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FictionLiterary Fiction

How secrets fray the ties that bind

Interview by Sarah McCraw Crow

In Mothers and Sons, Adam Haslett offers a family story, though it’s a fraught one. Peter Fischer, a gay immigration lawyer, is haunted by a secret he carries from his teen years. His mother, Ann, left behind her life as an Episcopal priest to build a women’s retreat center in Vermont. Their struggle to reconnect after years of estrangement unfolds as a closely observed character study. Haslett shares with BookPage how being a lawyer has impacted his writing, and what it was like to write about the long shadow of the AIDS epidemic.

 

Though the novel is set in 2011, both Peter’s work—the often-hopeless work of trying to help asylum seekers—and his isolation feel very timely. How did you decide to write about that moment in time?

I think I needed, for my own reasons, to describe in fiction the social isolation that is so common now, and which so many of us respond to by burying ourselves in work. Of course, the causality runs in the other direction, too: Capitalism and precarity force people to overwork, which creates isolation. But either way, it’s a defining fact of contemporary life, which was true before the COVID-19 pandemic and has only been exacerbated by it. And then, if you look around the world, you can’t help but see that mass migration caused by war and climate and oppression, and the demagoguery that enshrouds it, is controlling our politics. Rather than trying to chase headlines, it seemed right to set the novel at a time when these forces were beginning to emerge.

You have a law degree and have done legal volunteer work with asylum seekers. Many novelists are former lawyers, turning to fiction later in their careers, but you went to law school after you’d begun writing fiction, and after earning an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. How did going to law school affect your outlook as a writer?

I got into law school and then ended up deferring to go to Iowa, so going to law school wasn’t as much a swerve as just me in my 20s trying to figure out how to put together a life where I could write as well as support myself. As for the effect of law school on my writing, for a long time I thought it hadn’t had any, that it was simply learning a foreign language. But over time I realized it did instill a kind of hypervigilance about accuracy. When you write a contract, you’re trying to write impregnable sentences, ones that no one can disagree about the meaning of. There’s value in that for a fiction writer—to be precise—but also a danger: You tighten up when what you really need to do is be open.

Ann, Peter’s mother, is a former Episcopal priest who let her pastoral work take over her life when her kids were younger, and who now runs a spiritual retreat in Vermont with her longtime partner, Clare. When did you know that Ann was going to be a main character? 

I knew Ann would be central from the beginning, but for a long while I thought she could be described and encountered through Peter’s point of view. Yet, however hard I tried to make those scenes work, they just didn’t, because there was so much Peter couldn’t see about his mother that I wanted the reader to see. So eventually I just started writing scenes from her point of view, which was a huge relief, and ultimately a pleasure.

“There’s a lot of cargo on the ship of good intentions, and not all of it is aid to the people in need.”

This novel is in part about the stories we tell ourselves, the secrets we keep and how those narratives can keep us apart from others. Can you talk about those stories we tell ourselves, often about ourselves? 

My interest in fiction has always been about getting at the interior lives of my characters, and so much of that interiority consists of barely conscious thoughts, judgments, desires, aversions, etc. that together add up, as you say, to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—for better, or all too frequently, for ill. No doubt, this “interest” was driven by my own need to make peace with some of the less than charitable stories I told myself about myself. In that, I’ve been immeasurably helped by meditation, something I’ve done a lot of over the last 25 years, which has become integral to my writing practice.

Both Peter and Ann are ministering to the world, in their own ways. But both have failed each other, and they’ve failed others. As a parent, I couldn’t help but think about the ways we fail our children even as we’re trying hard to help them. Can you talk about this paradox?

The more I wrote each of Peter’s and Ann’s scenes, the more I came to realize I was trying to get at what you might call the psychic economy of liberalism—the way helping others can so often involve a kind of condescension and distance, and also be a place for the person helping to avoid themselves. Which is just to say that there’s a lot of cargo on the ship of good intentions, and not all of it is aid to the people in need. That’s the paradox.

While Peter’s sections are written in first-person present tense, which seems suited to his stalled place in his life, Ann’s sections are in a different mode: third-person past tense. How did you arrive at these two styles for these two characters?

I’m usually suspicious of first-person present tense because it’s a straitjacket for the writer in terms of moving the narrative forward, but in this case it was the only tense and point of view that made sense for Peter. Precisely because he is so buried in his work, and in many ways doesn’t even realize that he is, he can’t see into the future, or much into the past either. He spends his days assembling other people’s narratives—his clients’—but is inattentive to his own. His mother, Ann, is in many ways the opposite. She prizes intimacy, fellowship and spiritual discernment, and so has the kind of settled quality that lends itself to the more knowing voice of third-person past tense.

Ann and Peter are the novel’s main mother and son. But there are others, as the title suggests, like the young Albanian immigrant Vasel and his mother. Can you talk about them?

Vasel is the client of Peter’s who features most prominently in the novel, and his mother’s actions and decisions are central to him getting to the U.S. in the first place. Like a lot of asylum seekers, he feels guilt about his mother still being caught in the situation he fled. Peter has another client, Sandra Moya, whose son Felipe is very anxious at the prospect of his mother being deported. Finally, there is Peter’s sister, Liz, whose son Charlie is just a toddler. To be honest, I didn’t realize just how many sets of mothers and sons I was writing about until about halfway through the novel, but once I saw the pattern that was apparently drawing me forward, I got to play with the patterning more consciously.

