Stig Dagerman was a literary phenomenon who took his own life when he was 31. A hundred years after his birth, a writer goes in search of his typewriter to make sense of his life and enduring legacy

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I first came across Stig Dagerman and his books sometime in the first months of 2011, in the foreign language section at Dussmann’s bookstore, on the Friedriechstrasse, shortly after moving to Berlin. The city lent itself to long conversations about history and politics, and I read voraciously on subjects I had seldom thought about while trying to understand the country I was living in. I visited Dussmann often and my purchases were aspirational and chaotic. The title German Autumn, with the black and white photo of a bombed-out building on the cover, promised to fill a sliver of my quickly expanding ignorance. I assumed the author was German: Dagerman. He was Swedish, and his reportage through the rubble of 1946 Germany was written with uncompromising clarity and sensitivity that stuck with me.

While still in Berlin I read his novel A Burnt Child, and though I don’t remember why, I finished the last pages while pacing frantically outside the door of our apartment on the Köpenickerstrasse in the middle of the night. I remember that my postscript to that book was a plunge into the internet to learn more about this man, his life, and how he’d come to write like this. I got the usual synopsis, vague or prudent, on his precocity and tragedy, which I would come to know by heart. I stumbled on the name of a daughter and found her on Facebook. There was no mistake possible: one of her most recent posts featured a photo –in black and white, like all photos of him ever taken– with a message on mental health, the consequences of depression, and the help her father never received. Eventually, I wrote to her; she never answered. It was a message of gratitude, the type of zealous letter you write when still full of the voice that accompanied you while reading, still in a daze from the book you’d swear you’re the first to ever discover quite like that.

Over the next years, I’d look for him while perusing books, and even got lucky a couple of times, in the south of France and, of all places, Tucson, Arizona. Over time, I accumulated his works and testimonies the world over that spoke of this literary comet, of greatness interrupted. The enduring power of his story was such that in his 2008 Nobel Prize acceptance speech French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio spoke at length about Dagerman’s role in his own life: “Stig Dagerman’s little sentence is still echoing in my memory, and for this reason I want to read it and re-read it, to fill myself with it. There is a note of despair in his words, and something triumphant at the same time, because it is in bitterness that we can find the grain of truth that each of us seeks. ”

Ultimately I placed him on the vague shelf of themes to delve into and maybe write about one day.

In May 2019 I had been in Washington DC for three months, and the city felt more lonely than any I’d lived in, so I signed up for countless newsletters of embassies and cultural centers that animate the capital, to somehow fill my time. That’s how I read about an event at the Alliance Française called Digging Deep Into the Shadows: film screening & book talk, on Friday, May 10^th, featuring a movie based on the play “Marty’s Shadow,” by Stig Dagerman. It would be followed by a Q&A with Lo Dagerman and Nancy Pick, co-authors of The Writer and the Refugee, the book on the story that had inspired the play. I went, stayed throughout, didn’t ask any questions but walked up to Lo Dagerman at the end. I remembered her father’s work vividly enough to have her share her email address and take a signed copy of her book home.

I didn’t read The Writer and the Refugee until late September 2021, when the madness of the pandemic and the presidential election were receding; things felt possible again and so did writing for pleasure. I finished the book on the 21^st, and wrote to Lo Dagerman a week later:

I have recently read your book, and it reminded me why Stig resonated so much when I first read him a decade ago. I’m grateful for the light it shone on the person he was and where his work arose from.

I’m writing to you because I know you do much to promote Stig’s work, and as a journalist, I’d like to explore writing about him. I would love to talk if you ever have time. There are facets of the search for a parent, through his work, that touched me quite personally. 

From Lo’s book, it was the recounting of her search for her father that compelled me, more so than the story behind the play he wrote in the 1940s. An image in particular from the book’s beginning needled me:

“It doesn’t start with the typewriter, of course, but one day it appears. On my desk. Black and exotic in my little girl’s pastel-painted bedroom. It has Continental written on the front in faded gold lettering, and a hardtop hood that allows it to travel. My mother has put it there. I know that. I also know that it belonged to my father. Stig.

Who died, and whom I cannot remember at all.”

We met on October 20 in Georgetown, and though I intended to write about something entirely different, in reviewing the transcript I realize I returned to that typewriter at various points, asking her about that scene when she was a child, why her mother placed it there, in her room, and what became of the heirloom.

As with many stories that we’re drawn to, but can’t fully pin down, latching on stubbornly to an instinctive thread helps to stave off immobility. So I researched the typewriter, found out it had been purchased in 1946, and had cost 382 Swedish Kronen, along with various mentions of it in essays and remembrances on Stig Dagerman.

The sound of the typewriter, its staccato, its tonality, like heavy rain on a tin roof, that distinctive cackling like no other, was something that kept recurring whenever I read or mentioned the object in conversation. It was an unmistakable sound for generations, inseparable from an era not far gone, and now a figment of the past. It’s a sound I realized I had grown up listening to as a child.

In February I wrote to the Kungliga biblioteket, the National Library of Sweden, to find out about the typewriter’s final resting place. I’d already located its whereabouts in the library’s storage: reference code: SE S-HS Acc2019 / 42. Its terms of access: Produced for special purposes only. In storage, the reference collection stated, it occupies precisely 1.6 feet on the shelf. I got an answer in early March:

Thank you for your question. The typewriter was donated to the National Library of Sweden in 2019 by Stig Dagermansällskapet (Stig Dagerman Society). It is a part of the manuscript collection and only leaves the stacks on special occasions. Prior to that, the typewriter was in the care of the Stig Dagerman Society. Unfortunately, the Stig Dagerman Society was disbanded in 2019. At that point, Bengt Söderhäll was its chairman. If you want to find out more about how it was used by the Society I suggest that you try to get in contact with Söderhäll.

That week, I kept on pulling the thread, trying to find out about the object itself. Yes, a typewriter, but what type? I found there was a whole museum on the subject in Germany, in the city of Bayreuth, and contacted its director in my faltering German. He passed on my request and the images I’d shared of it, to an in-house expert. He answered on March 9.

Thank you very much for your message.

From the pictures, I would identify the typewriter as the “Continental 350” series produced for export.

This type is known as a “cheap” model without a moveable paper stop and without sheet support.

These typewriters had been produced from 1937 to ca. 1948. The price was around 185.00 German Reichsmark.

Even if this typewriter did not have special advantages it can be considered as a technical upper-class product.

The producer was the company Wanderer Werke (formerly company name Winklhofer & Jaenicke) located in the city of Chemnitz, Saxonia.

Kind regards

Günter Pschibl

Deutsches Schreibmaschinenmuseum Bayreuth

At the same time, following the National Library’s suggestion, I asked Lo Dagerman if she knew Bengt Söderhäll. She did, and they were friends. His answer took one month, and by then he was in Naples and occupied with the planning of the Stig Dagerman Prize, which I was to learn was given yearly since 1996 “to a person who, or an organization that, in the spirit of Stig Dagerman, supports the significance and availability of the ‘free word’ (freedom of speech), promotes empathy and inter-cultural understanding.” The first awardee was posthumous: a 14-year-old killed by racists.

A back and forth ensued until he gave me the date and time: April 27^th, 10 am Swedish time, or four in the morning on the East Coast. When asking for final confirmation the day prior, he wrote:

I will be awake after a müsli breakfast. I hope you can stay awake.

Looking forward to our talk,

Best,

Bengt

We spoke until dawn in the District of Columbia, and morning in Bengt’s home in Älvkarleby, a municipality a couple of hours north of Stockholm. I’d heard the name before and asked: it was only two miles “at bird’s flight” across the river Dalälven from the farm where Dagerman was born.

Bengt Söderhäll, I came to learn, had had the typewriter in his possession for a quarter of a century, and his reminiscences of it were like those of a fond friend. Together they had traveled across Sweden and touched many people over time.

Through the narrow gravitational pull of that single artifact, scenes started to coalesce: the visit from Dagerman’s widow, its role in a movie, and as the centerpiece of the museum on an island. How it had brought three generations together once. The pursuit of that old contraption, strange as it may have seemed, had led me to images I would never have found otherwise.

A device that symbolized all that persisted from that abridged life.

I. Journalists Are Always Late

News of Stig Dagerman’s suicide spread on the afternoon of November 4, 1954. From his suburban home in Enebyberg word came of the tragic end, at barely 31, of Sweden’s leading postwar literary light. A shock proportional to his reputation: “Everyone was talking about Dagerman; he was the genius of the decade,” remembers writer Per Olov Enquist in an essay. Or as Lo Dagerman writes:

“My father, the literary genius.

A sensation at age 22 with his first novel, ‘The Snake.’

A famous journalist at 23, whose book on postwar Germany, ‘German Autumn,’ becomes a classic.

Popularized through his occasional poems commenting on contemporary affairs.

The author of  ‘To Kill a Child,’ one of the most-read short stories ever written in Swedish.

The originator of a powerful body of work, feverishly produced over a scant few years, ranging from fiction, journalism, essays and drama to satirical verse and poetry.

A leader among his generation of Swedish writers.

And then: Dies young at age 31. Tragically.

‘The Nordic Rimbaud,’ as the French later would refer to him.

My father—the mythical author.”

Hence his death, that November night, was assured the front-page for the following day—with one notable exception.

“As the facts circulated throughout the city’s press, the irony of fate was that Arbetaren was the only one to ignore it: everyone thought that Stig’s old newspaper already knew what had happened. This explains why, while all the other Stockholm dailies were announcing his death, on Friday morning, the issue I’d been editing during the night featured, in its usual place, his daily bulletin,” wrote journalist Mauritz Edstrom.

So it was that Arbetaren, the very paper Dagerman had joined at twenty, where he’d once been editor, where still wrote a daily column which he’d dutifully sent before ending his own life, ran his final piece, entitled “Beware of Dogs,” instead of their collaborator’s obituary. It ensured he did not fully overshadow his writing.

It’s an outcome that fitted Dagerman’s self-effacement, as well as his definition of the profession: “Journalism is the art of arriving too late as early as possible.”

He’d coined that phrase in a letter to his colleague Werner Aspenstrom, sent from Munich in 1946 while covering the devastation of postwar Germany for the Swedish daily Expressen. Stationed in the Allied Press hotel, Dagerman had soon grown wary of the role expected of correspondents—“They think that a small hunger strike is more interesting than the hunger of multitudes. While hunger-riots are sensational, hunger itself is not sensational, and what poverty-stricken and bitter people here think becomes interesting to them only when poverty and bitterness break out in a catastrophe.”

Steve Hartman, his translator, recounts how Dagerman was advised by a fellow journalist “with the best of intentions and for the sake of objectivity to read German newspapers instead of looking in German dwellings or sniffing German cooking pots.” The news was the Nuremberg trials, and rightly so, but Dagerman sought stories amidst the ruins of the bombed-out cities of the former Reich, chose to report from the cellars and meet those who dwelled there, to reflect on suffering and hate and culpability. He denounced both the mistakes of the Allies and the German politicians alike; the growing class divides amidst the destruction, and the selfishness of those it had spared.

“When every available consolation has been exhausted a new one must be invented even if it is absurd. In German cities, it often happens that people ask the stranger to confirm that their city is the most burnt, devastated, and razed in the whole of Germany. It is not a matter of finding consolation in the midst of affliction—affliction itself has become a consolation. The same people become discouraged if you tell them that you have seen worse things in other places. We have no right to say that: every German city is the worse there is when you have to live in it,” he wrote in German Autumn, his collected reportages.

Dagerman was only 23 and knew German through his first wife, Annemarie Götze, the daughter of German anarcho-syndicalist political refugees. They had married in wartime, to afford her the protection of a Swedish passport. Now, having written his first novel, The Snake, to critical acclaim the year prior, he’d purchased his own typewriter for 382 Kronen and moved on from his editorial role at Arbetaren to become a full-time reporter and writer. From then until his last, through the initial rush, the ultimate wane, all his writing arose and fell from that single instrument which inaugurated a new life full of promise.

II. A Father’s Heirloom

Lo Dagerman lost her father a month shy of her third birthday. She was the only child of his second marriage to the actress Anita Björk. It was from her that she received a belated inheritance five years later: his typewriter, left on the childhood desk.

