books

You Haven’t Read A Heist Novel Like This Before

Arts, ,

by Jessica P. Wick

The All-Consuming World, by Cassandra Khaw

A rag-tag band of criminals must come together for one last heist; of course, they didn’t part on good terms after the last job …

You might know this story, but you don’t yet know it in the hands of Cassandra Khaw. They transform one last heist into The All-Consuming World: a visionary, foul-mouthed, gory sci-fi adventure, dripping viscera, violence, and beauty in equal measure.

This time the criminals are cyborg clones — grown and augmented for work, treated like second class citizens and, unless something goes wrong, functionally immortal. When their bodies wear out or are damaged, their minds are uploaded into a new body, as long as nothing goes wrong. “Work, die, mulch the corpses, brine in the appropriate solution, bring them back. Rinse repeat.” Maya is the muscle and often our viewpoint character, loyal number two to callous mad scientist Rita, the manipulative former leader who’s bringing the Dirty Dozen — or what’s left of them — back together.

The authorities determined to stop them are autonomous AIs called Minds: relentless, alien, fascinating. A powerful Mind faction, the Bethel, believe the physical world and data exist to be devoured. We also meet the enigmatic Merchant Mind — out for themself, playing multiple sides to a mysterious end — and Pimento, a surveyor Mind who becomes embroiled in politicking. There’s a third wrinkle: Elise, one of two casualties from the last heist, isn’t exactly dead. Of course, she’s not exactly alive either – and that’s one of the hooks Rita uses to reel the old team back, along with the chance to figure out what exactly went so wrong last time.

For most of The All-Consuming World, the reader doesn’t know why the heist has to happen now, or what its target is. True stakes reveal themselves slowly. Anyone who seems to have answers turns out to be an untrustworthy manipulator keeping everyone else in the dark, so you’re pretty much in the dark, too. Khaw’s characters are damaged, raw, full of salt and vinegar, not always likable but charismatic. Members of the Dirty Dozen have baggage, and Khaw effectively gives you a sense of a dysfunctional, formerly chosen family, of outsiders with history. There’s little warmth, but occasionally a gleam of yearning which keeps you interested and adds to the tragic elements at play. Kudos to Khaw for the Minds, who think in terms that don’t align with how a species defined by biomatter would think. They don’t feel like somebody trying to imagine how AIs would think if they ruled the universe; they feel like AIs, who are ruling the universe. They’re terrifying and great.

Let’s talk about the prose: It’s incandescent, densely layered, adjectives and metaphor encrusted on the page and the mind’s eye. Although “encrusted” connotes static, this work is anything but static; rather, it’s orchestral, in constant breathless motion. “A million adjectives fettered to the mythic” is a description of one of the characters, but it’s a pretty good description of Khaw’s writing, too. I love when language is poetry, as it is here, and the syncopated melange of curse words, programming language, and stunningly realized images is intoxicating. Occasionally, the language overwhelms the story, and with so many viewpoints and such a quick pace it’s not always easy to follow scene changes. I found myself pausing as often as I found myself staying up late to read what happened next. Make no mistake: I did both these things, but I acknowledge less patient readers might wander away.

Although immortality has been effectively achieved for clone and machine, who gets to be real and who matters are questions this novel wonders about. It also thoughtfully considers whether it’s possible to break free from patterns when they seem hardwired. You won’t get a great sense of location or what everyday life looks like in Khaw’s universe, but you will think about what goes into making a life and what is important. There’s a lot to be introspective about.

The All-Consuming World is a gory, gloriously punk, queer heist story set in an unsettling and cold universe. It delivers thrills and questions. This is Cassandra Khaw’s debut novel, although they’ve published many novellas before, and it’s a worthwhile addition to the sci-fi canon. The ending is abrupt; a sudden stop. But it feels right that this story leaves you with questions unanswered and futures uncertain. The All-Consuming World will consume your attention and linger in your thoughts, a very good ride and a remarkable what-if.

Jessica P. Wick is a writer, freelance editor, and California native currently living in Rhode Island.

In ‘Night Rooms,’ A Life Is Reviewed Through Memories And Movies

Arts, , ,

by Gabino Iglesias

Gina Nutt’s Night Rooms is a collection of biographical essays in which memories and movies — mostly horror ones — merge to create a narrative that explores identity, body image, fear, revenge, and angst.

Jumping between past and present with ease, Nutt slashes to the center of issues like motherhood and depression and ultimately emerges as the quintessential final girl of her own film.

The essays in Night Rooms are numbered instead of titled. With films and the past as cohesive elements, the numbered essays add up to a somewhat fragmented biography that dances between Nutt’s childhood, full of a ballet and beauty pageants; her school years and into college, when loneliness became as much of a problem as other people; and into adulthood and marriage, at one point jumping from the first anniversary of her marriage to the fourth one in a single paragraph. Because she goes back and forth in time, the collection feels simultaneously split and cohesive, and we get to see how sometimes her past — her trauma, the movies she watched, and the things she experience — echo in her life years after.

Nutt’s style is slightly jarring, but it soon becomes familiar. Her short paragraphs tend to jump between subjects and times. However, like a great jazz musician, she always keeps the themes at the core in mind and, after what feels like literary improvisations and melodic deviations, she always returns to the central topic. For example, movies tend to live at the heart of the essays, and Nutt talks about the memory of watching those movies, quotes them, and often describes them without mentioning actors, titles, directors, or years — but does so in ways that they are immediately recognizable. They are used to give shape and hold up other things, and much bigger themes. Passages about the films are often breaks in the large narratives about herself, but the economy of language with which she creates those breaks adds a special touch to the book that makes it feel unified in its fragmentation and reminds readers of how movie scenes can be interrupted by at a specific moment to create tension.

