When I was writing my book Raising Hell, Living Well I would repeatedly state to anyone who would listen that this was not a how-to or self-help book. Nothing against self-help books. I’ve been a reader of them my entire life, having found everything from answers to inspiration to backbone within their pages. They line my shelves like memories of old selves and old lives that were shed because of them. Their bindings are something I look back upon with pleasure, pride and sometimes—pain. The writers who share their talents, wisdom, philosophies, and intellect to make the world a better place to inhabit are my icons, idols, and a handful of times, saviors.

I found my way into writing through how-to books, whether it be the tattered and worn Making a Living Without a Job by Barbara Winter (which I haven’t let go of since I bought it at the age of 18), Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, Susan Shapiro’s The Byline Bible, or the essential Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I found my way towards an ownable and personal stance on religion and spirituality thanks to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now and Sam Harris’ Waking Up. I found my way through my career with the help of Cal Newport’s Deep Work, Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. I found an escape from unhealthy or unhappy relationships thanks to The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman or the Art of Letting Go by Damon Zahariades. And I found myself in the books that brought me back to center like Jonathan Fields’ How to Live a Good Life, Brené Browns’ Daring Greatly, Paulo Coelho’s the Alchemist, or Quiet by Susan Cain. Whether it was love, guts, money, purpose, career, or kids I knew there was always someone smarter that I could turn to in the self-help or how-to section of my bookstore.

But if the whole thesis of my book is that by opening readers eyes to the culture of influence, they can hope to escape it, having it be a practical how-to felt contrary to its core. My subtitle literally says: Freedom from Influence in a World Where Everyone Wants Something from You (including me). If I wanted my readers to think, discover, and explore on their own so they could fully embrace their autonomy and freedom, I didn’t want to tell them how to do anything, especially how to live.

Instead, I set out to make a book that was a how-come, opening their eyes to the programming of cultural, economic, geographical, historical, biological, educational, psychological, political and sociological influence to which we are all subject. Because in a world that had become much more unwell, unhappy, and unhinged despite all the how-to books, I saw a glaring hole in the market for understanding why we are the way we are. Maybe I could show that it wasn’t us that was the problem but rather something below the surface, below the mountains of influence throughout all of time and space culminating in this very moment. A root cause. My hypothesis was that all the productivity hacking, wellness seeking, and minimalism detoxes in the world cannot fix what’s ailing us if in fact, it is not us who are actually sick.

At different points in my life, I’ve sought out further understanding on topics that range from politics to persuasion to motherhood and culture. I have gone deep down the research rabbit hole to understand things like “what the Internet is doing to our brains?” or “why women make less money than men?” or “what’s the makeup of resilient people?” or “why do some people have all the luck?”. I like to ask big picture questions but also, I like to question why those answers are what they are. Along the way to writing Raising Hell, Living Well there were key books that answered some of these questions, creating the foundation of how I now think and view the world. While some might be shelved as how-to’s, they ultimately helped me understand how-come.

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Freakonomics by Steven Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

I can’t begin this list without starting with the very first book that opened my eyes in understanding that there is so much more hidden below the surface than we ever were taught in school or around our kitchen table. Or as the authors of Freakonomics say, that there is a “Hidden Side of Everything”. My first introduction to behavioral economics thanks to Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner lit a new curiosity for the world in me, through the lens of their quirky analyses of why things are the way they are. This book implanted a “question everything” mentality in me in my formative years.

The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene

If it’s not the luck of height, right birth month, family, or zipcode that propels some forward and not others, it’s the ability to understand human nature and instincts. As Robert Greene, the author of The Laws of Human Nature says, knowing why people do what they do is the most important tool we can possess. Understanding how-come someone might seek money, status, power, or fame allows you insights on their motivations and you can adapt yourself accordingly. This book beautifully draws on ancient stories and philosophies that are brought to life through the modern lens. My perceptions of others as well as myself changed drastically after reading this book.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

And if you’re not able to understand why someone is the way they are, the book Predictably Irrational shows us what happens below the surface. Author Dan Ariely picks apart how-come we are not to trust our assumptions, because even experts can be irrational. He reveals our cognitive biases and the tricks at play but delivers his experiments and research in a light-hearted manner, making our past mistakes more palatable. Most importantly, he shows us how-come we repeat mistakes time and time again, arguing that the irrationality is so patterned that it’s predictable. By knowing these patterns, it’s possible to stop falling into the traps our brain makes.

Untamed by Glennon Doyle

Speaking of mistakes I’d be remiss to not mention a book by Glennon Doyle that I still can’t shake out of my brain. Her book Untamed shines a spotlight on the repeated mistakes that are so commonplace we accept them as fact. I was already a feminist, but this book showed me how-come I was the way I was despite all my best attempts to not be boxed in. I was a product of the culture that surrounded me, and the cages it produced for me as a woman. I spent much of my twenties and thirties operating as a man would in a system built by men that prioritized men. I was so under the influence of this culture that I didn’t even know I was reinforcing the cage I was attempting to escape.

The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

No book helped me appreciate that we are a product of the influences of our generation’s zeitgeist more than Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties. How-come I was so obsessed with digital culture and nostalgia in my later life was because my formative years happened at the nexus of pre-internet/post-internet. The nineties were when I consumed my core intakes of the world around me and boy did it influence who I would become! Looking back on that time period and my place within it, allowed me to see myself with new eyes.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

My fascination with the current era only grew as I consumed books about the digital revolution, the digital divide, the algorithms, technology innovation and regulation, social media and loneliness, connection and neurology. But it wasn’t until I read Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror that someone was zooming out on the entirety of the modern world to pick at scabs below the surface of our self-delusions that affected everything from how we see ourselves to how we see others. Jia’s work wasn’t just a reportage on all that ails us, and it wasn’t the first how-come that tied together personal narratives with philosophy and criticism of the modern world. But it was the first one I had read from a woman who came from almost the same generation as me, and it gave me a different perspective from those written by older PhDs, from the male dominated world of theory, criticism, and technology.

Monsters by Claire Dederer

When I picked up Claire Dederer’s Monsters on a whim (I loved the cover) I had to buy it. But it was the first page that had me immediately tucking myself away like ten-year-old Bastian in the Never-Ending Story. Just me, my book, an apple and a blanket while I journeyed through a world I had never known before. The writer’s entire book was a question: can we separate the art from the human? In fact, the book continued to pose many questions. Is using the word “we” a cop out in criticism? Why are specific individuals considered geniuses? Who crowned them so? And why? Or how-come? As with Trick Mirror, reading a female perspective in a genre often dominated by men shifted everything. Dederer resisted tying up her book with authoritative statements, telling us if we should or should not ban Picasso for his actions or if we can still dance to R. Kelly. Her book didn’t tell us how-to think about it. She lead the reader through her exploration on how-come we think, believe, and act certain ways based on culture and allowed them to decide for themselves.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

When I began putting this list together I started with my own mind, moved through others’ minds, and zoomed out into social structures, accepted norms, technological systems and culture. But no book zooms out like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. This is the final book in my list because his work is the ultimate how-come book. Tackling everything from our revolutions (industrial, cognitive, scientific, agricultural, etc.) through to huge events like the invention of language, his book threads needles to tie momentous moments in history to issues like happiness, poverty, and sexuality. It’s hard to understand how-come if we don’t fully see the whole.

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Jessica Elefante’s Raising Hell, Living Well: Freedom from Influence in a World Where Everyone Wants Something from You (including me) is available from Ballantine Books.

A meta-narrator has an authorial awareness of a story being told. They make their presence known, intervening when they deem necessary. In the case that they are also the protagonist (which is often) then they must be as adept as immersing themselves in the real-time story unfolding up close as they are in commenting on it from on high.

I have a fascination with these sorts of narrators for as long as I have had stories told to me (which is always). When it came time to approach the task of writing my own novel, Pay As You Go, I knew that I wanted such a narrator at its helm. Slide is as much a participant in the novel’s unpredictable events as he is an intrepid reteller, and is the best companion I could have asked for along the many pages.

To discover him, I first had to do some reflection myself on just how such meta-narrators work, or the differences in their positioning. Here are the results of those reflections.

Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco

Can storytelling save us? As far as our souls are concerned, sure. But what of actual, existential survival—as a defense against death or erasure? One of our great examples is that of Scheherazade, spinning tales for one thousand and one nights just to stave off a sultan’s cruel judgment. More recently, there’s Chamoiseau’s Texaco, a masterpiece of Caribbean literature.

The novel opens with a modernizing urban planner who is struck by a stone the moment he arrives at the eponymous Martinican slum. Residents are rightly suspicious that he has been sent by some government council to consider the eradication of their shanties.

Unconscious, he is taken unconscious to Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the community’s wisest resident and, of course, our meta-narrator, who recognizes the urgency of relaying the town’s (and townspeople’s) saga, so that the urban planner can see its underlying worth beyond the appearance of some stitched together shacks. What follows is multi-generational saga spanning from the last days of slavery, through decolonization, to the rise of the post-colonial city and the founding of the shantytown Texaco itself.