The novel’s scenes of Peter’s teen years in the late ’80s vividly evoke teenage uncertainty, and Peter’s anxiety and shame about his sexuality. How did you access the young Peter and that time period?

That’s simple! I lived it—not in the details of this particular plot, but in the sense of having been a teenager at that time, when the virulence of homophobia and the specter of AIDS were so deeply ingrained in American culture that it was next to impossible for a young person to experience desire without fear and loathing. In my first two books, You Are Not a Stranger Here and Union Atlantic, I wrote about some of this, but Mothers and Sons is the first time I’ve allowed myself to write about its long term sequela, as it were. Its effects on adult life.

You’ve written both short stories and novels. Are you continuing to write in both forms? What do you like and dislike about each?

I enjoy them both, and admire anyone who does either of them well. Of late—as in a couple of decades—I’ve been mostly drawn to novels because they let me explore characters and the worlds they inhabit at length. But I have missed the lyric concision short stories allow, and in writing Mothers and Sons, part of me was aiming for that tightness of construction, that close holding of the reader’s anticipatory attention, which made it harder to write but in the end more satisfying to complete.

Can you tell us what you’re working on now?

Alas, I’m a very slow writer. Ideas take a long time to germinate and develop. So mostly what I’m doing is allowing that process to unfold by reading widely, taking notes and paying attention to the world. Technology companies have quite deliberately addicted us to speed in nearly every aspect of our lives, so for me the first real task is to disenchant myself from that forced distraction regularly enough to sense my own intuitions.

Read our starred review of Mothers and Sons.

Adam Haslett’s emotionally complex third novel, Mothers and Sons, examines the way past pain hovers over our closest relationships.
FictionLiterary Fiction

We Do Not Part

Review by Alden Mudge

Korean author Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, returns with We Do Not Part, her poetic, starkly beautiful fifth novel to be translated into English. Kyungha, the book’s narrator, wanders through a bewildering internal dreamscape, haunted by a recurring nightmare of graves inundated by rising water. She has lost or cut off most relationships, and spends her time alone, shedding her belongings and rewriting her will and final instructions. Then a texted summons brings her to the hospital bedside of her friend Inseon.

Kyungha has known Inseon for more than 20 years as a work colleague, friend and, now, artistic collaborator. Though their current joint project, inspired by Kyungha’s nightmare, has begun to lose Kyungha’s interest, Inseon had persevered, until she severed her fingers with a power saw while preparing sculptures for their installation. She asks Kyungha to travel from the hospital in Seoul to her home to save the life of her bird, Ama, left without food or water after her accident.

It is a near-impossible task. Inseon lives to the south, on Jeju island, where she had moved to care for her mother until her recent passing. Kyungha arrives on the island in blizzard conditions. She struggles to reach Inseon’s remote and isolated house, slipping and falling unconscious in the snow more than once, then somehow arriving in the cold, dark building to find both Ama and Inseon inside.

We Do Not Part moves to its own disorienting rhythms, and at this point in the narrative, a reader will likely be both spellbound and unsettled. We feel the chill and isolation of the snowbound island. We see the shadows of birds projected on the walls by candlelight. We read the dry, crumbling documents gathered by Inseon’s mother detailing horrors perpetrated not so long ago by the Korean government on Jeju’s people. We sense the love between Kyungha and Inseon, along with their deepening understanding of the steely perseverance of that older woman, who was, in life, seemingly quiet and subdued. 

For readers unfamiliar with the history, at least 30,000 people—10% of the island’s population—were massacred on Jeju between 1948 and 1949 by the U.S. Military Government in Korea and then by the South Korean Army under Syngman Rhee. Google Jeju and this fact is not among the top hits. Han, however, considers this history with fierce humanity. She writes beautifully, with profound moral authority. Of course she should have a Nobel Prize.

In Nobel Laureate Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, narrator Kyungha has known Inseon for more than 20 years as a friend and artistic collaborator before Inseon asks her to travel to her remote house on snowbound Jeju Island to save the life of her bird.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Mothers and Sons

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

There are sound reasons that Adam Haslett’s debut short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, and his second novel, Imagine Me Gone, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. With Mothers and Sons—a story about the self-inflicted pain of long-buried memories—he demonstrates once again his ability to produce graceful, emotionally affecting fiction whose characters’ struggles seem as real as those of people we know in our own lives.

At the center of Haslett’s novel are Peter Fischer, a New York City immigration lawyer who specializes in representing clients seeking asylum, and his mother, Ann, a former Episcopal priest who abandoned both the church and her husband 20 years earlier to establish a women’s retreat center—a “ministry of hospitality”—in Vermont with her romantic partner, Clare, and her friend Roberta. Peter and Ann’s relationship, even on its best day, is a cool one.

Peter’s stressful but predictable law practice mostly involves representing victims of political violence, and it’s upended when he takes on Vasel Marku, a 21-year-old man from Albania, as a client. Like Peter, Vasel is gay, and his asylum claim is based on his fear that he’ll be persecuted for his homosexuality if he returns to his homeland. As Peter struggles to persuade a reluctant Vasel to help him gather the evidence Vasel will need to secure a judge’s permission to remain in the United States, his client’s predicament surfaces Peter’s painful memories of his own attraction to a charismatic fellow high school student, Jared Hanlan, and its tragic end two decades earlier.