The writing in Night Rooms is intimate and Nutt doesn’t shy away from any topic. Relationships, drinking, depression, awkward moments from her childhood, and the idea that we can bring people back from the dead are all tackled with the same earnestness. Also, Nutt’s love for poetry, myths, and folktales bleeds into some of the book’s most honest moments:

Scream, Jaws, House of Wax, Beetlejuice, Poltergeist, It Follows, Rosemary’s Baby, and two Stephen King classics, Carrie and Pet Sematary, are just some of the movies that appear in Night Rooms. They show up as integral parts of certain memories or as narratives that frame an idea or a memory. Nutt remembers some of these movies “by their covers, a flicker of recognition, followed by blankness” while for others she can “recall entire scenes” even years after having seen them. They are mirrors Nutt holds up to real horrors, narrative devices that hint at the ineffable, and bits of darkness that somehow became part of similarly strange, or anxiety-inducing experiences.

While films in general dominate this collection, there are also things like TV shows, other essays, ballets, and poetry that enrich Nutt’s writing and serve as connective tissue or a scaffold for a lot of the ideas discussed. Poetry occupies important spaces and often gives Nutt the words she needs to get a point across. That said, the author’s own writing is full of a rhythm and musicality that often leads to poetic phrases:

The same style that will strike some readers as jarring at the start eventually morphs into a unique approach to the delivery of thoughts, memories, and ideas that will stick with them for a long time after reading Night Rooms. Nutt has a knack for short, sharp lines that skip the brain and go straight to the heart: “My heartbeat can be the most horrifying sound in a room if I can’t slow the organ’s rhythm.” Those make this collection a spectacle of different lights that shine through a fractured lens.

Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

You Actually Will Be Talking About ‘No One Is Talking About This’

Arts, ,

by Heller McAlpin

Writing is a calling for Patricia Lockwood, as she made clear in her sacred and profane, lyrical and bawdy 2017 memoir, Priestdaddy. While still in her teens, she took the vows of literature and became “a person who almost never left the house.” Art became her emissary. She confessed: “This is the secret: when I encounter myself on the page, I am shocked at how forceful I seem. On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength.”

Now Lockwood has put that strength into her first novel, No One is Talking About This, which leaves no doubt that she still takes her literary vocation seriously. It’s another attention-grabbing mind-blower which toggles between irony and sincerity, sweetness and blight.

Her unnamed narrator is a social media star who achieved prominence when her post, “Can a dog be twins?” went viral. This led to speaking engagements around the world, at one of which a man asks, “This is your contribution to society?”

Even as Lockwood’s narrator acknowledges the difficulty of writing about what she calls “the portal” — especially without “a strong whiff of old white individuals being weird about the blues” — she attempts just that in the first half of this novel. In the second half, the portal’s hold on her vaporizes when real life intrudes urgently, in terrible and but also surprisingly beautiful ways. Important lessons ensue.

It’s another attention-grabbing mind-blower which toggles between irony and sincerity, sweetness and blight.

Lockwood deftly captures a life lived predominantly online in the “blizzard of everything,” this “place of the great melting,” with its vapid, mind-numbing, addictive culture. Her insider tour carefully showcases the “new shared sense of humor” and “elastic and snappable verbal play” that so insidiously morphs into jargon, dogma, and doctrine. This portrait of a disturbing world where the center will not hold is a tour de force that recalls Joan Didion’s portrait of the dissolute 1960s drug culture of Haight-Ashbury in her seminal essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”

Like Didion — and Nora Ephron – Lockwood is a master of sweeping, eminently quotable proclamations that fearlessly aim to encapsulate whole movements and eras: “White people, who had the political educations of potatoes – lumpy, unseasoned, and biased toward the Irish – were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice. This happened once every 40 years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again,” she writes. Unfortunately, much of her humor is too raunchy to be quoted here.

Although written before the January 6th attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters, there’s an eerie timeliness to Lockwood’s observations about the dark side of social media. She addresses many of the issues raised by New York Times media columnist and former BuzzFeededitor-in-chief Ben Smith in a piece written after the siege, in which he reminds us that “evil can just start with bad jokes and nihilistic behavior that is fueled by positive reinforcement on various platforms” and the “almost irresistible gravitational pull” of “getting more attention from more people than you ever have.”

Lockwood’s media maven laments how a shared sense of irony and mockery turned on itself, and what was meant to be a source of connection and individuality became instead a disturbing source of disconnection, derision, and worse. She writes of a generation that “had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis.”

Readers may well wonder where Lockwood is going with this. Some will be less charmed by the subversive humor than others. But hang in there. The novel shifts into another realm after the narrator receives a text from her mother about dire problems with her younger sister’s pregnancy.

In response to this wakeup call, Lockwood’s narrator becomes “a citizen of necessity.” She moves into the world of NICUs, a place where urgency is real, and wonders, “Why had she entered the portal in the first place? Because she wanted to be a creature of pure call and response: she wanted to delight and to be delighted.”