To make matters more meta, there’s also a stand-in for the author nicknamed Oiseau de Cham, who’s tasked himself with compiling this history through interviews with a now-older Marie-Sophie. Further, the novel is interspersed with excerpts from the urban planner’s notebooks, letters from Oiseau de Cham to Marie-Sophie, pages from Marie-Sophie’s diary and so on. In less deft hands, the whole thing would be unwieldy. Luckily, Chamoiseau and his team of narrators are nothing short of masters.

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (trans. Ann Goldstein)

The first book of Ferrante’s four-volume saga begins with the protagonist receiving a phone call. She is old, tried, and soon also annoyed by the content of the call, which is from the son of her erstwhile best friend, and has to do with that friend’s final disappearance. She hangs up, abruptly but reenergized, for the time has finally come to put into words what she has spent her entire life—spanning an impoverished childhood in Naples to bourgeois comforts in Rome—trying to say. “We’ll see who wins this time, I said to myself. I turned on the computer and began to write.”

Thus our story is framed as the final battle after a long contest of wills. Proceeding in mostly chronological fashion from age eight onwards, Ferrante’s novel nonetheless keeps us keenly aware of the older, wiser hand at the helm of proceedings, whose impetus for record-keeping (or setting) permeates the novel. Along the way we become so richly immersed in the characters’ girlhood happenings that we forget the meta-narrator at work, until she interjects to clarify that she may not be remembering something perfectly, or to confess she has skipped over details.

It’s an enjoyable pantomime of weakness that is one of the meta-narrator’s primary indulgences. Nothing would be lost in omitting these interruptions and keeping the story moving along: What difference does a “mis-remembering” make in a fictional story? These self-deprecating interjections on the part of the narrator, like those of an exquisite host apologizing to dinner guests that the soufflé will be a few more minutes, in fact serve mostly to remind us exactly who is running the show—lest we end up forgetting amongst so many delights.

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

Saleem Sinai has a problem: he’s falling apart. Not, as he clarifies, metaphorically, but by literal disintegration. In his role as narrator, his time left to tell his tale is dwindling, and the urgency of said telling becomes all the greater for it. It is why Midnight’s Children opens with a conflicted sense of both urgency and reticence, of a narrator who fears he may not get through all that he has to talk about.

Sinai is also another active chronicler, often stepping back from the world of the story to show himself at work at his typewriter under the care of companion and audience stand-in Padma. From here he is free to pontificate, summarize, foreshadow, or bemoan the extent of the labor still left before him. It’s all performance, and begs the question of why he should take the time for detours if there is so much to tell?

But Rushdie couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate guide through the hyperbolic world of newly independent India. In a book that takes on no less a subject than History as its central concern, part of the point of the story is to see it being made.

Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Hamid set out to write a story with the rhythm of a conversation, that could be read in a single sitting as if having an extended chat. So said so done: in this his first novel we assume the role of interlocutor, addressed directly by a loquacious narrator who tells us his life story. We see him pass from a fresh-faced immigrant to the US, full of bright prospects, to a disillusioned outsider in the aftermath of 9/11 anti-Arab sentiment.

For all the heavy baggage, our narrator seems unflappably upbeat whenever we return to the present moment with him. It is not without intent, and in the novel’s culminating moments Hamid uses his set up to push the story one step further. It seems we were not so innocent in our role as conversation partner after all.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (trans. Gregory Rabassa)

The true mysteries are those without an answer. Others are mere ploys to lure an audience further along. The question of whodunit, once satisfied, does not encourage us to return again and again to a text, for the author’s primary technique of enticing us though the pages by withholding vital information can be deployed only once before depleting in value. Conversely, questions of whydunit are concerned not with some concealed detail of plot, but rather the unfathomable nature of human desires and intentions, the ones that cause us to love, to cheat, to save and to destroy, which remain infinitely compelling through their essential inscrutability. 

As the title suggests, we learn who is to die and by whose hands in the opening sentences, and by the end of the first chapter the deed is done. This is how our meta-narrator frees himself of the mundane concerns of victim and culprit to head onto the mystery that has been haunting him and the townspeople for all the years since: How did everyone let something so avoidable like this happen? There is no satisfactory answer, and the story makes use of its narrator’s reporter-like gaze to revisit the moment, its buildup and aftermath from every possible angle.

What emerges is a tapestry of jilted love, machismo gone awry, a community’s complicity, and the clockwork indifference of fate. Here the storytelling is as self-aware as it is beautiful, and our meta-narrator a necessary cipher through which we are allowed to continually revisit these questions without answers.

Ian McEwan, Atonement

A meta-narrator should never be a mere stylistic quirk; their use should be integral to the story being told. Ian McEwan’s Atonement is a case in point, a novel that would be bereft of its emotional import without its choice in narratorial approach. Reader, here be spoilers.

The book proceeds in seemingly third-person fashion, up to and beyond the story’s major inciting incident: that of a young girl, Briony, mistakenly accusing their estate’s groundsman, Robbie, of sexually assaulting her older sister Cecilia. The consequences are ruinous. We follow the fallout over years of war, estrangement, and heartache, until at the end Cecilia and Robbie finally reunite and see what is left of their unrequited love.

Except this never happens. In actuality, the young Robbie perished in the war, his name still wrongfully sullied, without a chance at redemption. The account we have just read to the contrary has been one of earnest mythmaking on the part of our heretofore hidden narrator: an older Briony.

Haunted by the guilt of her girlhood lie and the damage it caused, she has spent the time since reliving that moment, and rewriting its consequences. It is the fabricated story itself that is the atonement, her attempt to repair through fiction what was rendered irreparable in “real” life.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (trans. Michael Henry Heim)

“It would be senseless,” declares this narrator, “for the author to convince the reader that his characters once actually lived.” Indeed, our narrator here is so meta in relation to the book’s characters—so “above,” to take the words Greek root literally—that we have the sense that he  watches proceedings unfold from some divine height. It’s for the best, especially since Kundera is less concerned here with the minutiae of daily experience that is the purview of realism, than he is with the lessons of the sublime made accessible by so lofty a vantage.

We as readers become attuned to the novel’s strange rhythm where the action may be interrupted for an extended musing (in fact, the book opens with two chapters of philosophical reflections before a character is even introduced), or a revisiting of earlier moments in order to re-examine through a new lens. The ambitions of the narrator extend beyond the bounds of simple storytelling and into, as the quote above shows, that of authorship, thinning the divide from Kundera himself.

This peek behind the curtain is in some ways the real show. Kundera’s true power lies in the audacity of emphasizing the wind-up doll nature of his characters, and imbuing them with such a sense of pathos and humanity that we care all the same.

Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events

Reader beware! If you have any other means by which to spend your time, then you should certainly do so instead of reading these books! They are simply too horrible! The story they contain too disastrous, without happy endings!

In similar manner are we warned by our narrator to take every exit available to us instead of continuing to read these episodes. As with any good trick of reverse psychology, it instead has the opposite effect of intriguing us all the more. Snicket is himself a kind of alter ego of the author Daniel Hadler, and assumes his role of both “author” and storyteller with the dire, morbid air of an Edgar Allen Poe creation. He adopts a grandiose pantomime of regret and weariness, forever apologizing to the reader when yet another unpleasant episode must befall the Baudelaire orphans, no matter the ingenious solutions they come up with.

By creating Snicket, Hadler allows his role of author to be assumed by this meta-narrator, freeing himself to be a passenger in this rollicking ride alongside us. All responsibilities are left to Snicket alone, whose shadowy past is slowly revealed to us as the series continues.

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Pay As You Go by Eskor David Johnson is available via McSweeney’s.

The leaves are amassing, the skeletons are out, and enormous bags of candy fill the grocery store aisles and threaten to spill their chocolates right into your mouth, through absolutely no fault of your own. Yep, it’s officially spooky season. But if you still need some help getting into the holiday spirit (or just want to kill some zombies time at work this week), Literary Hub is here to help, with a few of our staff’s very favorite spooky short stories—all of which are available courtesy of that lurking transient evil you know as the internet. Consider it a literary version of a scary movie marathon. Our choices range from horror to science fiction to realism, from straight-up frightening to the kind of unsettling that just sticks around the rest of the day like the smell of smoke. Spookiness, after all, is in the eye of the beholder.

So without any further ado, here are 20 spooky stories that you can read online for free this week, or anytime. (For even more short story recommendations from the Literary Hub staff, check out our One Great Short Story series.) And of course, this list is not meant to be definitive, so please feel free to add your own favorites in the comments—when it comes to scaring ourselves silly, more is always more.

Ray Bradbury, “The Veldt” (Saturday Evening Post, 1950)

“George, I wish you’d look at the nursery.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, then.”