It is a gift heavy with significance, which Lo recounts in her book from the perspective of the child she was then. “At eight years of age, things are simple. There is a typewriter that calls out to be typed on. So I learn how to peck on it using only my index fingers—still to this day the way I type.”

At first, she follows in his stead and the keys can be heard again, spelling the altogether different tune of a child’s deadlines: poems and rhymes for birthdays, Mother’s Day, and Christmas alike. She knows her father was a writer, and a famous one at that, though this is a mere fact, like that of his absence.

In her hands, it is at first a toy, a gift from the land of adults which children yearn to reach by counting half-years that will age them quicker, as if standing on the tiptoes of months. The childish age that seeks to forego all that is childish.

“I loved it, any kid would, because it’s an adult thing,” she tells me. “I was brought into adult complexities pretty early by my mother. I didn’t feel scared by that, I felt honored. Kids love when they are talked to not as little children, but as though they understand.”

Time brings greater awareness of just what she had inherited, a name, a past, a parent’s unwelcome fame.

“It was something that was always there because he died so shockingly, there were reverberations through Swedish society. People really remembered this writer because of his shocking death. So therefore, as a child growing up, or starting to attend school, people would know. They would ask ‘Are you related to?’ That would be a very, very common question.”

A famous father can be a minefield when you struggle to define who you are, or when he’s on the curriculum in high school and everyone reads his story To Kill a Child. But Lo doesn’t remember being in class that day, or reading his words, “It’s not true that time heals all wounds. Time does not heal the wounds of a dead child.”

Then there is the growing sense of expectation, that foreign weight that alienates you from yourself. “People know about your parents, and they look at you in a certain mind that maybe, you know, you would have some talent in this way or another. Or not.”

The symbol of it is the typewriter, her mother’s gift, laced with the risk of disappointment. “I think she was desperate to try to see in this child, something of Stig’s. There was, I’m sure, a hope, somewhere along the line that this child would carry some of this genius, have inherited some of this,” she says. “I carry with me my mother’s grief. Even if I don’t remember Stig, I grew up in a home with that grief, and it colored my life.”

Hers is a father she cannot evoke but that people measure her by. The steadfast leftist voice that denounced injustice, went against the grain and spurred debates with the belief “that solidarity, sympathy, and love are humanity’s last clean shirts.” When she is 17, Lo is asked to write a political article and dutifully obliges. “It was a dud. They had thought that maybe I would have something, but I didn’t,” she says. “It was pretty clear that that was not going anywhere. You could even see it as ending this period of the goddamn typewriter: ‘You gave this to me, this is what came out. Now you do whatever you want with it. But this is it, this is what I could do, and not more.’”

Lo will recount her estrangement from the heirloom half a century later:

“Even in my early teens, I write on the typewriter. For a brief moment in time, it is a tool for expressing my budding individuality and sense of identity. Then one day I set it aside, not to be used except for the most mundane of tasks. The typewriter is no longer a plaything, a tantalizing tool for reflection or free-roaming imagination. Instead, it has morphed into something entirely different. Something that brings intimidating performance demands.”

“‘Ah, Stig Dagerman’s daughter—do you also write?’ Hell no.”

So the typewriter falls silent again, waiting to be given new meaning. For Lo freedom and pressure meet on the keys, and in her adolescence the latter prevails. In that, she inversely reflects her father, who went from bliss to anguish on the typewriter as his career progressed.

There was more of the former leading to his time as a youthful correspondent, when, the summer before going to Germany, he holed himself up on Kymmendö Island, in the Stockholm archipelago, in the writing cabin built by the author August Strindberg. There, over the course of a summer, he writes Island of the Doomed, the story of a group of shipwrecks on a waterless island populated by giant lizards and blind birds. It’s one of the happiest times in his life.

It reads: “Another mooring rope had been cut, and now he could rise up like a balloon into silence and solitude. His limbs were filled with painful desire; as noted, he thought his paralysis had eased and suddenly found himself running. He felt as if he were swishing through the morning, his feet were like typewriter keys striking the unwritten sand, which had so often been rinsed by the waves.”

That summer Dagerman is one with his writing, as Lo explains to me. “It’s all documented in brain chemistry, it’s called flow. We are separated from ourselves; you just wander the moment, a pleasurable experience that becomes almost addictive. That’s where we want to be. He described it to a friend saying that he had never felt so happy as when writing that book. He felt like he didn’t write it, but that God did it for him, because it was automatic writing.”

But writing giveth and it taketh away, and after the astonishing output of four books in three years—a haul of two novels, a book apiece of non-fiction and short stories, and his first play—there comes what seems a natural lull. Yet Dagerman resents meeting the stubborn blank page. Seasons follow one another and are altogether different: the resounding success of German Autumn calls for a sequel, French Spring, with the opposite outcome.

“After Germany, the joy of writing was gone,” he would later write to his publisher, reflecting on the years that followed. “The foolish year in France may have been devastating. Roaming in solitude from place to place with a journalistic imperative in the backseat and a typewriter in my suitcase that ultimately grew so heavy with failure that I could hardly lift it.”

He is commissioned to write a dozen articles, of which he will struggle to produce less than half. His French is poor, the subject hard: France is victorious and decades from questioning its role in the war. He detests Paris, “A gigantic heap of historical souvenirs and luxury restaurants, agreeable for millionaires and alcoholics.”

“It’s a disaster,” as Lo puts it succinctly, and the lowest point of his first bout of writer’s block throughout 1947 and into 1948. With debts and guilt increasing he has to resort to pleading with Expressen to release him from his engagement, and somehow pay back the advance.

“Weary and unhappy I crisscrossed the French countryside without being able to work, unable to establish the necessary contacts, and constantly feeling an unbearable pressure at what was expected of me back in Sweden. (…) Perhaps I made of the success of the journey—and rightly so—a matter of prestige, but, all things considered, it might be more reasonable to put mental health before prestige,” he writes to his editor Ragnar Svanström, on July 4, 1948.

From his time “screaming in the Parisian desert” one notable encounter remains. It is at the heart of Lo Dagerman’s and Nancy Pick’s The Writer and the Refugee. Dagerman is the writer; Etta Federn is the refugee, a fascinating Jewish intellectual who is Pick’s relative. She is also a practitioner of palmistry, divination by reading the lines on the hand. The book uncovers the foresight of what she foresaw in those of the young Swede:

Paris, February 5, 1948

Analysis of Stig Dagerman’s hands by Etta Federn (extracts).

“The first impression given by these hands is that of a great timidity, whose origin can be found in an unhappy childhood. Unusually sensitive to suffering… 

These hands are as passionate as they are controlled. The subject’s passions are rarely unbridled, but they seem to always incite him to burn. The subject will not undertake anything that cannot be done passionately.

The subject’s evolution is marked by great inner and external crises, by upheavals begun by momentum followed by a great leap. 

It is remarkable that the subject’s combative spirit utterly fails him when it comes to his emotional life, he then needs to be taken in hand, he is then incapable of fighting, or even of asking or begging for help. From his first failure, he closes painfully on himself like a withering iris.

The subject is capable of feeling great suffering but derives no bitterness from it

Dagerman has had his crisis, now comes his great leap. Forced to produce something that will provide financial compensation for his failure, he turns to the isolation that served him so well in the summer of 46’. Not quite an island this time, but a peninsula, that of Quiberon, in Bretagne, in the village of Kerné, on the edge of the country, “in great loneliness in a locked room in a sleeping French village, with a continent between the writer and those he was betraying,” he’ll later write.

A single photo survives of his time there, facing his typewriter, the sheet of paper on which he’s typing bent backward, while he hunches forward, surrounded by papers and a plate on a narrow table, turning his back to a narrow bed strewn with clothing and more papers. There are various photos of Stig working, over the years, and in them, he often smiles coyly or looks warily at the camera. His fingers are always outstretched, awkwardly suspending writing for the image of writing, eager to lose himself again once the photo is taken. In the shot from Kerné he does not look away from the typewriter, his body is slightly askew as if mirroring the movement of the typewriter along the phrase. It is the portrait of a man absorbed by the page.

If writing has stuttered in France throughout the winter and spring, the extreme opposite occurs in Kerné. An entire novel is written in scarcely six weeks, and the result, A Burnt Child, is perhaps his masterpiece.

“A moment ago, there was fire. Now the tepid ashes warm our feet. A moment ago, there was blinding light. But now a blessed twilight cools our eyes. Everything is calm again. The volcano is slumbering. Even our poor nerves are slumbering. We are not happy but feel momentary peace. We have just witnessed our life’s desert in all its terrifying grandeur, and now the desert is blooming. The oases are few and far between, but they do exist. And although the desert is vast, we know that the greatest deserts hold the most oases. But to discover this, we have to pay dearly. The price is volcanic eruption. Costly, but nothing less destructive exists. Therefore, we ought to bless the volcanoes, thank them because their light is dazzling and their fire scorching. Thank them for blinding us, because only when we are blind can we gain full sight. And thank them for burning us, because only as burnt children can we give others our warmth.” 

That summer he discovers that being on the brink releases him, exorcises doubts and guilt, wrings catharsis from the jaws of hopelessness. It’s a pattern he will come to repeat in his work, and later in his dealings with death.

He wrote: “The important thing for me is that when the inevitable failure comes, it hits me not like pain but as liberation because it also provides me the courage to escape into creativity and the art of writing. In the summer of 1948, I was aimlessly traveling from place to place in northern France, dragging with me a weighty writing assignment for a Swedish publication: a series of articles about French farmers. But the whole country lay closed as a clam to me and I possessed no knife. My saving grace became an escape into A Burnt Child, into the writing of a novel where, for as long as it lasted, I was unavailable to shame and discouragement.”

III. The Typewriter’s Keeper

Seventeen years later, in Älvkarleby, a boy is breathlessly reading A Burnt Child. That is no figure of speech: something in the novel asphyxiates him, the character who is his namesake, the muddied secrets that belie the prose’s cold clarity, and speak to queries that age is putting before him. His name is Bengt Söderhäll.

“I began to read A Burnt Child when I was 14. We lived in a little flat on top of the public library, so I wouldn’t even put on shoes when I went down. I read the bookshelves from left to right. The librarians were kind because I was allowed to also read adult books, books for grownups. So I read a lot of writers, but when I read A Burnt Child, I had to stop. Because the young man in the novel is also called Bengt. And when you’re that age, and adolescence is not too far away, and the line you are going to follow is getting problematic…and the question in that novel: Who is that? Who is mom? Who am I the child of?” Bengt says. He has spent the first part of his life in an orphanage, and something in the absences Dagerman has put in his novel resonates beyond what he can bear.

“So I stopped reading. I remember I just walked out into the forest to get some oxygen. I was almost being suffocated.” He’ll finish it only much later, but that first encounter with Dagerman will change him, “This is my personal history that I’m trying to puzzle together. And it’s mixed with Dagerman.”

Another scene cements the writer in his memory. It’s the image of his mother, fragile of health but steady in reading, listening to the radio while Bengt looked on. “And always, when there was something on about Stig Dagerman, she kind of nodded and looked a bit sad. And at the same time, happy, that a writer like him had lived.”

In time Bengt became a teacher and Dagerman was something he taught and discussed with friends. One day his musings about creating a Stig Dagerman Society made it into the local paper. Eventually, in 1987, he founded a library with his friend Urban Forsgren, dedicated to the author’s work. The Society had become a reality. This time it made national news.

“Two or three days later, the phone began to ring, ‘Could you please come and give a lecture about Dagerman?’ The first two, three years we spun around Sweden and talked about Dagerman at schools, high schools, to unions of all sorts and women’s organizations.”

Then, on the nearby island of Laxön, once a restricted military area, buildings became available for public use. The budding Society was offered a space. It opened in 1992. For the next 25 years, it would be known as the Dagerman Room, a one-room museum where the flotsam and the valuables of a literary career and two marriages converged. Thousands would visit yearly.

“From the beginning, it was an interest in the texts by Dagerman, that was my interest, to read for yourself and make your decision on what is good, what is bad, and what you know,” Bengt tells me.” But it became life and letters. It was letters from the beginning, only letters, but it became more and more life.”