Deliberately, and with consummate skill, Haslett braids these stories until, in the final third of the novel, he reveals the devastating event that lies at the heart of the emotional gulf Ann and Peter must span. Though it anchors the book, theirs is not the only story of maternal love he explores, layering depth and complexity over an already rich novel and illuminating its plural title. Haslett’s prose is simultaneously efficient and evocative, so that the pleasures of this touching novel extend well beyond those that flow from engaging with a psychologically astute and well-told story. In his capable hands, Mothers and Sons is an exemplar of realist fiction.

Read our Q&A with Adam Haslett about Mothers and Sons.

Mothers and Sons is a touching story about the self-inflicted pain of long-buried memories, once again demonstrating Adam Haslett’s ability to produce graceful, emotionally affecting realist fiction.
FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Going Home

Review by Alice Cary

Téo Erskine is a Londoner in his 30s with an orderly, if somewhat aimless, life. As Tom Lamont writes in his smart, warm-hearted debut, Going Home: “He had been careful to arrange a life in which he could leave obligations at the door of his flat, next to the coins he saved for Ben’s poker nights and his shoes that were comfiest for driving.” Téo’s life is completely upended, however, during a weekend back home in his North London neighborhood. He offers to babysit the toddler son, Joel, of his childhood friend Lia, a single mom for whom he has longed for ages, in hopes that his chivalry might gain him favor. Instead, however, an unimaginable tragedy occurs, and Téo suddenly finds himself Joel’s reluctant, bewildered guardian.

The novel focuses on the ongoing question of Joel’s permanent guardianship while showing how the young boy changes the lives of those in his orbit. There’s Téo, of course, who blunders his way through car seat and nappy issues, wondering, “Was it water you did give small children or never gave them?” Téo’s father, Vic, whose life is now shrinking due to the advancing effects of Parkinson’s disease, quickly becomes smitten with Joel, especially since he himself grew up in an orphanage. Téo leans on his best friend, Ben, for support, but because of Ben’s wealth and self-centeredness, they don’t always see eye to eye—especially after Ben informs Téo that he had a brief fling with Lia. Rounding out this exceedingly well-drawn cast is rabbi Sibyl Challis, who is on probation with her congregation, and questioning her faith in the wake of Lia’s tragedy.

Comparisons to Nick Hornby’s About a Boy are inevitable and well deserved. Going Home overflows with heart, and its characters feel real with their multitude of dreams, fears, serious self-doubts and fierce loyalties. Over the course of a year, Lamont paces events with precision and humor, asking life’s big questions regarding family and friendship, duty and devotion. Going Home marks the debut of a gifted writer whose readers will find themselves feeling better, somehow, about the world.

Going Home marks the debut of a gifted writer whose readers will find themselves feeling better, somehow, about the world.
FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

Death of the Author

Review by Laura Hubbard

Fired from her lackluster job as an adjunct professor of writing, and on the verge of needing to move back in with her parents, Zelu has lost control of her life. Because she’s disinclined to pick up the pieces in a way that will satisfy her family, a Nigerian American dynasty for whom being exceptional is considered merely ordinary, she turns instead back to her writing. What comes out of those dark moments is a piece of science fiction set in the aftermath of humanity’s extinction. Upon publication, the novel captures the entire world’s imagination, quickly becoming a bestseller and almost immediately being optioned as a movie. But the consequences of Zelu’s meteoric rise aren’t all so dreamy. As they ripple out, they change her life forever, causing her to rethink her relationship to her writing, her family and even her own body.

Death of the Author, by acclaimed science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor (Who Fears Death), is comfortable straddling the line between genres. Okorafor explores the dynamics Zelu experiences as a disabled Nigerian American author from the south suburbs of Chicago, rendering familiar experiences with remarkable specificity, pulling us in so that we understand Zelu’s truth, warts and all. As the book shines on a literary level, so, too, do its science fiction elements. In a metafictional twist, Okorafor peppers in chapters from Zelu’s bestselling novel with increasing frequency as the story progresses. Beyond being interesting in their own right, the chapters give us a lens through which to see Zelu more clearly—and influence the course of her journey. A remarkable exploration of storytelling, fame and the Nigerian American experience, Death of the Author surprises all the way to its brilliant ending.

Read our interview with Nnedi Okorafor about Death of the Author.

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.
FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

Nnedi Okorafor is making robots mainstream

Interview by Laura Hubbard

Nnedi Okorafor knows that her latest novel is “a lot.” The way Okorafor delivers this pronouncement with a grin makes it clear that the description is anything but apologetic. “I feel like one of the things about this book that’s going to be interesting is this question of ‘What is it?’ Because it’s so much.”

This wouldn’t be the first time Okorafor’s work has defied easy categorization. Though many of her previous books, such as the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Binti, were decidedly science fiction, their setting and perspective lacked a place within science fiction’s numerous subgenres, leading her to coin a new term, Africanfuturist, to describe them.