Instead, she finds something far more affecting, and what results is a sort of conversion story in which sincerity supersedes irony. “It was a marvel how cleanly and completely this lifted her out of the stream of regular life,” Lockwood writes. “She wanted to stop people on the street and say, ‘Do you know about this? You should know about this. No one is talking about this!'”

It’s a testament to her skills as a rare writer who can navigate both sleaze and cheese, jokey tweets and surprising earnestness, that we not only buy her character’s emotional epiphany but are moved by it.

Lockwood acknowledges that her novel is based on her niece’s heartbreaking case — the first person ever to be diagnosed in utero with Proteus Syndrome, a one-in-a-billion disorder whose most famous sufferer was the Elephant Man. It’s a testament to her skills as a rare writer who can navigate both sleaze and cheese, jokey tweets and surprising earnestness, that we not only buy her character’s emotional epiphany but are moved by it.

Of course, people will be talking about this meaty book, and about the questions Lockwood raises about what a human being is, what a brain is, and most important, what really matters. “What did we have the right to expect from this life?” her narrator asks. “What were the terms of the contract? … Could we … could we post about it?”

Author Digs Into Family’s ‘Smalltime’ Mob Operation, Finds Family Secrets

Food For Thought, ,

by Dave Davies

Hollywood portrayals of the American Mafia often focus on major cities, but writer Russell Shorto says there have been active mob organizations in countless small and midsize cities in the United States.

Shorto knows this firsthand: His grandfather was a mob boss in the industrial town of Johnstown, Pa. Shorto says his grandfather’s involvement with the Johnstown mob initially began as an offshoot of Prohibition, which opened doors for Italian Americans facing employment discrimination.

“When Prohibition happened, here was an opportunity,” Shorto says. “In this case, there was an old Italian guy in the neighborhood who seemed to have organized families to operate stills.”

When Prohibition ended, the Johnstown mob shifted its focus to gambling. It had a headquarters on Main Street, two doors down from City Hall, where it ran various operations, including card games, numbers games and sports betting.

“They had something like 100 people in their employ, most of them just sort of on the side, but some full-time bookies,” he says. “They made about $2 million a year over about a 20-year period.”

Shorto says his grandfather’s first arrest records were for running card and dice games out of the trunk of his car. He later rose through the ranks of the organization, eventually becoming its second in command.

Shorto writes about the Johnstown mob and the family havoc that resulted from his grandfather’s position in it in his new memoir, Smalltime. He says the family secrets he uncovered while writing the book were sometimes hard to stomach.

“The pain [my grandfather] inflicted on [my grandmother], the pain he inflicted on my father … that then colored my father’s whole life, which in turn colored my life,” he says.

Interview Highlights

On how the gambling operation was out in the open and paid off police and the mayor

[The mob] paid people off. … Periodically [the police] would have to raid for form’s sake. And so [the police] would give [the mobsters] a call and let them know, “OK, we’re going to send a guy down to raid.” And so the idea was you would leave somebody behind, everybody would clear out and you’d take most of your betting slips, but you’d leave one guy behind, usually an older guy who was kind of down on his luck and didn’t have anything to lose by going and hanging out in jail for a day or two, and he would be there to take the fall and then they’d kind of reset and start again.

On how the mob organization had political influence

One of the differences, I think, between the small-town mob and New York or Chicago is that it was really focused on gambling. People told me this over and over, and I guess I have to believe them that they did not get into, for example, prostitution or drugs. Many people told me that, “Your grandfather and Joe, his brother-in-law, had this rule: Drugs, that’s dirty stuff. We don’t mess with that.” So I guess I have to believe them, regarding payoffs and things like that.

They were very much involved in local politics. They engineered to get a DA into office who they liked, and they were involved in unions. So that sort of thing was part of their world.

On his grandfather’s lifestyle, which was paid for by mob activity

On the surface, it was plain. They had a “no Cadillacs” rule. You couldn’t be showy. They didn’t wear tailored suits. But when you got out of town, that was a different story. And so when they were in Atlantic City, where they spent much of the summer every year with the whole family, they would bring a whole entourage of cars down to Atlantic City, and they rented a suite in the swankiest hotel and they had waiters for everything. They were often in Florida as well. So they lived it up when they were out of town. … But my grandfather was a very quiet guy. He mumbled a lot. Some people said they thought he was maybe pathologically shy. So he was good at putting up that kind of front.

On how his grandfather got beautiful clothes for his wife

He was a brilliant cheat at cards. And he would organize big card games. And my dad said he remembered as a kid watching him — he would practice for a couple of hours beforehand at the dining room table, dealing from the bottom of the deck and dealing the second card. And so he would get into these big games with the owners of the department stores and the jewelry store, and he would take them to the cleaners. And he would agree to take their winnings in merchandise. And so he would just tell his wife, “Go down to April’s, go down to Mark’s furniture store and get whatever you want.” And the manager would have to walk behind her and pile up all these dresses on his arm and that sort of thing.

On learning why his own father didn’t follow in his grandfather’s footsteps

Somehow I had grown up with this story that my grandfather, the forbidding figure, wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, and my father refused. And as a child, I think I saw this as valiant: “[My father is] doing this for us. He’s keeping his family protected.” As I talked to more and more of the old guys, I kind of repeated this, and they looked at me like, “What are you talking about?” And one of them said, “Are you kidding? Tony” — my dad — “wanted nothing more than to get into it.” So it turns out finally that I confronted my dad with this, and he admitted it and he said that, in fact, he had desperately wanted to get into it and he would hang out at City Cigar, the center of the operation. And if his father caught him there, he would beat the crap out of him. And so, in this strange way, my grandfather, this dark figure in my childhood, ends up being kind of this hero who’s trying to save his son from this life that he doesn’t want him to have.