“I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it.”

“What would a psychologist want with a nursery?”

“You know very well what he’d want.” His wife paused in the middle of the kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.

“It’s just that the nursery is different now than it was.”

“All right, let’s have a look.”

Tananarive Due, “The Wishing Pool” (Uncanny Magazine, 2021)

Joy nearly got lost on the root-knotted red dirt path off of Highway 99, losing sight of the gaps between the live oaks and Spanish moss that fanned across her hood and windows like fingertips. Driving back to her family’s cabin twenty years later reminded her that the woods had rarely been restful for her. Once, Dad had made her play outside instead of sitting on the couch with her Virginia Hamilton books, and she’d stepped in an anthill up to her shin. She howled so loudly from the vicious stinging that Dad and Mom heard her all the way from the lake, and when they reached her they expected to find her half dead. She’d never forgotten that wild, frightened look in their eyes. No, Joy did not like the woods.

Samanta Schweblin, tr. Megan McDowell, “Headlights” (2019)

When she reaches the road, Felicity understands her fate. He has not waited for her, and, as if the past were a tangible thing, she thinks she can still see the weak reddish glow of the car’s taillights fading on the horizon. In the flat darkness of the countryside, there is only disappointment, a wedding dress, and a bathroom she shouldn’t have taken so long in.

Joyce Carol Oates, “Zombie,” (The New Yorker, 1994)

My name is Q.P., and I am twenty-nine years old, three months.

I see my probation officer, Mr. T., Thursdays, 10 a.m., and my therapist, Dr. E., Mondays and Thursdays, 4:30 p.m.; my group-therapy session with Dr. B. is Tuesdays, 7-8:30 p.m.

I am a registered student at Dale County Business College, where I am enrolled in two three-credit courses for the spring semester: Introduction to Accounting and Computer Graphics.

My residence is 118 Church Street, Mount Vernon, Michigan. Which is close by the State University campus. Seven miles from Dale but no inconvenience for me, I have my van.

Mariana Enríquez, tr. Megan McDowell, “Julie,” Astra (2022)

She came from the United States straight to my house in Buenos Aires—they didn’t want her in some hotel while they looked for an apartment to rent. My gringa cousin, Julie: she’d been born in Argentina, but when she was two, her parents—my aunt and uncle—had migrated to the States. They settled in Vermont: my uncle worked at Boeing, and my aunt—my dad’s sister—birthed children, decorated the house, and secretly held spiritist meetings in her beautiful, spacious living room. Rich blond Latinos of German heritage: their neighbors didn’t really know how to place them, since they came from South America but their last name was Meyer. Even so, their firstborn’s features betrayed the infiltrated strain of Native blood that came from my Indigenous grandmother: Julie had the dark dead eyes of a rat, untamable hair always standing on end, skin the color of wet sand. I’m pretty sure my aunt even started telling people she was adopted. My dad got so mad when he heard that rumor that he stopped writing and calling his sister for at least a year. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown” (1835)

Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset, into the street of Salem village, but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as the wife was aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the street, letting the wind play with the pink ribbons of her cap, while she called to Goodman Brown.

Nalo Hopkinson, “Left Foot, Right” (2014)

“Allyou have this in a size nine?” Jenna puts the shiny red patent shoe down on the counter. Well, it used to be shiny. She’s been wearing it everywhere, and now it’s dulled by dust. It’s the left side of a high-heeled pump, pointy-toed, with large shiny fake rhinestones decorating the toe box. Each stone is a different size and colour, in a different cheap plastic setting. The red veneer has stripped off the heel of the shoe. It curls up off the white plastic heel base in strips. Jenna’s heart clenches. It’s exactly the kind of tacky, blinged-out accessory that Zuleika loves—loved—to wear.

Robert Coover, “The Babysitter” (2014)

She arrives at 7:40, ten minutes late, but the children, Jimmy and Bitsy, are still eating supper, and their parents are not ready to go yet. From other rooms come the sounds of a baby screaming, water running, a television musical (no words: probably a dance number—patterns of gliding figures come to mind). Mrs Tucker sweeps into the kitchen, fussing with her hair, and snatches a baby bottle full of milk out of a pan of warm water, rushes out again. ‘Harry!’ she calls. ‘The babysitter’s here already!’

Kelly Link, “The Specialist’s Hat” (Event Horizon, 1998)

“When you’re Dead,” Samantha says, “you don’t have to brush your teeth.”

“When you’re Dead,” Claire says, “you live in a box, and it’s always dark, but you’re not ever afraid.”

Claire and Samantha are identical twins. Their combined age is twenty years, four months, and six days. Claire is better at being Dead than Samantha.

Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild” (1995)

My last night of childhood began with a visit home. T’Gatoi’s sister had given us two sterile eggs. T’Gatoi gave one to my mother, brother, and sisters. She insisted that I eat the other one alone. It didn’t matter. There was still enough to leave everyone feeling good. Almost everyone. My mother wouldn’t take any. She sat, watching everyone drifting and dreaming without her. Most of the time she watched me.

Brian Evenson, “Windeye” (2009)

They lived, when he was growing up, in a simple house, an old bungalow with a converted attic and sides covered in cedar shake. In the back, where an oak thrust its branches over the roof, the shake was light brown, almost honey. In the front, where the sun struck it full, it had weathered to a pale gray, like a dirty bone. There, the shingles were brittle, thinned by sun and rain, and if you were careful you could slip your fingers up behind some of them. Or at least his sister could. He was older and his fingers were thicker, so he could not.

Carmen Maria Machado, “The Husband Stitch” (Granta, 2014)

In the beginning, I know I want him before he does. This isn’t how things are done, but this is how I am going to do them. I am at a neighbour’s party with my parents, and I am seventeen. Though my father didn’t notice, I drank half a glass of white wine in the kitchen a few minutes ago, with the neighbour’s teenage daughter. Everything is soft, like a fresh oil painting.

Laird Barron, “Shiva, Open Your Eye” (Nightmare Magazine, 2013)

The human condition can be summed up in a drop of blood. Show me a teaspoon of blood and I will reveal to thee the ineffable nature of the cosmos, naked and squirming. Squirming. Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it.

Shirley Jackson, “The Daemon Lover” (1949)

She had not slept well; from one-thirty, when Jamie left and she went lingeringly to bed, until seven, when she at last allowed herself to get up and make coffee, she had slept fitfully, stirring awake to open her eyes and look into the half-darkness, remembering over and over, slipping again into a feverish dream. She spent almost an hour over her coffee—they were to have a real breakfast on the way—and then, unless she wanted to dress early, had nothing to do. She washed her coffee cup and made the bed, looking carefully over the clothes she planned to wear, worried unnecessarily, at the window, over whether it would be a fine day. She sat down to read, thought that she might write a letter to her sister instead, and began, in her finest handwriting, “Dearest Anne, by the time you get this I will be married. Doesn’t it sound funny? I can hardly believe it myself, but when I tell you how it happened, you’ll see it’s even stranger than that…”

Harlan Ellison, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” (IF: Worlds of Science Fiction, 1967)

Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported—hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw. There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor.

Richard Matheson, “Button, Button” (Playboy, 1970)

The package was lying by the front door—a cube-shaped carton sealed with tape, their name and address printed by hand: “Mr. and Mrs. Aurthur Lewis, 21 7 E. Thirty-seventh Street, New York, New York 10016.” Norma picked it up, unlocked the door, and went into the apartment. It was just getting dark.

John Langan,”Renfrew’s Course” (Lightspeed, 2012)

“So this is the wizard,” Neil said.

“Supposedly,” Jim said.

Six feet tall, the statue had been carved from wood that retained most of its whiteness, even though the date cut into its base read 2005, seven years ago. Jim thought the color might be due to its not having been finished—splinters stood out from the wood’s uneven surface—but didn’t know enough about carpentry to be certain.

“Looks kind of Gandalf,” Neil said.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, “Lacrimosa” (Nightmare Magazine, 2015)

The woman is a mound of dirt and rags pushing a squeaky shopping cart; a lump that moves steadily, slowly forward, as if dragged by an invisible tide. Her long, greasy hair hides her face but Ramon feels her staring at him.

He looks ahead. The best thing to do with the homeless mob littering Vancouver is to ignore it. Give them a buck and the beggars cling to you like barnacles.

“Have you seen my children?” the woman asks.

Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber” (1979)

I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.

Karen Russell, “The Prospectors” (The New Yorker, 2015)

The entire ride would take eleven minutes. That was what the boy had promised us, the boy who never showed.