But with Death of the Author, Okorafor eschews the tidy boundaries of genre entirely. At its core, the book is a literary novel about a woman named Zelu, a disabled Nigerian American author from the suburbs of Chicago whose meteoric rise to literary stardom changes her life. Her story, which begins with being unceremoniously fired from her decidedly unglamorous teaching job, is told through a combination of close third person and interviews with family and friends that show her for the complex—and often flawed—person that she is. Interwoven with Zelu’s story are chapters from Zelu’s breakout novel, Rusted Robots, in which humans have been replaced by robots we created to live alongside us.

“I have a general rule that if I’m scared to write it, I have to write it.”

While those familiar with Okorafor’s science fiction may see a literary novel as a departure, Death of the Author is a book whose heritage mirrors that of its author. Although she’s a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, Okorafor—like Zelu—also has a more traditional background as both an English PhD and as a professor of writing. “I learned a large part of my writing from professors who were very anti science fiction and fantasy,” she says. She credits both her literary and genre instructors for what Death of the Author became, and hopes that the novel can forge a middle ground between the two camps where everyone can “just love storytelling” regardless of genre.

Early in her career, Okorafor had dreamed of writing a literary book about the Nigerian American experience and all of its “complexity, all of its hypocrisy, its strengths, and its specificity.” After the death of her sister a few years ago, Okorafor felt compelled to return to the idea of writing the great Nigerian American novel. For her, that meant talking about food, something that in most Nigerian families is passed down from mother to child. “You develop this whole mythology around the food,” she says. “You love it so much that you bring it for lunch in grade school.” But other kids weren’t familiar with Nigerian food and would question her jollof rice or egusi soup. “You’re forced to explain what it is and either be insecure, or you start defending it, and that strengthens your cultural identity.”

In the book, Zelu’s relationship with food is complicated by the fact that she is the child not of two cultures, but of three: Yoruba, Igbo and American. “Nigerian men expect the wife to cook and be able to cook. . . . So if Zelu’s mom is marrying an Igbo man, then she’s going to have to know how to cook those foods. And then she’s proud of her own culture, so she’s going to cook Yoruba food, too.” Plus, like all children of Nigerian American immigrants, Zelu initially experiences Nigerian food prepared with American substitutions for all the ingredients that you just can’t get in the suburbs of Chicago. Being raised with these foods, in this context, Okorafor explains, connects Zelu to her Nigerian heritage and makes her who she is. “I’m sure it’s this way with other cultures,” she says, when asked about capturing the specificity of this experience, “but I’m speaking as a Nigerian American.”

She’s also speaking as a writer with a disability. Like Zelu, Okorafor became partially paralyzed after an accident. Although she did eventually learn to walk again, the experience profoundly affected her. She says that it felt like she was a “broken, rusting robot.” Instead of moving through the world with the agility of an athlete, “I had to think about every step that I took. I was programming myself instead of intuitively walking as I did when I was a baby.”

“Wanting to box something comes from wanting to feel comfortable, wanting to feel in control.”

And so when it came time for her to write about Zelu experimenting with exoskeleton-like prosthetics that would allow her to walk again, Okorafor drew from personal experience. She’d seen a similar type of prosthetic in the real world and had wondered: If she had the chance to augment the athleticism she’d lost, “would I do that? How would that change who I am?” It’s a fraught question among people with disabilities, she says, whether to see your disability as “something that’s wrong with you that needs to be corrected” or as a part of your identity that you should embrace. “That’s what I’ve had to do with my situation. There is no cure for it. . . . I’ve built my identity around that.” To use this kind of prosthetic “would just shatter so much about what I’ve built. It wouldn’t be as simple as one would think.”

Through playing out part of that debate in the pages of her novel, Okorafor wants to start a conversation, “not necessarily an argument,” about subjects that we might normally shy away from. Where Okorafor sees nuance, however, her main character often doesn’t. Zelu picks fights, and she is sometimes bullheaded, both traits that can be challenging in a main character. But, as Okorafor points out, “It’s not about right or wrong. This is the world, and this is how some people choose to navigate through the world.”

It wasn’t originally Okorafor’s intent to write Rusted Robots as part of Death of the Author. She was interested in writing a literary novel, after all, not more science fiction. But as she began to write about Zelu writing Rusted Robots, Okorafor knew that she wouldn’t be able to keep going if she didn’t at least write a chapter or two of Zelu’s book to understand it a little better. As someone whose science fiction typically depicts the future of humanity, Okorafor initially balked at the idea of writing something with no humans in it—nothing that would interact with the world in the same way that we do. “I was scared of that. But I have a general rule that if I’m scared to write it, I have to write it.” So she did. And within a few chapters, she was hooked. She began to write the two stories in parallel, noticing how what she wrote in Rusted Robots often reflected Zelu’s story, and vice versa. Where Zelu is paralyzed by an accident, the main character of Rusted Robots, Ankara, loses her legs in a brutal attack from a rival robotic faction. Both regain use of their legs in a way others in their lives see as distasteful or outright unnatural (Zelu with her prosthetics, and Ankara with the help of an AI from the faction responsible for the attack). These connections, Okorafor says, were at first unconscious, but later became an intentional way to show how the experiences of an author affect their subjects.

It’s the interplay between these two stories that gives Death of the Author its strength—and which might make it an intimidating read for some. Literary fiction readers may be tempted to skim the science fiction sections, and science fiction readers might “focus on the robots and totally miss out on the whole Nigerian American thing.” But Okorafor stresses that part of the point of the book is to strain against the need for a label. “Wanting to box something comes from wanting to feel comfortable, wanting to feel in control.”