Investigating your family history is part of growing up, basically. It’s moving yourself to another level of maturity, which is why I think everyone ought to do it — if they dare.

Russell Shorto

On his grandfather’s infidelity and children from those affairs

My grandfather … acted like a medieval king or something. He did what he wanted. This woman had his child, and she was actually the housekeeper who cleaned his house and his [business] partner’s house. And he decided eventually, “You’re not going to keep the baby.” His partner and his wife were unable to have children, [so] the two men decided they would announce that this was their child whom they had adopted, and that’s who raised the child. He had another child with another woman.

When I talk about me having this sense of darkness, which came from my awareness of how the older people in the family reacted to my grandfather, it’s not so much about the mob per se. It’s more about the fallout from his personality and his behavior. This kind of thing really kind of colored — and, I think, to this day … colors — a lot of people in the family.

On the intensity of doing family history research

I’m now kind of a great believer in family history in general. … Research your family, but do it if you have the stomach for it, because generally speaking, you know certain stories about your family. Once you start researching them, you’re going to find out that’s probably not true — or there’s a veneer of truth there, but the reality is something quite different. … Investigating your family history is part of growing up, basically. It’s moving yourself to another level of maturity, which is why I think everyone ought to do it — if they dare.

Sam Briger and Seth Kelley produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.

‘To Hold Up The Sky’ Asks A Simple Question: What If … ?

Uncategorized,

by Jason Sheehan

Cixin Liu’s To Hold Up The Sky is a 1974 Chevy van with icy moons and swirling nebulae painted on the side that you saw for sale by the side of the road in a snowstorm. It is a copy of Heavy Metal you found stuck in the back of the rack at Empire Comics when you were looking for old Savage Sword of Conan issues to read on a long road trip with your parents. It is the torn cover of a faded sci-fi paperback you found at the thrift store and spent the afternoon reading in the car while you waited for a girl to get off work and let you into her apartment for which you didn’t yet have a key.

Tor Books

It is magic, this collection of short stories Liu wrote and published ten, 20, 30 years ago. It is a time machine; a split-vision tunnel that lets you go back in time while staring forward, to see what 2003’s or 1985’s version of 2010 or 2020 or 3000 looked like from China, in the pages of the Beijing edition of Esquire or Chengdu’s Science Fiction World and Novoland Fantasy.

“At that time, sci-fi was still a very marginal pursuit in China,” Liu writes in his foreword. “Science fiction is seen as something foreign.”

And you can see it (smell it, taste it) in every page — a sense of artistic isolation and loneliness, sure, but also the compounding joy of exploration. Of discovering new territories and imagining other frontiers. “For my part, I have never consciously or deliberately tried to make my sci-fi more Chinese,” he writes. Because science fiction, when done well, when done thoughtfully, engages ideas of humanness beyond nationality or ethnicity. It is a language more concerned with humanity in general than the specific sub-categories thereof. Because the aliens don’t care about our addresses, of course. To them, we all taste the same.

Still, that’s a lot about what Liu’s writing here isn’t (mainstream, local, modern, deliberately Chinese), but what matters is what it is. What matters is what it does. What matters more than both of those put together is how it feels to see tomorrow through his eyes — to experience a science fiction that comes largely innocent of 21st century concerns and wholly absent its modern sins.

Because Liu is at play here, alone with a toy box full of rocketships, circuit boards, plastic tanks and army men. “The Time Migration” (translated by Joel Martinsen) has a Harlan Ellison quality (something in the exclamation points, the righteous surprise at every turn) and compresses 10,000 years of human evolution into a few thousand words, using cryogenic freezing to allow his witnesses to whistlestop through the centuries, periodically dropping in on humanity to see it move beyond war, beyond beauty, beyond individual consciousness and, finally, beyond life. “Contraction” (translated by John Chu) feels like something lifted whole from Asimov’s Science Fiction — its brevity and compactness attractive, its whole existence hanging on one complex scientific hook. “Mirror” (translated by Carmen Yiling Yan) is a kind of sci-fi whodunit that ropes in complex algorithmic discussions, superstring computing, simulation technology, IT stack overflow limitations and a long explanation of the Big Bang in order to tell the tale of a Chinese government official screwed over by politics. And the following story, “Ode To Joy” (Martinsen again) is, ironically, about a giant mirror that plays stars like musical instruments.

“The Village Teacher” (translated by Adam Lanphier) seemed too simple and too pat (a rural teacher, dying of cancer, teaching his students about Newton’s laws of motion just before a massive alien battlefleet arrives to test our species’ intelligence by … asking it about Newton’s laws of motion), but as the first story in the collection, it sets up a dichotomy that plays out over and over again. In “2018-04-01” (Chu), Liu envisions a new gene therapy that allows people to live 300 years, and possibly forever. The story, though, is about a single man contemplating embezzlement in order to pay for the treatment, and what a couple hundred extra years of life would be worth to him in exchange. In “Fire In The Earth” (Martinsen), a new mining technology goes terribly wrong, but leads to a future breakthrough that allows for the safe extraction of gassified coal. Liu tells it as a tender story about the son of a miner trying to make life better for all the fathers and all the sons who go down into the mines, and how failure breaks you.