Teju Cole’s Tremor, Sly Stone’s Thank You, and Marie NDiaye’s Vengeance is Mine all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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Fiction

1. Tremor by Teju Cole
(Random House)

11 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Pan

“As a form for capturing the meaning and matter of our lives, novels still feel wholly up to the task. And anyone who doubts how effectively this elderly literary genre might survive and evolve to reflect an impossibly complicated world would do well to read Teju Cole’s involute new book, Tremor … t does not disappoint. Cole continues to demonstrate just how elastic a novel can be and how trenchant he is. His book crosses national boundaries just as confidently as it crosses literary ones. The eclectic structure may be challenging, but, given the continuity of Cole’s vision, it’s never baffling … Has little traditional plot but never lacks for interest or incident … To read some of these chapters is to see the essay form in its most elegiac, elastic and epiphanic mode.”

–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)

2. The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
(Bloomsbury)

6 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The House of Doors here

“Outstanding … Eng ingeniously inserts a further shocking twist. But what most gives his novel its grip is his masterly conjuring up of Maugham’s imaginative world and the steamy tropic latitudes in which it burgeoned … Occasionally the prose becomes overclamorous … Beautifully detailed and encompassing the vagaries of Maugham’s life, the contours of his creativity and the personal and political tensions covertly quivering through the sultry colony around him, The House of Doors is a finely accomplished piece of work.”

–Peter Kemp (The Sunday Times)

3. Vengeance is Mine by Marie NDiaye
(Knopf)

3 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an essay by Jordan Stump on translating Marie NDiaye here

“The characters in Marie NDiaye’s novels are an unsettling brood … A master at agitating, probing and upending expectations … She presents a new litter of misfits and constructs one of her most beguiling and visceral tales … NDiaye deals in impressions and captures a particular kind of emotional delirium in Vengeance. She leans into jaggedness, twisting her narrative to mimic Maître Susane’s fraying psychological state as she searches for a kind of truth.”

–Lovia Gyarkye (The New York Times Book Review)

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Nonfiction

1. The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie
(Knopf)

7 Rave • 1 Positive

“Ogilvie has provided a sprightly, elegant tribute to the ordinary readers…who made up the bulk of the O.E.D.’s work force, largely unpaid and unsung, filling in millions of slips in their spare time … An engrossing survey … The real joy of The Dictionary People is to be reminded that any group of people pinned at its intersection will still burst forth every which way, a tapestry of contradictions, noble and ignoble, wild and banal.”

–Dennis Duncan (The New York Times Book Review)

2. Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir by Sly Stone
(Auwa)

 3 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Sly Stone has been MIA for so long, many people will probably be surprised to learn that he is still alive. Actually, at age 80, the incredible and unpredictable funk music pioneer has, once again, surprised us all by producing a frisky, remarkably vivid and cogent account of his life and career.”

–Joel Selvin (The San Francisco Chronicle)

3. The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid
(Knopf)

4 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Lumumba Plot here

“Reid…has arrived with a carefully researched book that warns us about what is lost when tensions between great powers play out in the developing world … Reid develops his main characters beautifully, especially Lumumba, who passes ‘like a meteor’—to borrow the lovely phrase of his daughter Juliana—through its pages … Lumumba is re-elevated by the end of Reid’s book, mainly through the sea of indignities he suffered as a captive … argues convincingly that by ordering the assassination of Lumumba, the Eisenhower administration crossed a moral line that set a new low in the Cold War.”

–Nicolas Niarchos (The New York Times Book Review)

While I don’t have this technology in my home, so often I visit friends and hear “Hey, Alexa,” followed by some relatively basic command to play a song or album. The AI associated with the Amazon Echo allows it to listen for this cue (to which it responds in the often-feminine voice) and deliver data people request. Poet and performer Catherine Chen once transcribed data for the Echo and thus has had a good amount of time to meditate on technology, its trajectory. In an interview from a few years ago, Chen explains, “Every poem is a negotiation of self, the lyric I. In my understanding, the lyric I feels very far away from who I actually am and the poem is the lyric attempt to process this distance. Do I approach this self? Do I leave it alone? Do we awkwardly ignore each other? A poem offers a model for reconciling distance and tension in ways that I see as generative.”

Chen’s recently published debut collection Beautiful Machine Woman Language was published by Noemi Press, for which I am a Poetry Editor (I didn’t work on this manuscript). At one point in Beautiful Machine Woman Language, Chen writes, “Every technology reflects the desires of its creator.” We’ve seen this in films such as Her (though, arguably, not as insightfully), Ex Machina (pointedly). Often the creator’s desire is connected to feminine characteristics. This can hardly be a surprise considering the position women often hold and have held in the majority of the world—caretaker, doer of nettling tasks. The poems chronicle an unnamed data worker (“I was responsible for helping organize the oral archives of voice recognition technology”) falling in love with the femme AI people talk to—these are the utterances they are meant to catalog. As Chen writes of the AI, “Sometimes her worth is condensed to the size of ‘You are dumb.’ ‘You’re welcome slut.’” Even if it is “just a robot,” why treat it with cruelty? Where and when else have we had that impulse as creatures? Has it ever been a good one? Douglas Kearney says of the debut poetry collection, “Beautiful Machine Woman Language is the crash site of individual and empire, the smoke still twisting before the poet’s eyes; fire deep in their throat.”

Regarding their to-read pile, Chen tells us, “Mythic landscapes lying horizontal: what system is buried here.”

The Classic of Mountain and Seas / Shanhai jing
If you love a literary squabble, how about a book that’s been around for 2400 years, give or take, and people are still arguing over who wrote it? Sima Qian, the “father of Chinese historiography” from the 2^nd and 1^st centuries bce, started the debate—and it’s never stopped. It’s a text that, because of its age alone, has had many different hands in its existence over time. The illustration of a phoenix was colored in during the Qing Dynasty (between the 17^th to early 20^th centuries). Overall, The Classic of Mountain and Seas / Shanhai jing attends to a wide variety of concerns, largely the geographical, natural, medicinal, religious, and mythical. The landscape of mountains and water are given equal attention as Nüwa and Nine-Tailed Fox.

Ronaldo V. Wilson, Virgil Kills: Stories
Roberto Tejada says of Wilson’s collection of stories, “A novel, a dream book, a study in self-formation, a concert of surface, sex, and underswell…. Ronaldo Wilson’s ingenious Virgil Kills guides us, in the style of collage and choreography, through a netherworld where the “the act of the body in the turns of its written emissions” can connect memory to the real and the fictive. Wilson’s portrait of Virgil—mixed-media invention; composite persona—is in equal parts riotous and intimate. In scenes of sexual acts, social kinship, family attachments, and racial marking; in narratives of loss, defiance, escape, and exile, Wilson refutes ‘sorrow as the route to freedom,’ defining what it means instead to render ‘temperature and thought’—that is, to amaze, abrogate, and amplify the attributes of embodied life.”

Sarah Aldridge, Tottie: A Tale of the Sixties
Sarah Aldridge is the pen name for Anyda Marchant. Her legal name was Anne Nelson Yarborough De Armond Marchant—she began to use its acronym for her name. Marchant’s life is a wild one, and I highly recommend diving into this article on her if you’re inclined. She was of first women in the US to pass the Bar Exam in 1933. Not only did she practice law and have a celebrated career for 40 years, she reached high positions of power including in the Law Library of Congress. She attained a particularly choice post when the man who held it was drafted during WWII. When he returned and resumed his job, rather than settle for a lower position, Marchant left the Law Library of Congress. She met her life partner Muriel Inez Crawford while practicing in 1947 at a time when the hint of homosexuality could destroy one’s life thanks to McCarthy. They remained closeted for 40 years, until Marchant publicly came out in 1990. In 1973, Marchant, Crawford (Marchant’s partner), Donna McBride, and Barbara Grier founded Naiad Press for lesbian literature. Naiad published Marchant’s novel The Latecomer under her pen name Sarah Aldridge—largely considered the first lesbian romance novel that ends happily (it was published in 1974). The jacket copy for Tottie reads like a description from Marchant’s life: “Connie Norton is 27, an associate in a good law firm, and scheduled to marry an arrogant young man who bores her without her quite realizing why. She meets Tottie, a young runaway from a wealthy family, who is apparently involved with violent student activists.”

David Wojnarowicz, Memories that Smell Like Gasoline
Wojnarowicz is largely known for his paintings and art practices, as well as his AIDS activism. He writes, “It is exhausting, living in a population where people don’t speak up if what they witness doesn’t directly threaten them.” His writing and art feel no less urgent today, decades later, considering the exponential legislation and threats against queer people in the United States. There was an event at the Whitney from 2018 to highlight Wojnarowicz’s work that you can access here. As the site states, “Organized in collaboration with Visual AIDS, this evening devoted to Wojnarowicz’s written work includes readings and performances by artists who were engaged with Wojnarowicz during his lifetime, or who have been inspired by his example. Taking its title from his final collection of stories Memories That Smell Like Gasoline (1992), this program highlights the passion and rage of Wojnarowicz’s singular voice.”