This was a feeling Okorafor, too, has had to fight against. “I remember when I finished writing Death of the Author, I was like, ‘Oh my god, what have I done? How are people going to comfortably categorize this?’” But then she did as she hopes her readers will do: She let it go and focused on the joy of storytelling instead.

Read our starred review of Death of the Author.

Nnedi Okorafor author photo by Colleen Durkin.

 

The sci-fi superstar, author of Binti and Who Fears Death, takes a bold metafictional step in her masterful latest.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionClassics

Plucked from the ashes

Interview by Phoebe Farrell-Sherman

This book was nearly lost to history: It was burned with other papers of Hurston’s after her death, and only rescued, remarkably, by a friend of hers (Patrick Duval), who passed by the fire and was quick enough with a garden hose to save the manuscript. How, from there, did The Life of Herod the Great come to be in your hands? What condition was the manuscript in when you first read it?

From there, Hurston’s friend and neighbor Marjorie Silver deposited the manuscript, along with other items, at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1961. The “Life of Herod the Great” manuscript was placed in the George A. Smathers Special Collections library. Over the last several years, the Zora Neale Hurston Trust has worked to publish Hurston’s unpublished materials. Once the trust was ready to go forward with the publication of the Herod manuscript, I submitted a proposal to edit it for publication.

Overall, given that the manuscript had been pulled from a fire, I’d say that the manuscript was in surprisingly good condition. Yes, sections of several concluding chapters were lost or missing or, likely, simply burned. And a good many pages were singed or burned around the edges. But a major portion of the manuscript was intact. The several hundred pages that survived were a combination of typescript and longhand drafts.

As an editor, how did you approach what was missing in the manuscript, either because of damage or because it was a work in progress?

In instances where a page was singed or burned around the edges, and a word, a part of a word or a phrase was missing, the remaining letters of a word, the remaining words of a phrase, or the context of a sentence or paragraph indicated how I should complete the word, phrase or sentence. This, I would do only if Hurston’s intention was clear.

When I could not discern Hurston’s intentionality, I used ellipses to indicate missing words. One thing I did not want to do was to insert my thoughts or ideas into her work. I wanted only Hurston’s voice to speak, throughout. Whenever extensive passages or sections of a chapter were missing, asterisks indicate missing text or pages. This was the case mainly with the concluding chapters, which are shorter by comparison.

The last chapter, which would have told of the nature and circumstances of Herod’s death, did not survive. However, Hurston wrote about Herod’s death in various letters to her editor and to friends. So I extracted the events of his death from Hurston’s letters and edited them in the epilogue. This way, the readers would have the satisfaction that comes with a clearly stated ending. And Hurston’s interpretation of the events of Herod’s death would be preserved, in her own voice.

Like his life, the fact of Herod’s death had been buried under centuries-old untruths. Hurston found that historical accounts, which echoed the account documented by Flavius Josephus, were unfounded. As she wanted to set the record straight in relation to the biblical account of Herod’s reign, she also wanted to restore his dignity in death. In the absence of her narrative rendering of Herod’s death, Hurston’s letters give us insight into Hurston’s thoughts about the end of Herod’s life, and we can then imagine what she might have written.

“Reading Hurston’s The Life of Herod the Great can contribute to . . . our capacity to become conscious creators of the world we want.”

You’ve spent a great deal of time with Hurston’s writing, as the editor of Hurston’s posthumously released Barracoon (2018), and the author of several books about her (Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit, Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom). I’m curious how your relationship with her work began. How did you decide to make such a deep study of her?

My relationship with Hurston’s work began when I browsed the bookshelves in the Shrine of the Black Madonna Bookstore in Atlanta one day and glimpsed a cover that caught my eye. The green leaves and yellow pears of a tree in the foreground and a shack of a house in the background was the cover art that graced Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. I skimmed a few lines and was compelled to purchase the book.

I had never seen myself, my community, my culture captured so perfectly. I had never read the sounds we make when we talk and joke and pray and fuss rendered so true in written language before. Reading Their Eyes was like looking in a mirror. I was in grad school at Atlanta University, then. I hadn’t known about her, but she seemed to know so much about me. It was uncanny, to me, that she knew me so well. I thought the least I could do was to learn something about her. The Shrine happened to also have a copy of [Hurston’s memoir] Dust Tracks on a Road. I found in her life story so many incidents and events that accorded with my own. My interest in Dr. Hurston and her work would only intensify when I discovered that to study Hurston was to study myself, my culture, American society, the nature of humankind and Creation, Itself.

What would you say to those who might wonder how relevant Herod’s story is to contemporary readers?

Two things:

1. Many contemporary readers still subscribe to the story of Herod as told in the New Testament. As Hurston points out in her preface to the novel, there is much that Herod’s story has to teach about the 1st century B.C.E. which is especially important to understand, given that our culture was influenced by the ideas that were born then, and we’re still embodying and living those ideas now.