‘To Hold Up The Sky’ gives us a window that looks out over a different sci-fi landscape than we’ve seen in decades. Because science fiction was like this once upon a time: strange and alien, liberated, trope-less, exuberant, young.

There is an earnestness here. A human-centered vision of advancement that makes for complicated reading because Liu can bounce so quickly (so oddly, so sharply on occasion) back and forth between emotionless recitation of scientific facts and pure living drama that his stories tie the two things together in ways that few other writers can manage. His stories offer you a shiny new thing (a mining technology, eternal life, a complicated treatise on modern electronic warfare) and then ask you to consider who created it, and how, and why, and what it cost. He offers a father and a son and asks what hardship, what love, must’ve existed before the shiny new thing came to be? In half the stories in this new collection, he centers humans among the whirring, blinking gizmos of sci-fi and questions what price his humans are willing to pay. In the other half, he gives us aliens, unknowable and strange, playing stars and offering poetry, and asks us how humanity might react.

And in this balance — in its studied lack of irony, its simplicity, its lack of stepped-back post-modernism — To Hold Up The Sky gives us a window that looks out over a different sci-fi landscape than we’ve seen in decades. Because science fiction was like this once upon a time: strange and alien, liberated, trope-less, exuberant, young. It operated without maps or guiding principles, got lost, found its way, moved on. Before genre factionalism and the days of grim-dark apocalyptica, before Federations and Empires, before the calcification of semiotics, there was the simplest of questions: What would happen if…?

To Hold Up The Sky reminds me of those days. Of science fiction without guile, without snark, without ironic disaffection and all its exhausting modern baggage. It just asks what would happen? Waits for someone to answer. And then it asks again.

Jason Sheehan knows stuff about food, video games, books and Starblazers. He is currently the restaurant critic at Philadelphia magazine, but when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.

Yes, There’s Conflict — But No One’s The Bad Guy In ‘Memorial’

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by Scott Simon

by Scott Simon

A lot is going on with Benson and Mike. They have explosive sex, but are not quite sure they get along, or where they’re going.

Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant in Houston. Benson is a Black daycare employee who doesn’t really care much for children.

Mike’s mother, Mitsuko, has just arrived from Japan to visit. But Mike’s about to fly off to Osaka to hold the hand of his father as he dies. So Mitsuko will bunk with her son’s boyfriend. What could go wrong?

What could go right?

Memorial is a story about old and new loves and secrets — and it’s the highly-awaited debut novel from Bryan Washington, following his acclaimed 2019 short story collection, Lot.

“When I started the project, three things that I knew from the outset were that Benson, Mike and Mitsuko would be the three constants,” Washington says. “I knew that their relationships would be the centerpiece of the narrative, and I knew the emotional pocket that I wanted the narrative to end up in. So they were always there from the outset.”

Interview Highlights

On the character of Mitsuko

Yeah, what was really important to me with her character, and what I kind of knew from the outset was that if the novel worked, it would be because her character worked. And if it didn’t work, it would be because her character didn’t work on the page. And because so many of the other characters really aren’t in the same place at the same time for very much of the novel, she’s the constant in a lot of ways. She’s the most emotional constant. She’s the constant as far as a physical presence is concerned. So really seeing the ways that she touched each of these men in their lives was pivotal as far as trying to figure out how to make the narrative come together.

On whether he was timid about writing a middle aged Japanese woman

I think I’m pretty timid when it comes to writing in general, because I think that when you set out to write a narrative, what you’re really doing is putting people on the page, and people are made up of so many different multiplicities. So from my end, if I’m doing my job correctly, I’m trying to take heed of their hopes and dreams, their loves, their fears, the things that make them laugh and the things that they might shy away from. And that’s going to be particularly difficult with any character. But when you’re writing outside of yourself and as I wrote outside of myself for this text, there was just so much research that went into writing each and every last character.

On his research

I ended up actually editing the second to last draft of the text in Osaka. And I’m there honestly, probably once or twice a year. And I’ve been there once or twice a year for the past five or six years. So the research involved a lot of just being there, but also talking to friends, talking to strangers, trying to get a sense of a very singular iteration of the city, because you’re never really going to get a city right on the page, regardless of whether it’s Houston, whether it’s Osaka or whether it’s a place you came up or a place you visited once or twice, because it’s so many different things to so many different people. So trying to figure out what the city meant to the characters and the context in which they existed was the goal for me on this front.

On how much of the book is based on observation and experience, and how much is imagination

I think that what I wanted to do with this particular book was write first and foremost something that I wanted to read, but also to write about the relationships that I’ve had, the relationships that my friends have had that we haven’t really seen in narrative form in the way that I wanted to see them. So really reaching toward the kind of book that I thought that I would enjoy, and that would make me laugh or make me sad. And to try to write something that would elicit those emotions from my friends is really important to me.

On Mitsuko saying there are no wastes

Yeah, what was really important to me for the book was really trying to write a book in which there aren’t really any clear antagonists and when which there really isn’t a massive conflict. And so far as like life itself is, the conflict was a goal for me. I just wanted to see what that would look like. So trying to put each character in a position where they’re operating from a place of love for one another, as opposed to disdain or hatred or apprehensiveness, was something that I wanted to try to do.

This story was edited for radio by Samantha Balaban and Martha Ann Overland, and adapted for the Web by Petra Mayer.