Charles Chace, Fleshing Out the Bones: Case Histories in the Practice of Chinese Medicine
Chace began studying acupuncture in the mid-1980s and continues to take seminars on classical Chinese language and thought to gain greater knowledge on pre-modern Chinese medical texts. I was able to locate an interview with Chace (aka Chip). Some of those questions and answers are particular to acupuncture specialists, but I appreciated Chace’s answer to the question “What do you do if your prescription doesn’t work?” Chace states, “If what you prescribe doesn’t work, or makes the patient worse, that should tell you something about the diagnosis. You have to ask yourself, ‘why didn’t that work?’ You should be able to retrieve some piece of information that points to a positive outcome. It’s inevitable that you will make diagnostic mistakes, and you should use those mistakes to your advantage in a systematic sort of way. What doesn’t work should be as informative as what does work.”

Robert Ford Campany, Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China
The jacket copy for this book states, “Between the Han dynasty, founded in 206 B.C.E., and the Sui, which ended in 618 C.E., Chinese authors wrote many thousands of short textual items, each of which narrated or described some phenomenon deemed ‘strange.’ Most items told of encounters between humans and various denizens of the spirit-world, or of the miraculous feats of masters of esoteric arts; some described the wonders of exotic lands, or transmitted fragments of ancient mythology. This genre of writing came to be known as zhiguai (‘accounts of anomalies’).” In an academic review of this book, Stephen F. Teiser writes, “Anomaly accounts (zhiguai) are tales written in literary Chinese that relate the appearance of category-busters such as pygmies and giants, fishes shaped like oxen, weeping icons, dragons, immortals, the dead returned to life, elusive jade maidens, and ferns that turn into worms. First recorded perhaps as early as the third century B.C.E., these narratives continued to be written until recent centuries.”

Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Fatima Bhutto on Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, Julian Lucas on Teju Cole’s Tremor, Hermione Hoby on Marie NDiaye’s Vengeance is Mine, David Roth on Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite, and Kristen Roupenian on Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s book review aggregator.

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“The two halves of Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s slim, searing novel are bound by both minor and major details: a brutal gang rape and murder, the punishing heat, the eerie presence of a dog in distress and two nameless characters. The first is a fastidious, quietly malevolent Israeli platoon commander who organises the gang rape and murder of a young Bedouin. The second is a woman in Ramallah who stumbles upon the story in a newspaper decades later and becomes haunted by one minor detail—the fact that the girl’s assault happened 25 years to the day before she was born … The Negev gang rape at the heart of Minor Detail is a true story, carried out by Israeli soldiers in 1949. Another minor detail: according to declassified documents, the real-life commander answered his superior’s question on whether the girl was eventually returned to her village by reporting that his soldiers killed her because ‘it was a shame to waste the petrol.’ The atmosphere is one of unbearable tension, measured by the increasing anxiety of the dog who stands as helpless sentry over the girl. He howls and cries, pants and trembles, barking endlessly. Shibli’s writing is calm and tightly controlled, lyrical in its descriptions of cruelty and uncertainty. The terror Shibli evokes intensifies slowly, smoldering, until it is shining off the page … The second section of the novel follows a Palestinian woman as she hunts down information about the crime decades later. What ought to be an ordinary search—visiting two museum archives—becomes a logistical nightmare for someone living under occupation … All novels are political and Minor Detail, like the best of them, transcends the author’s own identity and geography. Shibli’s writing is subtle and sharply observed. The settlers and soldiers she describes in the second half of the novel are rendered with no malice or artifice; she writes of an elderly settler’s veined hands with tenderness, and as an author is never judgmental or didactic. The book is, at varying points, terrifying and satirical; at every turn, dangerously and devastatingly good.”

–Fatima Bhutto on Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail (The Guardian)

“His great theme is the limits of vision, and the way that these limits, when imaginatively confronted, can serve as the basis for a kind of second sight … An elegant and unsettling prose still-life, which reflects on art’s relationship to theft and violence, to privacy and togetherness, and to the way we mark time … If Open City was a bellwether of the last decade’s autofictional turn, Tremor occasionally sounds like a defense of the now-beleaguered genre … At least half of the novel, which hews rather closely to its protagonist’s consciousness, consists of ideas about how to live, listen, think, and see well … It’s tempting to characterize the novel as what the critic Becca Rothfeld calls ‘sanctimony literature,’ a mode of fiction designed to showcase the author’s ethical awareness. But there’s more going on than virtue signalling. Tunde’s worries over various moral problems—art restitution, the portrayal of the dead, artificial intelligence—converge on a dilemma that bedevils both him and his creator: Is there a way to represent the world and not ‘cannibalize the lives of others’? … A work of autofiction with the ambition of a systems novel, aspiring to illustrate the world’s interconnectedness without recourse to the fictional conventions of plot and psychological portraiture. Instead, it moves like an essay, interweaving slices of life with musings on Malian guitar virtuosos, astronomical phenomena, films by Ingmar Bergman and Abbas Kiarostami. Cole’s mind is so agile that it’s easy to follow him anywhere … There is a method to the meandering. Cole uses the resonance between fragments to imply a dimly apprehended totality, like a seismologist integrating measurements from different sites to map an earthquake … Fiction takes the transparency of other minds so much for granted that it can obscure the rarity of true communion—which doesn’t always require explanation, or even the exchange of words. Tremor, with its vision of separateness and synchronicity, is obliquely about the pandemic, much in the way that Open City revolved around 9/11.”

–Julian Lucas on Teju Cole’s Tremor (The New Yorker)

“No one could legitimately call Marie NDiaye ‘overlooked’…Nonetheless, the magnificence of her writing, in all its shocks of perception, makes you feel that by rights her name should come with the same pantheonic glow that attends, say, Annie Ernaux or Elena Ferrante. What makes her a master? In part, it’s NDiaye’s deft interweaving of those narrative traits we associate with genre fiction, specifically crime thrillers—suspense, mystery, intrigue, a touch of the supernatural—with a high-modernist sensibility in thrall to the shifting, refractive nature of memory, unsettled selfhood, and intersubjectivity tout court. To attempt to summarize NDiaye’s approach—this blend of the heady high and supposed low—is to properly appreciate what an unruly mix it is, one that surely risks chaos, or, worse, pretension. What a feat, then, that the author invariably marshals these strains into lucid sophistication, not least in her newest book, the superbly controlled Vengeance Is Mine … The plot is accelerated by these enigmas, while the prose fruitfully resists this velocity, submerging you into time-stretched and sensation-heightened dimensions. A friend once played me a Justin Bieber song that had been slowed down by 800 percent. ‘U Smile,’ a trite little burst of sugary pop, was now transfigured into thirty-five minutes of shimmering, transcendent washes of sound that felt like an appropriate score for the cosmos. It remains one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard. NDiaye does something like this with words. No life, no matter how modest or compromised or confused, is banal; through her telling and her talents, stray, lone consciousnesses are magnified to the epic.”

–Hermione Hoby on Marie NDiaye’s Vengeance is Mine (4Columns)

“Between Going Infinite and Walter Isaacson’s enormous biography of the increasingly daffy and grim Elon Musk, it has been a rough time for the Heroes of Capitalism genre. The future prospects for that type of book are certainly still bright; Americans aren’t going to stop revering rich people just because they are ‘awful’ or ‘boring’ any time soon. But the ways in which Going Infinite falls short suggests a problem that goes beyond a national shortage of sufficiently compelling or just acceptably non-sociopathic rich guys. The fact that Isaacson’s ‘The Genius Biographies’ series has declined from Leonardo Da Vinci to Steve Jobs to Elon Musk suggests not only that the heroes are getting less heroic, but that these books’ usual signifier of genius—vast wealth—has completely decoupled from any personal merit … Much of the satisfaction of these stories comes from how deftly Lewis explains those bigger issues and the artful, affectionate way that he colors in those characters. Lewis protagonists are not always admirable, and their motivations are not necessarily pure, but because they are correct and bold and often outside of an Establishment that is more smug or more self-interested or just slower than them, they tend to make for effective heroes. Going Infinite fails to deliver on either half of that formula. It’s not clear in the book, as it has never really been clear anywhere else, what social or economic problem is being addressed by cryptocurrency. This is doubly true of the ad hoc lawlessness of FTX … while he seldom fails to note the abstruse grandiosity that allows generalities about benefiting humanity to justify various smaller-scale inhumanities in the moment, Lewis does not doubt that Bankman-Fried wants to make many billions of dollars so that he can then give it away, at some point TBD, for some socially useful end, as effective altruism prescribes. The comedy is in the contrast—the reminder that all these strange, selfish, toweringly disagreeable people doing these socially useless things in a liminally legal space are actually doing them all to save humanity … Bankman-Fried is a weird guy and does plenty of weird things, but he is also never quite as brilliant as this story or the usual Lewis template would require. He’s absolutely high-handed and cold and difficult to be around in the ways that geniuses are, but any sense of his genius seems to have been reverse-engineered from how unstintingly, exhaustingly reckless and unpleasant and uncaring he is. As with Musk, the fact that Bankman-Fried was a billionaire when Lewis started reporting the book seems to not just color but retroactively justify what a turd he otherwise is; why else would this distinguished author be writing a book about him?”