2. The sociopolitical dynamics at play in Herod’s day are being played out as we “speak.” Hurston’s work dramatizes the efforts of the West in the domination and control of the peoples of the East. In Herod’s day, we’re talking about Rome’s domination of Persia and Syria and Judea, among others. And today, the conflicts in the Middle East are continuing these ancient wars of domination and resistance to domination. It’s like the names—of the people and the nations—have changed, but the insatiable energy of war has continued throughout the centuries. Hurston bemoaned that history—of war, and death and destruction—continues to repeat itself. But history doesn’t so much repeat itself as it simply continues—until there is a conscious intervention and a commitment to create what we prefer. Reading Hurston’s The Life of Herod the Great can contribute to our knowledge about the world that we inhabit and the worlds that inhabit us, our capacity to become conscious creators of the world we want, and our courage to live in the world authentically.

Where will your work take you next? Will you be working with more of Hurston’s writing, or could we expect another book of your own, like 2024’s Of Greed and Glory?

Well, we’ll see about “more of Hurston’s writing.” I don’t know whether there are more writings, but there is more to say about what we do have. And I know that whatever is next, even a book of my own, it will be inspired by the same ideals that I find compelling in Hurston’s work—a love of freedom, a respect for political and personal sovereignty, the evolution of humanity, and justice.

Read our review of The Life of Herod the Great.

Deborah G. Plant author photo by Gloria Plant-Gilbert.

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.
Science Fiction & FantasyFictionSpeculative FictionShort StoriesLiterary FictionHistorical FantasyFantasy

Start the year with stories for your book club

Feature by Julie Hale

In Old Crimes and Other Stories, Jill McCorkle’s characters face moments of reckoning and work to make sense of the past. A father has trouble connecting with his daughter and adjusting to the digital era in “The Lineman.” In “Confessional,” a husband and wife buy an antique confessional for their house—a purchase that leads to surprising discoveries. “Commandments” features a trio of women dumped by the same man who meet to share stories about him. Wistful and wise, McCorkle’s fifth collection is the work of a writer at the top of her game.

Louise Kennedy explores the lives of contemporary Irish women in her bleakly beautiful collection, The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac. Kennedy’s protagonists—rendered with authenticity and compassion—contend with fraught or dangerous relationships, motherhood issues and economic woes. Sarah, the main character of the title story, pays an ugly price for her husband’s poor business decisions, while the main character in “In Silhouette” is tormented by her brother’s participation in IRA activity. Kennedy’s moving stories offer numerous discussion topics for book clubs, including female fulfillment and the human need for connection.

Salt Slow finds Julia Armfield leaning in to science fiction and the supernatural in stories that examine urban life and women’s experiences. “Mantis” focuses on the turmoil of adolescence, as a young girl’s body mutates in startling fashion. In “Formerly Feral,” two stepsisters form an extraordinary bond with a wolf. Whether she’s writing about giant bugs or a zombie ex-girlfriend, Armfield is clearly at home with the odd and the uncanny, and the end result is a captivating group of stories. Themes of sexuality, spirituality and loss will get book clubs talking.

GennaRose Nethercott’s Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories is sure to delight—and disquiet—readers. Ominous, imaginative and intriguing, Nethercott’s stories probe the tension between the wild and the tame as they exist in our daily lives. In “Homebody,” a young woman undergoes a strange physical transformation after moving into a new house with her partner. “Sundown at the Eternal Staircase” chronicles the goings-on at an eerie tourist attraction. Thanks to Nethercott’s remarkable narrative skills, the impossible becomes plausible. Inspired by folklore and fairy tales, she reinvigorates the short story form.

Round up your reading group and ring in 2025 with one of these fabulous short story collections.
Science Fiction & FantasyNonfictionFictionLiterary FictionHorrorHistoryEssays

Want a short, sharp blast of literary excellence? Try one of these 4 novellas

Feature by the editors of BookPage

The Turn of the Screw

For every reader, there are things that will make them politely but firmly close a book and never open it again. For me, it’s always been what I deem perverse ambiguity. “Who’s to say what really happened! People are unknowable!” a book will proclaim, and I will grip it by its metaphorical lapels and demand to speak to its author. However, for some books, the ambiguity is the point, and there is no better example of this than Henry James’ eerie novella, The Turn of the Screw. The tale of a governess in Victorian England who becomes convinced that the children she cares for are being haunted by the spirit of her predecessor, The Turn of the Screw is horrifying because of its inscrutability. It could be a traditional ghost story, but tilt it just a few degrees, and it’s a tale of a woman trying so hard to suppress her sexuality that it becomes a paranoid obsession. Is her quest to protect the children a noble one, or does something heinous lurk within her need to safeguard their “purity”? A novel might not have been able to sustain such ill-defined anxiety, but as a novella, it’s an undiluted sliver of dread. 

—Savanna Walker, Managing Editor

Foster

In rural Ireland sometime in the past, a shy observant child has left home for the first time. Her long-suffering mother will soon have another child, so the girl will be looked after by the Kinsellas, a kind couple from her mother’s side of the family who own a small dairy farm. Though we don’t learn the girl’s name or specific details of her life at her home, it’s clear within two pages that her family is very poor, and her father is a layabout who would happily see her left on the side of a road, as long as another man didn’t put him to shame by helping her. And because the girl is telling the story, we know that she knows all this too. In the Kinsellas’ house, the missus tells her, there are no secrets and no shame, and the days the girl spends with the couple are filled with order and delight, as well as a mounting understanding that the Kinsellas are not entirely happy. Foster is filled with moments of ease, heartbreak and joy. Despite author Claire Keegan’s bucolic setting, the story never pretends that life is easy. Keegan’s writing is spare but never austere, and the hour spent in Foster’s quiet world will change you.