‘You Had Me At Hola’ Had Us Right From The Beginning

Arts,

by Kamrun Nesa

Alexis Daria’s You Had Me at Hola had me at Latinx representation, sexy soapy plot, and a meta-telenovela addicting enough to actually get picked up by Netflix IRL. This book fizzes with sex, betrayal, lies, and family drama — but the good news is, it comes without an actual telenovela’s requisite cliffhangers and tragedies.

We first meet soap opera star Jasmine Lin Rodriguez as she’s trying to move on from a public breakup, and after landing a lead role on a bilingual telenovela called Carmen in Charge, she comes up with what she calls a Leading Lady plan — because “Leading Ladies are badass queens making jefa moves.” That means focusing on herself, making her family (especially her abuela) proud of her — and swearing off men. After all, Jasmine doesn’t need to settle down just because her family thinks it’s the key to happiness. And she thinks her plan will be easy to pull off — until she meets her co-star, telenovela legend Ashton Suarez, who’ll play her ex-husband Victor.

Playing bitter exes forced to work together, Jasmine and Ashton unwittingly get as close to each other as their characters do, much to their chagrin. For one, it goes against Jasmine’s plan, and the last thing Ashton needs is a fling with a costar that’ll make his complicated personal life into tabloid fodder; he needs to focus on breaking out in Hollywood instead. But as much as he tries to avoid Jasmine offscreen, sparks inevitably start flying as they run their lines together. Pretty soon, rumors are spreading, and fans are insisting Jasmine and Ashton are a couple — but he’s keeping a big secret from both her and the world, and he’ll do anything to protect it.

Jasmine and Ashton’s real-life relationship may be rocky, but their roles on Carmen in Charge are on point. Daria pulls readers into the telenovela, which acts as a framing narrative for the larger story. Much like its imaginary show,Hola is a triumph of Latinx joy and feminist agency. It thoughtfully explores gender roles and diversity in entertainment and the greater Latinx community, and challenges the Hollywood status quo. “It’s rare to find ourselves so well-represented in pop culture,” Ashton says to Jasmine at one point.

Carmen in Charge creates a bubble around Ashton and Jasmine; on camera, they can act out their subconscious desires without having to justify them. They don’t spend as much time together as their on-screen counterparts do, but the script and dialogue Daria weaves into the story leads the way for a burgeoning real-world connection. And publicly stifling their attraction to each other adds a fiery rip-each-others-clothes-off urgency to their stolen moments — Ashton whispering Spanish dirty talk in Jasmine’s ear is a scene to behold.

The show provides a foundation for the romance in another crucial way, through the on-set intimacy coordinator Vera, who helps them get comfortable with each other, and with the idea of consent. Vera encourages Jasmine and Ashton to be vulnerable in front of each other, which builds intimacy, trust, and communication between them that carries into real life — even after the director yells “Cut!” Ashton muses that it’s the first time anyone has ever asked him if he’s comfortable touching women or being touched by them on set. In fact, during the first kissing scene, Ashton thinks to himself, “They’d consented to this, and there was power in that.”

This undercurrent of consent and agency carries over beyond the romance and into Jasmine and Ashton’s everyday lives. Paparazzi constantly hound them and invade their privacy without their consent, making it that much harder for them to be together; the very industry they’re trying to break into is the one breaking them down. This feeds into Jasmine’s fear of being publicly defined by the men in her life — and Ashton’s fear of putting his family in danger. His fears, while reasonable, affect his ability to get close to her; when he finally realizes his mistakes, he doesn’t quite make amends in a way that will fully satisfy readers, but Jasmine more than balances them out. She is a Leading Lady, after all.

Her self-proclaimed moniker reinforces Hola‘s themes of diversity, consent, and agency because it reimagines who a Leading Lady can be, and in turn, rebels against our cultural restrictions. Jasmine fights for herself but she also has the space to take risks and push the boundaries of her identity.

It’s through Daria’s deep and nuanced exploration of these ideas that You Had Me at Hola says hello to new risks. It’s a sensual choreography of romance, feminism, and identity that harmonizes the characters’ relationships on and offscreen — while making all the jefa moves.

Kamrun Nesa is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, Bustle, PopSugar, and HelloGiggles.

In ‘Intimations,’ Zadie Smith Reflects Back To Us The Early Days Of Now

Arts,

by Ericka Taylor

If narrative and storytelling are among our most essential tools for making meaning of the world — and I believe they are — then periods of upheaval can be especially fertile for writers.

Zadie Smith makes that much clear in the foreword to her newest essay collection, Intimations, noting: “There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytical, political, as well as comprehensive accounts.” Intimations isn’t one of those books. Drafted soon after “the global humbling began” and completed in the days after George Floyd’s murder, the book is “above all personal essays” that capture the author’s reflections during a time outside of time.

Smith burst onto the literary scene 20 years ago with her stunning debut novel, White Teeth. Since then her prodigious output has included four additional novels, a novella, and a short story collection. Intimations is the third and slimmest of her essay collections, at 100 pages, but its psychic heft is substantial.

In six essays that feel as intimate as a long walk with an old friend, Smith takes on some of the most pressing issues of our time, including police brutality and economic injustice. The book is grounded in inquiry far more often than in certainty, however, and the collection is one that probes, exploring everything from the relationship between privilege and suffering to the nature of isolation and what it means to be confined with the people we love.