–David Roth on Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (New York Magazine)

“…a ghost story conjured by representatives of a deceased author’s estate. It all sounds a little uncanny. Isn’t that the case, though, whenever we try to resurrect dead writers? In the past decade, a resurgence of acclaim has fully established Shirley Jackson as the queen of dark literary fiction, and there is no surer sign of an author’s success than the arrival of a new generation of writers eager to channel her spirit, rereading and reimagining her work. So much for the death of the author … These days, the more sophisticated literary estates may be less likely to hire ghostwriters to imitate a deceased writer’s work; instead, they authorize established writers to continue the work (and share cover credit) under their own names. The premise of a seamless transition, in which the original author slips off into the afterlife unnoticed, has been replaced by a Frankenstein-like chimera of the living and the dead…Such collaborations tend to be respectful, reasonably successful, and positively reviewed, but there often is, nonetheless, something unnervingly lifeless about them. Like all the undead, the books’ resurrected protagonists are free to perform only a few limited actions, shadowy repetitions of actions they took in life—solving mysteries, spying on behalf of England, channelling the One Power. It’s hard to read them without imagining those unseen authorities peering over the writer’s shoulder and wondering about the limits of their good will … the creation of official sequels and spinoffs is inevitably haunted by questions of agency, power, and control. To join Elizabeth Hand on her journey to Hill House is to be reminded of the slippery dominance of genius, the way it both establishes and breaks its own rules, tempting then trapping those who dare to follow them. Faithfully adhering to the rules doesn’t guarantee success, yet breaking them will inevitably invite accusations of failure and betrayal. Each reader who arrives at A Haunting on the Hill hoping to return to the original Hill House will feel disappointed in her own way, although the shape of her disappointment will speak more to the nature of her loyalty to Jackson than to the qualities of the new book. Perhaps unsurprisingly, A Haunting on the Hill is least successful when Hand directly imitates Jackson, most successful when she draws on her own talents—and becomes truly fascinating when Hand lets those anxious whispers about authority and influence take over the tale.”

–Kristen Roupenian on Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill (The New Yorker)

The situation in Gaza continues to deteriorate. At the time of this writing, some 4,200 people have been killed in Gaza in the last ten days—including over 1,000 children—hundreds of them in a horrifying explosion at the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City on Tuesday. According to Israeli authorities, there are also at least 199 people, captured by Hamas during the brutal October 7 attacks, who are currently being held hostage in Gaza, including children and the elderly.

Today, President Biden is in Israel; in a speech, he “announced $100 million in aid to help civilians in Gaza and the West Bank and said he had secured a commitment from Israel’s government to allow food, water and medicine to be delivered to Palestinians in Gaza from Egypt in a humanitarian effort overseen by the United Nations and others.”

However, despite the U.N. Secretary-General’s calls for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” as well as global protests and outcry—including a large group of Jewish demonstrators outside the White House—the United States has refused to call for a ceasefire; in fact, today, the U.S. vetoed a U.N. resolution “that would have condemned violence against all civilians in the Israel-Hamas war including ‘the heinous terrorists attacks by Hamas’ against Israel, and would have urged humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza.”

Here are a few recent pieces from around the internet that the Literary Hub staff has been reading about the worsening crisis and its many reverberations:

“Explanations Are Not Excuses,” Sarah Schulman, New York Magazine

Selective recognition is the way we maintain our own sense of goodness. Today, we see this process of denial in every aspect of our lives. In this moment, it has become a tool to justify the sustained murder of thousands in Gaza, where the current death toll sits at over 2,600 people. As Israel began its relentless retaliation last week, an accompanying image of Israeli and American moral cleanliness was put swiftly into action. This is called “manufactured consent” — Noam Chomsky’s term for a system-supported propaganda by which authorities and media agree on a simplified reality, and it becomes the assumptive truth. We’ve seen this erasure of history in the uniform responses by western world leaders, university administrations, heads of foundations, and even book fairs over the past week.

“Letter From the Editor: ‘We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other’,” Arielle Angel, Jewish Currents

Already complex and fragile relationships between Palestinian and left-wing Jewish activists—as well as factions within both of these groups—are being challenged as we struggle to derive the same meaning from the images coming across our screens. Friends and colleagues on all sides find themselves hurt by one another’s public reactions, or by their silence. . . . It is a situation none of us have ever before confronted in earnest, amid a long history of vastly disproportionate death tolls. And now, when we need it most, we find ourselves struggling with a lack of emotional and political vocabulary.

“Against the Imposters,” M. Muhannad Ayyash, The Baffler

The story of the Palestinian struggle is of course a complex one; the rise of Hamas within Palestinian political life alone has been the subject of many books and articles. And many Palestinians are opposed to Hamas on a number of issues and from a variety of perspectives, myself included. But what all these Western imposters have never understood is that we understand our struggle as a people’s struggle, not the struggle of this or that political faction. Across all our big and sharp differences, we know that we are all together in the end because it is all of the Palestinian people who are under brutal occupation and assault, aspiring for the same freedom and liberation. Palestinians, of course, share their experience of colonial violence with many communities and peoples from across the world, both historically and into the present. But we also understand that we are indeed alone in experiencing the specific structures of Israeli settler-colonial violence, and that we therefore must always stand together and help each other as people. Our collectivity as a people is our support and our guide.

“These New Ghosts,” Rob Delaney, Tribune

Can you kill anyone to fix this? Who? Where are they? Do you bring your other children with you to do it? Or do you get a babysitter for your other kids so you can go try and kill them? Is your babysitter alive? If you can’t kill your child’s murderer specifically, is there someone else you could kill? Would it feel good then and there, like working out or taking a shit? If so, how long would it take the feeling to dissipate?

“An Open Letter in Support of Adania Shibli From More Than 350 Writers, Editors, and Publishers,” Literary Hub

The shocking and tragic events that began on October 7th and are ongoing today have had repercussions all over the globe, including within the publishing world. Award-winning Palestinian author Adania Shibli, who was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for her book Minor Detail (New Directions/Fitzcarraldo, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette), was to receive Germany’s 2023 LiBeraturpreis for the same book, published in German as Eine Nebensache (Berenberg Verlag, translated by Günther Orth) at the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair, which begins this week.

On October 13, the organizers of the prize, Litprom, which is funded in part by the German government and the Frankfurt Book Fair, released a statement saying that the prize-giving ceremony would no longer take place at the book fair.

“Doomsday Diaries,” Sarah Aziza, The Baffler

I wake strangely early on October 7, groggy from a late night out. In my kitchen, I set my teapot to boil and the radio to BBC. A moment later I hear a news bulletin beginning with “Palestinian fighters from Gaza have crossed into Israel . . .” I turn in the direction of the disembodied sound. I am used to waking to news of violence in the West Bank—at least one morning each week seems to begin this way, with a story of settler attacks or another Israel Defense Force raid. In fact, Labib Dumaidi, a nineteen-year-old Palestinian university student, was shot yesterday during another pogrom in Huwara in the West Bank. But this report is something different, and my mind struggles to grasp the words. Gaza? How?

“Gaza: The Cost of Escalation,” Ben Rhodes, New York Review of Books

We don’t yet know how events will unfold. But the history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the Middle East, and the US’s own recent experience suggests that violence is likely to beget more violence, that trauma will beget more trauma. It is easier to start or escalate wars than to end them, and the consequences of war are always unpredictable. Short-term victories can engender longer-term challenges. Victors on the battlefield can lose something of themselves at home.

“A letter to the friendships I have lost and will lose,” Ijeoma Oluo, Behind the Book

This letter is to my friends. To the people in my social circles. The people in my writing and activism communities. The people I know or have felt kinship with online or in person. This is to the people who have sent me messages voicing their disappointment and dismay at what I have been saying. And to those who have said nothing, and are instead deciding right now to fade away from my life for good.

I know that my immediate focus on the safety of people in Gaza in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks seems to be in poor taste to many.

I know that my refusal to include denouncements of Hamas in my posts and videos talking about what is happening in Gaza seems cold and uncaring at best, antisemitic at worst.

I know that the passion I have towards freeing the Palestinian people seems grotesque in response to your pain.

I know this because you have told me, because many of you are sharing such sentiments in your messages and your status updates.

But this is what I must do.

“An Open Letter on the Situation in Palestine,” The London Review of Books

The deliberate killing of civilians is always an atrocity. It is a violation of international law and an outrage against the sanctity of human life. In Gaza, neither the occupying power, Israel, nor the armed groups of the people under occupation, the Palestinians, can ever be justified in targeting defenceless people. We can only express our grief and heartbreak for the victims of these most recent tragedies, and for their families, both Palestinians and Israelis. . . .

