of science fiction.
Fourteen years has been far too long to wait for another collection of novellas and short stories from Stephen Donaldson, who first came to our attention with his startling and epic anti-hero trilogies about Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. With Reave the Just and Other Tales,…
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.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
In a novel never published in her lifetime, Zora Neale Hurston presented a new vision of the biblical King Herod. Scholar Deborah G. Plant reveals how the masterwork was saved after Hurston’s death, and what we can learn from these precious pages.
“Family vacation” takes on a new meaning for grown children without kids of their own—like the couple trying their best to keep both sets of in-laws happy in Weike Wang’s Rental House.