On the haven of an island—which he’d been prone to seek—a composite of Dagerman’s various writing rooms started to come together. Each donation recreated his study, as if frozen in time, its pieces reuniting as they had once been when the author perused that book cupboard or consulted this encyclopedia. All that was missing was for the typewriter to regain its place on the old desk.

Then one day in spring the phone rang. “I would like to come up to the room. I have a few things, a few items that I’m bringing. Can we meet on Friday?” On the line was Anita Björk, Dagerman’s widow and one of Sweden’s most celebrated actresses, famous for her role in Miss Julie, which had won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1951. That Friday Anita Björk, who was nearing 70, got in her old-fashioned Volkswagen and made the two-hour from Stockholm to Älvkarleby bringing with her a large plastic bag.

“She came in there, sat down, and we talked. We had met before, we didn’t know each other that well, but enough. And she put this big bag against the desk,” Bengt remembers. “Then she took out a few things. And there was this fantastic machine, on which Dagerman wrote most of what he wrote, this typewriter, a traveler’s typewriter.” By then she’d preserved the memento for nearly four decades.

It was after she parted with his instrument that Anita asked to visit his grave. It had been moved posthumously in the 1960s from Stockholm, where they’d lived together, to his birthplace. Spring had reached the cemetery, and from the branches overhead tree sap had dripped on his gravestone. Anita went to her car and got a brush. “She came back and I fetched water and then we were laying on our knees taking away stains from Dagerman’s grave,” Bengt remembers. “Then we took a big bucket of water and threw it over it and it was like silvery granite afterward. To me, it’s such a beautiful memory. She was one of our most famous actresses. She was our Greta Garbo. She had that shimmering around her. And she was lying on her knees, cleaning her husband’s grave.”

They had been married for only a year. They had both been 31. Here was the gravestone of a man so young it was already older than he’d become, as his widow looked on, perhaps reading his poem carved in stone: To die is to travel / ever so briefly / from tree branch / to solid ground.

IV. Return to Älvkarleby

In 2016 Lo Dagerman returned to her past, to her father’s roots, to grasp his absence from the starting point. She flew from her home in the United States to Sweden, then drove north to Älvkarleby as her mother had done with the typewriter one spring, along the road lined with trees that winds through the village, passing her father’s old school, the church and the cemetery where he is buried, and onto the farm where he was born in 1923. She knew Stig had left her there one summer in childhood in the care of an aunt. Recollections of that time had started to swell since she had first approached his writing.

“This was a part of my heritage, of my history, that I hadn’t really looked at closely. And then when I read him, there is a whole world that opens up; there are my own memories of this. It puts a part of my life together, in a sense,” she tells me. “As I approached this material, I was able to open to what happened to him—in ways that bring grief and sorrow—to what happened to my mother and my father.”

It had been a long journey to meet him on the page—to reconcile with a heritage that had once been unbearable—of which visiting Älvkarleby was a stage a lifetime in the making. Lo doesn’t remember having read her father in high school when it was compulsory, and in a sense, she feels she never quite did until she was in her thirties. It was the age by which she had outlived Stig.

“Turning 31, there was a feeling of ‘okay. I made it, kind of.’ I waited a long time. The time was right. I was able to handle it emotionally,” she tells me. By then, she has made a life on another continent, she is married, has two children, and is a counselor with studies in psychology. “I can start to look at this because I can see that my own life has taken and served a trajectory.”

She started with his short fiction, of which the best is often set in that land of childhood in the countryside, the town, and its surroundings. Discovering it was a preface to rediscovering Älvkarleby.

“When I’m reading these stories, I have pictures in my head of the aunts, of the farm, of the people there, and of my grandfather,” Lo tells me. “All of that comes alive when I read them. It’s my own history that’s starting to be revealed.”

Dagerman had travelled the world but his hometown was never far from his inspiration. His characters often drew on the rural people he’d known, whether on the farm or uneasily transplanted to the city. There, too, return is both a desire and a reckoning. He may have left the farm but it never left his writing.

It was never more the case than in 1949, a carbon copy of the struggles he’d staved off with the marathon writing of A Burnt Child the year prior. “After having again failed to fulfill a writing job, needing desperately to find an idea to stave off editors and creditors, what saved him was the fertile terrain of his childhood memories,” Lo recounts.

When this latest crisis loomed, Dagerman returned to Älvkarleby.

He writes in an essay: “I found myself on an ocean liner crowded with refugees destined for Australia. My assignment was to get in as close contact as possible with the passengers to gather material for the setting and story of a film. This was a task that seemed simple enough for the first three days, but that after two weeks exposed the entire width of its impossibility. Art is among other things a form of freedom created by distance. But a ship is a prison surrounded by water. You cannot live tied to your subject matter and at the same time exploit it.”

“I finally gave up the script idea and fled into the writing of a novel. I traveled by a clipper across the Pacific Ocean in the company of a wool trader from Lille. In just five days, I would be forced to account for my expensive failure. So it was necessary for me to quickly mount a defense to help me through the difficult time that lay ahead. But the immediate task was to come up with a name for the defense,” or to put it concretely, a title for a new novel.

One morning during a stop in Fiji, in a setting as foreign to him as could be, he cut himself while shaving and remembered a scene from his childhood on the farm. He was the furthest he’d ever been from it, yet now it came to him, a plot developing on the journey to Honolulu, then San Francisco. By the time he arrived in Stockholm to face the music, he had brought back from Australia a rural Swedish narrative. He had, once again, repeated the formula of writing wrested from the brink of failure.

The title of the novel was to be Wedding Worries, and it would be the reason for Lo’s return to Älvkarleby decades later. By then she had not only reconciled with her inheritance, and read her father, but also found a way to make it her own whilst sharing it with others. It was while co-translating the novel that Lo decided to set out on her trip. “I sought to have insight into Stig, on my family and the place where he grew up. I visited the farm with the second story that had been added, walked by the barns and stables, breathed the air and plunged into the river below. Here I could see them all and hear them,” she writes. “For me, it’s a way to get closer to my father. I meet the menagerie of characters from his childhood, described and embellished with such love. It makes me think of the meaning of their acts, all the while hearing Stig’s tender and insisting voice.”

Translating is the way Lo says she truly reads, when she has to retain each part, when she internalizes the words to make them her own in her adopted language across the Atlantic.

“No matter the work,” she writes, “every time I enter a text and make it my own—word by word, one image after another—we find each other, Stig and I.”

Stig Dagerman was born at 11:30 on the night of October 5, 1923, in Älvkarleby, at the farm of his paternal grandparents. It was raining when they sent for the midwife. His parents, Helmer Jansson and Helga Andersson were not married, nor would they be. She left the farm two months later. Her son, from stories heard, describes it like this: “On New Year’s Day she went to the station with a small bag in one hand. She said nothing, but simply walked out of their lives. The snow whirled the old year away. She never came back.”

Stig would not meet her until he was 19, on his initiative. He was left in the care of his paternal grandparents.

There was no Dagerman then. Until the age of four, the boy was called Stig Halvard Andersson. In 1927 his father acknowledged him: he became Stig Halvard Jansson. His third name, the one he chose, the name that history retains, was one of his first creations.

The genealogy of it is painful; it blends the distance from his father, the absence of his mother, a litany of loss, and the need to write.

It happened in the 1940s; Stig was studying at the university in Stockholm when he received news that his grandfather had been murdered. It was nighttime on the farm and he’d gone out to the paddock to see the horses. Not long afterward he was heard screaming. He managed to stumble to the gate before collapsing, with seventeen stab wounds. A local madman was the culprit.

“The evening I heard about the murder I went to the city library and tried to write a poem to the dead man’s memory. Nothing came of it but a few pitiful lines, which I tore in shame. But out of that shame, out of that impotence and grief, something was born—something which I believe was the desire to become a writer; that is to say, to be able to tell of what it is to mourn, to have been loved, to have been left lonely.”

His grandmother would die of shock a week later. He kept writing.

“In school competitions, I had better luck, and in my graduation year I won a week’s holiday in the mountains, with a short story. But that trip ended in tragedy: I lost a very good friend and roommate in an avalanche. When I came back I knew beyond all doubt what I must be. I must be a writer. And I knew what I must write: the book of my dead.”

Dagerman was born then, a surname derived from the word “Dager,” “daylight” in Swedish. It was to be more than a pen name, or a pseudonym. He renamed himself in adolescence, in writing, and loss, and from then lived as, wrote as, and would pass on the surname Dagerman to his children.

Dagerman never did write the “book of his dead,” but in a way his daughter has. It is the book of her dead, of him.

It tells of a typewriter left on her childhood desk, of writing and of ceasing to write, because of him. But to the reader it’s all a matter of time—a lifetime—because by now it’s her that we’re reading to know him.

“Other than when I was typing as a kid, I hadn’t really been writing. I had been writing papers for university courses, and a thesis, but I hadn’t been writing,” she tells me. “And when we wrote that book, Nancy and I, I felt the joy of the writing. And it was that joy that also connected with him, although I couldn’t say that I experienced what he experienced when he said he was communicating with God. But I had a sense of flow, where you’re completely absorbed in the process, obsessed by the process, and that, I believe, is something that he yearned for, wanted, and thrived on. And hated when it was gone. I appreciated being able to touch base with that.”

Lo Dagerman could finally write: “His shadow also brings me peace.”

V. Our Need for Consolation

At the Gothenburg Book Fair, over the years, a man would approach Bengt Söderhall, always with the same query: “Did you bring the typewriter?” Then, being shown to it, he’d ask, “Can I sit there for a minute?”

“He could sit for half an hour, just like a meditation, in front of the typewriter, with his hands almost touching the letters,” Bengt recalls. “We have a lot of stories like that around this typewriter.”

Here Bengt stresses that he has no such “fetishistic ideas.” His work, however, bears resemblance to a pilgrimage: every year, for 22 years, he rented a van, loaded it with the Dagerman Room, and drove 342 miles to Gothenburg to install it at the city’s book fair. He would lay rugs on the floor, install the furniture, and recreate the ambiance of a room in the 1940s or 50s. The typewriter was the showpiece. Visitors would wander, stop out of curiosity, and he’d witness Dagerman’s enduring clout.

“A lot of people, ordinary people, but also writers, when they understood it was Dagerman’s typewriter, would say ‘Can I touch it?’ To me it’s kind of…” he says barely reserving his judgment.

Bengt respects the writer, and his writing, to a fault: they changed his life. He can do without the myth that surrounds him.

“Sometimes, with Dagerman, the shimmering is a big bit like James Dean: the young who died too early. The shimmering is so strong, that you forget to analyze what it really was what he did. I mean, you shouldn’t put Dagerman on a pedestal, you should remain in the spirit of Stig Dagerman, which is to look straight into the eyes.”

The myth itself, the myth of himself, in his lifetime, is part of what stifled Dagerman.

At the age of 26, the count read: six books, four plays, and hundreds of poems and articles. He has long been considered a prodigy and evokes epithets like “the Nordic Rimbaud,” a fatal simile with another writer whose precocity prefaced silence.

Dagerman will describe the crushing weight of expectation and self-doubt three years later, in a brief text titled Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable:

“We all have our masters. I am such a slave to my talent that I dare not use it for fear of discovering that it has been lost. I am such a slave to my reputation that I hardly dare write a line for fear of damaging it. When depression finally sets in, I become a slave to that as well. My greatest ambition becomes to hold on to it; my greatest desire becomes to feel that my only worth lies in what I fear that I have lost: the ability to squeeze beauty out of my despair, anxiety, and failings.”

It is not a lack of ideas that afflicts the young writer. From 1949 onwards, there are plans for as many as six new novels, “But he, who had once been so prolific, now found himself incapable of completing anything more than isolated chapters,” writes his friend Michael Meyer. In Swedish, writer’s block is called “writer’s cramp,” a stifling feeling you cannot shake off.

He’d grown used to bringing back writing from the brink, to feeling the edge of the precipice to spur him into a creative frenzy. After multiple blundered attempts on his own life, Dagerman committed himself to observation in a psychiatric hospital. Two years earlier, in A Burnt Child, he’d written about the main character’s botched suicide that reconciles him with the world.

The year 1950 held the extremes he’d lived out on the page. It had brought love, as Dagerman fell head over heals for Anita Björk, and with it came the hope of a new life, a new home in Enebyberg, and soon the beginning of a family; it had brought depression, the guilt that came with a painful divorce, and the feeling that writing had abandoned him.