We call on our governments to demand an immediate ceasefire and the unimpeded admission of humanitarian aid into Gaza. We also demand an end to all arms shipments and military funding, supplies that can only exacerbate the humanitarian catastrophe at hand. Although these measures will not be enough to secure true justice, liberation and equality for all in the region, they represent an urgent and indispensable first step. We plead for an end to all violence, an end to all oppression and denial of human rights, and a path towards a just and sustainable peace for all.

“‘The Interviewer Wants to Know About Fashion’: A Poem by Hala Alyan,” Literary Hub

Think of all the calla lilies.
Think of all the words that rhyme with calla.
Isn’t it a miracle that they come back?
The flowers. The dead. I watch a woman
bury her child. How? I lost a fetus
and couldn’t eat breakfast for a week.
I watch a woman and the watching is a crime,
so I return my eyes. The sea foams like a dog.
What’s five thousand miles between friends?

“How Social Media Abdicated Responsibility for the News,” Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker

An “algorithmically driven fog of war” is how one journalist described the deluge of disinformation and mislabelled footage on X. Videos from a paragliding accident in South Korea in June of this year, the Syrian civil war in 2014, and a combat video game called Arma 3 have all been falsely labelled as scenes from Israel or Gaza. (Inquiries I sent to X were met with an e-mail reading, “Busy now, please check back later.”) On October 8th, Musk posted a tweet recommending two accounts to follow for information on the conflict, @WarMonitors and @sentdefender, neither of which is a formal media company, but both are paid X subscribers. Later that day, after users pointed out that both accounts regularly post falsities, Musk deleted the recommendation. Where Twitter was once one of the better-moderated digital platforms, X is most trustworthy as a source for finding out what its owner wants you to see.

“Here’s how you can help people in Gaza right now,” Dan Sheehan, Literary Hub

The devastating humanitarian crisis in Gaza is deepening, with Israel cutting off access to food, water, fuel and electricity for the besieged enclave’s 2.3 million residents and unleashing wave after wave of air strikes that Palestinian authorities say have killed more than 2,800 people (including at least 724 children) and injured more than 10,000.

The situation is dire, but here’s what you can do right now to support the people of Gaza.

Bryan Washington’s Family Meal, Mary Gabriel’s Madonna: A Rebel Life, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories, andWerner Herzog’s Every Man for Himself and God Against All all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s book review aggregator.

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Fiction

1. Family Meal by Bryan Washington
(Riverhead)

7 Rave • 4 Positive

“Masterful … What makes Washington’s writing about family so refreshing and complex is how he shows the ways people attempt to demonstrate the emotions they otherwise have trouble expressing to the ones they hold dear … Family Meal juggles a lot…but Washington lays it all out with the control and artistry of a ballet choreographer. Each story line gives the other strength.”

–Ernesto Mestre-Reed (The New York Times Book Review)

2. Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
(Knopf)

8 Rave • 1 Positive
Read Todd Portnowitz on translating Jhumpa Lahiri here

“Melancholy yet electric … The fluid transitions between Lahiri’s and Portnowitz’s translations elevate Roman Storiesfrom a grouping of individual tales to a deeply moving whole. By putting many kinds of foreignness together, Lahiri shows that they all belong.”

–Lily Meyer (The New York Times Book Review)

3. Blackouts by Justin Torres
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

7 Rave • 1 Positive

“A transfixing collage of gorgeous prose and manipulated illustrations, with themes of cultural erasure and the effervescence of lust and love … Easily 2023’s sexiest novel … Astonishing … It steers clear of contrivance, thanks to edgy illustrations, an origami structure, and the author’s exquisite eye and ear. This is a novel of ideas, too, brimming with queer history, racial defiance and the injustices of the Freudian era … Run, don’t walk, to buy it.”

–Hamilton Cain (The Star Tribune)

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Nonfiction

1. Madonna: A Rebel Life by Mary Gabriel
(Little Brown and Company)

4 Rave • 2 Positive • 5 Mixed

“Gabriel’s writing is unfussy and direct … It’s a mark of Gabriel’s skill that she has managed to wrestle this complex, sprawling, eventful life into a book that rarely flags and conveys its subject’s wider significance without tipping into hagiography. We come to understand Madonna the person as well as Madonna the concept.

–Fiona Sturges (The Guardian)

2. Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog
(Penguin Press)

4 Rave • 2 Positive

“There is a great deal in this book about Mr. Herzog’s childhood and youth, a convention that can be dull, but not when the life is like this one … Herzog has never made strictly linear films, and this is not at all a linear book. Observations about his films are nonchalantly mixed with tangentially related memories … This year, Mr. Herzog turned 81. We can only hope that he continues the chase as long as possible.”

–Farran Smith Nehme (The Wall Street Journal)

3. Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction by Fergus M. Bordewich
(Knopf)

4 Rave • 1 Positive

“A vivid and sobering account of Grant’s efforts to crush the Klan in the South … For the most part, Bordewich’s narrative hews closely to the historical period, showing how federal power was the only way to stamp out local regimes that countenanced the suffering of Black people while allowing white perpetrators to go unpunished … Toward the end of the book, Bordewich gestures toward the fractured political landscape of the present day. Grant’s victory over the Klan is a story that many Americans would like to tell themselves, but the retrenchment that followed is a cautionary tale.”

–Jennifer Szalai (The New York Times)

Our fivesome of fabulous reviews this week includes Michelle Orange on Mary Gabriel’s Madonna, Becca Rothfeld on Werner Herzog’s Every Man for Himself and God Against All, Hugh Ryan on Justin Torres’ Blackouts, Charles Arrowsmith on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Be Useful, and Jennifer Szalai on Fergus M. Bordewich’s Klan War.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s book review aggregator.

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“Suggests something comprehensive: it is eight hundred and eighty pages … Light on author interviews and other new source material, the biography is a towering work of assemblage, a guided tour through the origins and the creative life of ‘the enigma called Madonna,’ with a view to solidifying her status as a leading artist of her time. That there exists some doubt about this forms a subtext of the book, which, like any biography, proposes a fragile patchwork of contracts with the reader in the name of mastering its subject and fulfilling its brief … Gabriel, a former Reuters editor, organizes the chapters by dateline, taking an almanac-like approach, the idea being, more or less, that a thorough record of Madonna’s accomplishments will speak for itself. The result succeeds on the strength of that record and on the fine-toothed diligence with which Gabriel, who has claimed that she set out with no particular knowledge of or attachment to Madonna, combs through it. The tone is one of admiring dispassion, the approach at times discreet to the point of inertia. Readers hungry for original takes, fresh intel, or freewheeling analysis will remain so. Gabriel avoids risk and complication as fervently as Madonna has sought them out, spinning modest threads of historical, political, and cultural context that are never less than perfectly apt and rarely anything more … Though Gabriel emphasizes the relationships that have helped midwife Madonna’s work, she fails to make them intelligible: we get no sense of the artist’s grind, her habits and challenges as a songwriter, singer, producer, dancer, or director; or of how her vision and her ear have prevailed, in a decades-long evolution, through countless co-productions and genre dalliances. Old press-tour quotes on this subject are as illuminating as you might expect … More than her talent or her cunning, Madonna’s success reflects a public’s ambivalence about those freedoms we cherish, even as they frighten, bewilder, and enthrall us. Her story is that of an artist committed to remaking certain old ideals: beauty, sovereignty, connection, grit. It also tells of how starved we were, and still are, for their pure embodiment.”

–Michelle Orange on Mary Gabriel’s Madonna: A Rebel Life (The New Yorker)

“The book is nonlinear and exuberantly free-associative, less a narrative than an extravagant demonstration of sensibility … The book’s oddities will delight devotees of Herzog’s singular cinema, but readers unfamiliar with his tragicomic tirades and brooding philosophical meditations may find his digressions vexing … He recounts near-fatal exploit after near-fatal exploit with unwavering sang-froid, as if it is perfectly natural, even inevitable, to pursue the impossible to the brink of death … I got the impression that Herzog has not only never had a normal experience but that he has never encountered a normal person … Is any of this true? These marvelously magical remembrances may not be flatly accurate, but childhood is, most essentially, a land of terrors and enchantments, and a sober account of its charms would only serve to distort them. No one understands better than Herzog that, as he puts it, ‘truth does not necessarily have to agree with facts,’ that it is a matter of ‘poetic imagination.’ ‘The ecstatic truth’ is his wonderful name for the elusive quality he chases in his documentaries, which are not dry investigations but feats of storytelling with a distinctive point of view. In many ways, this is a shockingly impersonal memoir, but there is one sense in which Herzog is palpable in it. His melancholic, meditative and theatrically nostalgic way of being is as irrepressible in his writing as it is in his films. Sometimes, he verges on self-parody…But if Herzog is a fertile subject for satire, it is only because he is so inimitably and emphatically himself … I feel the same sense of awe when I contemplate the phenomenon of Werner Herzog as I do when I contemplate the pyramids. Amazing, that this fabulous impracticality exists. Amazing, that we go to such lengths to achieve such magnificent superfluities. Amazing, that we create such burdens for ourselves, and for no other reason than that, if we didn’t, we would be living dully, without the respite of our dreams.”