The opening essay, “Peonies,” questions the concept of writing as a “creative” endeavor. “Planting tulips,” she notes, “is creative. Writing is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department.” Of course, part of the nature of crises is that they tend to undermine our sense of control, leaving us all to wrestle with, and perhaps ultimately accept, “the complex and ambivalent nature of ‘submission’.”

Even though Smith has long split her time between New York and London and has taught in the U.S. for over a decade, she retains an outsider’s capacity to observe the country from a afar. This perspective is perhaps most evident in “The American Exception.” In it, Smith quotes the president’s yearning for the good old days when “we [Americans] didn’t have death.” She doesn’t mark that statement as an obvious falsehood, however, drawing a distinction between the dead and death. “We had dead people,” she notes, “We had casualties and we had victims. But, in America, all of these involved some culpability on the part of the dead.” Not so with “the kind of death that comes to us all, irrespective of position.”

Smith’s initial assumptions about “the democratic nature of plague” are ultimately, she decides, inaccurate. She concludes the essay recognizing that the pandemic would not, in fact, be the great equalizer, coming to rich and poor alike. In the end, “American hierarchies, hundreds of years in the making, are not so easily overturned. Black and Latino people are now dying at twice the rate of white and Asian people. More poor people are dying than rich. The virus map of the New York boroughs turn redder along precisely the same lines as it would if the relative shade of crimson counted not infection and death but income brackets and middle-school ratings.”

In “Something to Do,” Smith takes on time in the age of the coronavirus, when “there are essential workers — who do not need to seek out something to do; whose task is vital and unrelenting — and the rest of us, all with a certain amount of time on our hands.” Never one for self-importance, she takes some comfort in a now broadly shared “manic desire to make or grow or do ‘something,'” while noting that “the people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art.”

If Intimations opens with an inquiry into the nature of the new plague upon us, it ends with a searing indictment of the plague that has haunted this land since colonization. (Technically the final entry is “Intimations,” a listing of those Smith owes debts to and has learned from.) Screengrabs is a series of seven scenes that ends with “Postscript: Contempt as a Virus.”

There is no gentle questioning here, but instead a direct assault on the centuries of injustice in this country. In it, Smith takes on contempt, “less flashy than hate,” but far more harmful because “in the eyes of contempt, you don’t even rise to the level of a hated object — that would involve a full recognition of your existence.” It was contempt then, not hate, at work in the murder of George Floyd. Smith writes, “You’d have to hate a man a lot to kneel on his neck until he dies in plain view of a crowd and a camera, knowing the consequences this would likely have upon your own life. But this was something darker — deadlier. It was the virus in its most lethal manifestation.”

Smith lists inequity upon inequity, noting how hard virus carriers work “even now, in the bluest states of America to ensure their children do not go to school with the children of these people whose lives supposedly matter.” She emphasizes the economic nature of this virus, accepting that fearing “the contagion of poverty is reasonable. To keep voting for policies that ensure the permanent existence of an underclass is what is meant by ‘structural racism.'”

Easily the most powerful segment of the collection, it is not an optimistic one. After all, this plague goes back centuries, when “patient zero of this particular virus stood on a slave ship four hundred years ago, looked down at the sweating, bleeding, moaning mass below deck and reverse-engineered an emotion — contempt — from a situation that he, the patient himself, had created.”

The success of the essay, just like the success of those that precede it in the collection, is in its clarity and honesty. Smith has taken a mirror and reflected us back to ourselves during the earliest moments of this crisis. It is up to us to change if we don’t like what we see.

Ericka Taylor is the popular education manager for Take on Wall Street and a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in Bloom, The Millions, and Willow Springs.

Take A Dangerous Ride Through ‘Blacktop Wasteland’

Arts,

by Gabino Iglesias

Blacktop Wasteland, by S.A. Cosby

The most surprising thing about S.A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland, which is marketed as a crime novel, is that crime is the least important element in the book. If it weren’t for the time it takes to write, edit, and sell a novel — and the months it takes to finally see it in print when dealing with a large press — you’d think Cosby plucked every crucial racial topic the past month’s headlines and used them to build a novel. But he did no such thing. Instead, this book is a cry about race that starts somewhere in Appalachia and echoes across the country. There are guns here, sure, but the strongest hits come from melancholy and the constant ache for a better life.

Beauregard “Bug” Montage is a loving father, faithful husband, and honest mechanic, but he has a criminal past and those in the underworld know him as one of the best drivers in the business. He’s been leading a straight life, but everything is crumbling around him. The stack of bills and final notices is huge. His daughter needs money for college. His mother is about to be kicked out of her retirement home. Bug tries to work his way through it, but the shiny new car shop in town has cut his clients in half. That’s why he can’t say no when a former associate offers him a job robbing a jewelry store. Eighty grand for a day’s work. But nothing is ever as easy as it seems, and someone might know who did it, and it’s not the cops.

Cosby understands the psychology of crime, the way that money can turn someone into a criminal. He knows that good people often do bad things for all the right reasons. Bug is a multilayered character who’s haunted by the ghost of his father, who was also a criminal and a driver, and the mix of guilt and pleasure he feels when flying away from the scene of a crime in a souped-up car. Despite that pleasure, he’s done time, so he knows what’s at stake, and the only reason he gets back into the life is because financial pressures push him to it. Crime means keeping his business running, his children fed, his mother safe, and giving his daughter a chance to be better than him by going to college. Prison is scary, but the temptation of giving your children a chance at upward social mobility silences that fear:

He would tell himself later that he had slept on it. That he had mulled over the pros and cons and finally decided the benefits outweighed the risks. All that was true. However, in his heart he knew that when Ariel told him about skipping college, that was the moment he decided to take the job with Ronnie Sessions and hit the jewelry story.