The following year, he writes to Anita Björk, already pregnant with Lo: “It is a terrible experience, which I know you will be spared, to feel oneself disintegrate and sink when one is praying to be allowed to grow and climb. Now that the choice has finally come between living like a pariah and dying wretchedly, I must choose as I have done, because I believe that a bad person’s death makes the world a better place. God grant that our child may be like you. I have loved you, and will do so for as long as I am allowed to. Forgive me, but please believe me. Stig.” The letter was never sent. Meyer writes that it was found torn into small pieces.

When Dagerman finally finishes a piece it comes from an improbable source. The prompt is a request from the editors of Husmodern—housewife, in Swedish. The magazine’s title speaks for itself. He is to write something on the art of living for the magazine’s readers. Dagerman, fresh from slashing his veins and turning on the gas, gives them a harrowing and moving seven-page essay that matches anything he’s ever written: Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable. To Husmodern’s credit, they run with it.

It reads: “I have no belief and because of that I can never be a happy man. Because happy men should never fear that their lives drift meaninglessly toward the certainty of death. I have inherited neither a god nor any fixed point on this earth from where I can attract a god’s attention. Nor have I inherited the skeptic’s well-hidden rage, the rationalist’s barren mind, or the atheist’s burning innocence. But I would not dare to cast a stone at those who believe in what I doubt, much less at those who idolize doubt as if that too were not surrounded by darkness. That stone would strike me instead, for there is one thing of which I am firmly convinced: our need for consolation is insatiable.”

The essay seeks to discover a reason to live, amidst the ubiquity of its opposite. “I can free myself even from the power of death. True enough I cannot escape the thought, much less escape the fact that death stalks my every move. But I can diminish its menace to nothing by refusing to pin my life down to such precarious footholds as time and glory.” The reasons exist, yet frail, as a match’s flame, blown out by the same breath that would speak them.

Perhaps the final hope of the text lies in the very act of its writing, for an author who, alone every night before his typewriter, lost faith in words that gave him meaning.

From its inauspicious beginnings, the text enjoys an eventful afterlife he’ll never witness, it becomes popular abroad, is set to music in France, inspires a choreography in England, theater in Portugal, and six decades after being written catches the eye of a young director. His name is Dan Levy Dagerman, the grandson the author never met. Suddenly, the typewriter is cast in the starring part in the role of Stig Dagerman’s typewriter, opposite Swedish film star Stellan Skarsgård in the short film Our Need for Consolation.

Bengt brings the typewriter down to Stockholm for the occasion, and Lo Dagerman has it cleaned and repaired, then searches for near-extinct ink ribbons that will allow it to type again. It’s as good as new for its big break.

“The typewriter in the film and someone is typing on it, and the text of Our Need for Consolation comes out as Stellan Skarsgård reads it,” Bengt says.

“Dan had a really hard time. He felt very moved by the text, but…it was a difficult time for him to work with a text like that, in retrospect,” Lo says. “The piece itself has a turning point, where Stig writes about ‘the miracle of liberation.’ Dan wanted in his film to emphasize it, so that it would stand out. It was, of course, hard for Stig to hold on to the ‘miracle’ but it is the memory of it that infuses hope and a will to live. Dan stayed true to the text.”

It’s the closest thing to Dagerman family reunion. Despite Lo Dagerman not remembering her father, and her son Dan being born decades after his death, three generations converge around that typewriter, brought together by his creations: his writing, and pseudonym that became a surname.

VI. Endings

The Dagerman room closed its doors in 2019, the casualty of island weather. Cold and humidity were eating away at the old 1940s Arbetaren and Dagerman’s words were fading. The pieces that the museum had brought together were dispersed again. Some went to the local library, others came home with Bengt. There was the large book cupboard too large for relatives to claim, and the traveling typewriter as well.

“I had the typewriter in our house and I was somewhat nervous,” Bengt says. “I couldn’t protect it if there was a fire or anything, or it could be stolen. I mean, an item like that…”

While finding a more permanent home for it, he settled for some improvised camouflage. His safe was too small to hold the typewriter, so he hid it behind it, then both behind a large desk, with an additional layer of old clothes nearby to dissuade anyone from looking closer. “It was impossible for any thief to guess that there was something valuable there.”

Bengt still took it out sometimes, to take it to lectures, or show it to a curious guest. What he never did while for the time he kept it, he assures me, neither at his home nor before, in all the many years it was in his care—despite being a writer himself—was to type on the typewriter.

“Sometimes I thought it would be nice to write something on it, but I never did that,” he explains. “Because it was Dagerman’s, not mine.”

When asked if he’s ever missed the typewriter after they parted, Bengt only says “In a way.” Then he’ll admit he yearns for writing on typewriters. It’s something only those who ever used one could attest to, that feeling it left on the fingers.

“The typewriter is more of an instrument than a computer. You touch the computer with the skin, but a typewriter is a physical object with another concentration of feelings of tactility,” Bengt explains. And he remembers when he was young and would type away to the sound he made, “like heavy rain on a tin roof.”

It’s the sound Michael Meyer recounts on his visits to Anita and Stig in their home in Enebyberg. “It struck two and I would totter upstairs to my guest room. Even then he did not always go to bed. Sometimes he would climb the extra flight to his study in a small tower which rose above the house, and I would fall asleep to the sound of his typewriter.”

They had spoken late into the night, discussing theater, literature, and the state of the world as one does at that age. They had even discussed sports once Anita had gone to bed. Dagerman was a delight to talk with, joyful and impulsive in English, which he spoke well. And yet it was 1953, and the next year would be his last.

“This typewriter, alas, now held a very different significance for him from what it had symbolized when I had first seen him in 1948,” Meyer writes. “The tappings of the typewriter which penetrated from his room in the tower to my small guest room below were the efforts of a man to overcome a paralysis; a paralysis from he was never to escape.”

And yet he’d been charming all night. Keys might not sound different when they give us purpose and when they drive us to despair. The sound of Dagerman at his typewriter would have been the same as anyone else, give or take the speed at which they typed. And yet, with Dagerman, what you heard was the sound of him alive.

There would be one last flare on the keys, the prologue to a fifth novel. It was a door half-opened and soon slammed shut. Anita Björk recounts it in a talk: “I followed Stig’s struggle to write at close range. He stayed up late at night, sitting at his typewriter—each morning only to tear up the pages he had written. But one night in the early part of 1954, he woke me up carrying a tray with tea and lit candles. He had finished the first chapter of a major novel he was planning. I listened as he read a piece titled A Thousand Years with God in his tense voice filled with anticipation (….) Afterward, as Stig finished reading, we were both overcome by emotion. We were struck by the extraordinary reach of the piece, and by the possibility that now, finally, Stig might have broken through his own silence.”

“Everybody is saying that piece signals a whole new beginning,” Lo says. “It’s a remarkable piece. It’s nothing like what he has written before. It’s a whole new thing. He was on to something.”

It would remain a prologue, as expectations and debts converged around a depleted vocation. For a time too brief a man wrote on this typewriter, in so doing he achieved a joy such that he felt god was typing for him. Then he lost it. He ceased to be able to write, then gradually, to be able to live.

“There are many culprits, but a main one is that the publishing company at the time, they are demanding of him to write a novel a year. And he can’t do that, particularly not when he’s trying to find his passion again.” Lo tells me. “What Stig needed was a moratorium. There was a kind of naive ignorance on all sides, probably my mother as well, the expectation that this could just happen like that: now you sit in your tower and write.”

Meyer again recounts this ambivalence, the outward appearance, the expectations, making you oblivious to warning signs. “Anita Björk and Stig Dagerman were deeply and mutually in love; and whenever I saw him, during the summer of 1953, he seemed calm and content,” he writes, then adds, “He had dark moods, which I never saw; often he felt the overpowering need to be alone, and would get out of bed in the middle of the night, take the car from the garage and drive for hours into the night, as though he longed to enter the darkness and be swallowed up in it.”

Then one day he ceased to go out. He would still get in his car, still, turn the engine on, and then wait until the last moment in the garage. It was the first garage he’d ever had, an advantage of the move to Enebyberg with Anita. It was a long way from the house; some 50 feet to stumble back from afterward, after every curtailed attempt. He called it “death played in the garage,” a strange game in the night. “He was a gambler that needed to deal with death to exalt the price of life,” Olof Lagercrantz writes in his biography of Dagerman.

“He was obsessed with it,” Lo tells me. “Sometime in ‘53 or ‘54 that idea occurs to him. He has tried gas before, so he understands it. That last fall is when I think my mother and friends around him understand that it was serious. And there are all sorts of interventions that are tried to but that don’t work.”

“Somehow my life has come to a standstill, and I don’t know how I’ll be able to revive it. I can’t do anything anymore: can’t write; can’t laugh; can’t speak; can’t read. I feel like I’m outside the whole game. When I’m with people, I have to force myself to listen to what they are saying in order to smile at the right moments,” he writes in a letter to a friend days before he falls silent.

Alone in the garage, behind the wheel, Dagerman lets the engine run until the last moment. Then he turns it off, crawls out, and staggers back to his house. It’s salvation from the brink once and again, and like rehearsals in the theater he adored. “He’d grown used to grazing his own death. Suicide was part of his life, so to speak, rather than of his death”, writes his translator Carl Gustaf Bjurström.

The final rehearsal occurred around 2 am, on November 4, 1954.

As on other nights, the engine of the car was turned off, likewise, the open door, though now it remained ajar. This time he was still inside with the carbon monoxide.

Thereafter, there remains the typewriter. In 2019 Bengt and Lo discussed what to do with this obsolete machine that had been an instrument of work, a childhood toy, a suffocating heirloom, an actress in a short film, and the centerpiece of a nomadic museum. It would travel no more. Bengt took it to its final home.

“I wrote a letter to the National Library, saying ‘We have Dagerman’s typewriter, maybe we could donate it.’ I had a response within a quarter of an hour! From the chief librarian! I took the train to Stockholm and when I got there they almost bowed to me, because it was so special. There it can be shown and talked about. So now it’s safe, forever I hope.”

VII. Typewriter

Six months after speaking to Bengt, and no closer to writing this story, I was visiting a colleague in Prague when he suggested going to the secondhand bookstores. Writing was much of our conversation that day, and while he shared his latest project I admitted to the odd research I’d been conducting for longer than I cared to acknowledge. After all, the typewriter was neither a Steinway nor a Stradivarius, just a cheap model of an outdated instrument. It should have disappeared, like its obsolete twentieth-century brethren; gone the way of the zeppelins and gramophones to an afterlife or rust. Still, it endured.

Journalists of a certain generation, when I had told them about it, had reminisced about the rat–tat–tat of the newsroom, the clacking so different from typing on the present keyboards. And I remembered waking up to that same sound in my childhood home, one of my oldest memories. Those typewriters had stopped working, left in a pile hidden behind the sofa, never to be replaced by computers. Some people fall silent, some people choose to fade, and it is their choice, though we might feel we aren’t quite enough for them to remain.

Maybe I wanted to disprove that was all there was to be said. To gather proof of the infinite ramifications of what continues to touch people, even despite ourselves.

We had reached the bookstore and were perusing old paperbacks in a basement when I found it. It’s the sort of thing that happens when you’ve been immersed in a story for so long. I waited until the seller had his back turned to examine it, let my hands hover over the keys, and even allowed myself a brief tap. It was a portable Continental typewriter, the same as Dagerman’s. You wouldn’t have thought it memorable.

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Adapted from “The Unlikely Posthumous Life of a Prodigy’s Typewriter” by Diego Courchay, published in The Delacorte Review

Our feast of fabulous reviews this week includes Hillary Kelly on Michael Cunningham’s Day, Rachel Syme on Babra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra, Ryan Chapman on Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn, Eliza Goodpasture on Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters, and Laurie Hertzel on Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day.