—Erica Ciccarone, Associate Editor

A Small Place

OK, this isn’t a novella. But if you’re looking for powerful literature that you can read the whole of in a single dedicated burst, this 80-page essay by the great novelist Jamaica Kincaid fits the bill perfectly. Kincaid grew up on Antigua, an island in the Caribbean that was colonized by the British in the 1600s and became the independent country Antigua and Barbuda in 1981. In A Small Place, written just seven years after independence, Kincaid addresses the North American and European tourists who vacation on the 9-by-12-mile island, picking apart a tourist’s mentality to reveal its willful ignorance, and drawing connections between centuries of slavery under British colonialism and the corruption of Antigua and Barbuda’s government. There’s so much here—careful tracing of how history becomes cultural narrative, evocative descriptions of the island’s “unreal” beauty, anecdotes about Kincaid’s love of her childhood library. Everyone living in our so-called “post” colonial world, especially anyone who’s ever been a tourist, should read A Small Place.

—Phoebe Farrell-Sherman, Associate Editor

Train Dreams

Inside the worlds of Denis Johnson’s fiction, the mundane evokes great sadness, terror or joy. Simple acts are magnified in subtle yet staggering ways. Along with his straightforward, limpid prose, this aspect of his writing makes the National Book Award-winner (Tree of Smoke) exceptionally suited for the novella format, as proven by Train Dreams, which tells the story of Robert Grainier, an itinerant laborer in the American West during the turn of the 20th century. Johnson gracefully doles out disjointed portions of Grainier’s life as it unfolds in an era suffused with ordinary tragedy. All around Grainier, people die from dangers both natural and human-made. But just as a ravaged forest returns after a massive fire, “green against the dark of the burn,” so does the humanity that stubbornly persists in this rapidly changing landscape. Despite—or as a result of—its short length, Train Dreams showcases Johnson’s impressive capacity for creating memorable characters, whether it’s a dying vagrant, or a man shot by his own dog. It’s truly a wonder that a book can fit so much engrossing vibrancy within so few pages.  

—Yi Jiang, Associate Editor

Our favorite quick reads pack an enormous punch in a slim package.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionClassics

The Life of Herod the Great

Review by Lauren Bufferd

A trained anthropologist and writer, Zora Neale Hurston worked on a novel about Herod the Great for much of her life. Planned as a companion to her 1939 book Moses, Man of the Mountain, it was unpublished when she died in 1960. The manuscript, part of the Hurston archive at the University of Florida, has now at last been released in a comprehensive edition that includes commentary from editor (and Hurston biographer), Deborah G. Plant and excerpts from letters Hurston wrote to friends and family as she researched the novel. 

The Life of Herod the Great tells the story of the Judean king who lived during the first century B.C.E. and may be best remembered as the man responsible for the building of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. He is also sometimes said to have ordered the execution of all male children in Bethlehem who were 2 years or younger, although many historians do not believe this event occurred.

Hurston did not either. Her novel begins with Herod as a young man assuming the governorship of Galilee under the direction of his father, Antipater. Hurston’s Herod is not only a canny political mind and brilliant strategist, but also a thoughtful man, drawn to the philosophy of the Essenes—a Jewish sect whose piety and devotion to peacemaking had much in common with early Christianity. Herod was ruthless to his enemies, but fiercely devoted to his family and loyal to the Roman leaders who controlled all the Judean kingdoms. His visits to Cleopatra, Marc Antony and Caesar in Rome are the highlights of Hurston’s novel; her familiarity with the political and spiritual workings of the Roman Empire makes this a thought-provoking read. 

Hurston died before The Life of Herod the Great was finished, and though the novel is cohesive, there are some gaps in the narrative. Herod’s first wife, Doris, and their baby son, Antipater, disappear from the book early on, and there are a few undeveloped plot points that the reader imagines Hurston would have tidied up if the novel had been completed in her lifetime. However, there is much here for any reader to enjoy, whether they are fans of Huston’s fiction or eager for a deep dive into a subject rarely seen outside religious texts or histories.

Read our Q&A with Deborah G. Plant about The Life of Herod the Great.

Zora Neale Hurston’s familiarity with the political and spiritual workings of the Roman Empire makes The Life of Herod the Great a thought-provoking read, particularly in her depiction of Herod’s visits to Cleopatra, Marc Antony and Caesar.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

I’ll Come to You

Review by Melissa Brown

“Despite the superficial monotony of their lives, things were changing so quickly.” Who among us—especially those with children or aging parents—can’t relate to that statement? 

Rebecca Kauffman’s I’ll Come to You follows an average family through one year (1995) and all that those 12 months bring. Corinne is pregnant with her first child, and she and her husband, Paul, are waiting expectantly for the new baby girl. Paul’s divorced mother, Ellen, is trying to find love and companionship again, and Corinne’s mother, Janet, is struggling to be honest about the cognitive decline of her husband, Bruce. Corinne’s car salesman brother, Rob, grapples with his own newly single state as he counts the days until it’s his turn for time with his twin sons. Each day presents occasions for joy or sorrow as these men and women wrestle with how life has gone and the challenge of attempting to connect with one another. 