–Becca Rothfeld on Werner Herzog’s Every Man for Himself and God Against All (The Washington Post)

“…erasure poetry is much like queer history, a discipline that revolves around reading against the archive—mining biased sources for neutral facts, reading meaning into what isn’t said as much as what is, and flensing useful details off a rotten mass of lies. In Torres’s lyrical new novel, Blackouts, these two forms—erasure poetry and queer history—collide to create one epic conversation between a pivotal 20th-century queer sexology text and two unreliable queer Puerto Rican narrators … The further into the novel you go, the less ‘real’ everything outside Juan’s and nene’s stories seems. It is impossible to tell if ‘the Palace’ is a sad charity hospice for dying homosexuals, for instance, or some kind of queer bardo for gay ghosts. The supreme pleasure of the book is its slow obliteration of any firm idea of reality—a perfect metaphor for the delirious disorientation that comes with learning queer history as an adult … Torres haunts this book full of ghosts like a ghost himself, and with this novel, he has passed the haunting on, creating the next link in a queer chain from Jan to Juan to nene to you.”

–Hugh Ryan on Justin Torres’ Blackouts (The New York Times Book Review)

“Now 76, the five-time Terminator becomes a first-time Tony Robbins with the publication of his self-help book … Yes, like a moribund franchise, the Austrian Oak has been rebooted—this time as an elder statesman ready to dispense hard-won wisdom as abundantly as he once doled out movie death … His sensible guru era suggests that Schwarzenegger believes it’s temperance rather than bile that behooves an elder statesman and that the nation will eventually return to its senses. It also puts clear space between him and the parlous ghouls of today’s GOP, with its commando tactics and true lies. But what of the book? Permit me to save you the trouble of finding out for yourself: Be Useful is a raw deal, a hollow PR exercise filled with precepts and quips but devoid of self-awareness or humility. You might be swayed by Arnie’s touching faith in bipartisanship and the need to tackle the climate crisis or moved by his tales of heroic procurement of personal protective equipment during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But as a pitch for Marcus Aurelius status…it’s thoroughly expendable—an overpromoted TED Talk, just another cross-promotional weapon in the Schwarzenegger multimedia arsenal … That the book is a naked attempt by a twilight superstar to shore up his legacy and project a new and benign vision of himself is abundantly obvious. Be not fooled: When Schwarzenegger talks of having vision, the ‘tunnel’ is silent.”

–Charles Arrowsmith on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life (The Los Angeles Times)

“A vivid and sobering account of Grant’s efforts to crush the Klan in the South … For the most part, Bordewich’s narrative hews closely to the historical period, showing how federal power was the only way to stamp out local regimes that countenanced the suffering of Black people while allowing white perpetrators to go unpunished. For all their cries about ‘states’ rights,’ the Klan was unabashedly antidemocratic. Some Black Southerners, especially those who survived attacks or witnessed the violence firsthand, decided that they couldn’t bear the extreme risk of simply exercising their franchise. Bordewich includes some heart-rending testimony from freedmen who were too terrified to go to the ballot box. As one Black man put it, ‘I had to deny voting to save myself’ … Toward the end of the book, Bordewich gestures toward the fractured political landscape of the present day. Grant’s victory over the Klan is a story that many Americans would like to tell themselves, but the retrenchment that followed is a cautionary tale. A premature push for conciliation and compromise can leave the roots of some very old pathologies untouched, ready to grow again when the conditions are right. ‘Barbarism,’ Bordewich writes, ‘may lie only a small distance beneath the skin of civilization.’”

–Jennifer Szalai on Fergus M. Bordewich’s Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and Battle to Save Reconstruction (The New York Times)

When I was in college, a man cornered me in my apartment after getting me drunk. He tried to have sex with me, relentlessly, until finally I found a way to hide in the bathroom, rendering myself both unavailable and abject, so that he would leave. It was an experience that felt both ordinary and cataclysmic, one that reverberated through my adult life for many years to come. How could I describe what had happened back there? How could I capture the banality of my disgust and fear, along with the violence of knowing what would have happened if I had fought, or if I had acquiesced to what he wanted?

I write about this experience in my new book, Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, but I have been trying to find the language for that experience for many years. In writing the book, I often found myself up against the edge of the kinds of violation for which we have a name. We have so few terms to describe how women are wronged by men—harassment, assault, rape, attempted rape, coercion. I don’t favor the phrase “gray area” experiences, which is too indecisive, too uncertain. The legal stakes are also too high for those who come forward about abuse to call these experiences “gray.” But culturally, politically, and legally, we often lack the terms to capture what it feels like to live as a woman in a misogynist culture that sees our bodies as disposable, and in which having one’s body taken and used has become so commonplace.

This reading list features seven novels that deal with questions of consent and coercion. Some are grim and dystopian; some are campus novels that consider the power of age and status; others depict the slow and even glittering violence of having one’s identity, and one’s body, shaped by a culture that reduces women’s bodies to their ability to provide sexual pleasure to men, or to reproduce. As I have been, the characters in these books are sometimes at a loss at times for the words needed to describe what others have done to them. This can make the pain they feel confounding, alienating, shameful, but it is no less real, or true.

Many of these books also explore, as mine does, how the institution of motherhood shapes who and what we believe women’s bodies are for, and how such beliefs provide a distorted rationale for the many ways women’s bodies are exploited in a patriarchal culture. All these books offer new ways of understanding what it’s like to live in a culture of male control, showing how narrative can be a tool for expanding the language we have to describe women’s pain, as well as for resistance.

Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

Florin’s debut novel is set on a university campus, supposed paragon of liberal ideals, and follows the aftermath one young college student feels after a fellow student abruptly and inelegantly has sex with her without asking for consent. The novel powerfully explores the fear and dissociation that arises in these scenarios, and the trouble young women have explaining the violation they feel when neither “rape” nor “nothing” seem to capture what’s been done to them.

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

I write about one scene from this novel in my book, Touched Out. In the scene, a student, Melanie, “moves of her own accord” during a sexual experience with an older male professor, “but not quite of her own volition,” as philosopher of misogyny Kate Manne notes in her book, Entitled. The scene, referred to by the male professor as “not rape, not quite” shows how, in Manne’s words, a woman can be “cast into a cultural script in which a man’s sexual desire has outsize ethical importance,” how a lack of agency can lead her into unwanted sex, and how, in the aftermath of such a violation, she may even feel obligated to protect the man who has mistreated her.

Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

An utterly propulsive narrative about one women’s slow descent into the world of social media and plastic surgery. Like my own book, this novel explores the desire many women have to remove the marks misogynist standards have made on their body—in this case through a surgery that reverses previous cosmetic procedures—alongside a nuanced exploration of assault.

Miriam Toews, Women Talking

Toews’ novel opens with a note about “the wild female imagination”—something men weaponize to silence women when they come forward about abuse, but also a weapon that women themselves can wield to survive in a world that disavows their reality. I love how this book circles around the limited options women feel they have available in the face of violence—as if the only choices are to fight or flee—and how it highlights the power of community and public speech to move beyond those limits.

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

A classic exploration of Lily Bart’s loss of self to New York high society by a classic American writer. The close encounter with rape in this novel is often underexplored, but the scene illustrates well the economics of sex, and how women often feel compelled to let their bodies be used in exchange for other forms of power—and how this can get turned against them when public perception mistakes male violence for feminine indecency.

Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers

Chan’s eerily familiar dystopian world imagines a society in which bad mothers are sent away to a school that will, supposedly, make them good. Chan’s first-generation Chinese-American protagonist, Frida Liu, who is eighteen months postpartum and struggling with little sleep, leaves her child alone at home for a few hours, which leads authorities to sentence Frida to a year at the school, alongside other mothers who have committed a range of offenses, from coddling their children to throwing them into pits. A complex portrayal of state control that begs us to reconsider the unevenly distributed standards we have for mothers.

Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

Another innovative dystopian world in the vein of The Handmaid’s Tale, Zumas explores an era not unlike our own, in which abortion is illegal and embryos have full personhood under the law. The book explores the question of who and what, in such a world, is a woman’s body for?

Raven Leilani, Luster

This exploration of power, race, and pleasure follows a young woman in a relationship with a married man. It’s a searing and funny exploration of desire, choice, race, and how we understand what we want, much less who that makes us.

Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

An experimental, genre-defying, parodic, smutty exploration of empire and love by a revolutionary queer writer. This wild novel explores patriarchal violence in all its forms, from the kind that is wielded in history and intellectual thought, to the kinds caused by The Father. Includes illustrations that are NSFW.

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Touched Out by Amanda Montei is available now via Beacon Press.