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

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“Michael Cunningham is possessed by a spirit, one whom a good deal of contemporary writers find it hard to shake: Virginia Woolf walks the hallways of his novels … with new emergencies rushing by us each day, I find it harder and harder to abide literature concerned with the pandemic itself, rather than its long-tail outcomes. (Woolf’s own Mrs. Dalloway—an obvious influence on Day—benefited from being set after, not during, the flu epidemic of 1919-20.) And yet, Day is not really about the pandemic at all, and its first section, set long before anyone besides virologists had ever uttered the word coronavirus, is by far its strongest. Cunningham scatters his characters to their separate emotional exiles with an aim to bring them together at day’s (and Day‘s) end. Dispersal is his forte … Cunningham beautifully pries apart the notion of what it means to have outgrown something, to be living in the liminal space between an earlier self and a future self, to be

unable ‘to reenter the orderly passage of time.’ Day is even set on a date New Yorkers will recognize as a kind of faux spring, when, in defiance of the calendar, the earth stays hard and the flowers huddle underground … In this novel that puzzles over the elasticity of all kinds of love—familial, parental, erotic, queer, fraternal, ambiguous—I yearned for Cunningham to forget his literary peers and stick with his own special talent … When Cunningham writes like himself, and not like an apostle, he is one of love’s greatest witnesses.”

–Hillary Kelly on Michael Cunningham’s Day (The Los Angeles Times)

“It has been a robust year for celebrity memoirs…There’s the sob story, the gallant bildungsroman, the louche chronicle of various addictive behaviors, the righteous making of an activist, the victory lap. Streisand’s book, in its sheer breadth and largesse, attempts to be all of these things, and thus becomes something incredibly rare. Call it the diva’s memoir, an act of bravura entertainment and impossible stamina. The diva’s memoir is, by definition, a somewhat delusional form, in that its author lives in a very different world from the rest of us, and has a different sense of scale …

If something interests her, then it is interesting, full stop. In a way, she draws on an old-fashioned idea of celebrity: to be a star is to be golden, and to make everything you touch look the same. And would we want anything less? Streisand has never thought it necessary to contain herself, and there’s no reason to start now. The audio version of My Name Is Barbra is forty-eight hours long—the longest author-read memoir at Penguin Random House. It is also, I would argue, the superlative way to experience Streisand’s opus. She ad-libs at will; she refuses to say the word ‘farts.’ Sometimes she sounds like a tired bubbe, sometimes a grand dame. But she’s her best, as ever, when she’s singing….The sound is pure, exultant catharsis. It will make you believe in something, if not quite as much as the singer believes in herself.”

–Rachel Syme on Babra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra (The New Yorker)

“Putting Rand in the title of one’s satirical novel feels like a dare, or at least—in a hyper-polarized time—a provocation. The good news is Freiman has written one of the funniest and unruliest novels in ages. It shakes you by the shoulders until you laugh, vomit or both … Freiman scratches at the difference between knowing and knowingness, and how our blind spots can subsume our personality … Rife with dissatisfactions—to its credit—and with self-aware jokes and serious questions about self-awareness. Also: serious questions about jokes … Ultimately, though, the author torques her contrarianism past trolling, past knee-jerk philosophizing and past satire, alchemizing a critique of literary culture in all its ideological waywardness.”

–Ryan Chapman on Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn (The Los Angeles Times)

“The feminism in this book challenges the idea that all art by women is feminist, and that all feminist art must be by or about women. It universalises, instead of essentialising. Elkin centres the book around second-wave feminism … Elkin seeks to demonstrate that any universal concept or theory about art is impossible. In a project that is fundamentally based on embodiment, there is only the individual’s reaction. The feelings we have in our bodies about what we see and experience are the truest theory—or perhaps they are beyond theory, and beyond the bounds of judgment … Instead of separating the art from the artist, she fuses the two together completely, provoking new, deeper questions about how feminism can and must evolve to engage with those who do things differently—the monsters in our midst.”

–Eliza Goodpasture on Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (The Guardian)

“The chasm between men and women is so vast in Claire Keegan’s story collection, So Late in the Day, that her characters might as well speak different languages. (In two of the three stories, they do.) Each of these tight, potent stories takes place over just a few hours, and each explores the fraught dynamics between two people, a man and a woman … Keegan’s stories are built around character rather than action, but they never flag. The tension builds almost imperceptibly until it is suddenly unbearable. As in her stunning, tiny novels, Foster and Small Things Like These, she has chosen her details carefully. Everything means something…Her details are so natural that readers might not immediately understand their significance. The stories grow richer with each read …

All three stories pivot on a clash of expectations and desires, with women wanting independence and adventure and men expecting old-fashioned subservience and feeling baffled when they do not get it. That bafflement carries an ominous undercurrent; a threat of danger runs through each tale … they have new and powerful things to say about the ever-mystifying, ever-colliding worlds of contemporary Irish women and the men who stand in their way.”

–Laurie Hertzel on Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day (The Star Tribune)

The literary community holds onto empathy as a dear goal while navigating the complexities of the human experience through the eyes of characters from diverse backgrounds. Readers worldwide have long celebrated the promise of empathy as a conduit for profound understanding, and reading from diverse sources is itself celebrated as an unambiguous moral good.

Yet I find an unsettling paradox has emerged, becoming ever more evident as Americans witness the ongoing genocide in Gaza—why does the empathy we cultivate through literature often remain a performative gesture, confined to the realm of fiction and failing to take root in the real world?

As a child in Brooklyn, New York, I was raised by Palestinian immigrants, born into a narrative of displacement, oppression, and marginalization—a narrative that became the very fabric of my identity. Growing up as a young Palestinian-American woman in post-9/11 America was profoundly isolating. I learned early that my heritage was laden with controversy, and saw that the mere mention of “Palestine” often ignited strong reactions, ranging from claims that Palestine didn’t exist—and by extension neither did I—to being branded as a terrorist.

I tried to make sense of it through the stories passed down from my grandparents, stories of dispossession and suffering during the Nakba, the traumatic and brutal expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948.

The weight of Palestinian history, and the trauma of the Nakba, is not a distant memory; it has seeped into our homes and community, creating a sense of powerlessness and fraying the fabric of our relationships: men against women, parents against children, tradition versus freedom. The weight of oppression was twofold: the external oppression imposed on Palestinians by Israel and the Western world, and the internal oppression within our own community, an oppression that was less visible but equally potent, where trauma left its scars on our families—the struggle of Palestinians against each other, each grappling with the legacy of displacement and the fight for survival even, or perhaps especially, in exile.

In the midst of this coming of age, books were my refuge. They were my companions during those lonely times when I felt invisible as a Palestinian woman. Although there were few literary works that portrayed the Palestinian experience, I was drawn to writers of color whose work mirrored the powerlessness and isolation I felt. Within those pages, I was able to uncover the roots of my loneliness and disconnection, and for the first time recognize how forces of oppression interacted on my life. Books became a bridge to a world beyond my own, broadening the scope of my understanding of life beyond the confines of my own traumatized household.

I found particular solace in the work of Black writers like Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Audre Lorde.  The emotions, struggles, and experiences they described in their brave and unflinching narratives connected me with the politics of liberation. I was surprised to find so much I now can recognize as part of the universal human experience in the stories of these women whose backgrounds were so different from my own. Reading their books made me feel less alone, less alien in a world that often saw me as “other.” It gave me insight into common struggles, and inspired me to take up causes I came to see as linked to my own.

The voices of these beloved writers gave me courage to set about that would shed light on the Palestinian-American experience. I wanted to create a space for Palestinians on the literary bookshelf and to share stories that might otherwise remain untold or ignored. I aimed to do for readers what Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou had done for me—to awaken their understanding of a voiceless community and foster empathy for Palestinians through the power of storytelling.

For many readers, my novels have done just that. I’ve seen people of all different backgrounds celebrate my books, which explore the intergenerational trauma within the Palestinian diaspora community. I was deeply moved by hearing how my stories resonated with them, introducing them to a world they might not have known. The empathy they expressed for Palestinians was evident in the messages I received thanking me for sharing these stories.

However, in recent weeks, I’ve been bombarded with messages from readers who were shocked and furious to learn of my unwavering support for the Palestinian cause. Some readers aggressively demanded denouncement or retraction of support from people who have promoted my books; others called me a terrorist for standing up for Palestinians; one reader even made a video of herself throwing my latest novel, Evil Eye, which she claimed to have loved, into the trash. These reactions prompt an important question: What had initially drawn them to my Palestinian novels, and what had they learned from reading our stories?

My novels directly address the enduring trauma inflicted upon the Palestinian people by the Israeli occupation, a trauma that persists through generations and causes suffering to those living under occupation and in exile. Were they unable to grasp that? Were these supposedly empathetic readers drawn to the rich tapestry of Palestinian culture, but then unwilling to reconsider their preconceived notions? Or did they approach my novels as mere entertainment, failing to truly engage with the underlying narratives? To fully see and understand our struggles?

The genuine astonishment many readers experienced when learning about my support for Palestine exposes a troubling reality—the prevalence of performative empathy within the reading community. There is a clear disparity between the empathy they felt for my fictional characters and their ability to apply it to the real-life humans suffering in Palestine.

I was disheartened to witness how many readers were merely performing their empathy, feeling self-congratulatory for reading the work of a marginalized author but still refusing to recognize the humanity of her people. True empathy is impartial and unburdened by prejudice, and pretending otherwise only perpetuates bias. This dualism, where one can hide their biases while feigning empathy, reflects the complex nature of our society—and reminds us that we still have more work to do.

The ongoing crisis in Gaza exemplifies the urgency of this issue. The lack of Palestinian representation in literature perpetuates the silencing of Palestinian voices, contributing to a long history of dismissing the narratives of people of color, women, queer people, and other marginalized groups. Literature can be a powerful tool of political awakening and I’m proud that my books have ignited awareness of the Palestinian cause for many readers. But awareness alone is not enough. If you can recognize our humanity in the pages of fiction, do not leave your empathy between the covers. Bring it into action after you close our books. There are real-world crises that demand our attention.

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Etaf Rum’s latest novel, Evil Eye, is available from Harper.

There has always been a gap between the English-language author Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Yiddish writer who published under at least three pseudonyms: Yitskhok Bashevis, Yitskhok Varshavski, and D. Segal. The publication of Singer’s wartime writings presents one of the first attempts to close that gap. Singer’s Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: The War Years, 1939-1945, the first of three volumes, covers the period between his first appearance as Yitskhok Varshavski in the Forverts—the world’s largest and most influential Yiddish daily—just months before the outbreak of World War II until the end of 1945, when Singer started publishing the Yiddish original of his first major literary memorial to the life of Jews in Poland, The Family Moskat. While the average Yiddish reader of the Forverts may not have known that Yitskhok Varshavski was Yitskhok Bashevis—the younger brother of Yiddish writers Esther Kreitman and Israel Joshua Singer—it is possible to imagine that same reader wondering about the identity of this “Isaac from Warsaw.” Whoever he was, he had a lot of opinions about the situation of the Jews in both Europe and the United States, before and during World War II, as well as the future of Jewish life in America. He was an unknown entity, but anyone reading his work could tell that he was deeply invested in his topic.

Singer’s writing during the period of World War II developed considerably, from pieces on various Jewish customs followed by Jews being targeted in Europe, to questions of how the Jewish spirit would survive the war. During those years, his own life also underwent radical changes. In 1939, his mother and younger brother, who remained in Poland after he and his older siblings had left, were sent by the Soviets in cattle cars to Jambyl, Kazakhstan, where they later died of illness and starvation, likely around 1942. His older sister survived the Nazi blitzes of London with her son, Maurice, and was struggling with mental health aggravated by the trauma of war. And his older brother, who had helped him immigrate to the United States and supported him during his first years, died of a heart attack in early 1944. His ex-lover, Runia Pontsh—who had given birth to Singer’s only son, Israel Zamir, in 1929—was expelled from the USSR by the Soviets and, after a sojourn in Istanbul, Turkey, settled in Palestine in 1938, where a few years later Zamir became a young member of Kibbutz Beit Alfa. Singer himself, in 1940, married a German-Jewish refugee, Alma Wassermann, who had fled with her husband and children from Munich, and who, after meeting him at a Catskills summer resort, began an affair that led to leaving her husband and starting a new life with the unknown Yiddish writer. In 1943, he became a citizen of the United States, solidifying his commitment to finding a path in literature as an American writer.

He wanted to get it all on record—not only the customs but also the immediacy of the loss that he realized was taking place at that very moment.