Kauffman thoughtfully portrays family relationships in all their tension and secrets as well as all their intimacy and wonder, in an unhurried narrative similar to the introspective style of authors like Ethan Joella or Ann Napolitano. Occasionally, her characters’ interactions are rendered more stiffly than authentically. And yet, I’ll Come to You surprises with moments of poetic poignancy, like when Bruce drafts a letter to his unborn granddaughter, and captures the palpable worry that any couple experiences about their children and the future. As Paul muses during his wife’s pregnancy, “For some people happiness seemed to arrive magically and effortlessly, like a little creature that flew to perch on its host’s shoulder and devoted its entire life to singing into their ear. In other cases, a person had to work like a craftsman to build it painstakingly, tiny piece by tiny piece, and then to protect it from predators of every size and form.” 

As the seasons change, defining moments from each character’s past take on new significance. The many facets of family vacations, Christmases, late nights in a hospital and any time of day with a newborn are all tangibly displayed in Kauffman’s precise and descriptive prose. 

Rebecca Kauffman’s thoughtful portrayal of family relationships in all their tension and secrets as well as intimacy and wonder in I’ll Come to You resembles the introspective style of authors like Ethan Joella or Ann Napolitano.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

Homeseeking

Review by Thane Tierney

Zhang Suchi and Wang Haiwen, the protagonists of Karissa Chen’s epic debut novel, Homeseeking, have a star-crossed romance that waxes and wanes over decades and continents. Suchi and Haiwen’s story begins when they are children in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during the 1930s; their relationship blossoms into romance in their teens, but is abruptly interrupted in 1947 when Haiwen enlists in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army. Suchi and her older sister are then sent to Hong Kong to escape the civil war, in which Mao Zedong’s Communists ultimately prevail. Separated by conflicts both internal and external, Suchi and Haiwen sacrifice their youthful dreams to build parallel, albeit occasionally intersecting, lives.

Homeseeking is primarily a love story, set against some of the most monumental events of modern Asian history. Its narrative hopscotches back and forth across seven decades, until the estranged sweethearts rekindle their relationship in the unlikely locale of a 99 Ranch Market produce section in Los Angeles. But it’s also a political story, tracing the diaspora of post-World War II mainland Chinese who never expected to wind up in Taiwan, or Hong Kong, or America. Finally, it’s a family story, of the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”

Over a decade in the making, Homeseeking embodies the ambitious scope of James Michener’s historical novels or (while not nearly as long) Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. Chen’s ability to navigate effortlessly across cultures and eras reflects not only the depth of her research, but also her natural gifts as a storyteller. 

There is one potential stumbling block for a more casual reader: Chen transliterates Chinese words differently under different circumstances. For instance, the character Suchi is also referred to as Suji at different points in the narrative. Chen addresses this in a forward, explaining that her choices reflect different regional pronunciations and romanization styles, and asking readers to empathize with the linguistic challenges her characters, and immigrants across the globe, must navigate. While it may take a few detours to Google to clarify the occasional word or phrase, the book settles into a compelling narrative that fills in most of the blanks contextually. It’s a small price to pay for admittance to such an auspicious debut.

Karissa Chen’s Homeseeking is both a love story and a family story, capturing the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Another Man in the Street

Review by Michael Magras

The 1960s may have been swinging for London’s Carnaby Street crowd, but elsewhere in the city, change of a very different sort took place: Caribbean immigrants came to Britain to fill job vacancies in hope of a better life. One such immigrant is Victor Johnson, the central figure in Caryl Phillips’ Another Man in the Street. The novel traverses half a century, and, like much of Phillips’ work, is a thought-provoking examination of colonialism and its repercussions.

Like Phillips, Victor left the Leeward Island of Saint Kitts to move to England. In Victor’s case, he leaves his parents, two older sisters and his wife, Lorna, when he’s 26 to endure two weeks packed onto a rumbling banana boat. Not content to be a cane cutter like his father, Victor has dreams of becoming a journalist and craves “a chance to start over without people judging me.”

That plan doesn’t go as Victor had hoped. When journalism jobs prove hard to find, he takes a gig as a handyman at a Notting Hill pub where he suffers racist comments from a white waitress, while living in a run-down hostel whose owner hates Black people.

Things appear to improve when Victor gets a job as a rent collector for a property owner named Peter Feldman, work Victor describes as “bullying people.” In the spare, formal prose typical of his style (“She closed her eyes, for she could see it all too clearly now.”), Phillips charts Victor’s dealings with Peter. Victor also begins a relationship with Peter’s secretary, Ruth, a woman desperate to figure out “what on earth she might do to make life more tolerable.”

Victor eventually finds his way into the world of England’s broadsheets, but life’s challenges prove as rough as that banana boat ride. Among them are health issues; a son in Saint Kitts who is often in trouble; Ruth’s adult daughter, Lucy, with whom she has an “uneasy relationship”; and the fallout from Ruth’s discovery of Lorna and Victor’s life back home.

Transitions aren’t always clear, primarily at the beginning, but Another Man in the Street builds quiet power with its deep exploration of Phillips’ characters. Like The Lost Child, his excellent take on Wuthering Heights, this book is absorbing in its investigation of the impact of the strictures of colonial rule in the Caribbean.

Caryl Phillips once again explores the impact of the strictures of colonial rule in the Caribbean in the absorbing Another Man in the Street.

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