Racial tension is at the core of Blacktop Wasteland. Cosby, a Black man from southeastern Virginia, knows racism well. He understands what it means to be Black in places where things like the use of the Confederate flag (which comes up in the novel) are still being debated today. This knowledge, and the heartfelt way in which Cosby writes about being the other now as well as historically, make Blacktop Wasteland the kind of book that should be part of every conversation about why we need diverse books. When Bug remembers a conversation about race with his father, more than a flashback, what we get is the author talking to us, letting the world know where he stands:

Listen, when you’re black in America you live with the weight of people’s low expectations on your back every day. They can crush you right down to the goddamn ground. Think about it like it’s a race. Everybody else has a head start and you dragging those low expectations behind you. Choices give you freedom from those expectations. Allows you to cut ’em loose. Because that’s what freedom is. Being able to let things go. And nothing is more important than freedom.

This is a gritty, violent story, which makes it a good crime tale, but what matters most here, what pushes Blacktop Wasteland into the realm of important novels, is the way it uses a fictional story to deliver truths and discuss history. This is about stealing diamonds and driving away, but it’s also about family, risking everything for others, and trying to be the father you wish your father had been. Publishing sometimes gets the timing of a book right, and this is the perfect novel to read as we witness the Black Lives Matter movement bring forth important changes. Call shotgun, buckle up, and take a dangerous ride with Cosby, but keep the radio down because he has something to tell you.

Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

If You Got A ‘Do-Over,’ Would You Like Your New Life?

Arts, , , ,

By Alethea Kontis

Have you ever wanted to go back in time and fix your past? Even just one tiny little thing you regret? It’s certainly a tempting proposition. But how might that one tiny thing change everything else in the landscape of your life? In Jennifer Honeybourn’s The Do-Over, that’s exactly what Emelia O’Malley is about to find out. And fair warning: Make sure you’re paying attention on page one, because this story moves FAST!

The book opens at a party. Emelia has wrangled a rare invite to hang with the in-crowd — Ben Griffin, specifically — and she’s brought her two best friends and gaming buddies Marisol and Alastair along. There is alcohol and kissing. Ben invites Emelia to winter formal. Don’t blink, because before you know it, Alistair is pouring out his heart to Emelia and asking her to the winter formal as well.

And then we skip ahead to six months later.

Emelia barely sees her old friends anymore. She’s not having a great time with Ben, but worries that if she breaks up with him, she’ll be left with no friends at all. Emelia’s mom is learning Italian for their upcoming vacation, despite her dad losing his job and becoming severely depressed.

Emelia is drawn to a crystal in a palm reader’s tent at a night market in town, sort of like a year-round fair. The palm reader tells her to put the crystal under her pillow and think about the event in her past she wishes she could change. But if she makes that change, she has to understand that a lot of other butterfly effects will come with it. Willing to accept the consequences, she does exactly as directed.

And then Emelia wakes up in a different life.

Her room looks completely different, her hair is shorter, and her family is no longer going to Italy. The six months from that fateful night of the party has still passed, but it’s a different six months she doesn’t exactly remember. Amnesiac Emelia must piece the mystery of this new puzzling life together. At the same time she’s figuring out what happened, she needs to figure out what exactly it was that she changed.

Emelia’s dad is now happy and making pancakes. Emelia works at Castle Hardware alongside her friends Alastair and Violet (who wasn’t that close a friend before), and she’s remodeling the bathroom with her father. And she knows how to drive. Surprise! Also, her mom is away in Palm Springs — and her parents are selling the house because they’re getting divorced.

Worse, not only is Emelia not with Ben, she’s not with Alastair either. In this new reality, he’s with Marisol. Because, as it turns out, Emelia never went to that party or hooked up with Ben — so Alastair’s jealous reaction and heartbreaking admission never happened.

Of course, Emelia blames herself for everything. Which is not totally unjustified, as everything in this new timeline is directly a result of something she changed … or is it?

‘The Do-Over’ is a fantastic mash-up: ‘Pretty in Pink’ meets ‘Big’ meets ‘Sliding Doors’.

As she navigates this new life, Emelia frantically tries to hunt down the palm reader and find another crystal so she can undo the crazy magic that changed her world. And as her every attempt is thwarted, Emelia begins to realize how much of these new developments she’ll lose if she goes through with her plan. Because not everything in this new timeline is completely terrible. Life is not just black and white.

Emelia’s story is a lesson on how the most seemingly insignificant things you do can affect others. But it’s also asks a great philosophical question: Exactly how much of your life would you have to undo in order to properly do it over?

The Do-Over is a fantastic mash-up: Pretty in Pink meets Big meets Sliding Doors. It contains a myriad of great dramatic tropes, but not in the order you’d expect them to happen, and the breakneck pacing pulls you along too quickly to dwell on them much anyway. There are twists as events unfold, some expected, some not. The Do-Over will definitely keep you on your toes and keep you guessing as you barrel your way to the end. If you’re anything like me, you will not be able to put it down until you slide, breathless, into the last chapter.

Alethea Kontis is a voice actress and award-winning author of over 20 books for children and teens.