This biographical background is helpful in understanding the intensity of Singer’s writing during this time. The topics, while covering various aspects of Yiddish culture and Jewish life, are all infused with his personal perspective and experience at the time they were written. This makes his wartime writing fundamentally different from almost everything published to date—nearly thirty books for adults and more than fifteen for children in English translation alone. It opens a new phase in the translation and publication of Singer’s writing, exposing an immediacy and rawness that were, during his lifetime, mediated by the length of time that passed between the writing and translation of a given piece, as well as editorial and cultural concerns reflecting his contemporary American context. The gap between Singer’s Yiddish and English publications, which greatly influenced his decisions, is partly lifted, offering readers more direct access to his perspective on life in the old country from which he came, and the new country where he settled.

One of the most important aspects of this access is the chronological order in which the pieces have been organized. It is the usual practice, for authors who write in the language of the country in which they live, to publish their work in the order that it is written. But as an emigrant writer first publishing in Yiddish and much later translating his work into English, American readers were less often able to engage with Singer’s work chronologically. His first short story collection, Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories (1957), featured stories that were published, in order of appearance, in 1945, 1957, 1945, 1956, 1956, 1945, 1956, 1943, 1932, 1956, and 1943. Anyone trying to get a sense of Singer’s development as a writer from the arc of the stories as they appeared in the collection would go dizzy bouncing back and forth between the early 1940s and the mid-1950s, making a pit stop in the early 1930s, all without an inkling of what he wrote in between. This non-sequentiality lent a sense of mystery to Singer’s writing. But it did little to offer readers a coherent view of the author’s artistic vision.

Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt takes the opposite approach, following the order in which each article appeared in the Forverts. This offers readers a sense of how Singer’s thinking developed over time while grounding each one in its immediate context. The twenty-five pieces included in this volume were selected from a pool of over one hundred and fifty potential articles. These numbers make it clear that the selection is representative rather than comprehensive—an embarrassment of riches. 

The articles vary across several themes connected to Jewish life and Yiddish culture, including history, customs, the influence of particular individuals, social tendencies, and critiques of the moment in which Singer was living and writing. The themes that emerge most tangibly during this period are the anger and anxiety that Singer felt over the apparent indifference of the Jewish sphere—including in the Yiddish world—over the cultural treasures that were in the process of being lost during World War II. Understanding his literary mission in the years during and after the Holocaust involves a reading of those concerns that he articulated during the time that it was actually taking place. It is no surprise, reading these pieces, that his first literary project after the end of the war was to write The Family Moskat, an epic novel about Jewish life in Poland. For him, Jewish life in the old country was not an abstract idea. It was a visceral loss, not only of the environment in which he grew up, but also of the two figures most directly associated with his own personal upbringing: his mother, who spent the most time raising him, and his older brother, who, in many senses, was the closest figure he had to a father.

These circumstances imbue Singer’s wartime writing with an intensely urgent tone. Singer did not have time to waste in writing the articles that he published during this period. He wanted to get it all on record—not only the customs but also the immediacy of the loss that he realized was taking place at that very moment. Knowing that a whole world, a whole way of life, a whole cultural treasure bound up with Yiddish and Yiddishkayt—knowing they were all going up in flames before his very eyes—this knowledge was crushing for Singer. It also drove him to put pen to paper and write.

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From Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt, The War Years, 1939-1945. Edited and translated by David Stromberg. Copyright © 2023. Reprinted with permission from White Goat Press. 

A couple months ago I found myself alone in a Northern California beach town, walking the hills and talking into a recording app on my phone. None of my usual ways of writing were working anymore. Not the laptop or the overpriced word processor with no distractions and an e-ink screen. Pen and paper— my method of choice up until a few days before—didn’t feel free and easy like it once had. At night, when I played the dictations back in order to transcribe them, I heard mostly half-formed thoughts; fragments of dialogue; a word to slip in somewhere for mood; long, deep sighs; the crunch of my footsteps on gravel.

A dozen books into my career, I’m still figuring out how I work and what I need. For years I’ve been drawn to other writers’ routines and processes, scouring interviews for rituals, raising my hand at readings to ask writers how they do it. At my own readings, when asked, I give honest answers: A song playing on repeat. A candle. A quick walk when I’m stuck. Keeping books I love within reach, turning to a random page for inspiration. All of these things have worked for me at one time or another, still do work for me a lot of the time. When they don’t, I tell myself I need a day of writing in bed, or a clear desk, or a dedicated room in my apartment, or an office outside of my home. I’ve tried all of these. They’ve all been right; they’ve all failed me. It depends on the day.

And then, sometimes, when I least expect it, there are the rare, exquisite, ecstatic experiences of writing, when the story bursts out, and I struggle to type as fast as I need to, afraid the sentences are going to fly out of my grasp.

Here’s the story of one of those times:

It was 2020, the era of staying home, and after many years of publishing young adult novels, I had just finished writing my first novel for adults. For months, all time not spent with my wife and daughter was time spent writing. My clear desk and my songs on repeat and my candles and my tea and my slippers and my closed door kept me afloat. And my characters did, too—the restaurants they went to, the people they fell in love with, their moments of growth and stagnation, their small wounds and pleasures. And then I was finished with them, for a time, and I turned my focus to long walks with my daughter.

We had only just moved to our duplex in San Francisco three days before the shelter in place orders. We barely knew our new neighborhood yet; these walks were our introduction. I emerged after months spent in a room to secret staircases cut into hillsides; views of the downtown skyline surprising us around a corner; a chicken named Lady Gaga who lived at the edge of a front yard a couple blocks away. My daughter and I walked and walked and, together, we fell in love with the place we lived now. Each colorful Victorian. Each empty park and playground. Each person we passed, waving from a safe distance.

It was strange, wandering our neighborhood’s streets and finding them so quiet and empty. We felt the absence of people and noise and life. All the shops had “closed” signs in their windows. At the little park with cherry trees and a stone bench overlooking Twin Peaks and the downtown skyline and the very top of the Golden Gate Bridge, we imagined a pair of dogs playing. One was a little white fluffball, the other a golden retriever. We ran through dozens of names for our imaginary dog friends, settled on Daisy and Danny. And who were their owners? We picked names for them, too. The thimble-sized pink house around the corner belonged to one of the men, and the other man lived up the street in the blue apartment building with the palm tree, and as the months went on and our stories grew, the men we made up fell in love and got married. We lay on the grass and imagined the wedding (a fiasco, I’m afraid) and then I sat up.

“This should be a book,” I said.

My daughter agreed.

We rushed home and I grabbed the laptop, perched at the edge of the bed, and began. It was effortless, joyful. Time became a blur. It didn’t matter where I was. Music could be playing or not playing. I didn’t need any of it. I didn’t know what I was writing. Was is it a short story or was it a novel? A single book or a series? It didn’t matter.

I wrote with the feeling of my daughter’s hand in mine as we explored our neighborhood streets. With the expansiveness of time on days when nothing was expected of us. Maybe most of all, I wrote from a place of wanting. Here we’d been, living downstairs from our dear friend who we couldn’t be with, new neighbors all around us who we hadn’t yet met. I wrote remembering all the apartments I’d lived in throughout my life. The teenager who babysat me by our shared pool when I was a little kid. The old woman with the tremor, holding her hands out for a plate of my mother’s scones. When I was in grad school, my wife and I lived across from a man who’d knock on our back door with bowls of matzo ball soup and under an opera singer who’d practice late at night, piano keys plinking, a high soprano. Downstairs to the left were a poet and attorney who kept their bed in the living room so the office could have a door. To the right was a traveling coffee saleswoman whose tabby cat we looked after whenever she was on the road.

I wanted that kind of life back, breathing the same air as the neighbors, moving casually from one apartment to another, footsteps always above or below or right past the door on the landing. I wanted my daughter to have that kind of life—who knew if or when we’d have it again?—and so I put a girl like her into the book, gave the girl a set of keys, established that she’d lived in the big, pink, Victorian apartment building for her entire life—nine whole years—and knew its inner workings, its residents, its quirks, its sounds.

I finished the book, named it The Apartment House on Poppy Hill, decided it was, in fact, the first in a series. Who could have imagined?  An entire book, written in just a few electric days. A gift, to work that way.

And yet—here’s this other novel I’ve been working on, the one I sighed over in my voice memos and couldn’t get down. After a stretch of floundering months something broke open and now I know what I’m doing. Hard-won clarity is a gift, too. Because I’ve spent years immersed in this book I’m writing now, it’s real to me in a new and distinct way, as though its characters are sitting on my living room sofa as I write this, drinking whiskey and listening to records and shaking their heads and laughing. Timing in publishing is forever dissonant. You work on a book and then you wait, sometimes for a very long time, and it comes out when you’re deep in another project, and you’re reminded of how strange and wonderful a thing it is to write a book, how unfamiliar each time. Right now, for me, it’s pen and paper, coffee, and a song.

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The Apartment House on Poppy Hill by Nina LaCour, illustrated by Sònia Albert, is available from Chronicle Books.

A message had arrived at the telegram office that morning. As the mailman approached the seaside apartment in Mumbai, India, that my grandfather Brij Kishore shared with my grandmother Chandrakanta and their four children, he felt his throat tighten as she pulled on his sleeve and said, “Taar aaya hai.” In Bombay in the 1960s, the arrival of a “taar”—a telegram—usually meant bad news. Few homes had telephones, so far-­flung family would send updates of their children, cooking, and cricket scores via the well-­named snail mail. Only if a matter was more pressing and urgent would they send the news via telegram.

Babuji, as we all called him, tore open the envelope and took out a sheet of pale blue paper. On it was glued a strip of white paper that contained three words: ANXIOUS TO RETURN. He looked at his wife, rolled his eyes, and reassured her that there was nothing to worry about.

After graduating college, Babuji’s son Shekhar had traveled to Italy to look for work. Evidently, he didn’t like it there and wanted to return, but Babuji was determined that Shekhar should give it a shot. So, he put on his chappals and walked down to the post office to send a telegram saying so, using as few words as possible, because telegrams weren’t cheap and were charged by length. Over the next few weeks, many more telegrams arrived from Italy, begging for a ticket back to Bombay. After ignoring many of them, Babuji finally relented. His son, my uncle, returned to Bombay, where he lived out his days.

Less than sixty years later, each week of pandemic lockdown was punctuated by the demanding squeaks of my toddler: “I want talk Nani right now!” The child of a pandemic, there were eighteen months of her life when she couldn’t see her grandparents in person, so her demands to speak to her grandma were swiftly obeyed. With the swish of a finger on a touchscreen, a call flew through the air to the other side of the planet, to which my mom responded. She saw my daughter crawl for the first time, and speak her early words, in color, live, on the screen of a smartphone. When I stop to think about the ease with which we were able to stay in touch through those tough times, I find myself not only in awe of how far we have come but also immensely grateful.

We have been through a radical shift in technology across just three generations of my family, and each step of the way has changed our lives dramatically, just as they did for society as a whole: allowing us to communicate with our loved ones, creating the world of instant news, changing the way we work, and altering the way we entertain and are entertained. But while a video call may seem a far cry from the telegram, all these forms of modern communication are based on the science of signals being sent from one distant point to another, almost instantaneously. And our ability to do that centers around magnets.

I find magnets magical. The magnetic fields that radiate from them are invisible, but they can be substantial, far-­reaching, and influential across large distances. The science is complex and wasn’t understood for thousands of years—­indeed, many physicists will tell you that magnetism, and especially electromagnetism, still isn’t fully understood. But once we had at least some understanding, we were able to create practical mechanisms. Humans harnessed the magic of magnets to create machines that could interact and exert forces on other machines, farther away than had ever been thought possible.

Unlike the inventions we’ve looked at so far, magnets—­or objects that exert magnetic forces—­exist in the very essence of our universe. You and I are magnets (very, very weak ones—­don’t worry, there’s no danger of us suddenly becoming attached to our refrigerators). Atoms, the minuscule building blocks of matter, are magnetic. The planet on which we live is a giant magnet. Magnets, unlike wheels and nails and springs, were discovered rather than invented by humans. Despite this, they nonetheless deserve their place in this book, because it was humans who figured out how to make them more useful than they were as supplied by Mother Nature. The magnets we found naturally in our surroundings a few thousand years ago were weak and hard to come by. They were formed of magnetite, which came to be known as lodestone, a natural mineral found in the earth that is a mix of iron and oxygen, plus other impurities. It’s a magnetic material, but only a small proportion of the magnetite that exists in nature is magnetic, because it needs both a specific combination of impurities inside it, and to have been exposed to specific conditions of heat and magnetic fields outside it.

The earliest references to this natural magnet date back to ancient Greece in the sixth century BCE. Around two hundred years later, the Chinese documented the phenomenon of a natural stone attracting iron, and in another four hundred years, they began using this material for geomancy (a form of divination). It took another thousand years, advancing into the Middle Ages, before it was used for navigation in the form of a compass. Navigators in the Song Dynasty in China shaped lodestone to look like a fish, and let it float freely in water, so it pointed south. This knowledge spread to Europe and the Middle East soon after. Even then, with over a thousand years of knowing about natural magnets, we couldn’t replicate them, and their use was restricted to navigation.

Magnets themselves come in two distinct forms: permanent magnets and electromagnets. Permanent magnets are the horseshoe-­ and bar-­shaped magnets we saw in school science demonstrations and those that decorate our refrigerators. They have two poles, north and south: bringing together the south poles or the north poles of two magnets creates a pushing or repulsion force, but bring a north and south pole together and the magnets will cling to each other.

It took millennia to come to grips with how magnetism works, because this requires an advanced understanding of atomic physics and material science. To become a magnet, a material requires many particles, at many different scales, behaving in a very particular way. Let’s start with the electrons that orbit the nucleus of an atom. Just as electrons have a negative electric charge, they also have what physicists call spin, which defines its magnetic characteristics. By “pointing” in different directions, the spin cancels out the magnetic forces of electrons entirely in some atoms, leaving them nonmagnetic. But in others, while some of the electrons are arranged so their spin cancels out, not all are, so there is a net magnetic force left over, creating a magnetic atom.

Then, if we zoom out from the electron scale to the atomic scale, the atoms in an element are naturally arranged at random, which means that the magnetic forces of the individual atoms cancel each other out. In some materials, however, little pockets of atoms—­called domains—­have atoms all arranged in the same direction, giving the domain a net magnetism. However, they are not yet magnets, because the domains themselves are usually arranged at random.

To make a material produce a net magnetism, then, the atoms in the majority of the domains need to be forced into magnetic alignment by a strong external magnetic field, or by large amounts of heat applied at particular temperatures in particular sequences. Once the domains point in the same direction, you have a magnet.

Even today, there is a debate as to how magnetite becomes magnetized in the first place, so artificially replicating this has been a challenge. Certain materials like iron, cobalt, and nickel have electrons favorably arranged to make their atoms magnetic, which in turn sit in well-­defined domains. Our ancestors tinkered with mixes of such metals, heating and cooling them in various combinations to try to figure out the best recipe for forming permanent magnets. They succeeded, to a degree, making somewhat weak magnets that didn’t hold their force for long.

The development of permanent magnets in a scientific way started in the seventeenth century, when Dr. William Gilbert published De Magnete, which outlined his experimentation with magnetic materials. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we developed more sophisticated methods for making iron and steel, and observed that certain combinations made much stronger or longer-­lasting magnets—­and sometimes even both. But we still didn’t really understand why. The nineteenth century also saw the advent of understanding electromagnetism, which we’ll come back to, but it took until the twentieth century and the conception of quantum physics before we were able to define and understand atoms and electrons well enough to create strong and long-­lasting permanent magnets ourselves.

This led to the use of three types of materials to make permanent magnets: metals, ceramics, and rare-­earth minerals. The first major improvement was the development of a metal mix of aluminum-­nickel-­cobalt, used to make “alnico” magnets, but these were complicated and expensive to make. Then in the 1940s, ceramic magnets were created from pressing together tiny balls of barium or strontium with iron. These were much cheaper, and today account for the vast majority of permanent magnets produced by weight. The third family of materials are the rare-­earth magnets, based on elements like samarium, cerium, yttrium, praseodymium, and others.

Within the space of the last century, these three types of permanent magnets have been refined to produce produced magnetic fields 200 times stronger than before. And this improved efficiency led to permanent magnets playing an important role in much of our modern lives: a car, for example, can have thirty separate applications for magnets, using over 100 individual magnets. Thermostats, door latches, speakers, motors, brakes, generators, body scanners, electric circuitry and components—­take any of these apart and you’ll find permanent magnets.

But as we saw, the stories of permanent magnets and electromagnets intertwine, and since the discovery of electromagnets around 200 years ago, each has swung in and out of favor as humanity learned more about how they worked and what they could be used for. The prevalence of permanent magnets in the past few decades is due not just to their increasing strength and compactness but also to the fact that, unlike electromagnets, they never need a source of power. But from the nineteenth century onward, and even today in situations where immense fields are needed, electromagnets dominated. We can control their strength, switching off or cranking up the magnetic field of an electromagnet when it suits.

The reason electromagnets took so long to make an appearance in the field is because we needed an understanding of the science of materials, electricity, and light—­and the mysterious force of electromagnetism. It’s only when we were able to move electrons in materials that we understood how to create and change this force and apply it to our technology.

Like gravity, electromagnetism is one of the fundamental forces in nature. It is the physical interaction that happens between particles, like electrons, that have an electric charge. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, André-­Marie Ampère, Michael Faraday, and other scientists published numerous theories about electric and magnetic fields, which were eventually brought together and summarized by the mathematician James Clerk Maxwell in what are now known as “Maxwell’s equations.” These gave us crucial information that led to the invention of electric motors, and these equations are also the basis of our power grids, radios, telephones, printers, air conditioners, hard drives, and data-­storage devices; they are even used in the creation of powerful microscopes.

The key principle that led to such technological advancement was the realization that moving charges create magnetic fields. Without getting too deep into the complex science, this means that if an electric current is flowing through a coil of wire, it behaves like a magnet. If you change the strength of the current, you change the strength of the magnet. And the converse is also true: applying a variable magnetic field near a wire will create an electric current in the wire. Following on from this science, experiments proved that when a charge, like an electron, moves within a magnetic field (either freely or inside a wire), it feels a pushing force.

Studying the electromagnetic force led us to define the phenomenon of electromagnetic waves. Think of these as waves of force that flow because of the interaction between electric and magnetic fields. Our understanding of light increased manifold when we were able to quantify it as an electromagnetic wave. And, in addition to visible light, we saw that a whole spectrum of electromagnetic waves—­from radio waves (with the longest wavelength) to gamma rays (with the shortest)—­exists, and that these waves can be used in different ways. It is electromagnetism and electromagnetic waves that form the basis of our long-­range communication technology: the technology used by countless people around the world to share news with their loved ones. People like my uncle, the prolific sender of telegrams.

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From Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way by Roma Agrawal. Copyright © 2023. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Neill Lochery, author of Cashing Out: The Flight of Nazi Treasure, 1945-1948, about the flight of Nazi treasure through “neutral” countries after the Second World War.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

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Professor Neill Lochery Ph.D., is the Catherine Lewis Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Mediterranean Studies at University College London. He has served as an adviser to political and economic leaders from both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is the author of nine books including The View from the Fence: The Arab-Israeli Conflict from the Present to its Roots (Continuum) and Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light 1939-1945.

Writer and editor Zeke Caligiuri joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion, a new collection of essays on class he co-edited along with eleven other incarcerated writers. The volume’s contributors include Eula Biss, Kao Kalia Yang, Lacy M. Johnson, Valeria Luisielli, Kiese Laymon, and many others. Caligiuri, who worked on the book while in Minnesota correctional facilities and is now free, discusses the challenges of creativity and the literary life in prison settings, as well as how the book came to be. He also reflects on the idea that “the history of class hasn’t always been written by the powerful, but they have always been its editors,” as he writes in a foreword, which he reads from during the episode.

Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: I want to rewind a little bit so our listeners can hear about the long road to this book. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got your start as a writer via the Stillwater Writers Collective and later with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop?

Zeke Caligiuri: I really just got my start as an incarcerated reader. A big thing is that my relationship to books and language has always made me want to be able to write the books that impacted my life in the same way. I sort of began writing my own stories and trying to put together my own life, and I ended up running into a cohort of people when I was incarcerated in Stillwater that were also writers or artists. And a big draw that I always tell folks is that when you’re in those sorts of places, the artists tend to find each other. There can be 1000 people, but the artists tend to find each other. And that was really what the case was. Anytime I was anywhere, I always ended up finding other people who were working on things—creatives. As a result, we also realized that there wasn’t going to be support coming from outside of the facilities. We had sort of all gotten together under the idea that we needed each other as a community for whatever that meant, so that it could grow. 

One really good friend of mine, C. Fausto Cabrera, and I always had a real kind of complicated artist relationship. He was phenomenal with all sorts of different mediums like paint and pastels, and he was also a phenomenal writer. I had this project that I wanted to write—I was writing my memoir at the time—and I was really afraid that they would do something to stop it, they would do something to prevent it from getting out there. So we had these sorts of ideas, like, how are we going to build sort of some collective power? There’s really only so much you can do in there, but it was about trying to create a collective of artists and creatives that would be able to somehow help each other. 

Regardless of what it was, we just knew that we didn’t have outside support, and so we built what we call the Stillwater Writers Collective, which was just the collective of us. We ran it. We did everything it took to take care of each other. Fortunately, what ended up inevitably happening was Jen Bowen coming into the facility. Jen had decided she wanted to teach some writing classes, and she did at one of the other facilities. 

When Jen started teaching at Stillwater, bringing other folks, it was sort of a natural relationship that just took over. Essentially, they came to us and said, “What do you guys as a writing community want and need?” And these are all people that had been doing other things in that same realm for many years, just not within carceral institutions. It became kind of this idea of, well, we would love some writing classes, we would love a mentorship program, and we would love to be able to post readings and do things like that. We’ve been able to do those things and they brought all of the right people. That was essentially what a lot of the core was—Jen going out  and finding wonderful people who were also wonderful writers and very talented and understood. 

I guess the landscape of it and what it kind of became was these two communities—one outside of the prison and then the prison communities itself, growing up alongside each other on these two different tracks. And that’s really what brings us to how the project becomes and how… How we have a community in which to be able to create something like this.

WT: You wrote a foreword to this collection, and you talked about the lack of infrastructure for writing or creating art inside these prisons. And you talked about computer labs that have been proposed and set up by members of your community. It made me think, just in a practical sense, what did your writing day look like when you were incarcerated? Where did you work? What did you work on? What hours? Did you have to work? What was your physical environment like?

ZC: That’s a good question. Well, I was locked up for 22 years, so I had a lot of changes. It was really about adaptation. I worked as a higher ed clerk, I worked as an editor of one of the newspapers at one of the facilities, I worked on the yard crew for a long time. Most of my practice would start very early. So I would get up prior to breakfast, prior to counts, prior to any of those early things that you have to get out and switch up. And I spent time with the word. Sometimes that’s really just reading, sometimes it’s writing. So most of my days, and even as a free person—or mostly free person—my practice starts in the morning. If I can start with some blocks of language, I can get something in my mind without any outside interference. You’re not hearing the voices or things that are barking out of a screen. 

If I was fortunate enough, I would get some computer time. I think the last job I worked was in the health service unit at Faribault. That meant you dealt with a lot of people with either long-term health care issues that were not going to leave, or were just recovering from different surgery. So I would spend my day usually reading and writing and then when I could get a chunk of time—an hour to three hours—on a computer, I would go and transcribe as much as I could. In the early days, I took jobs intentionally so that I could go type in a computer lab. You also had to build relationships. Early on, it was really difficult because they didn’t support the prison writing workshop. They didn’t really care that you were in these classes. You had to be in higher ed to be able to use the computer lab. 

WT: You’re writing by hand then and taking it to a computer lab and typing it?

ZC: Or on an actual typewriter. We actually would keep a typewriter, it’s just much more difficult and harder to keep a file.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: For an incarcerated writer to be transferred from one facility to another, what ability to keep files is there? How does a writer keep track of their own work under these circumstances? Is that possible?

ZC: Now it is a little more possible. But you do not get nearly as much computer time as you would like, so that’s the thing. Sometimes you might get a couple hours a week, sometimes you might get more. Each facility has different access. So when I left initially—I had left Stillwater in 2013—I had written my book and had most of this manuscript done. I was working through the process of editing it, and we didn’t have any sort of network file system. They have since changed it. Now if you do leave, your stuff is still saved on your file. So if you go to another facility, it’ll still be there. When I left it, it was not that way yet. 

We went through a really grueling process. I would make edits and send it to a woman who was a close personal friend—shout out to Myrna—and she would transcribe from an actual hard copy, send the digital copy to my editor at U of M Press. They would print that out, do a whole bunch of markups—just like the olden days—and send it to me. And we went through that process. I would circle things, maybe mark small things on the page, but then also maybe have a secondary page. So we had to go through that process several times, just because we couldn’t save the manuscript digitally on my end. So we had to do it through other folks and different channels.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Mikayla Vo.

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Zeke Caligiuri

American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (ed.) • This is Where I Am • Prison Noir (ed. Joyce Carol Oates) • The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison (ed. Caits Meissner) • How a Collective of Incarcerated Writers Published an Anthology From Prison – Electric Literature • “Before I Was Anything” (poem) Literary Hub

Others:

Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop • What Incarcerated Writers Want the Literary Community to Understand: Caits Meissner on Why “Prison Writer” Is a Limiting Label (featuring Zeke Caligiuri, Literary Hub, Sept. 11, 2019) • C. Fausto Cabrera • Kiese Laymon • Valeria Luiselli • Steve Almond • Jen Bowen • Kristin Collier  • Sarith Peou • Toni Morrison • Eula Biss

This week on The Maris Review, Ed Park joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Same Bed Different Dreams, out now from Random House.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts.

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from the episode:

Maris Kreizman: I love that we are told explicitly, throughout the novel, that writing from different viewpoints at different times in history is helpful in understanding how the world works.

Ed Park: Yeah, once I broke out of the idea that it would all just backtrack… Most of the original version was just a straight first person, Soon Sheen, with some flashbacks, and some stuff that I didn’t use. It was fine, but it just didn’t feel agile enough or capacious enough to get at what I kind of gradually understood were the themes of the book. Not to sound pretentious, but, you know, books like Ulysses and Pale Fire, kind of the usual suspects, but also there’s a novel called The White Hotel by a writer named D.M. Thomas, a British writer who passed away this year. Night Film by Marisha Pessl. Just books with a lot of parts. I think there’s a pulse if the writer is passionate. Like, I feel like he or she can just tell it in all these different modes and you kind of get a more panoramic view of the story.

And it’s not for everyone. It’s definitely not for every book and I’m not saying like, oh, my next book will be that way. But, even Personal Days, which is a relatively short book, it’s like a third or a quarter of the size of this one. The first part of that book is in the first person plural, but at around page 60, I was like, that’s enough, you know, I get it, the reader’s going to get it, and so I was like, let’s do something radical. And the next part is kind of written as a report, and then as I neared the 40-page mark, I was like, okay, enough of that. The story had developed enough that I thought this kind of long unpunctuated piece of prose poetry would emerge in the last third. So I guess at this point it’s part of my style, but it’s something I like to read anyway as well, in other books that is.

MK: And I love that you trust the reader to be okay with not knowing a bunch of different things.

EP: Yeah.

MK: But you also give the reader breadcrumbs. Towards the end, one of the characters says, this all wraps up in the final book. Tell me about establishing that trust though, because you had me the whole time.

EP: Oh, great. Yeah, that’s quite a trick. Breadcrumbs is a good way of putting it. Every time you start a section that is different in structure or voice than the previous one, as a writer, there is this burst of freedom and energy. And I think that’s a good thing. It’s like, okay, now here’s a fresh canvas.

Like, this is a triptych. I’m putting new marks on the page, on the canvas. But I think once you get enough into that, whatever this new section is, then you have to really think, how does it relate? Like, in my head, maybe I know it relates, but the reader’s gotta know after a couple pages. Why am I reading this part? Who are these people?

When a lot of the book was done, but still not completely finished, I realized in some of these, especially in the notorious third strand that I’ve been alluding to which goes under the title 2333, I realized that some of these minor characters could actually be characters from the other sections of the book. And so it was like, a bit like Easter eggs or cameos or walk-on roles. But it’s there if readers want it. I think it also works if you don’t catch on to it. But upon revising and editing it, it always made me smile to see like, oh, this is that character when she was a teenager.

And it almost changes the sensation of time because you’re reading something later that actually happened decades earlier, and it just gives it a much more complex, and I hope satisfying, feel.

MK: Yeah, let’s keep talking about time, because I love that  in various parts of the book there’s the idea that, okay, if you have VCR,  you can suddenly tape television shows and your entire world opens up in a way that suddenly you have so much time. And then, and then there’s something similar with, with the idea of how many movies you can see in a lifetime.

EP: Yeah.

MK: And then, of course, there’s the idea that war throws it completely off balance.

EP: Part of what I’m finding interesting about this book… I was conscious of certain things as I was writing it, but then other things kind of sink in later. I mean, as much as it is about Korean things and Korean American things and how Korean history and American history interlock, the character Soon Sheen is roughly my age, comes from Buffalo like I did, whose father was a psychiatrist like mine. But it’s also kind of a snapshot or a memory of the 1980s, not to get too Stranger Things, but that’s when I came of age and I feel like I remember the first VCR and just being like, wow, what does this mean? Like, at the time it could seem like just a new machine, a new gadget, but it was actually quite profound, especially kind of as we get into Dream 5, the last section of the book. I feel very emotional actually talking about it now. The book is quite fictional in most respects, but you know, a lot of those memories and impressions are almost like me trying to preserve that moment in time and that moment in my life. I hope other people, future generations, find it interesting, but it felt important as I went on and time and history became such a big part of the book.

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Recommended Reading:

Generations by Lucille Clifton • A Writer Prepares by Lawrence Block

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Ed Park is the author of the novels Personal Days and Same Bed, Different Dreams. He is a founding editor of The Believer, and has worked in newspapers, book publishing, and academia. His writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Born in Buffalo, he lives in Manhattan with his family.

This spring, I fell in love with John Gower, who died in 1408. For months I’d been reading his poems in their modern print editions with a scholarly disinterest. Then at the Huntington Library one morning, my stomach fluttered when I opened the cover of a fourteenth-century manuscript of his most famous work, Confessio Amantis, to a blurry illumination of a dreaming Gower, asleep. Since that day in Pasadena I’ve been talking about him breathlessly, chasing him through centuries of scholarship, tracking his records across continents in archives from California to Kent.

What is it about the archive that makes us fall in love? Why is it, as Saidiya Hartman puts it, that book supports and acid-free boxes make us dream of “a romance that exceed[s] the fictions of history—the rumors, scandals, lies, invented evidence, fabricated confessions, volatile facts, impossible metaphors, chance events, and fantasies that constitute the archive”? No doubt, archival research is occasionally extremely tedious—transcribing difficult handwriting can be a more effective sleep aid than melatonin—but most of the time it’s a unique thrill. Turning over folios or examining the wax seal of a medieval charter is a sensual encounter; Arlette Farge calls it a “physical pleasure [in] finding a trace of the past.” Parchment, the predominant material for medieval writing, is made of animal hide, so studying Gower’s manuscripts and life records means I’m often encountering him, literally, through the touch of skin on skin.

I’m far from the first person to swoon at the masses of papers, documents, and manuscripts that populate historical and cultural institutions across the globe. A smattering of novels has emerged in the past quarter century that stage a quest for knowledge in the low lighting and tense intimacy of a quiet study room, “unbashedly interpret[ing] the past through its material traces” and constituting a literary genre that Suzanne Keen calls the “romance of the archive.” In these books—A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, Isaac Fellman’s Dead Collections, to name a few—the narration of history often intertwines with personal love stories until the two threads become virtually indistinguishable. Lately, I’ve been reading as many as I can get my hands on.

While the researchers (or archivists, depending) almost always fall in love with each other, on some fundamental level, these love stories are always unrequited: a research object can entrance a scholar, but it can never really belong to her. Any encounter with a document in the archives—whether a nineteenth-century letter or a medieval court document—is an attempt to reconstruct the past from fragments that are only touchable and holdable in the reading room for an hour or two. Byatt plays on this paradox in her 1990 classic Possession, when one of the main characters, Roland, finds himself “seized by a strange and uncharacteristic impulse” to pilfer the previously undiscovered letters of a nineteenth-century poet out of a special collections library, catalyzing the adventure that will lead him to become equally possessed by his fellow scholar, the cold and beautiful Maud. Neither knowledge nor love should be mistaken for ownership, Byatt seems to suggest, though Maud ends up with the letters at the end of the day. Scholarship and romance can operate according to similar logics of jealousy and compulsion.

A quixotic longing underlies these books. Characters may have special access to collections and libraries, but the pursuit of history is nonetheless ingrained with a gnawing sense of loss. Archival romance novels often center on a search for someone or something that is missing; to quote Sol, the trans archivist at the center of Fellman’s fan-fiction-steeped 2022 novel, “in general what you find in archives is the absence of a body, the chalk outline of a life… You can almost taste the closeness of the body sometimes, almost feel the glossy heat of it, but never quite.” Historical research is always a kind of heartbreak; the more I learn about Gower’s works and life, the more I nurse a yearning for all I’ll never understand. And the past can be tremendously brittle; much of what we can know rests in records and account books and literary manuscripts that exist in fragile, finite copies. Perhaps it makes sense then that both Sol, whose love story with Else, a grieving donor to the archive, will lead him to uncover the source of a preservation issue, and the blood-sucking antagonist of Kostova’s book are vampires. Every time we use archival material, the ink fades a little from light exposure, the internal structure of the book weakens a little, no matter how gently we handle the spine. Like parasites, those of us who work with archives slowly leech life out of our materials, loving our subjects to death.

Given that the personal and romantic is always also historical, these novels are often intensely political. For Keen, who focuses on contemporary British literature, the romance of the archive necessarily constructs itself in relation—whether affectionate or antagonistic—to England’s imperial legacy. The multigenerational The Historian (2005), to give another example, centers on the story of two young researchers, Paul and Helen, who fall in love during a sprawling, trans-European quest to uncover the identity of a mysterious stranger who murders Paul’s academic mentor. Along the way, sedimented history, from the vestiges of the Ottoman Empire to the conflicts of the Cold War, constantly shape their lofty pursuit of knowledge and justice. The past and the present mutually construct each other, Kostova reminds us, inseparable from the passions that incite both love affairs and geopolitical strife.

Yet the archive’s sparkle can also leave us misty-eyed, occluding a political vision. I’ve been guilty of this myself. Gower was (it would seem from the texts he left behind) a morally stuffy money-grubber, with a vicious attitude toward peasants, who may have married a woman half his age. If I knew him when he was living, I probably wouldn’t have liked him at all. But from a distance of six hundred years or so, I find myself constructing enemies-to-lovers plotlines. Perhaps it’s just impossible to pay this much attention to someone and not catch an “archive fever,” as Jacques Derrida calls that fierce and consuming nostalgia for the past. Or maybe in a profession as solitary and quiet as academia, it’s all too easy to forget the present and become enamored of an intellectual figment or a ghost.

Last week, at the Lambeth Palace Library in London, I read Gower’s last will and testament, recorded prior to his death, then walked along the bank of the Thames to visit his final resting place. Pushing through the crowds at Borough Market sampling fruits, paella, and jams, I ducked into Southwark Cathedral. The tomb, to the left of the nave, is a wooden effigy of Gower’s supine body, painted in green, red, and gold. His eyes are open, and his head rests not on a pillow, but on books of his poems. I thought of a line from the Confessio, when Gower imagines his books will endure when he is “dede and elleswhere” for future readers to find in some “tyme comende after this” (time coming after this). I felt shy then, implicated in his transhistorical glance.

Eventually, my boyfriend came to collect me on his way home from the British Library. On our way out of the cathedral, I turned and blew Gower a kiss. My boyfriend laughed at me, then reached out and brushed a piece of hair behind my ear. I was alive, the year was 2023. His skin was warm and soft; it felt nothing like parchment at all.